Lilith was quiet for a long moment.
"You're going to tell me that's better," she said.
"I'm going to tell you it's more durable," Rex said. "Better is a judgment call."
"Durable is arithmetic."
She looked at the kingdom, and the kingdom looked like the beginning of something, and Rex stood at the top of the spire in the Lustful Villain's mask and watched it with the specific, complete satisfaction of someone who had built a position over months and was now standing inside it.
The "cleaning" was no longer a surgical procedure; it had devolved into a visceral, screaming deconstruction of life.
What had begun as a disciplined purge of the marked and the infiltrators had cascaded into a total systemic collapse of order. The Underlayer, once a marvel of structured engineering, was being churned into a red slurry of viscera, shattered steel, and unbridled primal terror.
