The silence that followed her accusation was not empty; it was heavy, a suffocating pressure that seemed to squeeze the very oxygen from the corridor. Rex didn't flinch.
He didn't even blink. He simply stared at her, his eyes dark and bottomless, reflecting none of the horror she was currently drowning in.
"You built the Underlayer's new governance," Elizabeth whispered, her voice gaining a frantic, jagged momentum as the grand architecture of his deceit laid itself bare before her. "You didn't just influence it; you engineered it."
"You dismantled the old regime piece by piece, purged the Legion's network from the inside like a virus, and then with the most sickening brilliance you attacked the surface as a third identity."
"You played the monster to force Aethelgard into a position of total strategic dependency on the very intelligence and political capital you had been quietly accumulating as Rex Rexilion."
