Lustia felt the heat of his fury, the raw, unyielding hunger for vengeance that burned in his soul. A flicker of something not quite a laugh but a ghost of a smile touched the corner of her mouth, a brief moment of levity that pierced through the exhaustion etched into her features.

"I have never once told you to be reasonable, Rex," she said, her voice gaining a subtle, sharp edge of pride. "Reason is for those who are content with the world as it is given to them."

"I told you the truth about how impossible the task would be."

"I told you how much of yourself you would have to break, how much blood you would have to spill, and how much of the divine order you would have to shatter to reach him."

"But telling you the cost is a different conversation than telling you not to pay it."

Rex exhaled, a long, slow release of tension that felt like a predator settling into a crouch. The tension didn’t leave him; it simply channeled itself into a singular, lethal direction.

"Good," Rex said, a grim, predatory satisfaction settling into his features. "Because if you had tried to tell me to be reasonable, I wouldn’t have listened to you anyway."

"I know that, too," Lustia replied, her gaze softening with a profound, ancient recognition. "It is one of the reasons I chose you."

Lustia sank onto the floor of the domain. It was an uncharacteristic gesture, the goddess lowering herself to the same level as the mortal, but it signaled a shift.

She had moved past the careful management of his emotional volatility; she had moved past the diplomatic caution of a patron. This was no longer a conversation about feelings or consequences.

This was the war council of two beings preparing to commit sacrilege.

"You cannot approach the God of Time as you would approach the Apostle Network or the Legion," she said, her voice carrying the cold authority of a strategist laying out a death sentence. "Those are creatures of flesh and magic."

"The God of Time exists in a dimensional register that your current capability set does not have native access to..."

"To him, you are not a warrior; you are a foreign object attempting to intrude upon a perfect equation."

"I know," Rex said. His voice was flat, devoid of hope or fear, carrying only the grim acceptance of a man who already knew the mountain he had to climb.

"You need more than combat skills," Lustia continued, her eyes luminous with the blue fire of divine knowledge. "Combat skills will get you killed before you even perceive his form."

"You need architectural skills..."

"You need the ability to exist in a dimensional register that is not your native one..."

"You need the ability to compress or mask your presence to a degree that defies human and even divine natural laws..."

"Most importantly, you need a specific adaptation that prevents temporal attacks from unraveling your very atoms before you can swing a blade."

Rex sank down across from her, the movement precise. His mind was already racing ahead, calculating variables like a grandmaster surveying a poisoned chessboard.

"The free skill selection," Rex said, cutting straight to the core. "Elizabeth’s confirmation..."

"The contingency we discussed."

"You have one slot remaining," Lustia said. "It is not enough to claim all three requirements, but it is enough to secure the most critical one."

"Presence Manipulation...?" Rex said. The words felt heavy in his mouth, loaded with the potential for either salvation or absolute annihilation.

"I knew it..." Lustia studied him, her expression unreadable. "You were already thinking about this."

"I was thinking about the divine engagement problem in general terms," Rex corrected, his inner monologue already dissecting the implications. ’I can’t afford to be reactive...’

’If I wait for the threat to manifest, I’m already dead.’

’I have to build the armor before the arrow is fired.’

"The specific application to the God of Time is new... But the skills I was planning to acquire for any divine confrontation are the same ones that apply here."

"You planned for a category of problem before you even knew the specific problem existed," Lustia remarked, and there was something like awe in her tone. "Most people do not think that far ahead."

"Most reincarnators I have watched over centuries solve the problem they can see, only to be slaughtered by the one they could not."

"Most people are not being hunted by something that erases the ground they stand on," Rex snapped, the memory of the reset flashing behind his eyes like a burst of static. "I plan for categories because a category catches things a specific plan misses."

"If I had built my entire strategy around the Legion, none of it would have mattered when a god decided to delete the island beneath my feet."

Lustia nodded slowly. "That is a colder way of thinking than most mortals manage."

"I mean that as an observation, Rex, not a complaint."

"Good," Rex said, his jaw tightening. "Because I wasn’t planning on changing it anyway."

"Then let us speak of the mechanics," Lustia said, returning to the thread with lethal focus. "Presence Manipulation..."

"It allows you to compress, expand, or mask the specific signature that your existence produces across every register simultaneously: physical, energetic, divine, and temporal."

"At full mastery, you can make yourself register as something that poses no threat to a divine perceptive function."

"You could register as something vastly larger than you are to intimidate, or more importantly, you could register as something that simply... is not there at all."

"For the God of Time specifically," Rex interjected, his mind already layering the skill over his tactical vision.

"For approaching his domain without triggering the automated defensive architecture he maintains around it," Lustia clarified. "You must understand: the God of Time’s domain is the one place where temporal attacks do not require a conscious working."

"They are not spells; they are the environment itself..."

"Everything that enters that space enters it under the full, crushing influence of the temporal framework."

"Unless the entering thing is immune," Rex said, his teeth grinding together.

"Unless the entering thing possesses full potential adaptation," Lustia countered. "That skill would absorb the hostile properties of the environment and convert them into operational parameters rather than threats."

"In the God of Time’s domain, Full Potential Adaptation would turn the temporal environment from your greatest enemy into your working medium."

"And how about... dimensional manipulation?" Rex added, the pieces of the puzzle clicking into place with terrifying clarity.

"To reach his domain at all," Lustia concluded. "His domain exists in a dimensional layer that is adjacent to, but not overlapping with, the layer accessible by standard teleportation."

"Dimensional manipulation, combined with your existing teleportation skill, would produce a navigation capacity capable of locating and forcing entry into that adjacent layer."

Rex stared down at his wrist. The Mark glowed faintly against his skin, a constant, pulsing reminder of the divine leash he was trying to snap.

His mind was a battlefield of cold mathematics and raw, bleeding ambition. He ran the numbers again, his mental calculations as precise as a surgeon’s incision.

One free skill selection remaining.

Three fundamental pillars are required to breach the sanctum of a god.

The arithmetic was cruel, and the equation was broken.

In any rational world, Rex was already dead; he was simply a ghost waiting for the universe to realize it.

"The other two skills," Rex said, his voice cutting through the ethereal silence like a blade through silk. "I’m not here for platitudes..."

"Give me the cost."

Lustia didn’t flinch. She met his stare with the unflinching honesty of a mirror.

"The cost is not measured in gold or blood alone, Rex... It is measured in creation."

Rex’s jaw tightened. "Speak plainly."

"You need pregnancies because the energy you need is still far away," Lustia said, each word carrying the weight of a divine decree. "Two more confirmed unions."

"Two more anchors of life to manifest the necessary power."

"One to unlock dimensional manipulation to give you the spatial leverage to tear through the fabric of reality."

"One to unlock full potential adaptation to give you the resilience to survive the crushing weight of eternity."

A muscle jumped in Rex’s cheek. The implications settled over him like a shroud.

This wasn’t just a quest for power; it was a quest that demanded he weaponize intimacy, turning the most primal of human connections into tactical necessities. His inner monologue screamed with a mix of disgust and cold, calculating pragmatism.

’I have to turn my own body into a factory for divine intervention.’

’Every union becomes a transaction, and every moment of passion becomes a siege engine...’

"So," Rex said, the words tasting like ash as he forced them past his teeth.

A dark, twisted smile, one that held no humor, only a grim, terrifying resolve, tugged at the corner of his mouth.

"The fastest path to killing a god," he said, his gaze locking onto hers with the intensity of a predator who had just accepted a poisoned bait, "runs directly through my own bedroom."