"What stopped the fucking reset?" Rex demanded.
He didn't want a lecture; he wanted the mechanics of the miracle. He wanted to know exactly which gear had jammed in the celestial machine to prevent his entire existence from being unraveled.
"Two things," Lustia said, her voice cutting through his tension like a blade. "The first was your speech."
"The specific, calculated intervention you made in that meeting... it produced a psychological shift in the room."
"It moved the collective despair of the Apostles away from the threshold."
"You pulled them back from the precipice just enough to stall the momentum."
Rex's jaw tightened. He remembered the sweat on his palms, the way he had forced his voice to remain steady while his soul was screaming.
"And the second?"
Lustia paused. She looked at him with a specific, heavy expression, the look of a strategist about to reveal the most volatile variable in a complex equation.
