Villain: Your Heroines Were Delicious - Chapter 160 - 25

Chapter 160: Chapter 25

Lunch time.

The midday sun beat down on the corrugated metal roof of the storage house, creating a sweltering, secluded cocoon far from the prying eyes of the rest of the student body.

Inside, the “Hellish Study Group” was in session, and the air was thick with the scent of old gym mats, dust, and pure, concentrated academic despair.

Haruka stood before a makeshift chalkboard, her movements efficient and robotic.

She was currently teaching a complex multi-variable algebra problem that she claimed was “most likely” to appear on the final.

“So, first, you have to do this…” Haruka said, her chalk blurring across the board as she performed a massive jump in logic. “Then, you simply multiply with that. Once you get that result, you need to apply the third thing to… And then do this…”

The chalk clicked rhythmically against the board, leaving behind a trail of intricate symbols that looked more like ancient runes than mathematics.

“Once you done all of that,” Haruka concluded, tapping the final answer with her chalk, “you will have the result. Do you understand?”

She turned toward her “students”—Suzune, Emi, Yukina, Renji, and Sakai, looking at them as if they should understand what she had explained.

But the silence that followed was deafening.

They stared at the board with wide, glazed-over eyes, their souls seemingly departing their bodies.

Understand? the thought echoed through their collective minds. Understand what?! What is ’this’? What is ’that’? You didn’t explain the solution! You just did magic on a board and expected us to follow the trick!

Even the usually bright and cheerful Suzune and Yukina looked like she was staring into the abyss, while Emi, Renji and Sakai had sweat dropping down their brows in sync.

“Amazing!” Touka suddenly exclaimed, her eyes shining with genuine admiration as she leaned forward. “I didn’t expect you to be so great at teaching, Haruka-chan! That leap in the second step was so elegant!”

The “failed” students snapped their heads toward Touka in unison, their expressions a mix of betrayal and awe.

What?! You actually understood that?! they screamed internally. Is this the world of the geniuses!? Are we even the same species?!

Furthermore, they couldn’t help but stare at the “new” Touka.

Ever since she had cut off her bangs and stepped into her role as Seijirou’s business advisor, her stutter had vanished, and her crippling shyness seemed to have been replaced by a sharp, academic confidence.

No, seriously, does removing your bangs really change your personality that much?! they retorted in their heads.

“This… it’s nothing,” Haruka replied. Her face remained as expressionless as a stone gargoyle, but the tips of her ears turned a bright, betraying crimson.

She was clearly embarrassed by the praise, even if her voice didn’t show it.

Why are you embarrassed?! You should be ashamed of your teaching skills! The idiot five couldn’t help but exclaim in exasperation.

To the side of the chaos, Seijirou sat on a stack of folded wrestling mats, his back against the wall.

He was completely detached from the academic struggle, his thumbs dancing across his phone screen as he keep pooling on his money in a horse girl racing gacha game.

Beside him, a rare phenomenon was occurring.

Rei and Erina were sat shoulder-to-shoulder, their notebooks spread out between them.

Normally, the two would be at each other’s throats or trading barbs and even argue about every little thing, but the looming threat of the finals had created a temporary, iron-clad alliance.

“If you look at this quadratic equation,” Rei said, her voice soft but focused, “you can see the parabola is going to shift. If we use the FOIL method here, it simplifies the whole thing.”

Erina nodded, her pen moving gracefully as she followed Rei’s logic. “Ah, I see. But if we plug the variable back into the original function, wouldn’t that create a conflict with the y-intercept? Here, look at my notes on algebra—I found a shortcut for the vertex formula.”

“Oh, that is faster,” Rei admitted, her eyes brightening. “Let’s use that for the practice set. If we solve the next five problems using your shortcut and my simplification, we can finish the Chapter before lunch ends.”

The two girls worked in a strange, focused harmony, their shared intelligence creating a bridge over their usual animosity.

They helped each other through the trickiest parts of the algebra review, their pens scratching in a rhythmic, productive duet.

Meanwhile, in the far corner of the storage room, Shou had found a comfortable spot on a pile of old curtains.

He was fast asleep, his rhythmic snoring adding a bass line to the sounds of scratching pens and Haruka’s clicking chalk.

Despite the gap between the “Geniuses” and the “Failures,” the atmosphere in the storage house was incredibly harmonious.

In the quiet of the lunch hour, the Delinquent King and his circle were simply a group of friends, fighting a war not of fists, but of grades.

*

*

*

At this moment, in the school building.

The polished tiles of the hallway echoed with the crisp, authoritative click of Kobayashi Rindou’s shoes.

As the Student Council President, she was always the fixture of the school’s midday landscape.

“Good afternoon, President!” a group of first-years chirped, bowing as she passed.

“Have you had lunch yet, President?” a member of the tennis club asked with a hopeful smile.

Rindou greeted them back with her signature regal nod, her expression a mask of cool, administrative poise.

Internally, however, she was a storm of impatience. Ever since the new Vice Principal had taken office, her patrol shifts had been extended, eating into her precious lunch hour.

It felt like a deliberate attempt to keep her away from the one person she truly wanted to see.

No, I need to hurry up and finish my patrol so I can have lunch with Seijirou! she thought, her pace increasing until she was almost running.

The Student Council rules on “decorum in the hallways” were currently being trampled by the President herself, but she didn’t care.

Ever since Seijirou had returned and the Saint Shinomiya war had concluded, she hadn’t spent a single, solitary moment with him alone!

She can understand it, of course, after all, Seijirou wanted a war with another school, so he would definitely be busy, but now that everything’s over with, they should spend this time deepening their relationship!

Yet now, because of that darn vice principal, she couldn’t even have enough time to eat!

This is bad! she worried. I need to invite him to the Student Council room for some alone time soon! I need to reclaim my territory!

However, while deep in thought while she rounded the corner toward the North Wing, she slowed down, immediately feeling the ambient noise of the school—the distant chatter, the slamming of lockers, the laughter—had begun to fade.

The hallway grew eerily quiet, the air feeling heavy and stagnant, as if the oxygen was being sucked out of the corridor.

Rindou stopped dead in her tracks.

Something was profoundly wrong.

She closed her eyes, centering her breathing, and activated Ki Sense, it is the most basic use of Ki and also the most useful, allowing her perceived the life signature of any living beings within her area of perception.

She reached out with her spirit, expecting to feel the dozens of warm signatures of students eating and talking nearby.

Instead, there was… nothing. The hallway felt like a vacuum, which was really strange.

After all, it was the middle of lunch; this wing should have been teeming with activity.

Why? she wondered, her hand moving instinctively to the hilt of the shinai she always carried.

Wait. She frowned, her Qi Sense pinging two signatures just around the far corner. They were stationary, their energy pulses erratic and strange.

She opened her eyes, her gaze sharp, and cautiously, she hugged the wall and took a quick peek around the corner.

Almost immediately, her eyes widened, and a flush of shock and anger rose to her cheeks.

In the middle of the hallway, in broad daylight, a fat, greasy student with thick glasses and a disheveled uniform was standing there, a lewd, triumphant smile stretching across his face.

In front of him, a beautiful female student was standing like a puppet, her hands moving with a rhythmic, unnatural precision as she began to undress.

Rindou pulled her head back and hid behind the wall, her heart hammering against her ribs.

What was that?! she screamed internally. Even if there’s no one around, you should do those things in private! This is a school! This can’t go on—I need to reprimand them immediately!

Steel-clad duty overrode her initial shock. She stepped out from the corner and let out a sharp, loud cough to announce her presence.

“Ahem! Students over there, this is the hallway you know?”

The fat student jumped, his eyes bulging in terror as he looked at the President, but suspiciously, the female student didn’t stop, she didn’t even flinch.

She acted as if she hadn’t heard a single sound, her fingers mechanically undoing the buttons of her uniform with the terrifying indifference of a machine.

Rindou’s gaze shifted from the panicking boy to the girl’s eyes, and her heart skip a beat as she noticed they were blank, the pupils dilated and hollow, devoid of any spark of consciousness.

This wasn’t a secret rendezvous; this was something far more sinister.

Rindou gripped her shinai, the blue aura of her ki beginning to hum around the wood as she leveled a glare at the fat student that could have frozen a volcano.

“You…” she hissed, the air around her vibrating with killing intent. “What have you done to her?”