Villain: Your Heroines Were Delicious - Chapter 166 - 31

Chapter 166: Chapter 31

The doorbell echoed through the lively chatter of the kitchen, its sharp chime momentarily cutting through Suzune’s laughter and the sound of Rindou’s rhythmic chopping.

Since the girls was elbow-deep in stew prep and the boys were busy helping them out, Seijirou wiped his hands on a towel and headed to the foyer.

He pulled open the heavy oak door, expecting perhaps a delivery or a late arrival.

Instead, he found Shou standing there, looking as perpetually exhausted as ever, nothing out of ordinary, but it was the person standing beside him that made Seijirou pause.

It was a woman who looked like a gender-swapped, slightly older reflection of Shou.

She had long, raven-black hair tied into a loose side ponytail that draped over her shoulder.

Her gray eyes were half-lidded, framed by heavy, dark eyebags that made her look like she hadn’t slept since the previous decade.

She stood with a slumped, lazy posture that radiated a profound lack of energy.

Seijirou looked at Shou’s eyebags, then at the woman’s, and then back to Shou before he leaned against the doorframe and muttered, “Are eyebags contagious? Should I be wearing a mask?”

“Fuck you,” Shou glared, though the effect was somewhat muted by his droopy, sleepy eyelids.

Seijirou chuckled at him, “Fuck you too.”

Shou let out a long, weary sigh and gestured to the woman. “This is my sister, Nakamura Maki. She’s heading back to Tokyo today and decided to drop me off since it was on her way.”

“Ah, nice to meet you,” Seijirou said, his mind already concluding: Not contagious, but definitely hereditary.

Maki didn’t move, she just stared at Seijirou with those hazy, lazy gray eyes, her gaze drifting over him with the speed of melting glaciers.

“You’re the one,” she drawled, her voice a sleepy monotone. “The one who corrupted my brother and turned him into a delinquent, right?”

Shou frowned at her.

“Sis, that’s enough,” he interjected, his voice firm, though he looked like he wanted to vanish into the pavement.

Seijirou didn’t blink, he just met her gaze with a calm, unapologetic nod. “I am. What of it?”

Maki didn’t explode in anger, she didn’t even scowl. She simply stared at him for a few more seconds, as if processing his existence, before giving a singular, sluggish nod.

Without another word, she turned on her heel and walked back to a sleek car idling by the gate.

She climbed in and drove off without a backward glance.

Seijirou blinked, watching the taillights disappear. “What was all that about?”

“Dunno,” Shou shook his head, already stepping past Seijirou into the house. “No one in our family really knows what that woman is thinking half the time. Anyway, have you started the study session yet? I’m ready to fail in the comfort of your living room.”

“Not yet. We’re waiting for everyone to arrive,” Seijirou said, closing the door. “Only Touka is left now.”

*

*

*

While the warmth of a home-cooked meal was filling the Kageyama estate, the air in a narrow, trash-strewn alleyway across town was thick with the smell of sweat and desperation.

Tadano Taro stood facing a scruffy delinquent who looked more confused than threatened.

The delinquent flicked a cigarette butt toward Taro’s feet. “The hell do you want, kid? You lost?”

Taro felt his heart hammering against his ribs as he took a deep, shaky breath, summoning the most offensive thing he could think of to trigger a conflict.

“I fuck your mom!”

The delinquent’s eyes went wide, then narrowed into slits of pure rage. “Fuck… you wanna die?!”

The man rushed forward, and sent a wild, swinging hook aimed at Taro’s jaw.

Taro, anticipating the movement thanks to his slightly heightened reflexes, ducked—though clumsily—and swung back.

He was nervous , afraid, after all this is his first time fighting, and he was no martial artist.

He punched and kicked with a frantic, desperate energy, which the delinquent returned with same ferocity.

And soon the two were a tangled mess of limbs, tackling each other onto the grimy concrete.

“Bastard! Say that again, I fucking dare you!” the delinquent roared, pinning Taro’s shoulders down.

Taro spat blood and glared up at him. “I fuck your mother! Turned her into my toy!”

The insult acted like gasoline on a fire.

The delinquent, now blinded by rage, didn’t even try to punch; he lunged down and bit into Taro’s shoulder.

“Ah!” Taro screamed in agony, the heat of the pain was becoming unbearable, but he he responded in kind, sinking his teeth into the man’s ear until the copper taste of blood filled his mouth.

They rolled across the alley, engaging in a primal, ugly struggle for dominance.

But Taro finally managed to scramble on top, pinning the man’s back with his knees.

He didn’t know how to finish it properly, so he used the only weapon he had left: his elbows.

He rained them down on the back of the delinquent’s head, over and over, until the man’s resistance finally faded into a limp, unconscious heap.

Taro collapsed backward, lying flat on the cold, hard ground, his knuckles were shredded, his shoulder was bleeding, and his chest felt like it had been hit by a truck, but he was breathing.

Suddenly, the familiar blue screen shimmered in the air above him.

[Quest: A Changed Man—Completed]

[Reward: Street Fighting Skill (E), Health +2, Physique +2]

A strange, numbing warmth flooded his body, knitting together the worst of his bruises and filling his muscles with a new, instinctive knowledge of violence.

Taro let out a ragged, hysterical laugh that echoed off the alley walls.

“Hahaha…” He held up his shaking hands, looking at them with a sense of wonder. “I’m not… I’m not powerless anymore!”

The system had given him the one thing he never had: the ability to hit back.

Feeling satisfied, he stood up and staggered out of the alleyway, his body aching from the raw brutality of the exchange, yet his spirit was soaring.

The “Health +2” and “Physique +2” rewards were already working, a dull heat radiating from his bruised ribs as the System accelerated his recovery.

For the first time in his life, he didn’t feel like a victim of gravity or circumstance, he felt like a protagonist.

He wanted to shout it from the rooftops, he wanted to pull out his phone and call someone—to say, “Look at me, I’m not the weakling you remember!”

But as his thumb hovered over his contact list, a cold, crushing reality settled over him.

The screen was a graveyard of silence as he finally realized…he was alone.

Rei hadn’t just distanced herself; she had practically erased him from her daily routine, her eyes now perpetually fixed on the golden shadow of Seijirou.

Erina, who used to at least offer him a sharp-tongued greeting, now treated him like background noise since Rei no longer provided the bridge between them.

Aside from those two, his social circle was a void.

He stood on the sidewalk, the vibrant weekend crowd of the city moving around him like he was a ghost.

He was growing, evolving, becoming “better” by the second, and yet… he was utterly, profoundly alone.

“What am I even doing?” he whispered, his voice cracking.

He began to walk aimlessly, his feet heavy.

He had spent his whole life feeling inferior, a “mob character” in someone else’s story.

He thought the System would fix that, he thought that by grinding, by sweating, by enduring the humiliation of biting a man in a gutter for a “Street Fighting” skill, he would finally be happy.

But as his stats climbed, the girls he once put on pedestals started to look different.

The “Affection Meters” and “Difficulty Scales” made them feel like objectives in a game, not people.

All that pain, the blood in his mouth, the sweat on the park grass… was it all just so he could be the “Chad” in a dating sim?

Was his entire existence just a quest for a higher number of “Sexual Partners”?

He felt a hollow ache in his chest that the System couldn’t heal with a stat point.

Lost in this existential fog, his feet unconsciously followed a well-worn path through the district.

He blinked, realizing he had stopped in front of a familiar, quaint building: Touka’s family café.

The bell on the door used to be a welcome sound. He remembered coming here almost every day, nursing a single coffee just for the chance to talk to Touka, to see her shy smile behind her bangs.

But the moment he saw her leaning toward Seijirou, the moment he realized she was drifting into that “other” world, his inferiority had flared up like a fever.

He had severed the bond himself, retreating into a shell of bitterness.

“Was it always me?” he wondered, looking at his reflection in the café window. “Rei, Erina, Touka… I was the one who pushed them away.”

He shook his head, a bitter taste in his mouth. Everything’s over, and there is nothing he can do to change that.

He turned his back on the café and began to walk away, his hood pulled low.

At that exact moment, the bell of the café chimed with a cheerful ring. Touka stepped out onto the sidewalk, a large, neatly packed bag of baked goods in her arms.

“Yes, Mom! I have everything!” she called back over her shoulder, her voice clear and free of its old stutter. “Now please, stop treating me like a kid in front of the customers! It’s embarrassing!”

The door clicked shut behind her as Touka let out a long, theatrical sigh of relief, adjusting the bag.

She turned, and for a split second, her eyes caught a glimpse of a familiar back—a boy in a black hoodie walking away with his shoulders slumped.

She paused, her brow furrowing as a memory of a friend flickered in her mind.

But the feeling passed quickly.

She checked her watch, her expression instantly shifting into a bright, excited smile as she had a study session to lead, a sleepover to join, and a crush to see.

She turned in the opposite direction, her steps light and purposeful as she headed toward the Kageyama estate.

The two former friends moved in opposite directions—one toward a house full of warmth and “existence,” and the other back into the shadows to grind for a future he no longer understood.