Villain: Your Heroines Were Delicious - Chapter 252 - 40

“Hand over Midorima Yuko, now!”

The head monk ordered, his eyes glowing with malicious light.

Haruka stepped forward with a precision that betrayed her intensive training, her expression as cold as the mountain mist.

Then, her Karyoku activated, erupting in a brilliant flare of sapphire light.

From the ether, a bow made of shimmering blue energy manifested in her grip, its string humming with a high-pitched, melodic vibration that seemed to cut through the oppressive ritual air.

She notched an invisible arrow and pointed it directly at the head monk’s throat.

This is the bow of Odysseus, the symbol of his unyielding love and the instrument of his justice.

The offensive aspect of her Karyoku.

“Hm. Karyoku… As expected, you people aren’t so simple,” the head monk muttered, his eyes narrowing behind the slits of his porcelain mask.

The blue light of the bow reflected off the white surface, making him look like a phantom.

“However, Midorima Ryusui is the only one we truly feared in this household. He is the master of the mountain’s old strength and is a great threat, but now that he is immobilized by the binding beads, we can do exactly what we want. Your parlor tricks mean nothing to the collective will of the God.”

The head monk gestured with a sharp, downward motion, and the monks immediately rushed toward the three women, their robes fluttering like the wings of giant bats as they leaped across the tatami mats.

Haruka’s eyes narrowed into sharp slits, her focus narrowing until the world became nothing but targets and trajectory.

“Penelope!” she cried.

Twelve axe-headed arrows, glowing with a fierce azure radiance, materialized and flew from her bow in a single, blurring volley.

They whistled through the air with the sound of a falling guillotine, each one finding its mark with lethal accuracy as they pierced through the bodies of the lead monks, the force of the energy throwing them backward.

They collapsed onto the floor, the axe-heads pinning their shadows to the wood as they groaned and bled.

Miyako stared at Haruka, a look of genuine appreciation crossing her face.

It wasn’t quite the shock of seeing her own granddaughter using supernatural powers, but rather the surprised and pride of seeing her own granddaughter being so strong.

She nodded slowly, recognizing the girl as a true successor of the Midorima spirit.

The head monk stared at his fallen subordinates, his hands clenching into fists as he saw them wheezing on the floor.

He turned slowly toward Haruka, his aura darkening. “You… little girl… you will pay for that sacrilege with your—”

But before he could finish his threat, the heavy sliding doors of the main hall burst open with a sound like a bomb detonating.

The wood splintered into a thousand shards, and Seijirou entered.

He was now fully clothed, having found the time to wear his clothes while he was running.

But his skin was still glistening with moisture and steam, and he was staring at the monks with a look that could kill.

His silver-gold Ki was no longer humming gently, but it was now roaring, a visible corona of power that made the very air in the hall vibrate.

The head monk frowned, his confidence wavering for the first time. “You… how? Those bastards were ordered to keep you distracted! You were supposed to be trapped in the mist!”

Seijirou smirked, a predatory, jagged expression. “Well, too bad. They were boring. And I don’t like being kept waiting when someone tries to touch what’s mine.”

His Ki burst out of his body in a sudden, violent expansion.

Then, with speed that transcended the human eye’s ability to track, he vanished from the doorway and reappeared directly in front of the head monk.

Before the man could even raise his hands in defense, Seijirou drove his elbow deep into the monk’s chest.

The sound of ribs snapping echoed through the hall as the head monk coughed up a spray of blood that painted the inside of his mask, and he flew backward like he had been hit by a high-speed train.

He crashed into the far wall, coughing and wheezing in agony, his ritual power shattered by the sheer physical dominance of the strike.

“Seijirou-sama! Their target is my mother! They’re trying to take her to the temple for some ritual!” Haruka shouted, her bow still drawn.

Seijirou nodded, his eyes scanning the room, then without wasting another second on words, he surged forward, a blur of bronze skin and golden energy, attacking the remaining monks.

He moved with the fluidity of water and the impact of a falling boulder, snapping limbs and tossing bodies aside as if they were made of straw.

Just then, the bunch of inbred bastards who had been tasked with keeping Seijirou at bay finally caught up.

They burst into the hall, breathing heavily, their faces flushed with exertion and terror.

They saw Seijirou standing in the middle of a pile of broken monks and realized they had failed utterly.

This angered them, thinking about how disappointed their “mothers” and “fathers” will be when they found out about this.

But before they could take a step forward to attack and vent their anger, Haruka swiveled on her heel, pointing her glowing bow at them.

“Penelope!”

Another volley of arrows flew like heat-seeking rockets, piercing through several of the youths.

They screamed in a discordant, high-pitched chorus of pain as the blue energy cauterized their wounds and pinned them to the floorboards.

“Take a step forward, and the next one will be you.” Haruka warned.

Seeing that, the others who had wanted to rush in stopped dead in their tracks and they simply stared at Haruka, then at the glowing bow on her hand aimed directly at them, and backed away in pure, unadulterated fear.

Just then, Seijirou reached out and grabbed the heads of the two remaining monks who were still standing and smashed them against each other with a sickening thud, before throwing their limp bodies into the garden.

At that, the ritual circle finally flickered and died and the binding on Ryusui was released.

The old patriarch slowly stood up, rubbing his wrists where the beads had bitten into his skin while his eyes were cold—a freezing, ancient rage that surpassed anything Seijirou had seen from him before.

He looked at the wreckage of his hall and the bleeding monks.

“These bastards… have they gone completely mad!?” Ryusui growled, his voice trembling with fury. “To attack the Midorima in their own home? To use temple arts against the keepers of the valley?”

Miyako frowned, “Forget that, why are they insistent on taking Yuko away?”

Everyone turned towards the bastards who stood frozen from Haruka’s arrow, and wanted to ask them.

But at that moment, the four of them—Seijirou, Haruka, Miyako, and Ryusui—heard a growing commotion from outside the mansion.

It wasn’t the sound of festival music or celebratory laughter, but a low, rhythmic chanting, punctuated by the sound of hundreds of feet marching in unison.

They stared at each other for a heartbeat, and without hesitation, they bolted toward the entrance of the mansion, ignoring the bastards.

And as they left, Seijirou immediately scooped Yuko up into a princess carry, shielding her with his own body as they left the wreckage of the hall behind.

Finally, when they arrived at the grand entrance of the mansion, they saw a sight that looked like a scene from a nightmare.

Hundreds of the town’s people were gathered outside the gates.

They were holding flickering torches, the orange light casting dancing, grotesque shadows over their blank, vacant faces.

They were shouting, a discordant wall of noise that made the hair on Seijirou’s neck stand up.

They were pushing against the massive iron gates with a suicidal intensity, and the people at the very front were being squished against the bars so hard that they started bleeding, their bones audibly breaking under the pressure of the crowd behind them.

Yet, they didn’t stop. They didn’t even scream in pain and just kept pushing, their eyes fixed on the mansion.

“Heretics! Kill the heretics!”

“How dare you blaspheme the Mountain God! Give us the Miko!”

“Kill them! Kill them all and offer their blood to the harvest!”

Seijirou frowned, his grip on Yuko tightening as he watched the iron gates actually start to bend under the inhuman pressure. “What the hell is happening? Why do they look like zombies?”

Just then, Haruka stepped forward as a holographic screen manifested in front of her, glowing with a soft white light as she began typing with blurred speed.

She scanned the crowd, her eyes darting across the data streams before he looked back at the screen, her expression darkening. “According to the spiritual resonance readings, Seijirou-sama… something is influencing their souls. It’s a mass-scale frequency, a parasite of the psyche. They aren’t in control of their own actions, they’re being hypnotized.”

“These fanatics,” Ryusui clicked his tongue, his hand gripping the hilt of his restored katana. “It must be that fat pig from the temple! I knew he was incredibly shady from the moment he arrived twenty five years ago! It was only after he took over that the temple rituals started getting weird, and the women started disappearing for ’longer prayers’!”

“It seems we need to deal with the source to bring this town back to normal,” Miyako said, her voice steady despite the chaos at the gates. “If we don’t stop the ritual at the peak, these people will literally crush themselves to death against our walls.”

Seijirou looked up past the mob, past the burning torches, and toward the distant temple at the highest point of the ridge.

And from there, something seems to be staring back at him, like a beacon of cold, ancient hunger.

“Fine,” Seijirou said, his voice dropping into a low, dangerous tone as he turned to Haruka and Ryusui. “I’m going to the peak. Clear a path.”