Villain: Your Heroines Were Delicious - Chapter 254 - 42

The High Priest screamed as he ran.

His voice were less like a man’s and more like a wounded animal’s as he tore through the narrow stone corridor.

His massive, bloated body was a grotesque spectacle of physics, with every panicked stride, his layers of fat waved and rippled like water under a storm.

Even without looking back, he could feel the air behind him growing heavier, vibrating with a golden heat that promised nothing but destruction.

He knew, just from sensing the raw, unbridled Ki radiating from Seijirou, that he was no match for the boy.

The High Priest was a parasite, a man who fed on the weak and hid behind the manipulated souls of the village, but in the face of a true apex power, he was nothing more than a mound of meat.

That’s why he ran.

His lungs burned, and his vision blurred with the salt of his own frantic sweat.

Right now, he wasn’t running to save his followers or his temple, instead he was running to the only thing left that could possibly protect him.

He wanted to beg the Great God for help, to offer whatever was left of the valley’s soul in exchange for his own miserable life.

Finally, he burst into the inner sanctum and arrived at the foot of the altar, and at that moment, his strength finally failed him.

Before he could take a step forward, his legs suddenly gave out, and he collapsed with a wet, heavy thud that echoed against the vaulted ceiling.

“Ah!” He grunted in pain, feeling every fats and bone in his body screaming at him.

He couldn’t get up, his heart was drumming a frantic rhythm against his ribs, and his muscles were locked in a spasm of terror.

Forced to move like the worm he was, he could only crawl toward the faceless porcelain mask, his fingernails clawing at the stone floor.

“Great God… Great God, please help me!” he shrieked, reaching out a trembling, grease-stained hand toward the altar. “Grant me strength! Consume the intruder! I have given you everything… just save me!”

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Back in the main hall, the silence was deafening.

Seijirou stood amidst a literal graveyard of distorted bodies as he had just stomped the head of the last remaining inbred bastard into the floor, the sound of bone meeting stone final and absolute.

He stood there for a moment, his chest heaving as he took a deep, shaky breath.

The silver-golden Ki around him flickered, reacting to the turbulent state of his mind.

Although he was someone who had faced many supernatural horrors, and had taken a life before in the heat of battle….but this was actually the first time he had killed so many people in such a short span of time.

He killed all of them so brutally that the room was already thick with the copper scent of blood.

He looked down at his hands, noticing they were still shaking—the involuntary nerves of a human being who had just crossed the line into mass execution.

However, he forced himself to stay grounded and even bit the inside of his cheek, using the sting of pain to anchor him to the present.

He turned his head and stared at the women huddled on the floor and that made him feel less guilt from having killed so many.

Some of these were so young they couldn’t have been more than children, their bodies marked by the temple’s cruelty, their spirits seemingly vanished into a hollow void.

He felt his heart ache with a visceral, jagged pain.

This wasn’t just a “supernatural incident” anymore; it was a crime against humanity that demanded a total, uncompromising reckoning.

If Suzune was here, he would’ve wanted her to drag their souls to that spirit world she has and make them suffer for eternity!

“Wait for me…” he whispered, his voice cracking slightly before hardening into a razor-edged promise. “I’ll handle that bastard first. Then I’m getting you all out of here.”

He didn’t wait for a response they were likely too broken to give and immediately pivoted on his heel and ran, his feet barely touching the stone floor as he propelled himself with a desperate, lung-bursting speed.

Each step was a like thunderclap, his Ki burning like a miniature sun within the narrow, oppressive hallway.

The air grew colder, smelling of ancient dust and a sickly-sweet rot that made his stomach turn.

And before long, he burst through the final set of heavy doors, the wood splintering under the pressure of his aura.

He arrived at the inner sanctum, a circular room dominated by the towering altar, and saw the High Priest kneeling in the center.

The man looked pathetic—a quivering mound of flesh whimpering before that said altar.

Without a second’s hesitation, Seijirou launched himself into the air and put every ounce of his momentum, his rage, and his silver-golden Ki into his right leg.

He meant to end it right there, intending to use the sheer downward force of his falling weight to crush the High Priest’s head like a ripened melon against the stone.

*CLANG!*

But the sound was not of bone breaking like he expected, but of metal meeting metal.

The moment his kick landed on the High Priest’s head, Seijirou’s eyes widened in shock as it felt as if he had kicked a solid plate of reinforced tungsten.

Then, a violent shockwave traveled back up his leg, the kinetic backlash rattling his teeth and threatening to snap his ankle.

He flipped backward through the air, landing in a defensive crouch several meters away as his Ki flared up instinctively, acting like a golden corona shielding him as he stared at the figure by the altar.

“What…the hell…”

The High Priest began to change.

And when he stood up, his body actually contorted and expanded, his bones popping and snapping like dry wood as they realigned into something hulking and unnatural.

Then, he let out a roar—a sound so horrifying it made the very stones of the temple weep.

The roar wasn’t just a human voice, it was a discordant symphony of thousands of people screaming and beasts howling in agony, all layered into one soul piercing vibration.

The High Priest turned to face him, and Seijirou felt a chill of pure dread as a porcelain mask was now fused to the man’s face, white veins of Ki pulsing rhythmically from the mask into his neck.

“Boy!” The High Priest’s voice was a booming, distorted rasp that echoed from the walls. “Do you have any idea what you have done!? Because of your interference, I had to awaken the Great God before we could secure the perfect vessel! Because of your ’justice,’ the ritual is incomplete! And because it is incomplete, many more sacrifices are now necessary to satisfy the God’s hunger!”

At that moment, a massive, obsidian aura exploded from the High Priest’s body. This wasn’t just ki or spirit energy, but a manifestation of pure evil and malice.

The force was so immense that the thick stone pillars of the temple disintegrated into dust, and the heavy tiled roof was blasted into the sky as if by a volcanic eruption.

Seijirou was caught in the center of the blast and sent flying back, his body skidding across the rubble as he struggled to maintain his footing.

Before he could regain his balance, the High Priest gestured with a clawed hand and a black, shadowy hand, formed from solidified darkness and malice, erupted from the ground beneath Seijirou.

It coiled around his torso and limbs like a colossal serpent, pinning him down to the shattered remains of the floor.

“Let go of me!” Seijirou roared, his golden Ki surging as he tried to flex his muscles and break the shadowy binding.

He pulled with everything he had, his veins bulging and the ground beneath him cracking, but the black hand held firm, absorbing his energy as if it were a bottomless pit.

Just then, the porcelain mask on the High Priest’s face split down the center with a wet, sickening crack.

It revealed his face that were no longer human, but a melting meat with his eye ball dropping down from his eye sockets.

Then, his jaw unhinged, opening unnaturally wide until his mouth was a dark, yawning cavern that reached his chest.

And from the depths of that abyss like mouth, dozens of wet, black tentacles shot out.

They didn’t target Seijirou, but instead reached across the room, snaking toward the corner where the naked, hazy-eyed women were huddled in their trauma.

Seijirou’s eyes widened, his heart hammering against his ribs in a frantic rhythm of horror as the tentacles wrapped around the women’s waists and limbs.

Then, with a violent, mechanical jerk, the High Priest began hauling them back, intending to throw the living women into his gaping, impossible mouth.

“STOP! DON’T YOU DARE!” Seijirou screamed, his voice cracking with a desperate, helpless fury as he watched the first girl being lifted into the air.

The High Priest didn’t even chew. There was no sound of grinding teeth or breaking bone, only the wet, cavernous “thwack” of flesh being pulled into a bottomless gullet.

One by one, the girls were hoisted into the air by the slick, oily tentacles.

The first girl went in headfirst, her limp legs kicking once before disappearing into the darkness of the priest’s throat.

Then a second, and a third.

He devoured them with a methodical, predatory hunger, his throat bulging and undulating as he forced the living sacrifices down into the furnace of his belly.

“NO! STOP IT! STOP!” Seijirou’s roar was primal, a sound of absolute, soul-shattering rage.

He strained against the shadowy hand with such violence that the skin on his wrists and ankles began to tear, blood slicking the black restraints.

His silver-golden Ki flared and sputtered, clashing against the obsidian darkness, but it was like trying to burn a hole through a black hole.

He was forced to watch, his eyes wide and burning with tears of fury, as the last of the broken women was dragged into the abyss.

When the High Priest finished his grisly meal, a terrifying silence fell over the ruins of the temple.

His unhinged jaw slowly creaked shut, realigning with a sickening metallic click while the porcelain mask, now stained with flecks of red, fused back together, hiding the horror beneath.

Suddenly, the shadowy hand holding Seijirou vanished, dissolving into tendrils of smoke and he gasped for air.

He looked up, breathing heavily and saw the High Priest’s body began to undergo another, catastrophic metamorphosis.

The bloated man’s body began to convulse and shake with a violent, rhythmic intensity.

His skin turned a bruised, sickly purple before tearing open, revealing a dark, greenish-black sludge beneath as he grew in size, his fat expanding and twisting into a mass of sentient, bubbling rot.

Within seconds, the man had vanished, and in his place stood a dark, greenish horror—a towering mass of sludge and muscle that looked like a deep-sea nightmare.

Countless tentacles, thick as tree trunks and tipped with serrated suckers, sprouted from the central mass.

The only remnant of the man was the High Priest’s torso and head, protruding motionless from the very top of the creature like a grotesque hood ornament, the porcelain mask staring blankly at the moon.

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At this exact moment, back at the Midorima Mansion, the atmosphere shifted instantly.

Haruka and the others were preventing the town people from breaking in when the roar of the high priest resounded.

At the sound of that voice, the hundreds of hypnotized townsfolk who had been bashing themselves against the gates suddenly stopped.

Their eyes cleared for a split second, a flash of pure terror returning to their pupils, before their knees buckled.

Then, in a wave of synchronized exhaustion, the entire mob collapsed, passing out cold on the dirt road and the torches they held fell to the ground, flickering out in the dust.

Ryusui, still gripping his katana, stared at the fallen crowd in total confusion.

He then looked at Miyako, whose face had gone pale, and then at Haruka, who was already staring up at the mountain ridge.

“The frequency stopped,” Haruka whispered, her voice trembling. “But the energy signature… it’s spiked. This… doesn’t feel human.”

This energy signature was similar to that one with “Mister” during their raid on his base.

They all turned in unison toward the temple at the peak.

“Seijirou-sama…” Yuko whispered, her hands clasped over her heart.