Villain: Your Heroines Were Delicious - Chapter 256 - 44

Seijirou and the others watched with bated breath, the air around them humming with a frequency that vibrated deep within their marrow.

The Great God stood at the border of the town, a pulsating wall of emerald rot that seemed to be fighting its own gravity.

The silence was heavy, broken only by the distant, rhythmic tolling of a bell that no one could see.

Then, at that moment, a sound that wasn’t quite a sound, like a psychic shriek that bypassed the ears and landed directly in the mind, resounded from the Great God.

The creature’s massive form shivered, its many nodules expanding as it suddenly turned its towering body and attacked them with a violent, desperate intensity.

Seijirou moved instantly, his reflexes honed to a razor’s edge as he grabbed Yuko by the waist and jumped, clearing several meters as a massive tentacle smashed the asphalt where they had been standing a microsecond before.

Simultaneously, Ryusui grabbed Miyako, his old muscles bulging as he dodged a sweeping strike, while Haruka performed a practiced roll to the side, her blue energy bow already beginning to manifest in her hand.

Seijirou frowned, his brow furrowing in deep concentration.

Within him, his Origin—the Seeker—began to scream.

It wasn’t quite a warning of malice or a alert of an incoming threat; it was a resonance of absolute, unmitigated agony.

He frowned, his eyes narrowing as he analyzed the shifting green mass. “This guy… it’s crying out in pain!”

He jumped and dodged with fluid, acrobatic grace as countless sharp pikes of solidified green sludge began to rain down from the sky like a localized storm.

The projectiles hissed through the air, melting the ground upon impact, turning the road into a minefield of corrosive craters.

“What!?” Ryusui exclaimed, his breath hitching as he performed a narrow dodge. “If it’s in pain, then why is the Great God attacking us with such ferocity!? It should be targeting the source of its corruption, not the people trying to stop it!”

Haruka was the one to answer while dodging a barrage with a series of backflips, her blue sapphire arrows flickering in the dark. “Possible reason… it cannot bear to destroy the town that once worshipped it, despite the pain they caused. It is in a state of cognitive dissonance. It wanted to use us as its target to calm its instinct to destroy, to vent the pressure of its corruption on something that can actually fight back!”

That was a reasonable, tactical explanation based on the data she was seeing, but for some reason, Seijirou felt like it wasn’t like that at all.

His Origin was pulsing in his chest, telling him that the logic was deeper, more tragic, and far more ancient than a simple venting of pressure.

“It’s like a mother,” Yuko suddenly said, her voice soft yet piercing through the roar of the monster and the sound of falling spikes.

“What?” Seijirou asked, landing beside her and pulling her behind the cover of a stone pillar.

Yuko pointed at the Great God, her eyes brimming with a mixture of terror and profound pity. “It’s like a mother. It can’t bear to hurt its own child. Even though the child has grown cruel and forgotten her, she would rather die than see them suffer. Probably… it wanted to bear the suffering alone. It’s lashing out because it doesn’t want anyone to see how much it’s hurting.”

Seijirou paused, the realization hitting him like a physical blow, but in that instant of hesitation, his guard dropped.

One of the green pikes whistled through the air, aimed directly for his chest.

“Seijirou-sama!” Haruka screamed, her voice shrill with panic as she notched an arrow to intercept.

Seijirou snapped out of his thoughts just in time.

He twisted his body mid-air, the pike grazing his shoulder and searing his skin, but leaving him unharmed.

He rolled across the pavement and stood up, his eyes now fixed on the High Priest’s motionless form at the creature’s peak.

At that moment, the Great God stopped its attacks as the pikes ceased to fall, and the tentacles withdrew, curling back into the central mass of sludge.

The silence returned, even more oppressive than before.

Haruka and Ryusui immediately bolted towards them, their faces pale with relief.

“Seijirou-sama!” Haruka hugged him tightly, her small frame trembling as she sighed in relief. “You can’t do that! You can’t just stop in the middle of a battlefield!”

“Brat, what are you doing getting distracted?” Ryusui added, his voice gruff as he tried to hide his own concern. “That thing could have pinned you to the dirt like an insect!”

Seijirou shook his head slowly, his eyes never leaving the monster. “That attack… it wasn’t going to hit me. Even if I didn’t dodge, it would’ve just grazed me. I felt the trajectory.”

“You got lucky, but that doesn’t mean you should get distracted and rely on luck,” Ryusui countered, crossing his arms.

Seijirou shook his head again, his voice dropping to a somber whisper. “Not quite. It wasn’t luck.”

He turned fully toward the Great God, which was now swaying gently like a dying tree in the wind. “It doesn’t mean to hurt us. It never did. It didn’t want to kill us… it wanted to threaten us. It wanted to make us stop it.”

“Huh?” Ryusui frowned, looking from Seijirou to the towering green horror.

Seijirou stepped forward and grabbed Yuko’s shoulders, his expression grave. “Just like Yuko said, it’s like a mother. It couldn’t bear to hurt its child—this town. No matter how much the people depraved it, no matter how much they perverted its mountains with their greed and poisoned its prayers with their selfishness, they are still its children that it used to protect for centuries. It loves them too much to destroy them, no matter how much its corrupted side screams for vengeance.”

“You mean…” Ryusui’s eyes widened, the ancestral knowledge of his clan finally aligning with the reality before him.

Seijirou nodded, his gaze returning to the monster. “However, it is also true that due to those perversions and the High Priest’s rituals, it became twisted. It can’t hold back its will to destroy forever. It’s a pressure cooker of malice that it didn’t ask for. So, it’s attacking us because it wants us to destroy it instead. It’s begging for an end before it loses the last shred of its divinity and does something it can never take back.”

“I see…” Ryusui sighed, a sound that seemed to carry the weight of the entire valley.

He looked up at the mountain he had guarded his whole life, seeing it not as a resource or a burden, but as a suffering parent.

Even Miyako stared at the Great God in melancholy, her stoic mask finally crumbling to reveal the grief of a woman watching an old friend pass away.

Yuko looked saddened, her hands clasped in prayer for a being that had protected her ancestors since the dawn of the village.

Ryusui turned towards Seijirou, then with a slow, deliberate motion, he reversed the grip on his katana and handed it over, hilt-first. “Take it. Use it to kill the Great God. End its suffering, Kageyama boy.”

Seijirou took the katana, feeling the sudden, immense weight of the weapon.

It wasn’t just steel; it felt like he was holding a piece of the earth itself.

“That sword was granted by the Great God to our ancestors many years ago,” Ryusui explained, his voice thick with emotion. “It was forged from the depths of the earth and strengthened by the god’s own blessings when it was still pure. This sword was meant to protect the mountain… and now, it must be the one to save it from its own shadow.”

Seijirou stared at the blade, then at the patriarch, and nodded firmly as he felt the Ki within the sword resonating with his own Ki, a harmonious vibration of purpose.

At that moment, as if the Great God finally lost the last of its control, it let out a soul-rending wail—a sound of pure, unadulterated madness.

Its body convulsed, and it began to send a frantic, chaotic barrage of green pikes in every direction once again.

It was no longer a targeted attack; it was a death rattle, intending to annihilate them.

Ryusui grabbed Miyako while Haruka grabbed her mother, both of them moving with desperate speed as they dodged the raining death.

Meanwhile, Seijirou didn’t retreat, and instead, he focused his Ki into his feet, his aura exploding into a brilliant silver-gold.

Then, he launched himself forward, using the very pikes that were meant to kill him as platforms.

He jumped from one flying projectile to another, a blur of motion rising higher and higher towards the creature’s peak.

’It must’ve hurt right?’ he thought, his eyes locked on the porcelain mask of the High Priest.

’You must be very sad right now, watching your children forget who you were, right?’ He reached the apex of his jump, hanging suspended in the air for a fraction of a second against the backdrop of the moon.

’Don’t worry. I’ll end it all. I’ll give you the silence you’ve been begging for.’

’Even if it means…. You won’t see the mountain grow green again.’

Seijirou kicked off a final pike and was suddenly directly above the body of the High Priest and the core of the Great God.

At that moment, he raised the ancestral katana high above his head, the blade drinking in the silver light of the moon.

“Farewell, oh great god of the mountain,” Seijirou whispered, his voice steady and full of a strange, mournful respect. “May you rest peacefully in the earth you loved.”

The sword began to glow, not with the sickly green of the corruption, but with a blinding, radiant white—as if he were holding a miniature sun in his hands.

He swung it down with everything he had, a strike that combined the strength of a King, the resolve of a Seeker, and the blessing of the mountain itself.

The blade sliced through the High Priest, through the sludge, and deep into the heart of the Great God.

Everything turned white.