Villain: Your Heroines Were Delicious - Chapter 261 - 49

The silence in the living room was so absolute you could hear the soft ticking of the wall clock and the distant hiss of a tea kettle in the kitchen.

No one moved.

Even Yuko, who usually possessed a maternal instinct that kept her moving through any domestic chaos, hadn’t even started preparing the dishes.

She stood by the doorway, her apron strings half-tied, simply staring at the scene in front of her with a mixture of bewilderment and a strange, lingering sense of competition.

There, on the plush leather sofa, the impossible was happening.

Rei was sitting directly on Seijirou’s lap, her expensive silk skirt riding up her thighs, completely indifferent to the audience.

She had her arms draped lazily around his neck and was resting her head on his shoulder, her eyes half-closed in a trance of bliss.

She leaned in closer, burying her nose into the crook of his neck, and took a deep, shaky breath.

“Ah~, darling… you smell so good~,” she purred, her voice a velvety rasp that sent a shiver down Seijirou’s spine. “The scent of the mountains, of rain, and of you, mixing together… This is so intoxicating I feel like I could just melt into you right here.”

Seijirou sat there, his hands hovering awkwardly in the air for a moment before he slowly rested them on her waist, unsure if he should push her off or embrace this terrifyingly glamorous version of Rei.

At that moment, Suzune finally broke the paralysis.

She stood up, cleared her throat with a sharp cough against her fist, and stared at the group of girls who looked ready to start a riot. “I think there’s nothing wrong with her—”

“You fucking cuckqueen!” Yukina yelled, her voice cracking as she lunged forward, grabbing Suzune by the shoulders and shoving her back down into her seat with enough force to make the springs groan. “Just because you apparently have a secret fetish for seeing our man get seduced right in front of us doesn’t mean we have to let Rei remain as she is! This isn’t Rei! Rei would be asking him how much the train ticket cost and if he kept the receipt for tax purposes!”

“Isn’t it fine?” Suzune shrugged, her expression infuriatingly calm as she smoothed out her uniform. “I don’t sense any malicious Ki nor spirit energy, and I certainly don’t sense a possession or a curse either. She just seems… enlightened. I don’t sense anything wrong with her, and I’m sure none of you can detect a foreign signature either, right?”

“But that just makes it even more suspicious!” Yukina retorted, her eyes darting back to Rei, who was now playfully nipping at Seijirou’s earlobe. “If there’s no magic involved, then she’s doing this of her own free will, which is even more insane!”

Suzune waved her hand dismissively, ever the pragmatist. “If she still hasn’t returned to the way she was in a few days, then we can take action then. For now, maybe something just triggered her, prompting her to act like this. People change, Yukina. Sometimes they just need a push.”

Touka, who had been sitting quietly and twisting the hem of her skirt, suddenly raised her hand with a trembling uncertainty. “M-Maybe… maybe it’s my fault? I… I might have bragged to her last night that I slept with Seijirou-kun. I told her how… how amazing he was.”

Everyone stopped and looked at Touka.m as the room went silent again as they processed this.

They thought for a moment, looked at the pink-haired siren currently purring on Seijirou’s lap, and slowly nodded in unison.

They found it entirely reasonable.

If anything could break Rei’s brain and force a total personality reboot, it was the realization that the “shy” one had beaten her to the finish line.

“Anyways,” he tension eased slightly, though the jealousy remained as Suzune turned her attention away from the lap-sitting drama and looked toward Haruka and Yuko. “Enough about Rei for a second. Was the countryside fun? You guys were gone for a while. Should we all plan a trip to visit that town later this summer? It looked beautiful in the photos.”

Haruka let out a long, weary sigh that seemed to carry the weight of the entire mountain range. “It was alright, I suppose.”

Everyone turned toward her, their curiosity piqued.

The tone of Haruka’s voice suggested something far darker than a simple family reunion.

They leaned in, eager to know more.

Haruka stared at them, her eyes growing cold as she recalled the green sludge and the faceless masks. “Well, for starters, we found out that the monks in the temple were actually using the women in the town as breeding pigs. They kept them drugged and broken in the dark. Not only that, they had perverted and depraved the ancient prayers and rituals to worship a corrupted version of the mountain god. They were feeding it misery and blood, causing said god to turn into a monster that almost destroyed the entire town.”

The silence that followed was heavy and suffocating.

“What!?”

“Elaborate! Now!”

“That’s right! We need more details! Did Seijirou fight a god!?”

Haruka sighed again, and this time, she sat down and began to tell the story from the beginning.

She added a lot more details and context, the inbred cultists, the high priest’s disgusting appetite, the way the townspeople were being piloted like zombies, and finally, the heartbreaking moment where Seijirou had to put the mountain to sleep.

After they listened, the atmosphere in the living room turned incredibly solemn as the girls’ eyes were burning with a cold, righteous anger.

This incident reminded them too much of the “Mister” and the other scum they had encountered in the city.

The idea of a whole town being turned into a systematic nightmare of exploitation made their stomachs turn.

Suzune turned toward Haruka, her voice sharp. “What happened to those priests? And those inbred monkeys who were helping them? I hope they didn’t just get a quick death.”

Haruka shrugged, her expression unreadable. “I have no clue. Although Seijirou killed some of them, but Grandmother took charge of those who survived and she had the mansion guards round them up and imprisoned them in our deepest basement. She wouldn’t tell me what she planned to do, and she made it very clear I shouldn’t ask.”

“It’s fine that you didn’t know,” Yuko added as everyone turned to her.

She had a strange, distant look in her eyes, one that suggested she knew exactly what was happening back home.

“Mother was always the ’shadow’ of the Midorima family. Long before she met father, she was once a high-ranking officer in the nation’s anti-reconnaissance and torture division. She earned the nickname ’The Surgeon of Silence’ for a reason.”

*

*

*

At this very moment, hundreds of miles away in the cold, damp dark of the Midorima basement.

Miyako was no longer the graceful, tea-pouring grandmother, and was now wearing a crisp, white lab coat over her black kimono, with her eyes were hidden behind the glint of clinical, wire-rimmed spectacles.

She was grinning, a wide, predatory expression that didn’t reach her eyes, as she stared down at the High Priest, who was strapped naked to a heavy steel table.

“Now then,” Miyako whispered, picking up a tray of surgical instruments that gleamed under the harsh fluorescent light. “You know I was very surprised to see that you’re alive, but I guess the Great Mountain God must’ve wanted you to suffer for what you have done and took away the relief of death.”

The High Priest tried to scream, but his jaw had been surgically unhinged and wired shut in a permanent, agonizing position.

“Oh, don’t worry,” she cooed, dipping a long, serrated needle into a jar of caustic acid. “I’ve developed a special serum that stimulates the nerves to four hundred percent sensitivity while preventing the brain from falling into shock. You will feel every single millimetre of what I do to you. We’re going to start by peeling back the skin of your feet, layer by layer, like an onion. I want to see if becoming a high priest gives you a golden blood or if you’re just as red and pathetic as the rest of the pigs.”

She pressed the needle into the soft arch of his foot, and the sound of sizzling flesh began to fill the room.

“We have such a long night ahead of us,” Miyako laughed, the sound echoing through the soundproofed stone walls. “And I have so many tools I haven’t used since the Cold War.”

Miyako leaned in closer, the scent of the High Priest’s charred flesh acting like a vintage perfume to her refined senses.

The man’s eyes were bulging, the capillaries in his retinas shattering one by one until his vision was a crimson smear of agony.

His body bucked against the steel restraints with such rhythmic violence that the bolts anchoring the table to the concrete floor began to groan.

“Now, now,” Miyako chided, her voice a terrifyingly soft lullaby. “If you snap your spine now, you’ll lose sensation in your lower extremities, and we simply can’t have that. We’ve only just finished the first layer of the dermis.”

She picked up a pair of heavy-duty surgical pliers, their teeth jagged and stained with the remnants of the previous monk.

With agonizing slowness, she began to move toward his midsection.

She wasn’t looking for organs, no, she was looking for the delicate, interlacing network of nerves that governed the sensation of touch.

With a sickening *squelch*, she made a deep incision near his hip and began to pull.

Of course, she wasn’t planning on removing the nerve, but simply to flay it, stretching the white, thread-like fibers over a series of small, heated brass pegs she had hammered into the table.

The High Priest’s muffled screams became a high-pitched, whistling wheeze as his brain bypassed every known threshold of pain.

“Fun fact, the human body is so incredibly resilient if it’s properly supported,” Miyako mused, checking a heart rate monitor. “I’m pumping you full of a synthetic adrenaline and a coagulant that turns your blood into a thick syrup. You won’t bleed out, and your heart won’t stop, you will just be a prisoner within your own suffering.”

And with that, she spent the next hour performing a “symphony of the flesh.”

She used a diamond-tipped bone saw to carefully remove the kneecaps, exposing the raw, quivering marrow, then poured a mixture of salt and crushed glass into the voids.

When he tried to bite through his tongue, she used a spreader to lock his mouth open, then began to meticulously remove his fingernails, replacing them with copper wires connected to a low-voltage battery.

“Look at me, Priest,” she commanded, her voice dropping the playful facade and turning into something ancient and cold. “You stole the lives of those women. You turned their bodies into vessels for your greed. I am simply returning the favor. I am making your body a vessel for the mountain’s wrath.”

As the hours ticked by, the High Priest’s psychological fortresses finally crumbled.

The man who had commanded a village with an iron fist and a twisted god began to weep, not from pain, but from the total dissolution of his identity.

His mind, unable to process the sheer volume of agony, began to shatter.

His eyes lost their focus, drifting toward the ceiling as he started to babble incoherent nonsensical sounds through his wired-shut jaw.

He was no longer a man; he was a heap of traumatized meat.

“Oh?” Miyako paused, her scalpel hovering over his bicep as she leaned in, peering into his pupils. “Total synaptic collapse. How disappointing. You were supposed to last until dawn.”

She sighed, a sound of genuine professional frustration. “But, as I promised, I won’t let you die. Death is a gift you haven’t earned yet.”

She pressed a button on the wall and a crane mechanism descended from the ceiling, its hooks sinking into the steel table.

With a mechanical hum, the entire table, High Priest and all, was hoisted into the air and moved toward the back of the room.

There stood a series of massive glass cylinders, filled with a shimmering, turquoise-colored fluid that smelled faintly of ozone and ancient minerals were lined up perfectly.

This was a refined version of the “God’s Blood” she had extracted from the temple’s hidden vats, stabilized by her own scientific genius.

The crane lowered the broken man into the tube, and as the fluid touched his raw, flayed skin, his body let out one final, massive convulsion before going limp.

The liquid acted instantly; the terrifying wounds began to knit together, the missing skin regrowing in translucent pink sheets, and the broken bones snapping back into alignment.

It was a miracle of healing, but one designed for a cruel purpose: it repaired the body while keeping the mind trapped in the memory of the trauma.

Miyako watched as the High Priest floated in the tank, his eyes wide and unblinking behind the glass, his mind a shattered ruin of screams that would never end.

He was healed, but he would never be “whole” again.

She took off her blood-splattered gloves, tossing them into a disposal bin, and smoothed out her white lab coat.

She checked her watch and then looked toward the row of shadows tied to the chairs in the corner—the remaining priests, who had been forced to watch the entire process.

“An hour for the first one,” Miyako whispered to herself, picking up a fresh pair of gloves and a gleaming new bone-hook.

She turned her gaze toward the next monk in line, a man who was already shaking so hard the chair was rattling against the floor.

“You’re next,” she said, her voice bright and cheerful. “Let’s see if your faith is any stronger than your master’s.”

With a graceful stride, she moved toward the next table, the “Surgeon of Silence” ready to begin her work anew.