I Became the Patron of Villains (Novel) - Chapter 65 - It Was There, Though (6)

Chapter 65 – It Was There, Though (6)

===================

Translated by Jinmu

Read it only at Novelbyu.com & Utoon.net

===================

For only a brief moment, Marquis Philvoid felt as though his breath might stop under the eerie aura pouring from the beastkin in front of him.

Then he immediately turned and reached into his clothes to pull out an artifact.

However.

“-!”

Thud.

In the next instant, Marquis Philvoid realized that his own body had collapsed, and his face went blank with confusion.

Soon, feeling a strange and grotesque sensation from below, he lowered his gaze.

And saw.

That both of his legs had been twisted into a hideous shape.

“Aaaagh!”

The moment he saw it, the horrifying pain reached him belatedly, and the marquis screamed.

“!?”

“What happened, my lord?!”

The mercenaries outside the gambling den immediately threw open the door and rushed inside.

But.

Crackle.

Seollang vanished in a burst of current and reappeared in an instant.

And the mercenaries who had been flooding into the den moments before were now nothing more than handfuls of mangled flesh.

Then.

“Ah, what is this? I was trying to deal with this quietly. Now it has become annoying.”

The beastkin who had crushed every mercenary nearby to death in a single moment rubbed the red blood splashed across her golden hair and looked at Marquis Philvoid with a pout.

Seeing Seollang wear an innocent expression as though taking dozens of lives in an instant were an everyday occurrence, the marquis felt instinctive terror.

“S-spare me.”

His voice trembling, he began to beg.

Seollang stared at him silently for a moment, then hummed.

“Do you want to live?”

Seeing a trace of hope, Marquis Philvoid immediately grabbed at the lifeline.

“P-please… I am a marquis of the Kingdom of Asteria. If you spare me here, I swear I will promise more than enough reward.”

A desperate struggle for survival.

But Seollang merely crouched down in front of him with a mildly interested look and asked while staring straight at his face.

“Then why did you say that?”

“Wh-what?”

“If you want to live, why did you say that?”

“…?”

Marquis Philvoid wore a face that said he did not understand at all.

However.

“Why did you tell someone to kill my benefactor?”

“…Ah.”

At those next words, he realized it.

He realized who the benefactor mentioned by the beastkin with the shining golden eyes was.

“Then Count Palladio is.”

“Yes. My benefactor. Or maybe my husband? Since I am going to marry him soon.”

Seollang nodded with a smile, and Marquis Philvoid’s face went vacant.

From his perspective, he understood none of this.

Not the existence of a beastkin woman who had slaughtered a Proxy said to possess strength beyond Master Knights.

Not the fact that that beastkin had a connection to Count Palladio.

Not the depth of Count Palladio’s abyss.

The only thing he could infer after hearing of the relationship between the beastkin before him and Count Palladio was one thing.

“…Baba Yaga?”

That the beastkin before him was one of Colony’s Baba Yaga.

Golden Flash.

“Ah, how did you know?”

At Seollang’s response, the marquis could only gape.

“Why in the world is a Baba Yaga, who should be in Colony, here?”

He genuinely could not understand it.

But Seollang answered as though it were obvious.

“Why else? It is obvious.”

“There is no way I would sit still while someone tries to do something bad to my benefactor.”

Seollang’s golden eyes were shining brilliantly.

But they were also filled with a killing intent thicker than at any other time, and from that alone he could already guess what would happen next.

Splatter.

After the sound of something bursting rang out, the marquis’s thoughts went no farther.

And then.

“Absolutely not. No.”

After blowing off the marquis’s head, Seollang wore an icily cold expression.

“No one, no matter who they are, is allowed to touch my benefactor.”

And she disappeared somewhere.

* * *

The week-long royal ball came to an end.

After the third day, Critenia Siyan no longer showed herself, and though Count Palladio had not yet formally received the succession ceremony from the monarch, he was in effect already being called Marquis Palladio.

What in the world is Siyan’s intention?

And for about a week, while enduring the repeated Now what? bombardment from Count Xenonia and Duke Altia and somehow buying time, Alon had spent that period thinking.

But he still could not figure out what she had been thinking when she granted him the title.

In truth, if it were possible, he would have liked to ask her directly.

But that was impossible from the start, so though he was certainly pleased at being raised to marquis, the whole thing still left him feeling oddly uneasy.

Even so, he had to leave the capital immediately and review the schedule ahead.

There is quite a lot I need to do.

First I need to return to the ruins and meet that thing again. And if I want to activate the ring, I need to go to Laxas. I have also already come up with a strategy, so I should at least begin laying groundwork with the Proxies. Ah, and if I am going to Colony anyway, should I visit the colosseum too?

If he achieved a certain number of victories in the colosseum event in Colony, he could gain an audience with the king and receive one of the relics in the royal treasury.

Recalling that fact, Alon quietly organized his thoughts.

A moment later.

He set his priority.

Let us lay the groundwork for the Proxies first.

In terms of urgency alone, meeting that thing in the forgotten ruins was slightly more important, but the place where he needed to sow the bait was on the way to Colony anyway, so he settled on the order.

After several days passed, he arrived at a small territory called Atla on the boundary between the grasslands and the desert and began moving east.

And then.

“My lord. Or should I call you marquis now?”

“That already makes the tenth time you have said that. Call me what you like.”

“In that case, for now I will keep calling you my lord. But my lord, is this the place?”

At Evan’s question, Alon looked around slightly.

The scenery around them was rather interesting.

There was forest on one side, but endless sand on the other.

Looking at that contrast, Alon rose from the carriage.

“Yes.”

“Are we going somewhere like that labyrinth from last time again?”

As Alon climbed down from the carriage, he answered Evan’s question.

“No. There is somewhere I need to visit briefly, so wait here.”

“You do not need me to follow?”

“No.”

Then he started walking into the forest.

How far did he walk?

“There it is.”

Deep within the forest, an entrance to a cave hidden by vines revealed itself.

It looked like a natural cave untouched by human hands.

But Alon knew that what stood before him was not a natural cave, and that knowledge made him somewhat tense.

Because inside this natural-looking cave was none other than the leader of the Proxies that he needed to deal with.

Al-Kamae.

A notorious boss from early Psychedelia so infamously brutal that even players who had already spent a fair amount of time with the game cursed him out. Even by the setting, he was strong enough to handle more than five Master Knight-class Proxies on his own.

He was effectively as strong as the midgame powerhouses in the game itself, so after letting out a small breath, Alon thought.

Let us stick to the plan.

Then he cleared his throat and, after steadying himself, opened his mouth.

“By the first covenant, broker one promise.”

A moment later.

“…?”

Nothing happened.

What?

Wearing a bewildered expression, Alon called out once more into the cave toward the leader of the Proxies who ought to be inside.

“By the first covenant, broker one promise.”

Yet there was still no response.

This should not be possible.

After several attempts yielded nothing when the man unquestionably should have appeared, Alon, now deeply puzzled, moved forward into the cave.

And then, after walking into the dark cave for some time.

Suddenly, unlike the entrance itself, a great manor constructed inside the cave came into view.

A huge estate that would not pale even in comparison to Count Palladio’s own residence.

It was grand enough to suit the dignity of a Proxy leader who ruled over the strong, and its old-fashioned style and scale, large enough to fill the entire cavern, drew a small admiration from him.

Of course, he had come here several times in the game to kill the Proxy leader and loot his belongings, but even so, seeing it in reality was quite different from seeing it in illustrations.

But only for a moment.

Soon he discovered something strange.

It is all wrecked?

From a distance it had been difficult to tell, but as he got closer he realized that the manor, which should have been intact, was utterly destroyed.

And when he finally stepped inside.

“…?”

Seeing the estate of the Proxy leader Al-Kamae essentially half-destroyed, Alon wore a thoroughly bewildered expression.

* * *

Over the course of three hundred years of life, Al-Kamae had killed countless people.

He had beheaded more than a dozen Sword Masters.

He had once slaughtered an entire king and his royal family, bringing a kingdom to ruin.

He had killed the master of the Violet Tower.

He had massacred thousands of knights on his own.

And one hundred and fifty years earlier, he had waged war alone against a territory and consigned that territory to the back pages of history.

By any measure, he possessed indisputable strength.

Enough that every Proxy whose skill stood above Master Knights regarded him with fear and reverence.

That was why he felt irritation.

Toward the insolent girl who had found her way here somehow and declared that she would kill him.

At the appearance of such an annoying fly, he, who had been keeping himself hidden for the sake of a greater cause, had intended to toy with her lightly before killing her.

He certainly, certainly should have done so.

And yet.

“…Cough.”

Al-Kamae coughed up blood and looked at the existence before him with trembling eyes.

A girl stood before him.

A girl wearing black sacred robes embroidered with red patterns.

A girl holding in one hand a staff that shone with a deeply eerie red light.

At first glance, that appearance should not have posed any threat at all.

And yet.

Al-Kamae felt unmistakable fear as he looked at her.

And not just fear.

Terror. Despair. Emptiness.

All of those feelings tangled together and wrapped around him.

Because of the girl before him.

Because of her.

Because of her.

Because of the thing behind her.

What in the world is that?

From the black space behind her, dozens of tentacles were flowing out.

And because of them, he realized that his own perception was repeating itself.

Even though he understood it consciously, his thoughts would not form properly.

The same thoughts spun in his mind again and again.

Fear.

Despair.

Emptiness.

Terror.

Those many emotions, each capable of dragging Al-Kamae into a hideous pit of hell, kept coming to him over and over.

And then.

“Why in the world are you doing this to me?”

Having somehow forced out that one line with bloodshot red eyes in the midst of that terrible terror, Al-Kamae stared at the girl.

No.

At Yutia.

And Yutia sentenced him, with chilling red eyes, as he lay coughing blood again and again across the floor.

“Because you tried to touch him.”

And then.

“!”

The black tentacles seized Al-Kamae and began dragging him into the black rift.

It all happened in an instant.

At that, Al-Kamae forced himself upright and swung his sword in an effort to resist somehow.

But the blade that had even killed Sword Masters was utterly powerless in front of a single girl.

“N-noooo!”

With a sickening sound.

He disappeared without leaving even a corpse behind.

One week.

That was the time it took for the organization known as the Proxies, which had lurked in the world for about fifty years, to disappear completely.

And then.

“Normally I would have tormented you enough before killing you, but I have things to do right now, so I had no choice.”

After muttering that while looking toward the place where Al-Kamae had vanished, Yutia turned her gaze toward the desert visible beyond the forest.

More precisely.

Toward the place where the desert city of Colony lay.

“Thank Seollang for this.”

Then she turned her body.

“…I need to move quickly as well, so I killed him quickly.”

In her hand was a letter Alon had sent.

A letter from Alon saying that it seemed he would be going to the desert city once again.

“At last.”

A small smile touched Yutia’s lips.