Villain: Your Heroines Were Delicious-Chapter 223 - 11

The air in the Otsuka Sanatorium didn’t just feel cold anymore; it felt heavy, as if the oxygen had been replaced by the weight of a stagnant, deep-sea trench.

Seijirou stood frozen, the phantom pressure of the translucent, missing-fingernail hands around his waist sending a primal alarm through his nervous system.

In the world of the supernatural, there is a classification of entity far more tragic and deceptive than a mere ghost or a vengeful wraith: the Living Spirit.

Unlike other types of spirits who are bound by their hatred or their final moments of agony, Living Spirits are anomalies of denial.

They are the souls of those who died so suddenly, or under such traumatic circumstances, that their mind fractured, and they simply forgot that they had died.

Then, driven by an absolute, subconscious refusal to face the void, they continue to believe, with a conviction that borders on a divine law, that they are still breathing, still warm, and still part of the waking world.

This belief is not a passive delusion, but is a conceptual weight that literally bends the reality around them.

Their sheer denial creates a "perception field" that forces the living to see them as alive.

They possess a heartbeat that doesn’t exist; they cast shadows that shouldn’t be there, and to the average person, a Living Spirit is just another face in the crowd, a classmate, or a neighbor.

Initially, these spirits are generally harmless, seeking only to maintain the status quo of their "life."

However, the laws of the universe do not tolerate such a blatant contradiction for long, and the longer a Living Spirit remains in contact with the living, drawing on the life force of those around them to maintain their facade, the faster they decay.

This decay does not mean they turn into dust, but they decay and turned into Evil Spirits.

Their denial turns into a festering, burning hatred—a resentment toward the very life they are trying to mimic.

They become parasitic, causing psychological and physical harm to everyone in their orbit until they eventually snap and become a localized catastrophe.

Living Spirits are also uniquely haunted by their own kind—the dead.

This was the true nature of the "ghosts" following Tamaki.

They weren’t hunting a victim; they were trying to reclaim a runaway.

They were the voices of the mass grave, calling out to a sister who had wandered too far from the dirt.

They wanted to bring that spirit back to where she belonged.

"Let go of him! MOON FANG!" Rindou’s roar shattered the chilling silence.

She didn’t hesitate as she drew her reinforced shinai in a blur of motion, her blue Ki erupting like a tidal wave.

She swung the weapon in a wide, vertical arc, sending a crescent-shaped blade of pressurized energy flying toward the figure clinging to Seijirou.

The attack should have cleaved through the girl, but "Tamaki" didn’t even flinch as she simply vanished into a smear of gray mist, reappearing several meters away near the edge of the mass grave.

She stood there, her head tilted, a haunting, vacant smile on her face.

"Tsk. I can’t believe I didn’t notice it until we saw the body," Rindou spat, her breathing coming in sharp, ragged bursts as she adjusted her stance, the blue Ki around her weapon humming with a lethal frequency. "No wonder you were being haunted even though you ’did nothing.’ Those spirits weren’t attacking an intruder; they were trying to drag you back to the hole you crawled out of. You’re a Living Spirit, Kusana Tamaki. You’re a glitch in the cycle of life."

Seijirou let out a long, shaky breath of relief as the freezing pressure left his body.

He stared at the girl—the girl who had cried in his arms, the girl he had tried to protect, and everything clicked into place: the "welcome back" whispers of the ghosts, the "come back to us" chants.

They weren’t threats. They were reminders.

"Yeah," Seijirou muttered, his silver-gold aura flaring to combat the encroaching dark. "No wonder those spirits were saying she should return to them. She never escaped that night. She just... forgot she didn’t."

"Living Spirits might be harmless at first, Seijirou, but they are the most dangerous type of entity once the transition begins," Rindou warned, her eyes never leaving the orange-haired girl. "Once they become Evil Spirits, they are filled with a bottomless hatred born of their refusal to accept the truth. They go insane, and they take everyone nearby into that insanity with them."

"That’s rude, President. My head is very clear now. Clearer than it’s ever been," Tamaki said.

Her voice had lost its timid, high-pitched tremor. It was now a melodic, honey-sweet tone that sounded entirely artificial as she let out a vicious, crazy grin, and with a sickening crack of bone, she tilted her upper body to the side in a perfect, ninety-degree angle.

Her spine remained straight, but her torso hung horizontally, her dead, hollow eyes staring at them from a sideways perspective.

"See? Don’t I look alive?"

"That is only because you’re only a week old," Rindou countered, her voice hard as iron. "And even then, your soul knows the truth. You subconsciously wanted to return here, didn’t you? That’s why you brought us to this basement. Your instincts were screaming at you that you shouldn’t be involved in the affairs of the living. You’re trying to find a way back into the earth."

"But I’m not dead! Look at me! I’m right here, aren’t I? I’m speaking! I’m thinking!" Tamaki’s voice began to rise, like a discordant harmony of a dozen whispers layering over her words.

"Your corpse is already rotting down below, Tamaki," Rindou said, pointing her shinai toward the open pit of bones. "You’re just a memory that refuses to fade."

"That’s not me! It can’t be! I have a home! I have parents!" Tamaki’s face began to twist, the skin stretching and bubbling as if something were boiling beneath the surface. "Why won’t you believe me? You... and them too. Why are you all saying I’m dead? I’m obviously here? I’m obviously here? I’M OBVIOUSLY HERE!"

As she shrieked the final words, her voice dropped into a guttural, earth-shaking roar as her body began to convulse violently.

The pale skin under her school uniform turned an oily, obsidian black as countless lidless eyes and jagged, tooth-filled mouths erupted across her arms, her neck, and her cheeks, all of them snapping and blinking in a frantic rhythm.

Then, a thick, black substance—the same oily ichor Seijirou had seen on the "Mister"—began to leak from her pores, pooling on the floor.

"That’s...!?" Seijirou’s eyes widened, his very origin vibrating in recognition. ’As expected. It’s a fragment. The Outer God’s influence found her soul while it was in limbo and anchored itself to her denial.’

"I’m still alive! President! Seijirou-kun! Look at me! Don’t I feel warm!?"

Tamaki’s form began to bloat, her limbs elongating into jagged, multi-jointed scythes, and the smell of rotting lilies and ozone became a physical weight, rattling their minds.

At this moment, she was no longer a girl; she was a mountain of grieving, corrupted flesh.

"Stay with me, you two! If you won’t believe I’m alive, then I’ll just make you just like me! I’ll introduce you to my friends!"

Suddenly, the floor beneath Seijirou and Rindou erupted as fozens of skeletal, black-slicked hands emerged from the dirt, grabbing their ankles with a strength that defied logic.

"What!?" Seijirou shouted, trying to flare his Ki, but the hands were like leaden anchors, and before they could counter-attack, the floor gave way entirely.

They were hoisted into the air and thrown down into the dark, yawning hole where the mass grave lay as they plummeted into the pit, landing hard amidst the clattering of old bones and the soft, squelching impact of decaying meat.

Seijirou groaned, his head spinning as he tried to pushed himself up, but as he opened his eyes, he found himself mere inches away from the rotting, melting face of the real Kusana Tamaki.

The oily, liquefying flesh was crawling with maggots, and the empty eye sockets seemed to stare directly into his soul.

Instantly, the stench hit him like a physical blow—a concentrated essence of twenty years of hidden murder.

His stomach revolted, and he doubled over, puking violently onto the ribcage of some long-forgotten victim.

He scrambled to get up, his hands slipping on the gore-slicked bones, but he didn’t make it as the spirit of Tamaki materialized directly on top of him.

She was heavy—not with weight, but with the conceptual mass of a thousand deaths as she pinned his shoulders to the dirt, her black, multi-mouthed face inches from his.

She grabbed his chin, forcing him to look back at the melting corpse beside them.

"What do you think, Seijirou-kun?" she whispered, her voice a wet, loving caress that made his skin crawl. "Don’t I still look alive? Aren’t I still very beautiful? Even like this?"

She stroked the cheek of the rotting corpse with a translucent hand. "Those people who brought me here... they said it as well. They said my eyes were so beautiful, so they used a spoon to take them so they could keep them forever. They said I had such smooth, soft skin... so they used their knives to peel it off while I was still awake. They wanted to keep pieces of me. What do you think, Seijirou-kun? Do you want a piece of me too?"

Seijirou stared into the black voids of her eyes, the silver-gold light of his soul beginning to burn with a cold, absolute fury.

He could feel the fragment within her pulsing, feeding on her trauma, turning a victim into a monster.

"I think," Seijirou whispered, his voice vibrating with the power of the Seeker, "that those people are going to spend a very long time screaming from pain. But first... I’m going to set you free."