Chapter 34: The Villainess I Always Wanted

"R-Reyn!?"

Anna repeated, already rushing to my side, her hands trembling as she checked the bruises blooming across my face. Healing magic poured from her palms before she’d even fully knelt down.

She didn’t notice the others at first.

"What are you all just standing there for!?"

Anna finally snapped when she realized they were still in the room.

"Go find help! He’s clearly hurt—"

She stopped mid-sentence.

Her eyes swept over their faces, recognition dawning. These weren’t random students. They were the ones Reyn had tormented first. The ones who’d learned to fight back only after realizing his father wouldn’t punish them for it.

The type to hold grudges.

And Anna could tell.

"W-Wait... why are you all..."

Her gaze dropped to the dagger still clutched in the quiet one’s hand. Then to the bruises scattered across their faces. Then to my knuckles, raw and split, the skin broken from the blows I’d landed.

Someone like Anna could piece it together instantly.

"What did you do to Reyn...?"

Her voice dropped, and the room flooded with mana.

BOOM!

The door slammed back into its frame, the lock snapping into place with enough force to crack the wood. The woman nearest it grabbed for the handle, pulling frantically, trying to escape.

It wouldn’t budge.

Anna’s magical pressure was so immense it was pushing the door in the opposite direction of its hinges, sealing them inside with her.

And there I was, sprawled on the ground, listening to it all unfold while playing unconscious.

"Lady Rose, this isn’t what it looks like—"

Marcus started, but Anna wasn’t listening. Her pink eyes had already shifted, glowing faintly as the light magic in the room responded to her emotional state.

"I asked you a question."

She stood slowly, leaving me on the floor as she positioned herself between my body and the five of them. The air around her shimmered, pressing down on everyone in the room.

"What did you do to Reyn?"

"W-We just taught him a lesson!"

Daemon blurted out, his earlier confidence gone entirely, replaced by something closer to panic. The calculating woman shot him a look that could have killed.

"A lesson?"

Anna repeated, and then she giggled. It wasn’t her usual bright sound. This one was hollow, the kind of laugh that made the hairs on the back of everyone’s neck stand up.

"You thought you could teach him a lesson?"

She took a step toward Marcus, and he stumbled backward into the wall. The pressure in the room increased until even the dust on the floor stopped moving, pressed flat by the sheer weight of her mana.

"He beat three of the strongest students in the academy yesterday. And you thought—"

Her voice caught, and for a moment she paused, looking back at my bruised face. Something in her expression softened, then hardened again as she looked back at the five of them, one by one.

"It doesn’t matter..."

She said, and the mana in the room suddenly calmed. All five perpetrators wore expressions that mixed confusion with desperate hope. They had thought Anna, the kind, saintly girl, was about to spare them.

Because after all, that would be in character, wouldn’t it?

But...

THUD!

BANG!

The quiet student hit the wall hard as the blunt end of a Radiant Spear struck him square in the chest, pinning him like paper to a board.

"All of you... all of you will pay..."

Anna’s eyes began to tear up, but her expression was the complete opposite of crying; she was smiling. A wide, trembling smile stretched across her face, the kind that belonged on someone utterly unhinged.

They were about to kill her childhood friend. Her crush. The person she was going to marry.

The one who’d finally made her feel useful!

Even killing her wouldn’t have been as destructive as killing Reyn himself.

"I can’t guarantee you won’t do this again... You’ve already proven you’ll touch him despite his strength. Proven you’ll attack him even though he’s a duke’s son, even though he has the support of House Rose and House Fillaunete..."

Anna paused mid-ramble.

"Nothing would deter you five at all, would it?"

She arrived at the conclusion herself. All of her proof built on nothing but paranoia. And that was exactly it, wasn’t it?

The core of a true, unhinged villainess. Someone who could still think, who had the power, but whose irrationality, when it came to the people she cared about, drove her completely insane.

"So you five should just die."

No hesitation. Radiant chains coiled around the throat of the fifth student, the one who hadn’t even spoken or laid a finger on Reyn, tightening until his head separated cleanly from the rest of his body.

"Reyn’s kind, you see... he might have been bad before, but he changed, didn’t he? And I don’t recall him ever murdering someone before or after his change~"

Anna tilted her head, her voice lilting with giddy delight.

"So if you think Reyn deserves death... but you five are objectively worse than him... doesn’t that mean you should face the same punishment? Maybe even worse?"