I Am a Villain, So What?-Chapter 164: Next Best Choice

Chaos erupted among the Empire’s finest.

Princess Celestia, Elisha, and Mariella frantically pulled out their magical communication crystals, shouting into them with desperate urgency.

"Commander! Marquis Vance has committed high treason! He hid Inferno Matrices across the capital and activated them!" Celestia ordered her Royal Guards. "Evacuate the Grand Square immediately!"

"They’ll explode in less than five minutes! Find the Imperial Mages! Isn’t that what the Capital Defense Force is for?!" Elisha screamed into her crystal, contacting the Ravenscroft knights.

"Please! Please believe me, Father! Send the healers to the slums!" Mariella pleaded.

Watching my classmates—who were just emerging from the shock of the ambush—move so desperately... it was painful. Because deep down, anyone with a brain knew the truth.

There was no solution.

Kael, unable to steady his trembling eyes, muttered under his breath, gripping the hilt of his sword until his knuckles turned white.

"...I’ll save them. I have to save everyone."

Twenty-five high-tier magic circles hidden across the massive Capital, the very heart of the Aurelian Empire. Find them, decipher the alchemical locks, and stop all of them in less than five minutes?

I barely held back a hollow, cynical laugh.

"You can’t save everyone, Kael," I said coldly.

"I have to! Somehow...!"

Even in the worst, most mathematically impossible situations, the Hero believes they will win and save the day. A cliché of heroic tales gripped Kael like a terminal obsession.

"There has to be a way! A way... a way...!"

As if struck by a sudden, desperate idea, Kael’s expression flipped. He looked down at the Marquis’s body.

"A core! Like the ring that transmitted the signal to the 25 spells at once, there has to be a master magical core sustaining the network!"

"How will you find it?" Bordon asked, sweating profusely.

"It’s... it’s a massive mana draw! It’s probably at the Vance Marquisate estate! In his private laboratory!" Kael concluded.

"The estate is on the other side of the noble district," I pointed out mercilessly. "Five minutes won’t get you there in time, let alone give you time to dismantle a master rune."

"Y-Yeah... damn it, think! Four minutes! Just four minutes left!" Kael clutched his head, racking his brain.

With his ridiculously overpowered [Protagonist Plot Armor] and sheer luck, he might actually pull it off.

But as I watched him struggle, a chilling realization washed over me.

In Asteria Online, for the sake of player entertainment and a sense of realism, the plot wasn’t just handed to the Protagonist. The game developers created severe hardships for the heroes to overcome. They dealt them trials, made them grow through agonizing failure, imposed tragic loss, and forced them to mature.

’This is that moment.’

In the original storyline, the 25 magic circles activated exactly like this. The Protagonist Party stood there, devising heroic plans, rushing to the estate, and shockingly... they saved almost no one.

The outbreak of the chimera in the Fern Kingdom slums? I stopped it. Irina’s death in the Elena summoning incident? I prevented it. Merle’s suicide? I saved him.

I had systematically erased every single tragic event that was supposed to show the Protagonist that the world doesn’t revolve around his sword. These tragic events were the narrative scenarios meant to break Kael so he could rebuild himself stronger, vowing never to let such tragedy happen again.

Because I had resolved everything else, the narrative weight of the world’s "correction force" was falling entirely on this one incident.

Marquis Vance’s bombing was the pinnacle of their early-game failures. It was the brutal tragedy that fully awakened the Protagonist Party’s political and martial drive. A brilliant, albeit cruel, narrative device.

And because of that...

’I don’t have a magical solution either.’

How could I? I had derailed the plot so much that I didn’t know the exact locations of all 25 bombs. I just knew the general areas.

Of course, it was my fault. I warned them to be careful, but the Protagonist Party encountering Vance here today was entirely the result of my actions in the diner. Still, if time rewound, I’d probably make the same choice. Securing Nero—the Phantom Sword—and eliminating the Marquis early outweighed the risks in the grand scheme of the apocalyptic late-game.

"Lucien!"

Kael suddenly grabbed my shoulder, his golden eyes pleading.

"You... you have a way, don’t you?!"

What was he talking about?

"...What way would I have?" I asked, swatting his hand away.

"Because... because you know everything! You always have solution for everything! You are..." Kael started to say something about the Executioner, but he clamped his mouth shut, glancing at Celestia and the others.

What the hell was he trying to say? Did he think I planted the bombs?!

Instead of pressing me, Kael gritted his teeth and rallied the party.

"Guys, let’s move! Run! Head to the surface and make straight for the Vance Estate! Princess, use your authority to commandeer horses! If we find the core, we can disarm the network! Bordon, Mariella, split off and head to the slums to evacuate as many as you can!"

It made sense. It was the heroic choice. Time was ticking down to three minutes.

While the Protagonist Party ran desperately toward the surface to chase the ’best’ outcome...

I turned around and ran toward the ’next best.’

Because I knew, with absolute certainty, that their heroic plan was going to fail. The bombs were going to go off.

I sprinted out of the VIP lounge, abandoning the chaotic Black Market. I triggered [Flash (Blink)], my body turning into a streak of light as I bypassed the stampeding crowds and shot up the hidden stairwell to the surface.

Bursting out of the tavern’s back door into the blinding summer sun, I channeled mana into my legs. My [Sixth Sense] pushed my physical limits to the absolute maximum.

I headed straight for the heart of the Imperium Empire, the pride of the Capital: The Grand Square. It was the central hub of the city, a hotspot where thousands of commoners, merchants, and nobles mingled at any given time.

Using my enhanced agility, I scaled the side of a six-story clock tower near the edge of the square, my fingers digging into the brickwork. I hauled myself onto the roof, the entire sprawling plaza visible below me.

I looked down at the thousands of tiny, oblivious people walking through the sunlit square.

’How much time is left?’

I checked my pocket watch.

One minute. Less than one minute.

Standing on the edge of the six-story rooftop, I focused every ounce of my mana, pushing it into my optic nerves and auditory canals. My perception expanded, violently enveloping the entire Grand Square.

My ears caught hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands of sounds simultaneously—the chatter of merchants, the clinking of coins, the laughter of children, the rustling of summer leaves. My vision scanned every brick, every cobblestone, every shadow.

My head throbbed with agonizing pain. Overload fever set in instantly.

[Skill: Sixth Sense (Lv. 3) sharply boosts focus!]

[Skill Synergy: Detection identifies anomalous mana signatures!]

[Searching for: Tier-4 Alchemical Inferno Matrix]

About forty seconds passed. Only twenty seconds remained. Blood began to drip from my nose, but at the absolute edge of this sensory tightrope, I found it.

’There!’

The massive clock tower at the exact center of the square. Its spire housed the intricate gears of the clock face, but hidden just behind the roman numeral ’XII’ was a pulsating, sickly purple light. 𝙛𝒓𝓮𝒆𝔀𝒆𝙗𝓷𝒐𝙫𝒆𝙡.𝒄𝓸𝓶

If that matrix detonated, a firestorm would cascade downward from the spire, instantly incinerating the thousands of people mingling below.

I had to stop it.

’It’s too far.’

Climbing the clock tower would take at least three minutes. Even if I used [Flash (Blink)] to reach the belfry, I didn’t have the alchemical knowledge to safely disarm the physical spell matrix before the timer hit zero.

Then—I remembered my preparations.

I reached into my tactical ammo pouch and pulled out a highly specialized Magic Bullet. It wasn’t one of the standard explosive rounds. It was a single, pure-white bullet crafted from a refined Opal core—a prototype Merle had designed specifically for mana-nullification.

Click. Loading it into the chamber of the Winchester, the barrel immediately hummed with the turbulence of suppressed mana.

’Aim.’

I dropped to one knee on the rooftop, resting the barrel on the stone parapet, taking a precise, perfectly stable aiming stance. The target: a stone slab etched with the Inferno Matrix, partially obscured by the moving, massive iron hands of the clock.

[Skill: Firearm Proficiency (Lv. Max) blesses your trajectory.]

[Skill: Wild Instinct calculates wind resistance and gear rotation.]

[Skill: Sixth Sense (Lv. 3) dictates the absolute perfect moment.]

Fifteen seconds.

Ten seconds.

Five seconds.

I held my breath, visualizing the bullet’s path, and pulled the trigger.

BANG!

The mana-stone hammer struck the casing. A contained explosion propelled the projectile forward with deafening force. The radiant opal bullet tore across the sky, leaving a faint white vapor trail above the oblivious crowd.

It reached the clock tower’s spire. It flawlessly threaded the needle, dodging the moving minute hand, weaving through the heavy iron gears, and lodged dead center into the purple stone slab.

CRACK.

The opal glowed with a blinding, purifying white light. The absolute zero-mana field expanded, instantly flash-freezing the Inferno Matrix. The purple runes shattered like brittle glass, dissolving into harmless, inert dust just as the clock struck noon.

’I did it.’

I lowered the rifle, panting heavily. Even as the invisible countdown hit zero, no explosion rocked the Grand Square. The people below continued to chat, shop, and read, completely oblivious to the fact that they had just been fractions of a second away from being burned alive.

But my relief was short-lived.

BOOM! RUMBLE...!

The ground beneath my boots trembled. Loud, muffled explosions tore through the horizon. Columns of thick, black smoke began to rise from the eastern slums, the warehouse district, and the outer commercial rings.

The other twenty-four matrices had detonated.