I Am a Villain, So What?-Chapter 172: Return

"Stop mining," I said, dropping my pickaxe. "Get to the side of the door."

Alicia didn’t question the order. She stepped away from the ore vein and pressed her back against the obsidian wall, her rapier drawn and a small sphere of fire ready in her left hand.

I pulled the Reaver shotgun from its holster and waited.

Heavy, metallic footsteps echoed down the stone corridor. The sound of armor clanking and ragged breathing grew louder.

A moment later, the Steel Vipers appeared in the doorway.

The two vanguard knights stepped into the vault first, their broadswords raised. The captain followed, his scarred face illuminated by the glowing blue crystals lining the walls. The scout, the healer, and the mage stopped in the corridor, looking at the piles of dead Crypt-Stalkers we had left behind in the dark.

The captain’s eyes swept over the massive vault. He saw the Orichalcum veins, the Mithril, and the ancient weapons. His expression shifted from caution to pure, unfiltered greed.

"Well, well," the captain said, a dark smirk forming on his face. "Looks like the scavengers found a jackpot."

"We found it. We opened it," I said calmly, keeping the barrel of the shotgun pointed at the floor. "Turn around and walk away, Captain. You already have your centipede."

The captain laughed. It was a harsh, scraping sound.

"You think we’re going to walk away from a fortune because a couple of guildless kids asked nicely?" He rested his greatsword on his shoulder. "This entire temple is our claim. That includes the catacombs. Drop your weapons and the mining sacks. Do it now, and I’ll let you run back upstairs."

He was lying. The moment we dropped our weapons, the scout would put an arrow in my back.

"You’re exhausted," I stated. "Your mage is running on fumes. Your armor is dented. You really want to push your luck?"

"There are five of us and two of you," the scout sneered from the hallway, nocking an arrow.

I sighed. I hated dealing with greedy idiots.

"Alicia," I said. "Kill the backline."

I didn’t wait for the captain to give the order. I moved first.

I pushed off the stone floor, crossing the distance between me and the vanguard knights in a fraction of a second. My physical training kicked in perfectly.

The knight on the left swung his broadsword in a wide arc. I ducked under the heavy blade, stepped inside his guard, and drove the barrel of the Reaver directly into his armored stomach.

I pulled the trigger.

The high-explosive slug tore through the steel plate and blew him backward into the stone wall. He didn’t get up.

"Kill him!" the captain roared.

The second knight thrust his sword at my chest. I didn’t try to dodge. I raised my left arm, letting the blade slice into my forearm. The steel cut deep, but the Rune of Vitality in my chest pulsed instantly, stopping the bleeding and numbing the pain.

Using my bleeding arm to trap his blade, I pulled the knight forward, drew my combat knife with my right hand, and drove it through the weak point in the armor at his neck.

At the same time, the corridor behind them exploded in heat and light.

The scout released his arrow, but it burned to ash mid-air. Alicia didn’t bother with fancy swordplay. She thrust her free hand forward, unleashing a compressed spear of white-hot fire directly at the mage and the scout.

The mage tried to raise a mana shield, but his exhausted reserves shattered instantly. The fire consumed him and the scout in a split second. The healer turned to run, but Alicia stepped past the burning bodies and drove her rapier straight through his back.

Only the captain was left.

He stared at the burning remains of his team, his eyes wide with shock. He looked back at me, realizing he had made a fatal miscalculation. We weren’t helpless scavengers.

"You bastards," he snarled, gripping his greatsword with both hands.

He channeled his remaining mana into the blade, causing it to glow with a heavy, yellow aura. He lunged at me, bringing the massive sword down in an overhead strike meant to cleave me in half.

I dropped the shotgun and caught the blade between my bare hands.

The kinetic force drove my boots into the stone floor, cracking the tiles. The yellow aura burned my palms, but the auto-healing immediately began repairing the charred skin as fast as it burned.

"Impossible," the captain gasped, pushing down with all his weight.

I forced the corrosive dark mana from my system into my hands. The black mist seeped out from my palms, latching onto his greatsword. The metal hissed and warped as the dark magic instantly destabilized the weapon’s structural integrity.

With a sharp twist of my wrists, I snapped the greatsword in half.

Before the captain could recover from his shock, I stepped forward and drove a mana-reinforced punch directly into the center of his chestplate.

The steel caved in. The impact shattered his ribs and stopped his heart.

He collapsed onto the floor, his dead eyes staring up at the glowing ceiling of the vault.

Silence returned to the room, broken only by the crackle of Alicia’s fading fire in the hallway.

I picked up the Reaver from the floor and holstered it. I looked at my burned hands. The skin was already knitting back together, leaving no scars.

"Are you hurt?" I asked Alicia.

She stepped back into the vault, wiping a drop of blood off her cheek. "I am fine. They were too slow." She looked at the dead captain on the floor with utter disgust. "Greedy fools."

"That’s how it goes in the Spire," I said, walking back over to the Orichalcum vein and picking up my mining pick. "Finish filling the sacks. We have what we came for. Let’s get out of here before the smell attracts anything else."

I tossed my bloody combat knife into my inventory and picked up the mining pick again.

We spent the next twenty minutes stripping the vault. Alicia filled the canvas sacks with the highest density mana crystals, while I carved out chunks of pure Orichalcum and Mithril ore. The sacks were heavy, but the physical conditioning I had put my body through made the weight manageable.

"That’s enough," I said, tying the last sack closed and slinging it over my shoulder. "If we take any more, it’ll slow us down in a fight."

Alicia tied off her own sack and hoisted it. "Should we do anything about the bodies?" she asked, glancing at the dead Steel Vipers. 𝕗𝕣𝐞𝐞𝘄𝐞𝚋𝚗𝗼𝘃𝗲𝗹.𝚌𝕠𝚖

"Leave them. The Spire will absorb the corpses eventually, or the monsters will get to them first. Either way, it covers our tracks."

Alicia let out a long breath, adjusting the heavy strap of her sack. She looked around the dim vault, the adrenaline from the fight finally fading. "Master, I am exhausted. Fighting the hordes was one thing, but dealing with those people was draining. I want to go back."

"Yeah. My mood is ruined too," I agreed.

I had come here to push my physical limits and gather resources. We had achieved both. Fighting our way back up through the dark catacombs and the jungle with heavy sacks of ore just to find the exit portal simply wasn’t worth the hassle or the risk.

I opened my inventory and pulled out a small, thick parchment scroll inscribed with a glowing blue matrix. It was an emergency return scroll.

"Stand close," I instructed.

Alicia stepped next to me. I gripped the top of the parchment and tore it in half.

A pillar of bright blue light erupted from the torn halves, instantly enveloping both of us. The cold stone walls of the vault, the glittering crystals, and the dead hunters faded away. The familiar, nauseating pull of spatial distortion yanked at my stomach.

A second later, the blue light vanished.

My boots hit the smooth, paved stone of the Celestial Spire’s main entrance plaza. The sudden noise of bustling crowds, merchants shouting, and armored knights patrolling immediately washed over us. The sky above was the real, late-afternoon sky of the Capital, not the artificial canopy of the 20th floor.

We bypassed the resting hunters and walked straight over to the Hunter Association’s appraisal desks lined up near the exit gates.

"Reporting an expedition return," I told the clerk behind the glass, dropping my heavy sack onto the reinforced metal counter. Alicia placed hers right next to it.

The clerk opened the sacks, his eyes widening at the sheer volume of high-grade Orichalcum, Mithril, and raw blue mana crystals. He looked up at us, clearly surprised to see two people hauling a haul that usually required a full mining team.

"Floor 20 hidden cache," I stated simply before he could ask any annoying questions.

The clerk nodded silently. He quickly weighed the materials, cataloged the monster cores we had gathered from the jungle and the catacombs, and calculated the total value. He deducted the standard Association tax for Spire extraction—a hefty cut—and handed back the processed materials along with a secure credit voucher for the surplus.

Even after the tax, it was a massive haul.

We left the plaza, hailed a private carriage, and headed back to the Academy District.

The ride was quiet. Alicia leaned her head against the window, her eyes closed, completely drained from the continuous casting and the stress of the vault ambush. I rested my hand on the Reaver shotgun across my lap, watching the city streets roll by while calculating how much of the Orichalcum I needed to give Merle to start upgrading our arsenal.