Villain: Your Heroines Were Delicious-Chapter 220 - 8

The heavy oak door of the Student Council room groaned on its hinges as Seijirou stepped inside.

His brow rose noticing that the atmosphere was stifling, the air thick with the salt-tang of tears and the oppressive, static hum of lingering spiritual residue.

Rindou sat at the mahogany desk, her posture rigid and her expression unreadable, while Tamaki sat huddled on the leather sofa, her small frame wracked with rhythmic, silent sobs.

Seijirou stared at them and let out a long, heavy sigh, the sound echoing in the high-ceilinged room.

He adjusted the strap of his bag, and found a place to sit down as he leaned back.

"So? Shall we go?" he asked, his voice calm.

Rindou didn’t look up immediately. Instead, she kept her gaze fixed on Tamaki, her eyes filled with a clinical sort of pity as she shook her head slightly and motioned toward the girl. "Let’s wait for her to calm down first. Pushing her into that territory while she’s in a state of emotional collapse is just asking for a possession."

"No!" Tamaki’s voice broke the silence, her tone sharp and desperate as she wiped her eyes with the back of her hand, her face blotchy and pale. "President, please. We can go now. I... I can’t stay in this school another minute feeling like they are watching me from the vents. If we’re going to end this, let’s do it while the sun is still up."

Rindou stared at her for a few long moments, searching for a flicker of genuine resolve amidst the terror.

Finally, she gave a sharp, professional nod. "Very well. I’ll call my father and have him send a car to pick us up."

"Well, that’s very convenient." Said Seijirou as he stood up, "Come on."

The two girls nodded and stood up.

*

*

*

Half an hour later, the three of them were seated in the back of a blacked-out executive sedan.

The interior was quiet, the only sound being the soft purr of the engine and the muffled roar of the city outside.

Rindou sat by the left window, her hand resting on a small wooden case containing her exorcism tools she always kept just in case.

"Seijirou," Rindou said, breaking the silence as they crossed the bridge into the desolate outskirts of the district. "What do you know about that hospital? Beyond the official police reports of the fire twenty years ago."

Seijirou hummed, his gaze fixed on the passing blur of gray industrial buildings as he accessed the deep, dark archives of his memory—the "game" knowledge he had from what he thought was his past life. "Not much of the history. But from what I can remember of the local underworld rumors, that place is the primary territory of the Blowers."

Rindou’s brow furrowed. "The Blowers? What kind of lewd name is that? Are they a gang?"

"They aren’t just a gang," Seijirou corrected, his voice turning cold. "They’re a feeder branch for a local Yakuza clan. Their members reach across several vocational schools throughout the 24th District, and what they love to do is lure women, mostly students or runaways, into that hospital under the guise of a ’test of courage’ or a ’mixer.’ Once they’re inside those soundproofed wards... they rape them. Repeatedly."

He didn’t mention the rest. He didn’t speak of the snuff films, the organ harvesting implications in the game, or the way the Blowers used the "haunted" reputation of the building to mask the screams of their victims.

The sheer human depravity of the place made his stomach churn, a physical revulsion that even his very own origin struggled to process.

In this world, he believes that, that hospital is as depraved as the one with Mister.

"Tsk. Those people deserve to die," Rindou said, her jaw tightening.

Her exorcism training with her grandfather had taught her that human evil often attracted spiritual rot, creating a feedback loop of misery.

She wondered if that was the source of the hospital’s anomalies as well?

She turned her gaze toward Tamaki, who was staring at her own trembling knees. "Then, Kusana-san... were you...?"

"No," Tamaki said, shaking her head frantically as a fresh wave of tears threatened to fall. "The night of the mixer... they tried to get me drunk. They kept pushing these brightly colored drinks on us. But my father is a heavy drinker, and it seems I inherited his tolerance. I was pretending to be out of it. When they brought me and three other girls to the third floor of the hospital, I saw one of them pull out a roll of duct tape. I didn’t wait for them to get close and ran away immediately. Thankfully, they didn’t chase after me for some reason."

"They’re probably satisfied with the others," Rindou noted grimly. "And to them, it doesn’t matter whether you escaped or not. If they are truly connected to the Yakuza, they have the resources to silence a transfer student before you can even find a police station that isn’t on their payroll."

Tamaki looked even more timid after that statement, her shoulders hunching as if trying to disappear into the leather seat.

"It was after that night that you began to be haunted?" Seijirou asked, leaning forward.

"Y-Yes. That night, I had a nightmare, and the very next morning I woke up and saw a handprint on my bedroom window... from the outside. I live on the eighth floor."

"Strange," Seijirou muttered, rubbing his chin.

Just then, the driver’s voice came over the intercom, flat and professional. "Miss, we’re here."

The car came to a halt, and everyone looked out the window.

Looming over them was a skeletal, blackened husk of architecture, the Otsuka Sanatorium.

The scorched concrete was covered in layers of aggressive graffiti, and the surrounding fence was pulled back in jagged, rusted gaps.

Even in the afternoon light, the building seemed to swallow the sun, like a void of gray stone and shattered glass.

Seijirou opened the door and stepped out into the tall, yellowed grass as Tamaki followed suit, her movements jerky and stiff.

She immediately scurried to his side, timidly hiding behind his shoulder, her hand clutching the hem of his jacket.

"Please wait for us here. We won’t take long," Rindou instructed the driver before stepping out and adjusting her blazer.

She felt the spiritual pressure of the place hitting her like a physical weight, like a thick, cloying miasma of old grief and fresh malice.

"Let’s go," Seijirou said.

The three of them approached the main entrance, where the heavy double doors had long since been kicked off their hinges.

Seijirou led the way, his presence acting as a stabilizing force as Rindou followed, her hand hovering near her charm case.

Tamaki flinched with every step, the sound of dried leaves crunching under her feet sounding like breaking bones in the silence.

She hurried after them, sticking so close to Seijirou that she was practically stepping on his heels, her eyes darting frantically toward the dark window frames above.

Even though it was broad daylight outside, the interior of the hospital was an absolute, unnatural darkness.

The soot on the walls seemed to absorb all light, creating a claustrophobic tunnel.

Rindou pulled out her phone and clicked on the high-intensity flashlight, the beam cutting a bright path through the dust-heavy air.

At this moment, they finally saw the state of this building.

The lobby was a graveyard of filth, and the beam of her flashlight illuminated hundreds of discarded alcohol bottles—some old and dusty, others fresh as if they have just been opened and discarded.

There were piles of cigarette butts and the remnants of small fires.

But beneath the party trash lay the evidence of the Blowers’ cruelty: torn pieces of school uniforms, lace-trimmed panties, and shredded skirts.

Ropes hung from the rusted light fixtures, and half-melted candles were arranged in ritualistic circles around stained mattresses.

Rindou couldn’t help but frown, her lip curling in disgust. "Disgusting... I can’t believe people like these go to my school. They’re worse than animals."

Seijirou, however, wasn’t focused on the trash as his nose wrinkled, his senses heightened by his ki picking up something.

He smelled the copper of old blood, yes, but beneath that was something else, something so disgusting it almost made him puke.

"...do you smell that?" he asked softly.

Rindou raised an eyebrow, scanning the room with her light. "Smell what—?"

At that moment, the entire world seemed to lurch and swirl as the beam of the flashlight distorted, stretching into a long, sickly purple line.

Tamaki’s eyes widened to the point of tearing as she looked to her left, then her right.

Seijirou and Rindou were gone.

Then, a wet, gurgling sound resounded and before she knew jt, the llobby was no longer empty; it was crowded with dozens of distorted, translucent figures began to manifest from the soot-stained walls.

They had uncanny, elongated faces—some with too many eyes, others with mouths that stretched down to their chests.

They began to glide toward her, their feet making no sound on the broken glass.

They were all smiling. That same, ear-to-ear, creepy grin.

"Tamaki..."

"Tamaki..."

"Welcome back, Tamaki..."

"Join us, Tamaki... stay in the dark with us..."

The voices were a wet, rhythmic chant that made her brain feel like it was being scraped with sandpaper.

At that moment, Tamaki let out a piercing, lung-bursting cry, her knees giving out as she collapsed toward the floor.

But she didn’t hit the cold concrete.

A large, warm hand caught her, pulling her into a firm, protective embrace and immediately, the freezing cold of the vision was instantly incinerated by a sudden, localized burst of heat.

"It’s okay. Calm down. I’ve got you," Seijirou’s voice rumbled against her ear, grounded and real.

"DISPERSE!" Rindou’s voice rang out like a bell.

She had stepped forward, her Ki flaring in a brilliant, blue-white pulse as the spiritual shockwave slammed into the apparitions, causing them to hiss and dissolve back into the shadows like smoke in a gale.

The lobby returned to its normal, grimy state, and the flashlight beam was steady once more.

"The resonance here is too strong," Rindou said, her breathing slightly elevated as she looked at the sobbing Tamaki in Seijirou’s arms. "She’s like a lightning rod for this place. We can’t stay in the lobby. Whatever is tethered to her is deeper inside, likely in the ward where she escaped from."

Seijirou nodded, his face grim as he supported the trembling girl. "Let’s get back for now. She needs to calm down."