A Villain's Survival Guide

Leomaris’s POV: 𝒇𝒓𝒆𝒆𝙬𝒆𝒃𝓷𝒐𝓿𝙚𝙡.𝒄𝓸𝒎

In the middle of taking it all in, the sensation of having killed one of the greatest threats to his life, applause came from his right.

Heavy, deliberate claps. The kind that suggested whoever was doing it had been there a while and was well pleased with what they’d seen.

He swallowed hard. Nothing good ever came from applause like that, not for someone in his position.

He was a pseudo Philosopher. If his tricks had been seen through, he was finished. He’d summoned Myrasol moments ago and deliberately masked her presence for that very reason.

His head jerked toward the sound before he could think better of it. What he saw chilled him, though it wasn’t fear, not quite. It was more like bewilderment.

The man was a stranger. But it was the tattoo across his hands that snagged his attention most. Before he could open his mouth, footsteps sounded from behind him.

They showed themselves without ceremony, and the gunshot came just as plainly, tearing through the air. It caught the man above the brow and dropped him on the spot.

Leomaris didn’t need to see them. Their presence alone told him everything.

Excitement broke across his face as he spun around, Lucius’s corpse and severed head tumbling from his grip in the process.

"You came, Hazel."

Hazel came toward him dressed like a man, bowing slightly, making a decent go of hiding her excitement behind the gesture. She didn’t quite manage it.

"Nice to see you again, young master."

Leomaris patted her gently on the head. She enjoyed every second of it, and when he stopped, she made no effort to hide that she wasn’t best pleased. She said nothing, though.

Her blue eyes soon drifted toward the man she’d just killed. "Uhm. Who was that, young master?"

Leomaris’s expression darkened. He looked at Hazel again, just to be sure she wasn’t taking the mickey, but everything about her said the same thing. She was dead serious.

"You killed him without knowing who he was?"

She nodded once. Leomaris shook his head. It was Hazel’s calmness that made it worse, the way she’d said all of it like it was nothing.

Hazel’s attention immediately shifted.

"Oh, right, Young Master. I brought your uniform."

She reached for her shoulder, and a black robe glitched into form. Her chest was next, a black mask with a white question mark floating within. Finally, two revolvers materialised around her waist.

Leomaris didn’t waste a moment, he put them on and, with them, the persona of his false identity. The Jester of the End. Hazel reached for her mask in turn and, with a single gesture, became the Herald of the End.

Before training with Instructor Moon had even begun, Leomaris had been dead certain the man wanted him gone, but without proof, he couldn’t say so outright, and that made caution the only sensible option.

The task he’d given Hazel was simple enough. Come to this location under two conditions: if a fortnight passed without him returning, or if she noticed the other cadets he’d trained with back on campus and he wasn’t with them.

He might have been dead by the time both conditions were met. He’d made his peace with that. At least Hazel would find his corpse, enough for closure, enough to stop her waiting around for someone who wasn’t coming back.

"Lady Raine spoke to me yesterday. She said Instructor Moon wants you dead. I suppose your foresight was correct this time as well, young master."

Her eyes drifted toward Lucius’s corpse. "He was working with Instructor Moon?"

She let out a sigh. "Would you want me to kill Instructor Moon?"

Leomaris looked back toward the man who’d approached him moments ago and began walking over. The tattoo was still nagging at him.

"I believe this is going to be trickier, Hazel."

Crouching beside the corpse, he got a proper look. The tattoos were similar to Instructor Moon’s, but where Moon’s were elsewhere, these were on the hands.

It told him what he needed to know. Instructor Moon wasn’t working alone, there were others. And if they were strong enough to enter a Malice Rune Realm, they wouldn’t be easy to deal with. Not when he’d only just finished with Lucius.

The day was giving way to night. More than anything, he wanted to be done with Instructor Moon quickly.

His gaze went to the statues in the distance. The gigantic sword pointing toward the sky held its own from this far out, hard to miss, even through the distance.

Lucius had done a vanishing act on him yesterday morning, and that was where he’d turned up. Given the arena’s religious significance, it wasn’t hard to see why Instructor Moon would gravitate there.

"Hazel, let’s go."

His weapons were draped in dark ash, threading slowly through the air. Almost nonexistent, engulfed so completely in darkness that whether they were handguns at all was hard to say.

Leomaris picked his way across the rubble, and by the time they reached the arena, something felt off bizarre in a way he couldn’t place. Hazel felt it too, her reaction made that plain.

Whatever Instructor Moon was playing at, it was shady, and facing him head-on would be asking for trouble.

"Let’s use the building to get a better vantage point, Hazel."

They took to the buildings and kept going, making it their business to get atop one of the statues for a better vantage point on the arena.

As he’d feared, what lay within the arena turned his stomach. A massive ritual circle dominated the centre, rose candles and red powder doing the bulk of the work, and within it, three corpses dressed in clothes that had no business belonging to this era.

Five black-clad figures knelt around the corpses, whispering and bowing in what looked very much like prayer.

A short distance away stood three figures: a man with dark hair that brushed his shoulders, a modestly dressed woman, and another whose red hair caught what little light remained. Even as darkness crept in, she had a mirror out, attending to her looks.

’A ritual? What the heck?’

He didn’t wait a moment before pulling the trigger. The bullet tore through the air, and despite the sharp crack of the gun, not one of them caught it.

The bullet found a ritualist’s head. Everything stilled in the same instant, and everything’s gaze with it, drawn toward the Jester and Herald of the End as though pulled by the sheer weight of the malice coming off them.