The Baddest Villainess Is Back - Chapter 179

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This chapter was translated by Lunox Novels. To support us and help keep this series going, visit our website: LunoxScans.com
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Part 2, Episode 49
“Tch, honestly.”
She rubbed her face and let out a sigh.
“Listen, Bashin. I’m being sincere here. Give it up. If you’re truly serious about this, give it up even more.”
……
“In the first place, humans weren’t made to live for Eternal Life. They’re far too fragile for that.”
She narrowed her eyes and spoke at a leisurely pace.
Something like a serpent’s forked tongue flickered across her lower lip, and her eyes split wide to the sides.
“For us, it’s merely a fleeting moment. But for them, it’s everything. No matter how good a gift you give them, in the end, they only treasure it for that brief time.”
“That’s not your place to interfere with. I’ll manage as I see fit.”
“Hey, you’re not planning to get involved in this yourself, are you?”
Garren Wilbred clicked his tongue and turned away.
“I have constraints. I can’t lay hands on it directly.”
“I have one favor to ask of you. Will you do it?”
Garren Wilbred glanced back over his shoulder.
“That girl you have. Give her to me.”
The woman, who had been smiling with seductive charm, licked her lower lip lightly and whispered with evident intent.
“Those filled with excessive greed hasten their own fate. But you, you’re so greedy it’s a problem.”
Garren Wilbred strode forward, kicked her hard, stepped down on her stomach with his full weight, and drove the spear he held straight into the ground beside her face with a violent thrust.
“…Hey, hey. What’s gotten into you…?”
“After knowing me for this long, you still don’t understand?”
“What…?”
“How old have you lived now? A few thousand years? Though I don’t think you’ve reached ten thousand yet.”
……
“Weren’t you called the Demon of Greed?”
He kept his foot pressed on her stomach, bent down, and looked directly into Amon’s eyes with a cold smile.
“Then surely you remember my old epithet as well.”
……
“You don’t?”
She swallowed hard.
Whether what went down was breath or something else, she couldn’t say for certain, but either way, it happened.
“…The Abyss Hunter.”
She barely managed to part her lips and speak the words.
Only then did the man’s eyes curve with something like satisfaction.
A supernatural being dwelling in the Abyss, one who had hunted down creatures of the otherworld in an effort to maintain the world’s balance.
So notorious was he that the Abyss itself, sensing his existence, had imprisoned him directly and meted out punishment.
A heretic among demons.
Yet, in all truth, the strongest of them all.
Amon knew of him only through hearsay.
It was a tale from more than thousands of years ago.
There had been a human beloved by the demons born from the Abyss.
And from a certain point on, that human was said to have disappeared from sight.
The demons who traveled with him scattered in all directions, and one of them, Bashin, became a hunter who wandered the Abyss in endless pursuit, it was said.
He killed everything that caught his eye and slew everything that displeased him.
A demon of destruction and slaughter.
The man before her could be described in just those two words.
He posed as the most gentlemanly of creatures, but she was well aware of the colossal monster coiled within him.
She had simply been at peace for so long that she had momentarily forgotten.
In the end, the very cracks that appeared in the Abyss—and the power that spilled into humans, becoming what they now called the Abyss—all stemmed from this man’s rampage in that distant past.
He had shattered the balance.
“If you understand, then stop provoking my nature. I care little what you do and play at in this world, but…”
He narrowed his eyes.
“Don’t lay a hand on Selena.”
“…What, is it okay if I touch the other girls?”
Hadn’t he just gotten angry about her mentioning girls?
As she stared at the retreating spear in confusion, Garren Wilbred had already turned and resumed his human form, opening his mouth.
“That one will handle herself.”
“…What, you’re not protecting her?”
“I suppose. It wouldn’t hurt if you did lay hands on her. Just don’t blame me if you end up dead for it.”
Garren Wilbred thought of Rozelin and let out a quiet laugh.
“She’s quite headstrong, you see.”
With that remark, Garren Wilbred turned to leave the room where she lay.
“Bashin, if you want her so badly, why not just preserve her like my Collection pieces?”
Amon rose from the bed and asked with a puzzled expression, and Garren Wilbred shrugged.
“Surely over all those centuries, you’ve given your heart to some human at least once.”
“What?”
“Did you perhaps add one of them to your Collection?”
“…….”
Uncertain what conversation he was steering toward, she narrowed her eyes before slowly nodding.
“Well…… naturally.”
“Then I’ll ask you this: when you look at that human now, does it bring you the same joy it once did?”
“……What? Joy or not, what does it matter? They’re already…….”
“Already as good as dead. So can you really say it’s the same as the human you once loved and cherished?”
“…….”
“The answer to your question comes down to how you view my response.”
He finished his terse reply and vanished in an instant within a Magic Circle.
“……So what? Is that a yes or a no?”
She’d provoked him, and now he was angry, but she couldn’t tell what rhythm to dance to anymore.
“Ah, forget it.”
A game is a game, and amusement is amusement.
Her amusement was to slowly devour the world and bring it to ruin.
To make humans exalt her, then reveal to those who once worshipped her that she was a demon and transform the world into hell itself.
The emotions that bloomed in those moments—she quite savored them.
The despair that welled up, the gradual transformation into lawless chaos and disorder.
Drawing swords to live, killing children, parents, brothers, sisters—all to live.
What remained at the end was human nature alone, stripped raw and naked, and that’s what she found exquisite.
The hunger to live.
For even in despair, humans could not abandon hope—their endless craving for life was utterly intoxicating, wasn’t it?
‘……I’ve never interfered in another’s games before.’
The man who had returned after thousands of years of exile no longer touched those of his own kind.
The Abyss is the foundation of the world, existing to maintain its balance.
And to preserve that balance, the Abyss had created them.
Called demons, known to the human world only as creatures bent on wickedness…….
Yet they had meaning only in their existence. They were emotions given form in the world.
She was greed itself. Because she existed, desire dwelt in the world, ambition flourished, and countless yearnings bloomed.
If she died, desire would vanish from the world line.
The will to live, the hunger for finer things, the pursuit of better lives—all of it would cease.
“Of all things, a human…….”
Why did she have to lose her heart to a human?
The absurdity of it drew a hollow laugh.
She flicked her fingers lightly and summoned her beautiful Collection pieces again.
From the beast-kin with tails and ears, to a young dragon whose growth had halted at the hatchling stage, to pure-blooded elves, to the most beautiful human in the world—so exquisite that humans had waged war for the right to possess her.
Along with these appeared the already extinct, the dead and forgotten beings the world had abandoned.
Their eyes were devoid of light, hollow and empty.
Stripped of self and will, they gave no response without command, their gazes lifeless.
“Whether human or anything else, if you don’t keep them like this, they go insane.”
How much better it was this way.
They didn’t die, they didn’t cry out noisily. Without selfhood they spoke only as commanded, nothing more.
Wasn’t this the inevitable end of forced Eternal Life?
“……It’s better than changing, isn’t it?”
Who knew.
With that thought, Amon gently stroked her Collection piece’s cheek and collapsed onto the bed.
“That girl needs to be taken.”
She couldn’t fathom why that woman trampled about so irritatingly, planting stakes as she pleased.
Her tongue clicked softly as she gazed blankly upward, then slowly closed her eyes.

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This chapter was translated by Lunox Novels. To support us and help keep this series going, visit our website: LunoxScans.com
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