Investing in My Yandare Villainess Fiancée:Each Reward Fuels My Growth

Chapter 61: Investment 61: Elemental Ascension

The centipede lunged, a hundred mouths screaming in perfect, horrifying unison, and Rose’s voice cut through the chaos like a blade through silk.

"Now!"

They scattered on cue—not in retreat, but in formation, each of them peeling off toward a different flank of the beast with a coordination that could only come from months of fighting side by side.

Deria’s stone gauntlets slammed into one flank, buying half a second. Futaba’s wind gales tore through another cluster of legs. Rose’s thorned blade carved a line of wine-dark mana across its underside. Leonard’s lightning arced from limb to limb, chaining through the creature’s segmented body.

It wasn’t enough.

Every wound the centipede suffered simply knitted itself shut within seconds, bone regrowing, sinew re-threading, the acidic bile continuing to hiss and bubble across the ruined floor.

"This isn’t working." Deria gritted her teeth, dodging a swipe that took a chunk out of the pillar behind her. "We’re just tiring ourselves out."

"She’s stalling us." Seria’s voice was strained, frost clinging to her lashes. "Feeding on the ambient mana in this room. The longer this fight drags, the stronger she gets."

"Then we stop dragging it." Elliot’s grip tightened on his sword. "We end it. Now."

[Bond Level: 8]

[The user’s Bond Level with Seria Ale Migalison has crossed a critical threshold.]

[New system function unlocked: Vassal Resonance.]

[Vassal Resonance allows bonded allies to draw directly upon the user’s Vassal Affinity, entering a temporary Elemental State.]

[Warning: Backlash upon overuse may result in severe mana exhaustion or death.]

The notification blinked through Elliot’s vision like a lifeline thrown into a drowning sea.

"Everyone!" he shouted. "I can share it—whatever this is—but I need you to trust me!"

"When have we ever not trusted you?" Futaba yelled back, dodging another swipe by a hair’s breadth.

"Then hold on!"

Elliot closed his eyes for the span of a single heartbeat and reached inward, toward that strange, warm current of power Yuki’s system had gifted him—the one that had once been a simple gauge measuring Seria’s happiness and had since become something far vaster, far stranger, something that felt less like a system function and more like a living, breathing river of primordial will.

He pushed it outward. Toward all of them.

The effect was instantaneous.

Seria’s crystal-blue mana ignited into something far beyond its usual intensity—no longer simply cold, but glacial, absolute, the temperature around her plummeting until frost crystallized in the very air she breathed. Her eyes, usually a soft crystalline blue, turned a piercing arctic white.

"Elemental State: Absolute Frost," she whispered, and her voice carried an echo that hadn’t been there a moment ago.

Deria’s skin cracked like drying earth, veins of raw stone spreading up from her fingertips to her shoulders, until she looked less like a mage and more like a walking, breathing mountain given human shape.

"Elemental State: Bedrock Ascendant," she rumbled, voice deep and grinding like shifting tectonic plates.

Futaba’s white hair billowed as if caught in a hurricane that existed only around her, Moohawk’s light merging fully into her very skin, wings of pure wind-woven feathers unfurling from her shoulder blades.

"Elemental State: Tempest’s Herald," she grinned, wild and fierce.

Rose’s wine-red mana bloomed outward into an entire garden of thorned vines that wrapped protectively around her arms like living armor, crimson petals drifting from her hair with every movement.

"Elemental State: Thornbound Sovereign," she said quietly, and for the first time that day, her usual composed detachment cracked into something resembling genuine, focused fury.

Leonard’s golden lightning condensed into a crackling crown that hovered above his brow, his blade humming with contained thunder.

"Elemental State: Heaven’s Verdict."

Even Edith, arriving late with a fresh trail of blood on her sleeve, felt the pull of Elliot’s shared power and let it flood through her, green vines erupting from every inch of exposed skin, blooming with flowers that pulsed like a second heartbeat.

"Elemental State: Verdant Requiem," she breathed, eyes wide with something between terror and exhilaration. "This—this is insane power."

The centipede reared back, its many mouths hissing in what almost sounded like uncertainty.

"What... is this?" Entoma’s voice, for the first time, lost its mocking edge entirely.

"This," Elliot said, stepping forward with his own mana burning gold and crimson around him, wind and fire coiling together into something that felt less like a spell and more like an extension of his own will, "is what happens when you threaten the people I love."

He raised his sword.

"Everyone. On my mark."

"About damn time," Deria growled, stone fists clenched.

"Mark!"

They struck as one.

Seria’s frost locked half the centipede’s legs to the floor in solid, unbreakable ice. Deria’s stone fists shattered the frozen limbs on impact. Futaba’s wind gales tore through the openings, ripping flesh and bone alike from the creature’s writhing body. Rose’s thorns coiled around its throat, choking the flow of dark mana at its source. Leonard’s lightning arced through every wound simultaneously, cauterizing regeneration before it could even begin. Edith’s vines burrowed beneath its scales, siphoning away the ambient mana it so desperately needed to heal.

And through the center of it all, Elliot moved like a comet given form, blade tracing a path of golden fire straight toward Entoma’s exposed, screaming core.

"Impossible," Entoma’s voice cracked, fraying at the edges. "This level of coordination—this level of raw power—you’re first-years! You shouldn’t—"

"You talk," Elliot said, sword plunging forward, "entirely too much."

The blade found its mark.

An explosion of golden-white light tore through the throne room, and the centipede’s massive body convulsed once, twice, before collapsing into a pile of ash and shattered bone that scattered across the cracked stone floor like dark snow.

For one long, breathless moment, silence reigned.

"Did we..." Futaba panted, wind mana finally settling, wings retracting into nothing. "Did we actually do it?"

Seria collapsed to her knees, elemental frost fading from her eyes, exhaustion finally catching up to her all at once. Elliot was there in an instant, catching her before she hit the ground.

"You did wonderfully," he whispered against her hair.

"We did," she corrected weakly, a faint, exhausted smile tugging at her lips. "Together."

The ash where Entoma’s true form had crumbled began, ever so slightly, to shift.