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

Chapter 64: Investment 64: Root and Ruin

Entoma’s composure shattered entirely.

"Kill him," she snarled, dark energy erupting off her in violent waves. "All of you, now! Don’t let him finish whatever he’s—"

"Too late," Jin said quietly.

The green light pulsing through the throne room’s forest of branches surged all at once, and the entire chamber seemed to inhale.

"Ancient-Tier Spell." Jin raised a single hand, and every root, every branch, every glowing tendril of green mana wrapped around the bone pillars responded in perfect, synchronized unison. "Yggdrall’s Verdict."

The name alone made the air itself tremble.

"Ancient-Tier?" Rose’s voice cracked with disbelief. "There are only supposed to be a handful of those spells in existence. Recorded ones, anyway."

"Guess we’re witnessing history, then," Taumus said breathlessly, having only just staggered into the throne room alongside August, both of them freezing mid-step at the sight before them.

The branches beneath Entoma and the three Bug Lords erupted upward through the cracked stone floor, coiling around their legs, their torsos, their throats, with a speed and precision that left no room for escape. Ru tried to teleport away—the branches simply followed, tracking through space itself as though distance meant nothing to them.

"Impossible—" Mary’s mushroom-pale hair whipped wildly as she thrashed against her restraints. "This is a first-year academy! Ancient-Tier spells aren’t supposed to exist outside the Imperial council’s personal records!"

"Funny thing about records," Jin said, walking calmly toward the center of his spreading forest, "is they only account for what people know about. And very few people know about me."

Gion, ever the tactician even in his final moments, attempted one last desperate illusion—splitting into a dozen false copies in a bid to confuse the spell’s targeting.

The branches ignored every single decoy, converging with unerring accuracy on the one, true, panicking original.

"How—" Gion’s composed mask finally, fully cracked, real terror bleeding into his voice for the first time since the fight began. "How can it tell the difference?!"

"Roots don’t see with eyes," Jin said simply. "They feel. And fear has a very particular scent, Gion. You reek of it."

Ru, still thrashing uselessly against the roots wrapped around his throat, managed one last venomous glare toward Elliot. "This isn’t over, boy. Mother has—others. Older. Worse. You’ve won nothing tonight but a delay."

"Noted," Elliot said flatly. "I’ll worry about that after I’m done watching you lose."

Mary let out a final, furious shriek as the branches tightened around her, ladybug-shell gauntlets crumbling uselessly to dust in her restrained grip. "You insufferable, overgrown weed—"

"Funny, coming from the woman made of bugs," Futaba muttered, too exhausted to fully appreciate her own joke but saying it anyway.

Entoma, cornered and desperate, gathered every last scrap of dark energy she had left into one final, massive orb above her restrained hands.

"If I’m going down," she snarled, voice raw with fury, "I’m taking every last one of you insects down with—"

"You talk," Jin interrupted, echoing words that would have made Elliot smirk had he not been utterly transfixed by the scale of power unfolding before him, "entirely too much."

He closed his raised hand into a fist.

The forest of branches detonated inward simultaneously, crushing, piercing, and consuming everything within their grip in a blinding pulse of green light that swallowed Entoma, Ru, Mary, and Gion whole.

There was no scream this time. No last defiant words. Just an overwhelming wave of light and pressure that sent every exhausted student in the throne room stumbling backward, shielding their eyes against the brilliance.

When it faded, the throne room stood in near-total silence.

Where Entoma and her three remaining children had stood, there was nothing left—not even ash. Just a scorched, perfectly circular patch of blackened stone, and the lingering, fading glow of green mana slowly retracting back into the earth from which it came.

For a long, stunned moment, nobody spoke.

"That’s it?" Deria finally managed, voice hoarse with disbelief. "That’s just—it’s over? Just like that?"

"Ancient-Tier spells tend to have that effect, yeah." Jin rolled his shoulders, and just like that, the crushing weight of his mana receded entirely, folding back into the same unassuming, lazy presence they’d all grown used to over the past several months. "Honestly, the annoying part wasn’t the fight. It was maintaining the illusion of being a mediocre first-year for this long. You have no idea how hard it is to fail exams on purpose without it looking suspicious."

"You—" Futaba’s exhausted mind was still struggling to process everything. "You’ve been failing exams. On purpose. For months. While being an actual Imperial."

"The headmaster was very specific about maintaining cover," Jin said solemnly. "Though between you and me, I think Professor Xuyie suspected something. She kept giving me these looks."

Elliot, still cradling a barely conscious Seria against his chest, finally let out a long, shuddering breath of relief.

"Jin," he said quietly, "I think you might have just saved all our lives."

"Don’t mention it." Jin gave a small, tired smile, the first genuinely unguarded expression any of them had seen on his face since the fight began. "Seriously. Please don’t mention it. The headmaster’s going to have my head for blowing my cover this early as it is."

Rose lowered herself slowly to sit on a fallen chunk of bone pillar, thorned vines finally retracting from around her arms as exhaustion caught up with her all at once. "I believe," she said, voice unusually thin, "that is the first time in my life I’ve watched a fight end so decisively I didn’t even get to see how it happened."

"Welcome to fighting an actual Imperial," Jin said. "Most people don’t get to see the ending. Usually they’re already unconscious by that point. Consider yourselves lucky."

"Lucky isn’t the word I’d use," Leonard muttered, finally allowing his own knees to give out, sitting heavily against the cracked stone. "Grateful. Terrified. Deeply confused about how I’m going to explain any of this to my brother. But not lucky."

A distant, muffled groan echoed from somewhere deeper within the throne room—beyond the shattered dais, past a half-collapsed archway of bone that led into darker, unexplored depths.

Every head snapped toward the sound.

"Please tell me," August said, voice tight with exhaustion, "that’s not another one of them waking back up."

Jin’s expression sharpened instantly, green mana flickering faintly back to life around his fingertips as he moved cautiously toward the archway.

"No," he said slowly, after a moment of careful listening. "That’s not a bug lord."

His eyes widened slightly.

"That’s human."