Maybe I really am a Villian

Chapter 142: Prophet ?

Royal Family Estate

Inside his private chamber at the Royal Family Estate, Emperor Aurelius Voltaris sat in silence, listening to the full report on the destruction of the Reaper Guild.

Aurelius Voltaris was the father of Lucian Voltaris and Celestine Voltaris. He was also an Immortal-rank cultivator of the Lightning element, and one of the strongest beings in the empire.

As the report went on, the atmosphere in the room grew heavier with each passing moment.

The Reaper Guild headquarters — built by the Voltaris and Viremont families through years of effort and enormous resources — had been utterly destroyed in the span of a single day.

At the site where the headquarters once stood, the destruction bore the unmistakable mark of a Grandmaster-rank Light-element attack.

When the man delivering the report finished speaking, Aurelius regarded him calmly. This was the man responsible for relaying information to the Reaper Guild, and to Aurelius himself, once missions were completed. After a moment, Aurelius simply said, "You may leave now."

The man did not hesitate. He left the room at once, wary of provoking the Emperor’s wrath.

Once the door had closed behind him, Aurelius turned his thoughts to the incident and the losses it had brought.

The toll was severe: two Grandmaster-rank cultivators and roughly one hundred and eighty Master-rank cultivators had been lost. The Master-rank losses alone would have been significant, but they paled in comparison to the value of a single Grandmaster — and here, two had fallen. One belonged to the Voltaris family, the other to the Viremont family.

And it had happened when no one had expected it in the slightest.

Aurelius sat silently, replaying the sequence of events in his mind.

First, the mission details had been leaked, and the enemy was already lying in wait at the location where the mission was supposed to take place. They killed the Reaper Guild members present, then killed the targets as well, making it appear as though an assassin had been responsible. They left behind a message that turned the incident into a major issue — one significant enough to draw the Church’s attention and force every member of the Guild to gather at headquarters. It was then, with the members assembled, that the enemy struck again, killing them all and ensuring none could escape or contact anyone outside.

The first possibility was that someone had orchestrated the entire incident to provoke a conflict between the us and the Church — drawing the Church into the affair, slaughtering their members, then using a light-based attack to shift the blame onto the Church, luring them to the scene to make it appear as though the Church itself was responsible.

The second possibility was that the Church had done it themselves, and wanted him to believe the first.

Aurelius rose from his seat and muttered, his tone filled with anger, "Do those Church bastards take me for a fool? Do they truly expect me to believe that some new faction infiltrated the base — after all the precautions I put in place to prevent exactly that?"

"And do they really expect me to believe that this same new faction killed two Grandmasters — each of them among the finest Grandmasters the Voltaris and Viremont families had to offer — in the span of mere hours?"

Aurelius calmed himself and let his anger subside, then continued to think.

’I am certain this is the Church’s doing. They likely learned of the Reaper Guild through that infuriating ability of their so-called Saintess — the power to glimpse possible futures — and orchestrated this entire affair to make it look as though someone else was trying to turn us against each other. I might have believed that, too, if I didn’t know full well how difficult it is for anyone to infiltrate our base. That is why I refuse to entertain the first possibility.’

His thoughts then turned to the Church’s so-called Saintess, and his expression soured. "I would love nothing more than to kill her," he muttered in annoyance. "She is an annoying enemy — and I would dearly enjoy seeing the Church’s reaction if she were gone. But those bastards guard her as though she were some invaluable treasure. And in truth, she is exactly that, given her power to glimpse possible futures. Even if the visions are vague, she can act to change them, and given enough clarity, she may come to understand the future with precision."

"Even though she cannot control what she sees, that ability alone is dangerous enough. And there are likely other abilities of hers I know nothing about."

Aurelius then began thinking, as if reminiscing about the past, and muttered, "She was already powerful as a Grandmaster, even though I never once saw her use her domain. She should have probably reached the Immortal rank by now."

Aurelius then emerged from his thoughts and began considering what to do next. No matter what he did, he could not undo the past. As for taking action against the Church, there was little he could actually do — he could hardly go public and declare, "I want the Church to pay for destroying the assassin guild I built through so much effort."

Having set aside these useless musings, he called the man who had delivered the report back into the room.

The man returned at once, looked at Aurelius, and bowed low. "Yes, Your Majesty. Why have you called for me?" he asked, his tone nervous.

Aurelius looked at the man and asked, "What of the lower branch of the Reaper Guild?"

The man hesitated for a moment before answering, his voice even more uneasy than before. "All members of the lower branch have vanished, with no signs of struggle at their base."

Aurelius showed little reaction to the loss of the lower branch’s members, since they had all been elementless Masters to begin with — of little real worth, mere cannon fodder kept on hand to preserve the guise of an ordinary assassin guild and Chruch probably just killed them quietly after getting information about them from the headquarters.