Transmigrated as the Villain: I Will Destroy Fate

Chapter 169: Duality [1]

The white flame vanished from Bruce’s arm, but the damage remained.

His wrist was raw, blistered, and the skin was peeling back to reveal scorched flesh beneath. He didn’t scream. He didn’t curse. He just cradled the ruined limb against his chest and stared at Grace, his earlier curiosity replaced by a sharp, assessing watchfulness.

He didn’t retreat.

Luca got to his feet, his body a dull, throbbing ache and his mind still reeling. The memory of Sylvia’s death, the piercing violation of his soul being pulled from his body – it lingered like a sickness. Iris’s hand was a cool, steady pressure on his arm.

He watched Grace.

She stood between him and Bruce, her posture not aggressive, but impossibly confident. She was a shield. The thought was so simple, so absolute, that it cleared some of the fog from his mind. He’d seen her fight before, of course, but never like this. Never with this much confidence.

Grace took a step forward. "You only have one element, don’t you?"

The question was not a guess. Luca felt the certainty in her voice. Had she heard the conversation from earlier? No, she would have come to help then.

Bruce’s eyes narrowed. "What?"

"Wind," Grace continued, as if stating an obvious fact. "Everyone assumes demons should have more. Fire, shadow, corruption. But you only have the one. Still, using it to master illusion and displacement is impressive. I see the way you use it. It’s unique." She gave him a small, almost sympathetic smile. "And Ravenous Soul... that ability. I’m surprised you managed to kill Ton. I assume Mesmer helped with that?"

Bruce froze.

The shift was immediate.

The last of his detached curiosity fractured, shattering into genuine, unadulterated confusion. His face, which had been showing boredom and intrigue was now gone.

"How...?" The word was quiet, torn from him. "How do you know that?"

Luca’s own confusion mirrored Bruce’s. He had no idea who Ton was, or what a Ravenous Soul was, but he knew Grace shouldn’t.

He had seen her use her knowledge before – subtle nudges, vague predictions, unnervingly accurate assessments of people she had only just met. She knew things about Irene’s relationship with Ronan. She knew about Iris’s political struggles. She knew things about himself as well.

He had always filed it away as the strange intuition of a saintess candidate.

Divine insight, maybe.

But this was not insight. This was information. And she had just handed that information to two more people who would remember it.

Specific, impossible information about a demon he’d – or she’d – never seen before. It re-contextualized everything. It wasn’t that Grace was a good judge of character. It was that she already knew the character.

Just who was she?

"I know a lot of things, Bruce," Grace said, her voice softening. She took another step, using the demon’s confusion as an opening. She was not just displaying knowledge now; she was using it as a blade. "I know about your sisters, too. Feyris. Areya."

At the names, Bruce flinched as if struck.

"They left you, didn’t they?" Grace’s voice was gentle, but the words were surgical. "Your family abandoned you first. Then your sisters did the same, taking the side of your parents due to your lack of talent." Her eyes, filled with a light that seemed to see right through him, met his. "Do you truly feel that was your fault?"

It worked.

The confusion curdled into something hot and raw.

Bruce’s control, the casual detachment he wore like a second skin, finally broke. A low growl rumbled in his chest, a sound of pure, animalistic anger.

"You don’t know what you’re talking about," he snarled, the words scraping from his throat.

Grace’s sympathetic smile didn’t waver.

"I think I do. I think I know what happened. And I think I know how much you hate them for it."

Bruce vanished.

One moment he was there. The next, he was gone.

Luca felt the shift in the air, the subtle ripple of wind magic that heralded an illusion.

He braced himself, ready to throw up a barrier, to defend Grace–

But Grace simply sidestepped.

An invisible force tore through the space where she had been standing, silent and lethal.

She didn’t even look surprised.

"Your illusion magic is good," she commented to the empty air, her voice still calm. "But there’s not much you can do against an artifact that blocks it."

She didn’t gesture to any ring or amulet.

She offered no explanation. The statement was just a fact dropped into the silence. She then turned her head, her gaze sweeping over the burning trees and mutated corpses.

"Is this what you want?" she asked. "Is killing innocents really the only path you have left to take?"

Bruce reappeared a few paces away, his face a mask of incandescent fury. He was breathing hard, the tendons in his neck standing out in sharp relief. His calm was gone, burned away by the raw, exposed nerve of his past.

"I have no choice!" he roared, the sound echoing with desperation. "It doesn’t matter what I want! Mesmer saved me. I have to repay my debt!"

He lunged, no longer bothering with illusions. Wind gathered around his fists, forming blades of compressed air that howled as they cut toward Grace.

His control was gone. The blades came wider than they should have, uneven, one arcing high enough that Grace didn’t need to block it at all.

This time, Grace met the attack herself.

Light flared from her open palm, not the searing white flame from before, but a soft, dense barrier that absorbed the wind blades, causing them to shred and dissipate. The impact sent a shockwave through the clearing, but Grace held her ground.

"Tell me, Bruce. Do you not think you could have left the inheritance grounds by yourself? There are known exits on the bottom levels. You could have–"

"I couldn’t have!" He screamed, not questioning her knowledge anymore. "It’s impossible. For someone like me, it’s impossible. That is why I must give my life to Lord Mesmer. He saved me from that hell. He–"

"Do you really think Ton arriving there was an accident?" Grace asked. "Do you really think anything he does isn’t intentional? There was no chance in that encounter, Bruce. Nothing. Not with you meeting Ton when he was badly injured..." she paused. "And not with your family forsaking you–"

"I don’t know what you’re talking about!" Bruce screamed, his attacks becoming frantic. "But I will report this to Mesmer. Right after I kill the future Hero!" He snarled. "And you."