Young Master's PoV: Woke Up As A Villain In A Game One Day

Chapter 391: The Crimson Guild [II]

My vampiric hand visibly swelled and contracted as the obsidian claw drained the man’s blood straight from his heart.

It looked like thick gulps of water being pumped through tight straws — except the straws were the veins in my arm, and what they were pumping wasn’t water.

The man shook and jerked and quivered, his voice still breaking out in terror-filled wheezes. He tried to move or get away, but my aunt’s foot on his face kept him pressed to the floor without mercy.

With each gulp of his blood that my arm greedily drank, the cold inside it began to thaw.

The glacial numbness that had been seeping out from my grafted limb calmed down to something warm and soothing.

That warmth slowly crawled up my forearm, spread into my shoulder, then went deeper — into places in my body I couldn’t quite name but could definitely feel.

...Essence.

My entire body was being flooded with a surge of Essence that circulated throughout before settling into my core.

It’s a euphoric feeling to experience so much Essence being poured directly into you, not unlike the sensation you get when absorbing it from a slain beast... only much more concentrated.

So much so that my core started brimming within seconds, threatening to overflow and expand. But before it could, the swigs of blood stopped coming in.

I was immediately pushed down from my high, realizing how heavily I’d been breathing with my cheeks flushed and pupils blown.

...Okay, that was something else.

Like I said, I had never experienced absorbing so much Essence. It felt like I absorbed it directly from a Greater Beast.

Well, that wouldn’t be entirely untrue.

A Greater Beast’s human equivalent was an A-rank Awakened, which this man appeared to be.

Wait... the man!

I blinked, forcing my mind back into focus before quickly snapping my gaze downward.

I realized that an A-ranker truly was in a different league than a normal human.

Because even after getting his heart impaled and having his blood drained like a faucet, the man actually survived well beyond what a normal person could.

...But even an A-ranker had limits.

This man, whoever he was, seemed to have reached his.

He had died.

Right now, he was nothing but a dessicated carcass under Aunt Morgan’s foot, skeletal-thin with hollow eyes and sunken cheeks, his chapped lips still parted in a silent scream.

What a gruesome death.

In the heavy silence that blanketed the room, I slowly pulled my arm back.

The obsidian claw retracted with a wet quelch, while the blackened veins dimmed as the crimson glow along the thin cracks dulled into a muted, ember-like pulse.

The irritating cold returned almost immediately, but it was much more manageable now... for the time being.

Aunt Morgan looked down at the dried corpse for a brief second, then casually stepped over it as if it were no more than a discarded piece of paper.

"Well?" she asked, her tone light but curious. "How do you feel?"

I scowled at her. "Who is— was... this man?"

My aunt rolled her eyes as if I’d asked her for menial labor instead of a simple explanation.

Then she ambled over to the edge of her bed and sat down, crossing her legs, resting an elbow on her knee, and propping her chin with her hand.

"If you must know," she sighed, "he was an assassin."

My brows shot up at her words. "An... assassin?"

She nodded. "His target was Alric."

"...Alric?" I repeated to confirm. "As in Alric Vael, the heir of one of our vassal families?"

"Yes," she replied. "And it’s not the first time something like this has happened, but it is the first time we’ve caught one of these rats alive before they could finish the job... or themselves."

I stared at her, then at the dehydrated husk of a corpse on the polished floor. "So you just let me kill him?"

Aunt Morgan tilted her head, studying me as if I’d asked a question she hadn’t expected. "You didn’t just kill him. You tested your arm."

"That’s not what I meant," I shook my head. "I mean, couldn’t we have gotten some information out of him?"

She stifled a chuckle, like that was exactly what she had expected from me. "Oh, believe me, kid. We’ve tried. But they’re all trained to die before they give up a single name. Actually, not trained— conditioned, or something. The moment they’re compromised, their bodies shut down from the inside. It’s creepy, honestly."

I gave her a look.

If she called something creepy, then it really must’ve been creepy.

"And that’s not all. I have tried extracting their souls," she explained, leaning back. "I thought maybe the failsafe was implanted in their body. But no! The moment I’d try extraction, they would just explode! There really is no way to get them talking. So yeah, we’ve definitely tried everything."

Well, that was troublesome.

And that also reminded me of something.

These assassins sounded very familiar.

"Who is sending them?" I asked to clear my doubt.

It was Master Urvil who replied in her stead. "We don’t really know, Young Master."

"We don’t," my aunt picked up right after him, "but we do have a name."

My mind was already in a spiral.

It couldn’t be them, right?

They weren’t supposed to be relevant to the story yet.

Or were they?

Perhaps they were active, but since the game never explored the world outside the Academy at this point in the plot, we never got to know them this early.

Still, with all my heart, I hoped I was wrong. Because if it was indeed who I suspected, then things were about to become very problematic.

"They call themselves the Crimson Guild."

Fuck.

My aunt’s declaration was like a knife to my gut.

I wanted to facepalm. I wanted to laugh and cry into my hands. I wanted to just go on a vacation.

Can’t I just catch a break? — I thought to myself.

If you think I was overreacting, you’re wrong. If anything, I wasn’t reacting enough.

The Crimson Guild was an association of deadly assassins. Rumors about them weren’t so much whispered as they were buried.

In the game, they were an emerging group of contracted murderers affiliated with the Syndicate. They were responsible for the assassination of the Royal Twins — Alice and Willem.

Their leader, the Scarlet Killer, somehow managed to infiltrate the Academy — a feat previously thought of as impossible — and disposed of the Central Safe-Zone’s Prince and its crowned Princess.

Later, the Syndicate succeeded in framing the Northern Monarch for the killings. That single event was what accelerated the Total War of Five Monarchs.

From the very start, it had been my goal to stop that assassination, avoid that war, and then eventually thwart the awakening of the Queen of Rot.

I thought I had time.

In the game, the assassination didn’t happen until the start of the second academic year. Right now, it was only November.

I thought I had months to prevent that route from ever taking place.

But if the Crimson Guild was already influential enough to invade a High Noble family — and not just any High Noble family, but the Theosbanes! — then everything I thought I understood about the timeline was wrong.

Who was to say they hadn’t already infiltrated the Academy? The game never showed how they managed to do it. It only hinted that someone on the inside was working with them.

So maybe they were already a part of Apex!

Argh!

Just thinking about it gave me a headache.

"But you don’t have to worry about it," my aunt’s voice broke me out of my thoughts. "You just focus on yourself and your upcoming assignment. I doubt these guys will be a problem anytime soon."

...Famous last words.

I offered her a blank stare. Then, "How did he even slip in?"

"He didn’t," Master Urvil huffed. "He was recruited into the family when he was a five-year-old orphan on the streets of Luxara. He was trained alongside our own people, fed our teachings, and trusted like one of our own."

Silence washed over the room as my gaze drifted back to the corpse. Raised and fed and trusted here since he was five years old... and yet, he was an assassin. A traitor.

"Then that means..." I started slowly, "they’ve already infiltrated us from within."

Aunt Morgan didn’t deny it. She didn’t even look surprised, for that matter.

"How is that not a problem?" I squinted at her.

She shrugged. "I said it’s not going to be a problem anytime soon. We are already tackling the issue and have cleared our army. Only the staff, distant cousins, and immediate core personnel remain. As I said, don’t worry."

That did absolutely nothing to reassure me.

"It’s a shame, though," Master Urvil sighed, sounding genuinely disappointed as he looked down at the dead body. "He was a very talented healer."

Aunt Morgan suddenly cheered up. "Oh, now that is something I can help with."

Master Urvil’s face went paler than his milky eyes. But before the old man could utter even a weak protest, my aunt jumped from the edge of the bed and summoned her Origin Card.

The temperature in the room plummeted, turning colder than the chill I’d been feeling in my arm earlier.

Specks of violet light flared up in the air all around, slowly swirling as if roused by an invisible vortex before flowing into the corpse.

That river of bright sparks was the color of a deep, dark bruise. And as soon as it entered the desiccated dead body... the corpse stirred.

There was a series of wet, snapping sounds like the dry pop of rehydrating joints and the rustle of leathery skin stretching over bone. The hollowed-out husk that had been an A-rank assassin began to twitch, slowly pushing itself off the floor.

Before long, it stood on its own two feet, swaying slightly like a reed in a dark wind. But it was the face that made my hair stand on end in disgust.

The man’s jaw unhinged and then snapped shut, his grey lips peeling back until they stretched toward his ears. In the end, his mouth was locked in a wide, eerie smile that reached up to his dead, sunken eyes.

Now, this was creepy.

You see, after death, the soul usually dissipates. But one of the applications of Aunt Morgan’s power was to catch those fleeing sparks of life and pin them back into their meat-suits to reanimate the dead.

These thralls she that brought back to life retained a fraction of their original power, but they were nothing more than puppets — hollow shells locked in eternal servitude, forced to wear that grotesque smile regardless of the horror they had become.

This was the true source of her moniker. It wasn’t because she was cheerful or kind. It was because she was served by an entourage of the dead, all of them beaming with the same terrifying, artificial smile.

This was why she was called the Queen of Smiles.

I shuddered and immediately headed for the exit.

"Wait, where are you going?" Aunt Morgan called out. Beside her, Master Urvil had a hand firmly clasped over his mouth as if trying not to throw up.

"To meet my friends," I answered, getting the fuck out of there and slamming the door behind me.