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

Chapter 477: My Best Soldier Is Stealing My Spotlight!

“Who’s keeping an eye on Terry?” Juliana sauntered into the camp we had set up in her territory.

I glanced at the girl, her white hair looking almost silver in the diffused evening light filtering through the dense canopy above. “No one. He’s still up at the Castle, on the roof.”

There was a rare flicker of surprise on my Shadow’s otherwise impassive face. “He can leave the throne room?”

“As long as he’s touching the tower, he can,” Alexia spoke before I could, lounging on the chair opposite me. Her right shoulder was wrapped in a tight elastic bandage, her arm below it bound in a sling.

Juliana gave me a disapproving stare. “And you let him out? Young Master, you ought to know what’s happening, right?”

“Exactly what I said!” Alexia interjected, resting her chin on her uninjured palm with a huff.

“He’s not a dog!” I made an exasperated gesture. “I can’t keep him chained to a place against his will! Also, I trust him.”

“Sure you do,” Juliana let out a dry scoff before coming to stand directly behind me, one hand casually dropping onto my shoulder as she leaned over slightly. Her eyes went on Alexia. “What’s with your arm, shorty?”

Alexia scowled. “Heyyy! I’m not short anymore! Or little!”

“I didn’t call you little.”

“Shut up!” The short girl whined. “It was a flesh wound. I tried a healing potion, but the mace I got hit with seems to have been coated in some kind of strong necrotic debuff. It’s dampening the potion’s regeneration effect.”

Alexia couldn’t use her Divine Ring because all healing artifacts — and all the healers themselves — were explicitly banned from this Mock War.

“Oh my fair lady,” I chimed in, putting on my most theatrical, heartbroken posture as I leaned back into Juliana’s touch. “Do not fear. Should that delicate, totally-not-short frame of yours wither away from dark magic, I shall personally commission a magnificent gold-plated statue in your honor. Right at the gates of the Zynx estate, so everyone knows you died as you lived: utterly stubborn and complaining about your height.”

Alexia picked up a half-eaten green apple from the earthen table with her good hand and hurled it at my face.

Before I could even flinch, Juliana’s hand blurred from my shoulder, snatching the fruit out of the air a mere inch away from my nose and tossing it aside into the brush.

“You’re an asshole, Sam,” Alexia grumbled, though a tiny smirk twitched at the corner of her lips before she hid it behind another huff. “Both of you are.”

“Seconded,” Ray’s voice drawled as he entered the clearing at last, a half-empty canteen loosely dangling from his fingers. “But if we are building statues, make sure mine captures my good side. Which is all of them.”

“Why is this guy always so delusional?” Juliana blinked, unimpressed.

“See! Case in point! Asshole!” Ray pointed a finger at her right before taking a seat next to Alexia. “Anyway, I came to report that Michael is eliminated. He’ll be missed. Let’s start with his statue first.”

I nodded, ignoring his last quip. “Yeah, I knew it when no one from his platoon returned even long after Alexia did.”

“Mhm,” Ray nodded back. “According to the reports, a Cadet in their ranks possessed a condition-based innate ability that allowed its user to suppress the Origin Card of a target. Now, normally, that alone wouldn’t have been a problem for Michael. But someone there also had an artifact capable of disrupting the Essence Circulation of anyone in a thirty meter radius. Without both his Circulation Technique and Origin Card, he and his troops were left all but defenseless under the artillery fire of enemy Casters who were stationed outside the disruption zone. Our Casters fired back too, but theirs were shooting through their own men so they had far more coverage and better line-of-sight. Once enough of our troops fell, the Sector Officer deployed all his available Brawlers. It was carnage.”

Yeah, that made sense.

Even if those Brawlers also lost their Essence Circulation upon stepping into that thirty-meter null zone, the sheer numbers favored the defenders.

Without his Origin Card to tip the scales or Essence to reinforce weapons, Michael must’ve been overwhelmed, forced to rely on unaugmented martial arts against an army.

I sighed. “It’s fine. He did his job. I just wish we had gotten a few more of their Cadets. And their other Rook.”

Ray gave me a confused look, an eyebrow arched.

But before he could utter a word, Kang, who had been sitting quietly on a low-hanging branch of a tree at the edge of the camp, spoke up in his usual gravelly tone. “The Rook fell, dude.”

I turned my head toward Kang so fast my neck nearly snapped. “Wait… what?”

Kang repeated, sounding a little tired. “The Rook fell. We couldn’t retrieve the Medallion, but their Sector is defenseless.”

Wait, wait.

No.

That didn’t make sense.

Why would the enemy Sector Officer personally risk going in against Michael when he was already holding the advantage in numbers?

Unless…

Unless the Brawlers he sent were falling…

“How many Cadets did Michael eliminate?” I found myself asking.

Ray suddenly seemed to understand something. “Ah. At least twenty out of the fifty he was up against. In the end, the Sector Officer himself had to step in because he was gutting their formation. Dozens of men had to hold him back together. Guy went down like a fucking legend. I wonder why he wasn’t using his Demon Sword. I don’t think he has used it ever since Noctveil Wilds, right? I think he still feels guilty for what happened.”

Alexia shrugged. “I don’t blame him. And I’m glad he’s not using it, to be honest. I get weird vibes from that sword.”

“No, same. I’d rather he throw that thing somewhere far away. But if it’s bound to him and it’s housing an actual Demonic being that only he can control, or at least keep at bay…” Ray shuddered.

“It’s a big responsibility,” Alexia agreed. “He said he found it in his parents’ belongings, right? I wonder how such a thing even got there.”

The two of them continued their chit-chat while I sat there in total silence.

Seconds ticked by and turned into minutes, until finally a nerve on my forehead twitched. “Bullshit!”

“…What?”

“Hmm?”

“I call bullshit!” I stood up, slamming a hand on the earthen table I had myself conjured earlier. “This is total bullshit! You’re telling me he at least took down twenty people, forced their Sector Officer into the dirt, and broke their defenses under heavy artillery fire — all without his Origin Card or Essence usage?! What is he, an action movie protagonist? I call bullshit!”

For a while, no one knew what to say.

Then the young woman behind me moved.

“There, there, Young Master,” Juliana cooed smoothly, her fingers lightly tapping my shoulder. “Your jealousy is showing. It’s unbecoming for a man of your noble stature, isn’t it?”

“I am not jealous!” I shot back, though my voice cracked and ruined any lingering shred of dignity I may have had left. “I’m a tactical genius, okay! I spent six days engineering a logistics crisis, starving two whole armies, orchestrating a high-altitude kamikaze air drop, and Monarchs know what else! But what does Michael do?! He falls out of the sky on an oversized lion-bat thing, loses his Origin Card, gets hit with artillery fire, and just… punches twenty people with his bare hands like a fucking lunatic?! And now people are going to talk about him!? Fuck him! I’m the hero of this war!”

“Sure you are,” Juliana nodded pitifully, then patted my shoulder like a mother comforting a toddler who had just dropped his ice cream into the dirt. “A very loud, very whiny hero.”

“Shut up!” I whined.

•••

After I had finished my totally justified, highly dignified meltdown, the rest of the camp proceeded with the final discussion.

My Shadow was sitting beside me now, her legs crossed at the knee and fingers lazily twirling a silver kunai.

“Ah, right, Lord Hero,” she called, the subtle bite of sarcasm as polished as ever. “Now that you’ve gotten your daily fragile-ego quota out of the way, I was here to tell you that your boy wonder pulled it off.”

I looked at her, a smile subconsciously surfacing on my lips. “Ivan? He did it?”

“Yes,” Juliana shared my smirk. “Twenty-five confirmed eliminations. More than thirty heavily injured. I really believe he could’ve taken them all, but his cover was blown at the last possible moment. Still, he has crippled their navy. Actually, crippled is an understatement. Their navy is non-existent now. No more than two enemy naval specialists survived and that’s only because they ran before ever entering the water.”

I chuckled. “My boy wonder indeed.”

Alexia, Ray, and Kang were confused. We had to explain the whole setup to the three of them.

“Well, I’ll be damned,” the ginger sobbed like a proud elder sister, wiping a non-existent tear from her eye. “You had a plan after all. I take back ten percent of the insults I thought about you in my head while fighting Kaelron.”

“Ten percent?” Ray whistled, taking another swig of whatever was in his canteen. “Generous. I was at eight percent.”

“Very impressive. Sure. But can we now return to the topic at hand?” Kang muttered from above, sounding more sleepy than usual. “Who’s the spy?”

Because there was a spy. That much we were sure of now. A good one, at that.

To counter Alexia, Kaelron had a strategy set in motion long before she even stepped foot in his territory.

They marked her immediately, then started bombarding her with hexes and spells. Kaelron also knew to strike fear in her heart by restraining her.

That wasn’t quick thinking or on-the-fly battle instinct. That was a targeted plan specifically tailored to counter the Fist of Heaven’s exact fighting style.

And Michael ran into a similar problem.

They had figured out where he was going to drop, had an Essence Disruption artifact set up in that area, and held a Cadet with a condition-based innate ability in reserve specifically to force him into a close-quarters meatgrinder

You don’t just happen to have those two absurdly rare combinations sitting in the exact Sector where one of my strongest soldiers happened to land.

They knew.

Because someone had told them.