The Villainess That Was Once A VRMMO player

“Nicholas!”

“Maia!”

When I returned to town, Maia and Nicholas, who had sought refuge there, rushed up to each other and hugged tightly. As I watched them smiling at each other, Maia turned bright red and pulled away from Nicholas.

“I’m sorry, Carol-sama! I’m uh…”

“Carol-sama…? Carol-sama! Oh, I was thinking why she looked so familiar, but how?”

“Don’t worry, Cam knows.”

“He didn’t mention anything about it!”

Nicholas was getting on my nerves. I entered the reception room of the temple-like building that served as my residence and started the conversation. Nicholas and the girl from earlier exchanged glances, and the girl – Lilia – gulped as I began to speak.

“I will tell you the story from the beginning.”

I escaped from the kingdom by smashing the top of the castle, but it seems that the king’s property was in there, and to make up for it as well as to force the people to pay heavy taxes, they tried to oppress the subhumans and started a war with the daemons to compensate for the money that they lost. That’s a lot of work.

I knew about that part, but I heard that the heavy taxation had worsened the crop failure problem due to the decrease in the number of spirits outside the royal capital, which had been a problem for some time, and that recovery was carried out by “the Beloved Child of the Spirits”, but even though there was recovery, it was temporary, and the number of spirits decreased even further afterwards.

Because of Alice’s efforts to gather the spirits, the area around the capital was said to have a better harvest than before, but it was still not enough to supply the entire kingdom. In the first place, there were many lands of high nobles around the royal capital, and there were few nobles who shared their lands with other fiefdoms, so the nobles on the frontier and their fiefdoms were complaining.

The Kingdom of Caenista was in trouble.

Flare saw this as an opportunity. She was going to support the impoverished nobles from behind the scenes and accumulate power by making allies of the frontier fiefdoms to overthrow the royal family. …Perhaps Flare also realized that as long as Alice was around, the country would only continue to decline.

But Flare’s plot was foiled by her own father, the Duke of Prata, and her brother, Cashmere. They trapped Flare and tried to reduce her power.

Flare should have been able to chew through the trap, but they had a trump card. It was Alice, the spirit’s beloved child.

At the request of the Crown Prince, the battle between Alice and Flare set the royal city ablaze, and it seemed as if their powers were a close match.

“Flare-sama was captured because of my foolishness…”

“It seems like she had a hard time.”

Flare was protected by a spirit, so they couldn’t kill her. They could only capture her by sealing her with the spirit, so no one could get to her, and she was imprisoned in a dungeon with no medical treatment for her wounds.

Ah~ this was Flare’s only route to survival, the route of imprisonment after the usurpation of the throne. The situation was similar, though slightly different.

After that, Lilia and her followers fought hard to secure Flare, but nearly half of them were killed or captured, leaving young people like Lilia behind.

They had sworn an oath to rescue Flare, but there were no longer many places to hide in the Royal Capital, so Lilia and her family, who were holed up in a lowly noble family of the Flare faction, were approached by a man they had not expected.