Chapter 152: Arrest
"I don’t want to talk about it."
That’s all that Beatrix needed to say, but it was clear to Vivian that things had not gone as well as Beatrix had hoped.
Like Vivian, Beatrix was seventeen, too young, naive, and hopeful, even with her terrifying personality. If one shed all these layers, one would find just a normal girl who had built many walls around herself.
The previous night, Vivian and Beatrix had been sitting together the same way, and they had had a lengthy conversation. Vivian spoke about herself, and so did Beatrix, but every time Beatrix said something, Vivian seemed aware of her struggles in life and how she had become who she was.
There was a great deal of backstory for every villainess in the game that Nadia played. The writers seemed to have tried to humanize every villainess in some way in order to justify their villainy, but a lot of content was later cut and released in the guidebook of the collector’s edition, a common practice in the video game industry, even for a popular indie game.
For that reason, Vivian knew a lot about both Edith and Beatrix: their vices and devices, how each of them had become a villainess, and how they thought and acted with the heroine, at the very least.
While Vivian was a typical bully, doing pranks, making the heroine look bad, and using other girls to humiliate her while destroying her image in society bit by bit and waiting for her to make a single mistake in order to initiate her downfall, Edith was the type to dig into the past, find leverage, fabricate crimes, and even send assassins. On the other hand, Beatrix was rather unique, as her two routes, the brother route of Ronald and the fiancée route of Ian, were totally different from each other.
Ronald’s route was almost as easy as Valentine’s route, as neither ended up with the destruction of the route villainess. But with Ronald, Beatrix tried hard to push the heroine away from getting close to her brother without stating any reasons. At first, she used threats and became very dark, and in the latter half, when Ronald and the heroine were courting, she started using curses to separate the two. However, after some point, she stopped after getting confronted by her family.
As for Ian, Beatrix became a whole new animal, utilizing curses, poisons, and even monsters from the get-go.
Vivian soon understood that Beatrix was merely trying to stop the heroine from courting Ronald to protect, not her brother, but the heroine, for some reason; and when she failed, she gave up. As for Ian’s route, it was a total war of love rivalry, and upon failure, she suffered a Vivian-level of destruction.
However, since Vivian had intervened in these relationships, almost all the heroines’ routes were now open. So long as Edith and Beatrix were on Vivian’s side, she would guarantee their survival by dissuading them from getting in Matilda’s way.
It was the best course of action so far, since Vivian’s goal was no longer to take down the heroine, but to survive and maybe, just maybe, take down the seven charming princes.