I Became the Villain Alpha's Omega (BL)-Chapter 80: The Shattered Script

"I’m going to the subjugation, Reiner."

The words hadn’t even fully left Cherion’s mouth before the world inside his bedroom seemed to grind to a violent, screeching halt. Reiner was arranging the vase when that sentence made him stop cold. His hand stayed suspended in the air like a glitch in a video game. Then, with a slowness that felt almost painful to watch, he retracted his arm and began to scratch at his ear with a look of such profound, squinty-eyed confusion that Cherion almost felt bad.

Almost.

"Apologize, My Lord," Reiner began, his voice strained through a polite, customer-service smile that didn’t quite reach his panicked eyes. "But it seems the bathwater that got into my ear this morning is playing absolute havoc with my sensory perception. Truly. I’m hearing things that shouldn’t exist in a sane world. Could you repeat that? BecauseI just heard you say you’re going to ’subjugate’, which, as far as I’m aware, is literally impossible."

Cherion sighed, leaning his hip against the edge of a window "You heard right the first time, Reiner. I’m going."

The silence lasted for exactly three seconds. His calm little bubble didn’t just pop, it went kaboom, sending tiny panic pieces flying everywhere. Reiner let out a sound that was half-gasp, half-whimper, and began to pace the length of the rug with the kind of frantic energy usually reserved for a cat in a room full of rocking chairs.

"The Duke has lost it," Reiner muttered, his fingers knotting together so tightly his knuckles turned white. "He’s finally, truly snapped. First, he orders you into that barbaric training, which, granted, did wonders for your posture and hey, survival rates, too, but still! Then he keeps you in his chambers until the sun comes up when you are already sore enough to groan every time you sit down. And now? Now he’s sending you into the monster’s mouth? To a subjugation? Does he want to destroy you? Is that it? Is he trying to see how much one omega can take before he simply evaporates into a cloud of frost?"

Cherion rubbed the back of his neck, feeling a twinge of guilt. He had expected the panic, but Reiner was currently working himself into a full-blown existential crisis on his behalf.

"Reiner, breathe. His Grace didn’t send me. I told him I was going. I practically had to give a long speech to him to get a ’yes’."

Reiner came to a dead stop, like someone hit pause on him. He blinked, his jaw dropping so low it looked like it might actually detach. "You... you volunteered for a death march? Lord Cherion, I say this with the utmost respect for your station, but have you been sniffing the medicinal salts? Or perhaps the cold has finally seeped into your brain?"

"I know it sounds like a suicide mission," Cherion said, his voice dropping an octave as he looked toward the window. "But my power... You know about it, Reiner. It will help them a lot and I know you know they need it."

Reiner went quiet then, his shoulders slumping. He stared at the vase like it owed him answers, his brow furrowed in deep, agonizing thought. He wanted to argue, but somehow his mouth refused to cooperate.

While Reiner got lost in whatever mess of thoughts he was having, Cherion’s own mind drifted somewhere far darker.

He wasn’t just thinking about the curse. He was thinking about the novel. A story he had read in another life, under the hum of fluorescent lights, far away from the scent of pine and impending doom.

He remembered a specific Chapter from this story. It was one of those scenes that didn’t seem important at the time, just fluff to show how elegant and untouchable the protagonist was. Philia had been at a high-society gathering, the kind where the tea costs more than a commoner’s house and the gossip is deadlier than a knife. They spent the whole evening trading rumors, backhanded compliments, and one particularly juicy piece of bad news.

He didn’t remember the text clearly, but he could still make out the main point, or at least what he thought the main point was:

The steam from the jasmine tea steamed in little spirals, matching the intricate lace of Philia’s sleeves. Across the table, the Marchioness sighed, though her eyes remained bright with gossip. "A tragedy, truly," the older woman murmured, "but what else is to be expected of the North? I heard the Subjugation was quite a mess this year. The Duke returned with barely half his troops to a sudden, ’unnatural’ frenzy of the beasts, and they say his health has finally shattered. A ’hollow victory,’ they called it." 𝙛𝒓𝒆𝙚𝒘𝒆𝓫𝙣𝓸𝙫𝓮𝒍.𝒄𝒐𝓶

Cherion felt a cold shiver that had nothing to do with cold air. In the novel, Zarius had "succeeded." He had killed the monsters. But the cost had been a literal massacre. The book had mentioned a "sudden, unnatural frenzy" among the monsters, a surge of violence so unexpected that the Northern lines had folded like paper.

Zarius had crawled back to the castle a broken man, covered in scars that refused to heal and poisoned by a mana-taint that the novel only briefly touched upon. It was that specific "hollow victory" that had truly signaled the beginning of the end. It was why Yerel had been able to swoop in later and "end" the Duke’s suffering with such ease, and that curse didn’t make things any less dramatic, at least according to his very professional theory. The man was already a walking corpse by the time he returned from the ice.

Half the troops. Cherion’s stomach did a slow, nauseating flip. He thought of the knights he had seen in the courtyard, men with families, men who grumbled about the rations but fought like demons to keep the border safe. If the "original" story played out, most of them were currently packing bags for their own funeral.

"It’s a setup," Cherion whispered to himself, though Reiner didn’t hear him.

He knew how these tropes worked. "Unnatural frenzies" don’t just happen because the weather gets moody. There was a hand behind it, and probably the same one who loves cursing people for fun.

Cherion shook his head, letting out a short, bitter laugh. Oh, how I rolled my eyes at that Chapter back then, he thought. All those tea parties, high-society gossip, fancy lace sleeves... I thought it was filler. Useless fluff. Pretty words for pretty people doing pretty nothing.

And yet here he was, suddenly every bit of that so-called fluff felt like a breadcrumb trail to the truth.

Zarius thought he was going out to fight a seasonal surge of monsters. He didn’t realize he was walking into a pre-written slaughterhouse designed to leave him weak enough to be finished off by a "hero" from the Capital.

Cherion leaned back against the window frame, tapping a finger against his chin. "Lesson learned," he muttered, mostly to himself. No text is useless. No scene is irrelevant.

He wasn’t just going as a healer.

He was going as a saboteur.