I Became the Simp Character I Roasted Online-Chapter 33: Aftermath

She couldn’t cast a spell. She couldn’t distort gravity. She couldn’t crush the monster’s bones into powder with a wave of her hand.

But Sylvia von Vespera had survived sixteen years under Duke Vespera’s roof. She had studied every weapon her family had ever created—including the ones that shouldn’t exist.

"THE BASE OF THE SKULL! THERE IS A GAP BETWEEN THE FOURTH AND FIFTH VERTEBRAE! THE BONE PLATES DON’T OVERLAP!"

Her voice was raw, shredded from the freezing air, but every syllable carried the precision of a battlefield commander.

Revan heard her. Mid-leap, his exhausted mind processed the information with a speed that defied his broken body.

’Fourth and fifth vertebrae. Base of the skull. She knows the anatomy of this thing.’

He didn’t have time to question how or why. The monster’s massive frame was still pinning Dain against the train wall, its second claw rising to deliver the killing blow.

Revan landed on the creature’s back. His boots found purchase on the ridges of obsidian bone armor, the surface slick with ozone-scented fluid.

The three Crimson Tears crystals pulsed inches from his feet, radiating a sickly heat that seeped through his soles.

The creature sensed him instantly. Its skull-like head began to twist backward.

Revan didn’t hesitate.

He drove Volkar’s steel sword downward with every remaining ounce of strength—not at the thick skull plate, not at the armored spine, but at the narrow seam Sylvia had identified.

The tip found the gap. It slid between two overlapping bone plates with a wet, grinding resistance, sinking three inches into the exposed nerve cluster beneath.

The creature’s entire body seized.

A sound erupted from its throat—not a roar, but a high-pitched, electronic shriek that stabbed into Revan’s eardrums like hot needles. The three Crimson Tears crystals flared blindingly bright for one terrifying second.

Then dimmed.

The monster’s claw froze mid-swing, centimeters from Dain’s chest. Its massive body shuddered, limbs twitching in broken patterns like a marionette whose strings were being cut one by one.

"NOW! PUSH IT BACK!"

Dain ripped himself free from the pinning claw and threw his entire body weight into a brutal shoulder charge.

Two hundred and forty pounds of veteran soldier, driven by pure fury, slammed into the creature’s torso.

The beast stumbled backward.

And then, from the shadows of the overturned front carriage, Cassian Voss moved.

He had watched the entire fight from a safe distance. Revan had noticed—even through the chaos of broken ribs and blurred vision—that the Lord of House Voss had not engaged the monster once. Not during its initial rampage. Not when it had pinned Dain. Not when Revan had nearly been crushed into paste.

But now, with the creature staggered and its crystals flickering, Cassian appeared beside it with a speed that made Revan’s stomach drop.

His pristine white gloves were still immaculate. Impossibly so.

Cassian raised one hand, palm flat, and drove it into the creature’s fractured sternum.

CRACK.

The obsidian bone armor splintered. The impact sent the nine-foot aberration skidding backward, its claws carving desperate trenches in the frozen earth.

The beast crashed into the wreckage of the cargo wagon it had originally emerged from. Twisted metal and broken wood collapsed around it, partially burying the creature under tons of debris.

The Crimson Tears crystals flickered weakly. Then the light faded to a dull, barely visible ember.

Battery depleted.

Silence reclaimed the Ashenmoor Corridor. The only sounds were the howling wind, the distant hiss of broken steam pipes, and the ragged breathing of three battered men standing in a graveyard of iron and snow.

’He waited,’ Revan realized, still clinging to the pile of debris where the monster’s thrashing had thrown him. ’That bastard waited until the thing was already crippled before stepping in. He wanted to see what it could do. He was studying it.’

Revan filed the observation away. His body screamed for rest, but his mind refused to stop cataloguing threats.

The monster wasn’t dead. He could still see the faint crimson pulse beneath the rubble—slow, patient, waiting.

’The moment we leave this Dead Zone and ambient mana becomes available again, those crystals will recharge from the environment. We’re sitting on a ticking bomb.’

The aftermath was worse than the battle.

At least during the fight, adrenaline had numbed the reality of how badly they had been broken. Now, standing amidst the wreckage of the Z-Class Express in the gray, suffocating silence of the Dead Zone, there was nothing left to hide behind.

Three of the six carriages were beyond repair—twisted into unrecognizable sculptures of torn steel and shattered wood.

The locomotive at the front was still structurally intact, but the rails ahead had been destroyed for at least a hundred meters. The train wasn’t going anywhere.

The security detail had been gutted. Revan counted the bodies as he limped through the wreckage. Most of the guards Dain had commanded were dead—some cut down by the initial wave of assassins, others crushed beneath debris during the derailment, a few torn apart by the monster before anyone could reach them.

The survivors could be counted on one hand, and none of them were in fighting condition.

Lyra delivered her own status report with the same crisp, emotionless voice she had used since revealing herself during the crash.

"Minor lacerations. Operational."

Revan stared at her. The woman who had pretended to be a clumsy maid was standing amidst a field of corpses and rubble without a single significant wound. Her short swords were already cleaned and sheathed. Her breathing was steady.

Everyone else looked like they had been fed through a meat grinder. Dain was pressing a blood-soaked strip of cloth against his shoulder where the monster’s bone projectile had carved a deep gash.

Cassian’s expensive suit was finally ruined—though the man beneath it seemed disturbingly untouched. The surviving guards were barely conscious, wrapped in crude bandages.

But Lyra? A few decorative scratches. Like she had choreographed her own injuries.

’Another entry in the ledger of things that don’t add up.’

Professor Mirael appeared from the wreckage of her research carriage, supported by one of the walking wounded.

Her left arm hung at a bad angle, hastily splinted with a piece of broken wood. But her eyes burned with controlled fury rather than pain.

"The primary cargo is intact," Mirael reported, her academic composure barely masking the tremor in her voice.

"The sealed containers in the main wagon weren’t breached. But my personal research samples. Three months of field data, tissue specimens from the eastern anomaly sites—they’re gone."

She paused. Her good hand clenched into a fist.

"They knew exactly which crates were mine. This wasn’t collateral damage. Someone gave them a manifest."

The accusation hung in the freezing air. Nobody spoke.

Revan processed it silently. A manifest meant intelligence. Intelligence meant a source inside the operation. 𝘧𝘳𝘦ℯ𝓌𝘦𝒷𝘯𝑜𝑣𝘦𝓁.𝒸𝘰𝓂

He glanced at the faces around him—Dain, stone-faced and bleeding. Cassian, calm as a man waiting for afternoon tea. Lyra, blank and ready. Mirael, furious and calculating.

And somewhere behind him, in the wreckage of the VIP carriage, Sylvia sat in silence.

He let out a heavy sigh.

***

Marshal Dain found Revan twenty minutes later.

The servant was sitting on a twisted piece of rail, methodically cleaning Volkar’s sword with a torn strip of fabric. His movements were slow, mechanical—the kind of repetitive action a body performs on autopilot while the mind works on something far more dangerous.

Dain stood over him for a long moment. His massive frame blocked the wind, creating a pocket of relative stillness.

Revan expected a lecture. Another cryptic warning about his dead father.

Instead, the Marshal’s gravelly voice was quiet.

"Who taught you to fight like that?"

Revan didn’t look up. He continued wiping blood from steel, watching it stain the white fabric in long, reddish-brown streaks.

"Survival is the best teacher, Marshal."

Dain stared at him. Something shifted behind the veteran’s cold eyes—a recalculation. The same way a general reassesses a piece on the board he had previously dismissed as irrelevant.

"Your father fought the same way," Dain said. "Economy of movement. Reading the opponent before they’ve finished thinking. Never wasting a single breath."

Revan’s hand paused on the blade. One heartbeat. Then continued.

"I wouldn’t know."

Dain let the lie hang between them. He didn’t push. Instead, the Marshal lowered himself onto a piece of wreckage beside Revan with a heavy groan, his wounded shoulder making the movement visibly painful.

They sat in silence for a moment. Two battered men surrounded by the ruins of a catastrophe.

Then Dain spoke again, and his voice was no longer quiet. It was the hard, analytical tone of a military commander.

"Come with me. There’s something you need to see."

Dain led him to the undercarriage of the locomotive. The massive iron wheels sat dead on the tracks, half-buried in frozen mud. Dain crouched—painfully—and pointed to a section of the rail switching mechanism with the tip of his sword.

"Look."

Revan knelt beside him. His eyes traced the mechanism in the dim gray light.

At first glance, it looked like standard sabotage—twisted metal, broken bolts. But Revan’s gaze caught what Dain wanted him to see.

The switching lever hadn’t been broken. It had been adjusted. The bolts weren’t sheared—they had been loosened and retightened at a different calibration. Millimeter-precise modifications to the track alignment that would be invisible at normal speed, but at the velocity of an express train hitting the Dead Zone transition, the slight deviation would amplify into a catastrophic derailment.

"This isn’t demolition work," Revan said slowly, his voice flat.

"No," Dain confirmed. "This is engineering. The kind of adjustment that requires access to the train’s own maintenance toolkit. Equipment that was stored in the engineering compartment."

Revan’s blood ran cold.

"Inside the train."

"Inside the train," Dain repeated.

The implication detonated in Revan’s mind with the force of the derailment itself. The saboteurs hadn’t attacked from outside and gotten lucky.

Someone aboard had modified the switching mechanism before they entered the Dead Zone. Someone who knew exactly where the assault force would be waiting.

Someone who had access to the engineering compartment.

’A coordinated operation. Inside and out.’

Revan slowly stood. His dark eyes swept across the scattered camp of survivors. Lyra, sharpening her blades with mechanical precision.

Cassian, sitting apart from the group, reading a small leather-bound book as if they hadn’t just fought a biomechanical nightmare. Mirael, cataloguing her remaining supplies with one arm. The few surviving guards, too wounded to be suspects.

And Sylvia, motionless in the shadow of the wrecked VIP carriage, her silver hair matted with dust and dried blood.

She had known the monster’s anatomy. The exact gap in its bone armor. She had screamed it across the battlefield without hesitation—the kind of knowledge that only came from either studying the creature’s design documents or watching it be built.

’How much do you actually know, Sylvia von Vespera? And how much are you hiding from the people bleeding for you?’