I Became the Simp Character I Roasted Online-Chapter 35: The Ice and the Dog

Swallowing his rage did not extinguish it. He turned his back on the VIP carriage and returned to the grim work of stripping the dead.

Body number four had the tattoo on its collarbone. Body number seven had it scarred into its forearm. By the time he stripped the twelfth corpse, Revan didn’t even need to search for it anymore. The orchid with twisting thorns—the mark of the Garden of Eternal Bloom—was on every single one of them.

’Fuck, It was infuriating’

’I’ll just ask her,’ he decided, letting out a long, heavy breath.

’Properly. No shouting. Just talk.’

He forced his numb fingers to finish tying the bundles of coats and rations.

Ten minutes later, burdened with the heavy supplies, Revan turned around and made his way back to the shattered hull.

The VIP carriage had tipped roughly fifteen degrees during the derailment, turning its once-pristine interior into a crooked parody of luxury.

The velvet bench seats had torn loose from their mountings, the crystal chandelier lay shattered across the floor like frozen tears, and a long crack ran diagonally across the ceiling, letting in a thin whistle of frozen air.

Sylvia von Vespera sat in the only structurally sound corner of the carriage, on an overturned cabinet that she had apparently dragged into position herself.

Her silver hair was matted with dust and streaks of dried blood not her own.

Her pale violet eyes moved rapidly across a spread of papers on her lap the transit manifest, a topographical survey of the Ashenmoor Corridor, and what looked like a hand-drawn supply calculation.

She was working.

Revan stood in the doorway for three full seconds before Sylvia finally looked up from her calculations to acknowledge him.

"We depart at dawn," she said.

Her voice was steady and precise, as though she were issuing instructions in a warm office rather than sitting in the skeleton of a wrecked train in the middle of a Dead Zone with scouts on the ridge and thirty corpses cooling outside.

"I need three things secured before then. Rations — enough for six days if we stretch. Insulated coats for every mobile member of the party. And an alternate route assessment in case the northwest corridor is blocked."

Revan said nothing.

He walked into the carriage, his boots crunching on broken glass, and set down what he was carrying.

A heavy bundle of military-grade coats, stripped from dead mercenaries and sorted by size.

A sealed bag of ration packs — six days’ worth, as she had specified, because he had already done that math two hours ago.

A field medical kit.

Four canteens, still frozen but intact.

He set each item on the floor. Not handed to her. On the floor, between them, like cargo being delivered to a loading dock.

"Twelve usable coats," Revan said. His voice was flat.

"Six days of rations across the party. Four canteens — need to be thawed by fire before use. One medical kit. Limited."

Sylvia’s eyes flicked to the pile. She processed the inventory in approximately two seconds, cross-referencing it against whatever calculation she’d been running. A slight adjustment to the numbers on her paper.

"The alternate route?"

"Northwest is compromised. The scouts are positioned on the northern ridge with clear sightlines to our only viable path in that direction. Southeast is unknown territory, but the topographical gradient suggests the suppression field thins significantly in that direction. Possible partial mana recovery within eighteen to twenty kilometers."

"How certain?"

"Sixty percent. Based on geological surveys from twelve years ago."

Sylvia nodded. Made a note. Moved on.

"The cargo wagon?"

"Monster is dormant. Crimson Tears crystals at low ember. The moment we leave the suppression field, it begins recharging from ambient mana. Estimated time to full operational capacity: four to six hours after exiting the Dead Zone."

Another note. Another nod.

"The wounded?"

"Three guards mobile. Two stretcher cases. One critical — abdominal wound, won’t survive the march without intervention. Mirael has a broken arm but is functional. Marshal Dain took a bone projectile to the shoulder — deep laceration, heavy blood loss, but he’s standing."

Sylvia set her pen down. Looked at the inventory on the floor. Looked at the route assessment. Looked at the status report she had just received.

Everything she had asked for was already done. Before she asked.

"Good. Dismissed."

Revan didn’t move.

The word hung between them like the temperature drop before a blizzard. Sylvia’s pen had already returned to the paper, her attention redirecting to whatever logistical problem occupied the next line.

Three seconds passed. Five.

Revan always left after being dismissed. It was the rhythm of their entire relationship — order, execution, report, dismissal. Fifteen years of that rhythm, unbroken. The machinery of master and servant, oiled and silent.

Sylvia’s pen stopped.

She looked up. Not with concern — with the precise, analytical attention of someone who had just heard an unfamiliar sound from a mechanism that had always run perfectly.

"Is there something else?"

Revan’s jaw tightened. Not visibly — the movement was internal, a grinding of molars that sent a dull ache through his skull.

His hands were at his sides. The right one wanted very badly to reach into his pocket, pull out the Garden dog tags, and throw them at her feet.

He didn’t.

"When you planned this mission," Revan said, each word selected with the deliberateness of a man defusing a bomb.

"when you sat in your study and read the transit mandate and calculated the risks and decided who would be on this train — at any point in that process, was there a version of the plan that included telling me what we were transporting?"

Silence.

Sylvia studied him. The same way she studied everything — with total, clinical detachment.

"No," she said.

Not coldly. Not cruelly. With the genuine, uncomprehending simplicity of someone stating an obvious fact. Water is wet. Fire is hot. Servants are not briefed on classified cargo. These were axioms in her world. They required no justification because they had never been questioned.

"No," Revan repeated.

"The operational details of the cargo were classified at the household level. Your role was security and personal escort. The information necessary for your role was provided."

"The information necessary for my role," Revan echoed. The words tasted like ash.

"Was there a specific tactical decision that was compromised by the lack of cargo details?"

She was asking sincerely. That was the worst part.

Sylvia von Vespera, with her terrifying intellect and her ability to calculate seventeen variables simultaneously, was genuinely trying to understand what the problem was.

In her framework, information flowed downward based on operational necessity.

Revan’s operational necessity was: protect Sylvia, fight threats, survive.

He did not need to know what was in the cargo wagon to accomplish those objectives.

It was clean logic. Airtight. And completely, devastatingly wrong.

Revan looked at her. Really looked. Past the silver hair and the violet eyes and the aristocratic posture and the reputation that made grown men flinch.

He saw a sixteen-year-old girl sitting on an overturned cabinet in a wrecked train.

Alone, drawing supply calculations with a hand that trembled slightly at the edges — not from cold, but from something she was actively suppressing.

She didn’t know.

She genuinely did not understand why he was still standing here. Not because she was heartless. Because no one had ever stood in front of her and refused to leave after being dismissed.

No one had ever told her that the way she treated people was not the only way to treat people.

Duke Vespera certainly hadn’t.

The household staff certainly hadn’t. The academy, the nobles, the court — everyone around Sylvia von Vespera had spent sixteen years teaching her that this was simply how the world worked.

You give orders. People obey. If they die, you replace them.

Revan felt the anger in his chest shift. It didn’t disappear — it calcified into something colder, harder, and far more dangerous than a shouting match.

"Three times," he said quietly.

"I almost died three times on this train. For a mission I didn’t understand, carrying cargo I wasn’t told about, against enemies whose existence was apparently expected by everyone in the briefing room except me."

Sylvia’s expression didn’t change.

But something flickered behind her eyes.

Something very small and very deep.

"I’m not asking for an apology," Revan continued.

"I don’t think you know how to give one. I’m telling you a fact so that the next time you sit in a room and plan a mission, you have one additional variable in your calculation."

He didn’t wait for a response.

He turned and walked toward the broken doorway, his boots grinding against shattered glass with each step. The freezing air hit him like a wall the moment he crossed the threshold.

Behind him, Sylvia didn’t call him back. Didn’t argue. Didn’t explain.

But she also didn’t pick up her pen.

***

The coat was still on the floor.

Revan hadn’t handed it to her. Hadn’t draped it over the bench nearest to her. He had put it on the floor, with the rations and the canteens and the medical kit, because at that moment he had not been her servant delivering supplies to his master. He had been a man dumping inventory in a staging area.

Sylvia stared at the heavy military coat for a long time after the sound of his footsteps faded.

Outside, the Dead Zone was absolute in its silence. No wind. No animal sounds. No distant hum of civilization. Just the vast, oppressive nothingness of a landscape that had been stripped of magic and, with it, the subtle vibrations that made the world feel alive.

Marshal Dain was leaning against the exterior wall of the dining carriage, arms crossed, his massive broadsword propped beside him. His wounded shoulder was freshly re-bandaged — badly, with one hand — and a thin line of blood had already soaked through the white fabric.

He looked at Revan. Read something in the servant’s expression that made the old soldier’s jaw tighten.

"You done?" Dain asked. Not gently. Not harshly. With the pragmatic directness of a man who had seen too many subordinates pick fights with their commanding officers at exactly the wrong moment.

"I’m done."

"Good." Dain tilted his chin toward the northern ridge. "Because while you were in there having your heart-to-heart, our friends on the ridge decided to get creative."

Revan followed Dain’s gaze.

The ridge was three hundred meters north — a low, barren mound of frozen earth against a featureless gray sky. In the fading light, it was almost impossible to distinguish terrain from shadow.

But Revan’s eyes, sharpened by two hours of stripping corpses in the dark, caught it immediately.

Movement. Not on the ridge. Around it.

Two figures, barely visible, moving low and fast along the base of the ridge in opposite directions. Not retreating. Not advancing. Flanking.

"They’re not watching anymore," Revan said.

"No," Dain agreed, his hand closing around the grip of his broadsword. "They’re not."