I Became the Villain Alpha's Omega (BL)-Chapter 113: A Scheme Etched in Stone
The cold beyond the perimeter gnawed at their skin. It was that specific, wet-iron brand of Northern frost that seemed to bypass leather and wool entirely, sinking straight into the marrow until your bones felt like glass rods ready to snap. In the center of the clearing, a natural bowl of grey shale and stunted, skeletal pines, a small cluster of the new hearth stones sat nestled in the dirt.
Three were active, pulsing with that rhythmic glow that was supposed to be the camp’s salvation. The rest lay dark, cold as the ground they occupied.
Zarius stood at the vanguard of the small, hand-picked unit, his silhouette a jagged tear against the cold, colorless sky. Beside him, Elios moved quietly, adjusting the line of the knights with small, subtle hand signals. Further up, tucked into the shadow of a frost-shattered boulder, Ezek leaned on his sword. The knight’s eyes were fixed on the stones with a raw intensity that bordered on the feral.
Nobody spoke. In the North, silence was a survival skill, but now it felt like a physical weight pressing down on their lungs. They were waiting for the wilderness to tell them if they’d been betrayed.
Minute after agonizing minute bled away. The wind whined through the needles of the pines, a low, mournful sound that set the men’s teeth on edge. Doubt is a quiet rot, it started small, a subtle shift in a knight’s stance, the quiet scrape of a boot against gravel as someone wondered if they were out here freezing for a Southern boy’s hallucination. Even Elios, usually the paragon of stoic patience, spare a single, flickering glance toward the Duke.
Zarius remained a statue of salt and iron. He didn’t move. He simply watched the light pulse against the snow.
Then, the world tilted.
It wasn’t a roar or a scream. It was a shift in the air, a sudden, heavy pressure that made the hair on the back of their neck stand straight up. A shadow detached itself from the treeline. Then another.
Zarius raised a gloved hand, a fraction of an inch. The unit turned to stone.
The Velkyn didn’t charge. That was the first "wrong" thing. Usually, these bastards hit like a landslide, all screaming fury and obsidian claws. These ones slipped into the clearing with an unsettling, fluid restraint. They moved low, bellies scraping the shale, their long, multi-jointed limbs folding and unfolding with a sickening grace. They didn’t look at the line of armed men. They didn’t even hiss at the scent of blood and steel.
Their milky, pupilless eyes were locked, with a terrifying singular focus, on the glowing stones.
The tension in the clearing stretched until it felt like it would snap and draw blood. One Velkyn, a massive brute with a notched ear, crept closer. Its head twitched in sync with the pulsing light. Another followed. Their claws began to rhythmically scrape the frozen ground, scritch, scritch, scritch, an uneven, frantic percussion that sounded less like predatory instinct and more like a nervous tic. Like an itch they couldn’t reach under their own skin.
Without warning, the brute lunged.
It didn’t leap for Zarius’s throat. It slammed into the center of the stone cluster with a violent, bone-crunching force that sent shale flying. The sound that followed was a wet, desperate snarling, not the sound of a beast eating, but the sound of something trying to dig its way back into the womb. Its claws raked the surface of the lit hearth stones, screeching against the quartz as if trying to shatter the light itself.
The rest of the pack followed in a frantic, tumbling heap. They abandoned every scrap of combat logic. They ignored the flanks. They ignored the exposed backs of the knights. They crowded around the glowing rocks, shoving and biting at one another to get closer, their bodies quivering with a frantic, manic energy.
"Now," Zarius commanded. His voice wasn’t loud, but it cut through the snarling like a guillotine.
The engagement was a nightmare of blurred geometry. The knights moved in, blades whistling through the freezing air, but the Velkyn... they just didn’t care. It was the most unsettling thing Ezek had ever seen in a decade of border service. A knight would plunge a spear into a creature’s flank, and the beast wouldn’t even turn to snap at him. It would just keep clawing at the stone, its body angled toward the amber light even as its life leaked out into the slush.
One Velkyn nearly slammed straight into Ezek. The knight had to perform a desperate, grinding pivot, bringing his sword down in a brutal arc that nearly cleaved the creature in two. Even as it fell, the beast’s front talons remained hooked into the iron cradle of a stone, dragging the heater into the dirt with it.
"They’re not fighting back!" Elios shouted over the din, his voice tight with a rare flash of alarm. "They’re just... they’re just trying to get to them!"
It wasn’t a battle. It was a slaughter of addicts.
Zarius moved through the chaos with a terrifying, surgical precision. He didn’t waste movement on flourishes. He simply ended the creatures that were too far gone to notice him, his sword flickering like silver lightning in the half-light. Within minutes, the snarling subsided into a series of wet, bubbling gasps.
"Extinguish them," Zarius ordered, his voice echoing off the shale walls. "Now. Get them back to camp. Wrap them up in thick canvas sheets."
This time, there was no grumbling. No logistics officers talked about "standard protocols" or "palace vetting." The knights handled the stones as if they were live vipers, their faces pale and set in grim masks. The silence that rushed back into the clearing was heavier, more suffocating than the sound of the fight had been. It felt like the air itself had been tainted.
Zarius stepped toward the center of the clearing, his boots crunching on the obsidian-stained snow. He crouched slightly, his gaze fixed on one of the damaged stones that had been kicked aside during the fray.
Deep, obsessive gouges were etched into the stone surface. They weren’t the random scratches of a panicked animal. They were focused, concentrated on the ley-line etchings of the stone’s internal array. He ran a gloved thumb over a particularly jagged edge where a Velkyn’s claw had actually managed to chip the hardened crystal.
Behind him, the unit pulled back together, armor clinking softly in the open clearing. Elios stepped up a few paces behind the Duke, his breath hitching in a plume of white mist. He looked at the carpet of dead beasts, none of whom had a single human hair or scrap of cloth in their teeth.
"They weren’t hunting us, my lord," Elios said softly, almost as if he were afraid the wind might carry the words back to the capital.
Zarius didn’t look back. He remained crouched over the ruined stone, the flickering light of the remaining camp torches stretched his shadow long across the dead Velkyn.
"No," Zarius replied, his voice low. "Not this time."
He stood up slowly, the weight of the entire North seemingly settling onto his shoulders. He looked in the direction of the capital, the place this "gift" had come from.
"We were just in their way."
