I Became the Villain Alpha's Omega (BL)-Chapter 115: A Dangerous Understanding

"I can’t... I refuse to believe the palace would heap this upon us!"

The air inside the command tent wasn’t just cold, it felt like someone had turned the oxygen into tiny knives. Breathing? Optional. Regretting it? Immediate. Following the grim revelations of the field test, the sight of Velkyn behaving like starved addicts clawing at the glowing rocks, the internal atmosphere of the Northern high command had officially curdled.

The outburst came from Harlen, his face a mottled, unhealthy plum color. He slammed a gauntleted fist onto the map table, rattling the tin cups and sending a spray of ink across the tactical layout of the border. "We’re out there bleeding for the crown, and they send us monster-bait disguised as heaters? It’s a death sentence wrapped in a ’gift’!"

And then everyone started talking at once. Fear is a noisy thing when it’s trapped in a small space. Voices tripped over one another, a messy blur of outrage and frantic denial. Elios was trying to maintain some semblance of order, his hands raised in a calming gesture that was being systematically ignored. Ezek stood like a pillar of soot-stained iron, his jaw set so hard it looked like it might crack.

Cherion stayed at the outskirts of the group, his hands tucked into his opposite sleeves to hide their trembling. He listened to the arguments bouncing off the canvas walls, but his mind was elsewhere, drifting back to the blurred lines of the novel he had once read with such casual detachment. He remembered the descriptions of the "unnatural frenzy" of the beasts in the later Chapters. The book, of course, had been completely useless on the details. Bless the author. But seeing the gouges in the stones, hearing Marielle and Reiner discuss the high-level concealment magic woven into the quartz... the truth was far more clinical. The frenzy wasn’t nature. It was manufactured.

"Everyone, please!" Cherion’s voice was small, but it managed to snag on a momentary lull in the shouting. He stood up, his legs feeling a bit like overcooked noodles. "I know it’s... it’s horrifying. But thank the gods, or whatever you believe in, that we found the source before it was too late. We know now. We can stop using them. That’s a victory, isn’t it?"

The silence that followed wasn’t the kind he was hoping for. It was... the bad kind.

"A victory?" Harlen spat the word out like it left a bad taste in his mouth. He turned his bloodshot eyes on Cherion, his lip curling. "Easy for you to play the optimist, Southron. You weren’t the one on the front line with a beacon in your pack. You weren’t the one watching your men get shredded because their own warmth was calling the devils home."

"I was there," Cherion reminded him, trying to keep his voice from jumping an octave. "I was in the mud too."

"Yes, and why is that?" another knight, a lean man named Valerius, chimed in, his tone dripping with sudden, sharp suspicion. "You were so insistent on coming. Acting the martyr, the devoted healer... or were you just waiting for us to be dismissed so you could finish the job? Maybe the tampering didn’t happen in the capital. Maybe it happened right here, under our noses, by the hands of someone who knows exactly how to play with it."

The room flipped in an instant. It was the classic human reflex, when the monster is too big to fight, find a scapegoat you can actually hit.

"That’s absurd!" Reiner jumped in, stepping physically between Cherion and the advancing knights. "He almost got his head taken off too! Why would he walk into his own trap? Use your heads, for pity’s sake! He’s the one who pointed out the behavior in the first place!"

Cherion raised his hands slightly, like he was trying to soothe a pack of agitated hounds. "Everyone... please. Just... take a breath, alright?" His eyes flicked to Valerius. "It’s easier to think when your head isn’t boiling, I promise."

Valerius let out a dry scoff, then brought his hands together in a few slow, mocking claps. "Well said," he drawled. "A nicely played trick," Valerius countered, crossing his arms. "He’s from the capital. The Crown Prince’s ex-fiancé. Perhaps he’s trying to buy his way back into favor by ’saving’ the North from a disaster he helped cook up."

Ezek scoffed. "Use your brains. He walked into the same mess as the rest of us."

"Don’t be a fool, Ezek. You were the one who doubted him most when he arrived. Why are you defending him now?"

Ezek shifted his weight, his pale eyes flickering toward Cherion. For a long, agonizing beat, the big knight said nothing. The reminder of Cherion’s past status seemed to hang in the air like a bad smell.

Marielle, who had been leaning against the shadows of the rear pole, finally moved. She didn’t shout. She didn’t even stand up straight. She just sighed, a sound of profound boredom.

"I agree," she said.

Valerius smirked, looking toward the Duke’s sister with a triumphant gleam in his eye. "Right? Even Lady Marielle sees the logic. Even you think..."

"I think you’re a colossal idiot, Valerius," Marielle interrupted. She pushed off the pole and walked a few steps, her gaze sweeping over the knights with utter disdain. "He tells you to use your cool heads, and you immediately start frothing at the mouth like rabid curses. Brother," she said, shifting her gaze to Zarius, who had been quietly watching everything unfold. "Is this how you’ve been training your knights? To point fingers at the first person who tries to help because they’re too frightened to look at the real enemy? What a shame. Perhaps you should spend less time on sword-drills and more time teaching them basic manners."

Cherion stared. Well. That was unexpected.

He’d been bracing himself for the finishing blow, something refined, devastating, and entirely directed at him.

Instead, she’d turned around and dismantled the others. ...He wasn’t sure if that made him safer or in significantly more danger.

Either way, he would be appreciating the lack of hostility directed at him for as long as it lasted.

Zarius finally moved. He didn’t stand up. The air in the tent seemed to tighten around him. He looked at Marielle, then at the knights who had been shouting.

"Perhaps," Zarius said. "Marielle can assist you with your... lack of etiquette, later. For now, you will remember who has been stitching your hides back together while you slept."

He glared at Valerius and Harlen with a cold stare. "Cherion has done more for the stability of this camp in a few days than some of you have done in a month of patrols. I will not have this command room turned into a gutter for baseless accusations and wild, cowardly guesses."

The knights visibly flinched, their shoulders hunching under the weight of his authority.

"The stones came from the King," Zarius continued, his tone shifting into something more analytical, though no less dangerous. "But they passed through a hundred hands. Logistics, transport, the guilds, the border tolls. While they are clearly tampered with, there is no proof of a malicious decree from the throne. The palace has never had a motive to destroy the North intentionally, we are their shield. If the North falls, the capital is next. It stands to reason something was done to those crates after they left the central vaults."

"But it could also happen within the palace walls," Cherion interjected. "Factions, advisors, people with their own agendas. We can’t assume anything is safe."

"Then we burn them!" Harlen barked, though his voice lacked its previous venom. "We take every last one of those cursed rocks and we crush them into dust. We throw them into the ravine!"

He made a move as if to leave, but Cherion held out a hand, a dangerous sort of clarity settling over his face.

"No," Cherion said, his eyes meeting Zarius’s. "Don’t destroy them. The palace was ’kind’ enough to send us this help, wasn’t it? It would be a waste of royal resources."

He offered a small smile that didn’t reach his eyes.

"I think we should use them to their fullest."