I Became the Villain Alpha's Omega (BL)-Chapter 132: The Cold That Wouldn’t Leave

The light dying in Cherion’s palms was the most terrifying thing he’d ever seen.

It wasn’t a dramatic flickering, like a candle in a draft. It was a slow, agonizing seep, the mana being swallowed by the Duke’s skin as if his body were a desert that no amount of rain could satisfy. Cherion’s own hands were shaking, not only from the cold, but from the sheer, soul-crushing effort of trying to jump-start a heart that seemed to have forgotten its rhythm.

"Work, you piece of... come on," Cherion hissed, his voice cracking against the silence.

He was hunched over Zarius, his knees screaming from the cold of the cave floor. His hands hovered, palms down, a soft, pulsating light bleeding from his skin into Zarius.

Bruises. Some internal bleeding. Bones... not happy, but still cooperating.

The diagnosis hummed in the back of his mind, clinical and cold. He pushed more mana, a steady, golden stream of intent, into the Alpha. The injuries were responding; he could feel the tissues knitting, the deep purple contusions fading into a dull yellow beneath the skin. By all the laws of magic and medicine in this gods-forsaken world, Zarius should have been stabilizing.

But he wasn’t.

"Come on," Cherion hissed, his breath hitching. "I didn’t drag two hundred pounds of stubborn Alpha through a snowbank for you to pull this ’mysterious decline’ crap on me."

He adjusted his flow, narrowing the mana into a needle-fine point, targeting the heart. He tried again. And again. It was a repetitive, desperate loop, like someone frantically pressing a button on a machine that had already unplugged itself. Logic, that annoying little voice in the back of his head, was screaming that the internal damage wasn’t the problem anymore. It was the temperature. Zarius wasn’t just cold from the snow; he was losing heat from the inside out, his very core turning into a glacier that no amount of magical "patch-work" could thaw.

In the middle of this silent tug-of-war with death, Zarius moved.

It was barely a twitch, a slight hitch in the rhythm of his shallow breathing, but to Cherion, it felt like an earthquake. The Duke’s eyes cracked open. They weren’t the sharp, predatory red that usually pinned Cherion to the wall. They were glazed, unfocused, and heavy with a lethargy that looked far too much like the end.

Cherion froze, his hands still glowing. He leaned in until they were practically nose-to-nose, his voice doing that embarrassing crack thing because, yeah, he was freaking out. "Your Grace? Zarius! Wake up, damn it. Can you hear me?"

He didn’t fully come back. More like... halfway. His gaze drifted around like he was buffering, then somehow locked onto Cherion and just stayed there. No checking injuries, no situational awareness, nothing.

His jaw worked slowly. When he finally got words out, his voice was hoarse and broken, a very sad downgrade from his usual authority.

"Are you... fine?"

The simplicity of the question was like a slap. It was so fundamentally wrong that Cherion felt a physical jolt in his chest. Here was a man whose back had probably saved them both from being flattened into crepes, a man whose internal organs were currently throwing a protest march, and his first thought was a status check on the person who hadn’t even broken a fingernail.

"Am I fine?" Cherion snapped, the irritation bubbling up to mask the terrifying lump in his throat. "Look at yourself for once, you absolute lunatic! You jumped off a cliff! You’re currently a human popsicle and you’re asking me..."

But Zarius wasn’t listening to the lecture. If anything, a small shift crossed his face. Not enough to call it a smile, more like... the tension slipped out of it, leaving something uncomfortably calm behind.

"Still... spirited," Zarius murmured, the words slurring into a breathy exhale. "Then... you’re fine. That... is all I need."

Before Cherion could even register the sheer, idiotic gall of that statement, Zarius’s eyes slid shut again. His head rolled slightly to the side, his body going slack as he plummeted back into the darkness.

Cherion just stared. He sat there, hands suspended in the air, feeling completely and utterly thrown off his axis. The cave felt twice as quiet as it had a minute ago, but now the silence was dense. It felt like it was pressing against his ribs, making it hard to catch a full breath.

"That’s all you need," Cherion repeated under his breath, his voice flat. He clicked his tongue, a sharp, annoyed sound that echoed off the damp walls. "Really? You’re one step from death and you’re worried about my mood? Unbelievable."

He dragged a hand over his face, his skin stinging from the salt of dried sweat and melted frost. He tried to puff out a breath, hoping to physically blow the sentiment away, but it stuck. It hung in the air like that weird after-smell when something definitely just went wrong.

But then, the reality of the situation came crashing back down.

He reached out and pressed his palm firmly against Zarius’s chest, right over the heart. The dread that had been simmering in his gut finally boiled over. The healing had closed the leaks, but the engine was still freezing over. Zarius’s body wasn’t generating heat anymore. The cold was a living thing now, a predator that was winning. If he didn’t do something, something more than just glowing hands and prayer, the Duke would be a memory by dawn.

"Right," Cherion whispered, his jaw tightening. "Use your brain. That thing you supposedly have."

He looked around the cave. It was a miserable excuse for a shelter. The air was brutally cold, and Zarius’s armor, for all its glory, was currently acting like a giant metal heat thief. There was only one solution. It was the kind of trope Cherion had read in a dozen web-novels, the kind of "inconvenient necessity" that usually made him roll his eyes and scoff at the lazy writing. 𝒇𝙧𝙚𝓮𝔀𝓮𝒃𝙣𝓸𝒗𝒆𝒍.𝙘𝒐𝒎

Except now, he wasn’t reading it. He was living it. And it wasn’t romantic, it was a logistical nightmare.

He hesitated for a second, staring at the complicated mess of leather straps, steel buckles, and heavy fur as if they had personally insulted his mother. "Why does everything in this world have to have fifty buckles?" he muttered, leaning forward anyway.

It wasn’t graceful. His fingers were stiff, fumbling with clasps that seemed designed by someone who harbored a deep, personal grudge against anyone trying to get undressed in a hurry. He worked through the layers, his breath puffing out in white clouds. He kept his attention locked on the job, absolutely refusing to acknowledge that he was, in fact, taking off the Duke’s clothes.

Every time his knuckles brushed Zarius’s skin, he flinched. It was too cold. Far too cold. That sensation of ice-on-skin made him move faster, his movements becoming more frantic, more determined, even as his thoughts spun into a dark, unhelpful spiral.

This is just survival, he told himself, a mantra for the desperate. Just clinical necessity. I’m a healer. He’s a patient. Everything else is irrelevant.

He managed to loosen the final layer of the inner tunic. He paused then, his hands hovering just above the Duke’s collarbone. Up close like this, without the shadow of the great fur cloak or the looming presence of the Duke’s authority, Zarius looked... different.

The realization hit Cherion harder than the cliffside ever could. It made his throat feel tight, a strange, suffocating pressure that had nothing to do with the altitude.

He swallowed hard, his jaw set in a hard line as he forced himself to keep moving. He adjusted the remaining layers, pulling what he could together to trap every stray spark of warmth. He calmed down enough to move with purpose, trading panic for something a little more controlled.

Then, so quietly it almost got swallowed by the wind, he murmured two words to Zarius.

"I’m sorry."