Young Master's Pov: I Am The Game's Villain-Chapter 27: The Names They Don’t Call You
People call you many things when you’re Cedric Valdrake.
Lord Valdrake. The Valdrake Heir. Young Master. Sir. My Lord. Your Grace. The Void Prince — a nickname the student body had apparently agreed upon without consulting me, which sounded like a manga title and carried the implicit warning that proximity was inadvisable.
These were the names people used to my face.
Behind my back, the vocabulary was richer.
"The Cold One." Unimaginative but accurate. Used by students who hadn’t interacted with me directly and only knew the surface-level reputation.
"The Broken Heir." New. Post-entrance exam. Used by students who’d watched me take a hit that cracked ribs and interpreted my Gold-tier ranking despite a loss as evidence that something was wrong with me. They weren’t wrong, but they were wrong about what.
"The Commoner’s Equal." This one was interesting — used by noble students as an insult, implying that losing to Aiden Crest had demoted me from aristocratic excellence to common mediocrity. They didn’t realize they were accidentally praising Aiden.
And one name that I’d overheard exactly once, whispered by a girl in the hallway whose friend immediately shushed her:
"The one who stood up."
That was the one that stuck in my chest like a splinter.
I didn’t think about it. I had a schedule.
The second week of the academic term had settled into a rhythm — or rather, I’d imposed a rhythm onto the chaos of academy life, because without structure the sheer volume of variables would have overwhelmed even my game-trained pattern recognition.
4:00 AM — Void Meridian cultivation. Twenty circulations, proper technique. The Hidden Quest was complete but the training continued; the meridian network strengthened with each session, incrementally expanding the duration I could maintain combat-level Void reinforcement. Currently at 3 minutes 45 seconds, up from three minutes. Fifteen seconds of improvement in a week. At this rate, I’d hit five minutes by the end of the month — enough to sustain a full-length ranking bout without hitting the wall.
6:00 AM — Physical conditioning on Cloud Terrace Four, while it was empty before the seminar students’ schedules brought them there.
8:00 AM — Classes. Combat Arts with Veylan (Mon/Wed/Fri). Aether Theory with Arconis (Tue/Thu). History and Strategy with Malcris (Mon/Wed). Electives: none yet. I was waiting to see which ones provided the most strategic value before committing.
12:00 PM — Lunch. Alone. Ren sat three seats away. The quarantine radius had tightened to eight feet since the entrance exam — students were less afraid and more curious, which was actually harder to manage.
2:00 PM — Afternoon Practicum. Varied by day: dungeon theory (simulated training ground scenarios), team formation exercises, and survival skills that boiled down to "here’s how to not die when everything goes wrong," which I found both relevant and depressing.
6:00 PM — Seminar nights (Tue/Thu/Sat). Other evenings: independent training or research with Ren.
10:00 PM — The academy’s official curfew. The Iron Wing enforced it loosely. I ignored it entirely.
It was a Tuesday morning — History and Strategy with Malcris — when two things happened that changed the shape of my week.
The first was a note.
It appeared on my desk sometime between my arrival in the classroom and the moment I sat down. A small square of paper, folded once, placed precisely at the center of my desk space with the particular neatness of someone who valued efficiency over flourish.
No name. No signature. Just four words in handwriting so controlled it looked typeset:
"The tea is clean."
Nyx.
Death Flag #3: The Servant’s Poison. Status: disarmed. The compromised kitchen servant had been neutralized — removed from duty through a sudden illness that Nyx had manufactured with the clinical precision of someone who considered biological sabotage a basic professional skill. The Seraphel network’s poison never reached my food. It never would.
I folded the note. Placed it in my coat pocket. Didn’t look around the room for Nyx because looking for her was pointless — she was either in the room wearing the face of an ordinary student or she was watching from outside it, and either way, acknowledging the note publicly would compromise both of us.
But I felt something — the faintest shimmer at the edge of my Void Sense, three rows back and two seats to the left. Present. Watching. The ghost of a smile in the barely-there pulse of a signature that existed at the threshold of perception.
She was pleased with herself. The shimmer had the frequency of satisfaction — subtle, controlled, but real. Nyx Silvaine had completed a mission and received confirmation that her work was valued, and the professional assassin inside her was allowing herself approximately 0.3 seconds of emotional response before filing it away.
---
[ DEATH FLAG #3 — STATUS UPDATE ]
The Servant’s Poison
Status: DISARMED
Method: External asset (Heroine #4) neutralized
the compromised operative through induced illness.
Toxin never administered. Seraphel network
believes operative was compromised by natural
causes.
Death Flag #3 removed from active registry.
Death Flags Remaining: 46
Villain Points Earned: +10
> Reason: Successfully delegated an assassination
countermeasure to an allied operative. Efficient
use of human resources. The villain handbook
would approve.
Narrative Deviation Index: 3.2% (unchanged)
> Disarming a death flag through non-canonical
means does not inherently deviate from the
script, as the script only requires the flag’s
trigger conditions — not the flag’s success.
The system is grudgingly allowing this.
---
Forty-six. Down from forty-seven. The first flag fully disarmed — not conditionally, not partially, but completely. One thread removed from the web.
The second thing that happened was Malcris.
His lecture that morning was on the Consolidation Wars — a period two centuries ago when the Ducal Houses fought each other for territorial dominance. Standard history. Well-documented. The kind of material that should have been dry and academic and entirely non-threatening.
Malcris made it neither dry nor non-threatening.
"The Consolidation Wars were won not by the strongest house," he said, pacing the front of the classroom with his hands clasped behind his back, "but by the most adaptable. House Drakeveil had the largest army. House Kaelthar had the most powerful warriors. House Seraphel had the Church’s blessing. But House Valdrake —"
He paused. The pause was aimed at me the way a rifle was aimed at a target — not obviously, not overtly, but with a precision that only the intended recipient would feel.
"— House Valdrake won because they fought differently than everyone expected. Their Void Sovereignty was believed to be purely defensive — nullification, negation, the cancellation of others’ power. But the first Duke Valdrake revealed at the Battle of Ashenmoor that Void Sovereignty had offensive applications nobody had anticipated. He used techniques that his enemies hadn’t prepared for because they shouldn’t have existed."
His eyes moved to me. Not lingered — moved. A scanning pass that lasted one second and covered my face, my hands (gloved), and my posture with the efficiency of someone cataloguing data points.
"The lesson," he continued, addressing the class, "is that the most dangerous weapon isn’t the strongest one. It’s the one your enemy doesn’t know you have."
He moved on. The lecture continued. The class took notes.
I sat very still and processed what had just happened.
He’d described the Void Meridian Reversal. Not by name — he didn’t have the name, probably — but by principle. "Offensive applications nobody had anticipated." "Techniques that shouldn’t have existed." He was describing what happened when Void Sovereignty was used outside its expected parameters. Outside the standard cultivation path.
Through the meridians.
He was building a profile. Each lecture, each casual question, each "accidental" reference to Valdrake history — he was assembling pieces of a puzzle, testing whether the current Valdrake heir fit the pattern of the first one. Whether Cedric was using the ancient techniques. Whether the Void could be weaponized in ways the current world had forgotten.
For the Cult, this information was gold. If Void Sovereignty had offensive applications that the modern world didn’t know about, that changed the calculus of Phase 5 entirely. A Void user who could only negate was a key. A Void user who could attack was a weapon.
Malcris wasn’t just gathering intelligence. He was assessing whether I was a bigger prize than his masters realized.
I needed to accelerate my counter-investigation. I needed to know exactly what Malcris knew, what he’d reported, and what his timeline looked like.
I needed Nyx.
After class, I slipped the folded note from my pocket, wrote four words on the reverse side, and left it on my desk as I stood to leave.
"Watch the history professor."
The note vanished before I’d taken three steps. I didn’t see it go. I didn’t need to.
The afternoon brought an unexpected variable.
The Garden of Whispers was the academy’s social heart — a terraced garden complex on the main island’s southern face, where flowering plants from across the continent grew in curated arrangements that produced a perfume so layered it was almost narcotic. Water features cascaded between levels. Stone benches were positioned at angles that encouraged conversation while providing visual privacy from adjacent terraces. Aether-crystal lanterns warmed the air to a permanent mild spring regardless of the actual weather.
It was, by universal student consensus, the place where you went to be seen, to scheme, to flirt, or to have conversations that required beautiful surroundings to soften their edges.
I was there because it was the fastest route between the Practicum arena and the Iron Wing, and I’d chosen speed over the longer but socially safer interior corridors.
Mistake.
