I Became the Villain Alpha's Omega (BL)

”Nothing,” Flio said, exhaling a breath that ruffled the edges of the top page. ”I mean, it’s not literally nothing, but as far as what we were actually looking for? Dust. Echoes. A whole lot of useless ink.”

Zarius didn’t immediately reach for the report. He just sat there, the worn leather of his study chair creaking as he leaned back, the rough pads of his fingers coming up to scratch at his jawline. The stubble there was getting thick. He needed a shave, but honestly? Finding the energy to care about grooming when your veins were slowly turning to rotting stone was pretty challenging.

”Tell me anyway.”

Flio dragged a hand down his face. ”Right. Well, the boy’s lineage is... ironically violent, given how he looks. House Antel. They aren’t some minor, perfumed shallow followers. Historically, they were the loyalist backbone of the throne. We’re talking generations of famously unyielding swordsmen. The kind of men who’d take an arrow to the neck and still try to bite your nose off before they died.”

Zarius’s eyebrows crept upward. He pictured Cherion and tried to reconcile that image with a blood-soaked warlord. It didn’t fit.

”They were gutted during the rebellion,” Flio continued, tapping the parchment. ”When King Alderon’s brother tried to usurp the throne a decade back, the Antels were the ones holding the palace gates. Cherion’s father and his older brother were butchered on the steps of the throne room. Bought the King enough time to rally the royal guard.” Flio paused, a grim sort of respect twisting his mouth. ”Cherion is the only one left. The absolute end of the line. Which, geopolitically speaking, explains a lot. It’s why King Alderon treated the boy like a fragile, living monument. He didn’t just ’treasure’ Cherion, the kid was a walking, breathing reminder of the Crown’s unpaid blood debt.”

”A debt the Crown Prince clearly didn’t give a damn about,” Zarius noted dryly.

”Exactly.” Flio snorted, leaning against the edge of the bookshelf. ”The rest of the report reads like a cheap opera. Cherion was... what’s the word the spies used? ...infatuated. Followed His Highness around like a starved hound for years. Then Yerel goes on a border tour, brings back this Philia, and effectively drops Cherion into the gutter. Broke the engagement, humiliated the last surviving Antel.”

Zarius stopped scratching his chin. He let his hand drop to the desk, his long fingers drumming a chaotic rhythm on the wood. It matched. Every single miserable detail Flio just spewed matched exactly what the rumor mill had been churning out since... well, since forever as far as he could remember. It was the tragic, pathetic story of a discarded political pawn.

But it was missing the only detail that actually mattered.

”And the magic?” Zarius asked softly. ”The healing magic. Where are the records of his training?”

Flio shook his head, looking genuinely baffled. ”That’s the thing, Your Grace. There aren’t any. I dug through temple registries, royal physician logs, even the intercepted letters of the capital’s worst gossip. Not a single syllable mentions Cherion Antel possessing even a spark of healing magic. By all official accounts, he’s powerless.”

Zarius stared at the parchment. Powerless?

His chest flared up for a second, just a faint reminder of that brutal coughing fit days ago. He remembered the blinding, terrifying pain of the curse flaring up. And then, he remembered the boy’s hands.

He remembered Cherion pressing his palms against his chest. The relief had been so sudden, so absolute, that Zarius had almost passed out from the shock of simply not hurting for the first time in a year. The same thing had happened with the headache. A touch, a rush of light, and the spike in his skull had evaporated.

Cherion hadn’t been lying to save his own neck. He wasn’t playing some desperate survival game. He actually had the power to heal him.

But some random, magically ’dead’ castaway from the Palace could.

Did the King know? If Alderon knew Cherion possessed this kind of power, then giving him away to the North wasn’t just careless, it was catastrophic stupidity. You don’t hand your greatest enemy a living, breathing miracle just to clear the runway for your son’s new lover. Even with Yerel breaking the engagement, the King could have, oh no, should have, kept Cherion locked away. A healer of that magnitude was a strategic weapon.

So, the King didn’t know. He couldn’t have.

Zarius recalled the boy’s voice, a little shaky but defiant: I just found my ability recently.

Was that the truth? Had the trauma of the broken engagement somehow violently awakened the dormant power? Or had the boy been suppressing a god-tier ability right under the noses of the Royal Family just to avoid being used as a battery by the very people who got his family killed?

A sharp, stinging pain spiked behind Zarius’s left eye. He winced, sucking in a harsh breath, and brought the heel of his hand up to smack his forehead lightly.

Flio instantly stood up straight, his exhaustion vanishing behind a spike of panic. ”Your Grace? Are you okay? Should I call Lord Cherion up here?”

”No,” Zarius grunted, waving a hand blindly to dismiss the idea. ”No need. It’s just a headache. A normal one, for once.”

Pushing himself up from the desk and walked toward the tall, narrow arch of the window.

Down below, the training ground was a muddy, chaotic mess of sparring soldiers and clashing steel. But Zarius’s eyes immediately tracked to a splash of dark navy near the armory racks.

Cherion.

He was holding a basket, surrounded by four of Zarius’s most hardened veterans. And he was... laughing.

He looked so completely out of place, yet entirely in his element. He was the last son of a dead warrior house, a rejected fiancé, a supposedly magicless weakling who currently held the Duke of the North’s life in his hands.

Zarius rested his forehead against the glass, his breath fogging the pane. He watched the way the sun caught Cherion’s hair, making it look almost like a halo.

Who exactly are you, Cherion Antel?