I Am The Game's Villain

Chapter 765: [The Rewritten Lost Past] [5]

Months bled into each other with the slow persistence of a war that had no interest in ending.

The Second Holy War between the Kingdom of Celesta and the Arvatra Empire continued to consume the continent with all the enthusiasm of a fire that kept finding new things to burn. Battles won and lost. Cities changed hands. People died in numbers that stopped meaning anything after a while because the human mind simply wasn’t built to hold grief at that scale.

It showed absolutely no signs of resolution. No signs of fatigue on either side. Just the same continuous, pointless machinery of war.

Amael found the whole thing deeply uncomfortable, which was saying something given that discomfort was a condition he’d long since made his peace with. He was positioned quite far from the active battlefields, far enough that the sounds didn’t reach him, far enough that the smoke was just a distant smear on the horizon on bad days. But he wasn’t naive about what that distance actually meant. The violence had a way of spreading, of bleeding outward from its origin like ink dropped in water. The forest where he’d made his current home sat in the border territory between both kingdoms, and border territories had a tragic tendency to become relevant once the fighting ran out of more obvious places to go.

He probably should have chosen somewhere more sensibly located.

But he liked this place. The trees were old and dense and minded their own business, the hunting was good, and until recently nobody had known he was here.

He stayed.

As he so often did when the rest of the world was busy destroying itself, Amael was sitting in front of his campfire doing something that actually mattered: cooking.

He leaned forward on his wooden bench, turning a long stick slowly in his hands, tending to the meat he’d seasoned and secured above the flames with the focused attention of someone who took this particular task seriously. The smell coming off the meat was already good, herbs and fat and smoke combining into something that made the area considerably more pleasant.

Cooking alone for years had made him genuinely good at it. Not incidentally good, not adequate, actually good. His daily existence, when left entirely to his own devices and not interrupted by Nihil’s training schedules and divine obligations, followed a comfortable pattern: hunt, cook, eat, rest, repeat.

Simple yet good enough for Amael.

Though lately, alone had become a relative term.

Amael glanced up briefly at the trees surrounding the camp.

It had been approximately since the day he’d fought Metatron, the Guardian Spirit of the Kingdom of Celesta.

He’d defeated Metatron, yes. More relevantly, he’d saved the two women who had also been fighting it that day, pulling them back from danger.

In retrospect, saving people came with consequences nobody warned you about.

Because those two women, as it turned out, were absolutely determined to make his solitude as theoretical as possible.

”I have had damn enough of that bald chancellor of yours, Syl, I am telling you!” Lisandra complained. ”I am absolutely going to kill him the next time he opens his mouth in my direction!”

”Please don’t do that,” Alphonse said, emerging from the trees a step behind her.”That particular chancellor is very well-regarded in my court. Killing him would create serious complications that would take years to untangle.”

”As if diplomacy is doing anything useful right now,” Lisandra scoffed, stepping into the clearing around Amael’s campfire like she was arriving at a place that had been set aside specifically for her. ”Both our Kingdoms are going to despise each other forever, Syl. I don’t see that changing. I really, genuinely, do not see it.”

”We have to believe it can change, and we have to try,” Alphonse replied. ”We have to work at convincing our people.”

”Convince them how, exactly?” Lisandra asked, dropping onto the wooden bench across from Amael on the other side of the campfire.

”Through words,” Alphonse said, settling herself down beside Lisandra with equal calm. ”Through arguments, through patience, through—”

”I’m not good with words,” Lisandra interrupted, already reaching forward toward the cooking meat. She plucked one of the prepared sticks, examined the meat on it with brief professional interest, and took a bite. Her expression shifted immediately into something pleasant. ”Hmm. Good.”

”They don’t listen to me anyway,” she continued, mouth still slightly full. ”When I tell them to stop the war, they tell me the most efficient solution would be for me to simply kill you, Syl, and then it would all be over.”

”They tell me the same thing in the opposite direction,” Alphonse said, accepting a stick of meat for herself with considerably more grace. ”Nothing has changed since we each took power. They don’t respect us—not really. They tolerate us because we have power they can use, but respect is a different thing entirely.”

”...”

Amael sat across from them, stick in hand, staring at the two women who had appeared in his camp, occupied his benches, and were now eating his carefully prepared food with the familiarity of people who had been doing this for years rather than months.

This was happening again.

It kept happening.

Every two or three days, sometimes more often, they would appear. They’d find his camp regardless of where he relocated it, sit down without ceremony or apology, and proceed to have their arguments and air their frustrations and eat his food.

He’d complained about it at the beginning. Loudly, and with what he felt was entirely justified irritation. But somewhere between the first week and now, the complaints had tapered off. Not because he’d accepted it exactly, more because he’d noticed, with some private annoyance at himself, that he’d started listening to what they said. These two women who ruled warring kingdoms and couldn’t stand each other’s governments but somehow always ended up on the same bench, they complained about the same things he’d spent his entire life resenting.

Duty and expectations.

He recognized it and understood it.

Still. Today he decided to say something about the food situation.

”Have you quite finished complaining,” he asked, ”while stealing my food?”

Both women stopped mid-chew and turned to look at him.

”What?” Lisandra said.

”I’m asking,” Amael said, pointing his stick at them, ”because this is my camp. My fire. My food that I hunted and seasoned and prepared. And you have both sat down and helped yourselves to it without so much as acknowledging that any of those things belong to me.”

”You owe me,” Lisandra replied immediately. ”Don’t forget that.”

Amael’s brow lifted slowly. ”Owe you. For what, exactly?”

It should be rather them who should owe him?

”You saw me naked,” Lisandra said, completely without embarrassment, using her trump card. ”That is a debt that extends, frankly, for life.”

Amael looked at her for a long moment.

”I don’t think,” he said finally, ”there was particularly much to see. Certainly not enough to constitute a life debt.”

The silence that followed lasted approximately one second.

Lisandra went completely still. Then the color rose in her face with extraordinary speed, a deep, furious red that swept from her neck to her hairline in what had to be record time because she had not anticipated that response and had no prepared reaction for it.

”Y—You—!”

She shot to her feet, glaring down at Amael.

”Besides,” Amael continued, completely unmoved by the glare, ”you saw me half naked as well, didn’t you? So I believe that makes us even.”

”Y—You are a man,” Lisandra sputtered, pointing at him. ”That is completely different!”

”Is it?” Amael tilted his head slightly, his silver eyes narrowing slightly. ”Male or female, it’s the same thing. And yet here you are, complaining about being dismissed and overlooked because of your gender, now very happily using that same gender to draw a distinction between us when it happens to be convenient for you.”

Lisandra opened her mouth.

Then closed it.

The color that had flooded her face shifted from angry red into something more complicated and harder to name. She stood there with her mouth slightly open, clearly searching for a retort, until ultimately coming up completely empty.

He had shut her down entirely.

Amael turned his attention back to the fire, adjusting the angle of the meat above the flames.

But when he glanced back up a moment later, something gave him pause.

Lisandra was still standing. But the anger had drained out of her posture, replaced by something entirely different.

Her hands were balled into fists at her sides, trembling slightly. Her face was still flushed, but not with anger anymore, with something more vulnerable. Her one visible eye, the right one, the other still covered by cloth since the fight with Metatron had taken it was shining in a way that had nothing to do with rage.

”W—We just... wanted to be here,” she said, stripped of all its usual fire and volume, it barely made it across the campfire.

Amael blinked. ”What?”

”Can we not?!” She asked it like it cost her something to say, glaring at him through eyes that were undeniably, embarrassingly glassy with tears. ”Is that such a problem? Is it?”

Amael found himself completely without words for a moment. He looked at her, standing there trembling with her fists clenched and her eye wet.

Why was she crying? What was happening? He genuinely didn’t know what to do with this.

His more sensible side surfaced without his permission. He found himself shaking his head before he’d consciously decided to. ”I mean... I never said that.”

”Then why do you ignore us?!”

”Am I the one ignoring you?” Amael asked, dumbfounded. ”You two appear at my camp unannounced. Repeatedly. You sit down without asking. You eat my food without asking. How exactly am I the one—”

”S—Since that day, we thanked you for helping us and you just...” Lisandra bit her lips and continued. ”You didn’t even seem to care. Like it meant nothing. Like we meant nothing.”

”I accepted your thanks?” Amael said raising a confused brow.

”And that’s all?” Lisandra asked.

Amael stared at her for a beat. ”What did you want instead? For me to pamper you?”

”I don’t want to be pampered!” She flared up once again. ”But Syl said that you were like a Hero back then, the way you fought, and maybe you could—”

”Lisandra!”

Alphonse shouted out loud enough to make Amael grimace and shot her a scowl but the latter was too busy to shut down Lisandra as she reached out and grabbed Lisandra’s arm, pulling her back down onto the bench with considerable force, her own face burning a red so thorough and complete it had migrated all the way to her ears. ”T—That is enough.”

Amael’s gaze moved to Alphonse.

”A Hero,” he repeated, in a perfectly neutral tone. ”That’s interesting.”

”I—I didn’t say it like that,” Alphonse managed, staring down at her own hands where they were clenched tightly in her lap. ”I simply meant...the way you handled Metatron was...it wasn’t...I didn’t mean to imply—”

She stopped. Pressed her lips together and stared harder at her hands.

Amael looked at her for a moment.

It occurred to him, not for the first time but more clearly than before, that the one who dressed as a man was somehow considerably more feminine than the one who didn’t.

”Alright,” he said finally. ”Stop crying.”

”I am not crying!” Lisandra yelped, her head snapping up.

”Of course you aren’t,” Amael agreed easily, not wanting to purse this further. He reached over and held out another meat stick toward her.

The glare she gave him could have stripped paint. But after a moment of pointed hesitation, she took it, snatching it more than accepting it and dropped her gaze to the ground out of embarrassment.

”...Thanks,” she muttered, taking a small self-conscious bite and staring very intently at the dirt near her feet.

Amael sighed seeing this.

They may be Queens but they were both young women at the end.

”I get it,” he said. ”You’re exhausted. Both of you. You didn’t choose this war, you didn’t choose to be born with the power you have, and you’re running out of places to put all of it.” He glanced between them. ”You’re also not that old, either of you. It’s not strange that you’re struggling. What’s strange is the situation you’ve been dropped into.”

”We didn’t ask for it,” Alphonse said quietly.

”Neither did I,” Amael said. ”I didn’t ask to be born the son of the Holy Guardian Nihil. I didn’t ask to be the Vessel of Samael’s power. And yet—” he gestured at himself, at the campfire in the middle of nowhere, at the entire strange shape of his life— ”here I am. Living in a forest because it’s the only place I can breathe without someone trying to use me for something.”

Lisandra made a sound halfway between a gasp and a choke, her eyes going wide as dinner plates as she inhaled at exactly the wrong moment. ”Wh—What?!”

The coughing fit that followed was spectacular. She doubled forward, one hand pressed to her chest, the meat stick dangling dangerously from her fingers, absolutely shocked even while choking.

Alphonse’s composure, meanwhile, had simply ceased to exist. Her mouth was hanging open.

Amael waited patiently for the chaos to subside.

When things had calmed back down to something manageable, Amael surprisingly started talking.

About his father and the real issues up there, about what he’d been conscripted into by virtue of his birth. About Samael. About choosing to disappear into forests and mountains because the alternative was being shaped into something he wasn’t sure he wanted to become.

He wasn’t entirely sure why he was telling them any of it. They weren’t allies. They weren’t family. They were, objectively, two rulers of warring kingdoms who kept showing up uninvited to eat his food and argue with each other beside his fire.

But maybe that was exactly why it was easy. They had their own burdens on their own young shoulders. He recognized it because he’d seen it in mirrors.

He watched them as he spoke, watched their expressions move through surprise and disbelief and something quieter at the end.

When he finished, the campfire crackled between them. Both women were staring at him silently.

”Well,” he said, picking up his own stick again and turning it slowly above the flames. ”As you can see, there are people out there having it worse than your. Which doesn’t make what you are going through better. But it’s worth knowing.”

”I...” Lisandra shook her head slowly, voice hushed. ”I genuinely cannot believe you are the son of the Holy Guardian Nihil.”

”Believe it,” Amael said. ”And trust me when I tell you, there is nothing holy about him beyond the title. The title does most of the work.”

”You don’t seem to like him very much,” Alphonse said staring at him like she had never before.

She had known from that moment he took down Metatron that he wasn’t normal. But this was something else entirely.

”He’s my father,” Amael said, with a complicated expression. ”Some part of me can’t entirely write him off just for that reason alone. And I suppose, buried somewhere under everything complicated, I can appreciate certain things about him.” He paused. ”But he will never come close to my mother in terms of the love I have. She has never once tried to turn me into an instrument for someone else’s purpose.” His gaze dropped to the fire. ”He wants me to become Samael eventually. Fully, completely. And that’s not something I want.”

”You’re afraid,” Alphonse said.

Amael looked up at her and nodded. Just slightly, but genuinely. ”I am the Vessel of Samael. If I collect all the Sins... I don’t know what remains of me on the other side of that. The probability that I stop being me and become simply a continuation of Samael’s memories and will, that probability is not small.” Something flickered behind his eyes, not quite fear, but the honest acknowledgment of it. ”And I don’t want to disappear. Not like that but...”

”But?” Lisandra had leaned forward, her earlier embarrassment completely forgotten, drawn into the story with her whole body, too far forward, elbows on knees, single eye fixed on him.

Amael glanced at her, then reached out with a casual hand and removed a small piece of meat that had been clinging to the corner of her lips. He ate it without hesitation.

Lisandra went scarlet.

”But,” he continued, completely unbothered, ”if that is what it takes, if me becoming Samael is genuinely the only thing standing between everyone I care about and a world-ending catastrophe then I suppose I’ll take that gamble.” He said, his silver eyes glowing and reflecting the flickering flames. ”Sometimes protecting the people you love asks more of you than you want to give. Sometimes it asks for everything. Even the parts of yourself you most want to keep.”

He looked at Alphonse when he said it, then held out another meat stick to her.

”That is what I believe real love is.”

Both women sat very still. The words had landed somewhere deep in them.

Lisandra stared at the ground, chewing slowly, stealing glances at Amael every few seconds and looking away each time.

Alphonse accepted the meat stick quietly, both hands wrapped around it, looking at it rather than at him.

The silence stretched very comfortably between them.

Then Amael looked up at both of them.

Maybe he had waited a bit for them to process everything he had told them.

”I may have a solution,” he said casually, ”for the idiotic war between your two kingdoms.”

Both women snapped to attention very fast.

”What solution?!” Lisandra asked, leaning forward again.

”Are you going to intervene?” Alphonse asked right after. ”Come forward and stop it yourself?”

Amael grimaced at Alphonse’s words. ”Do you genuinely think I’m some kind of Hero who sweeps in and fixes wars?”

Alphonse opened her mouth. Closed it. Looked away with burning cheeks. ”I don’t... I wasn’t suggesting...”

Well, truthfully she was hoping someone as strong and clearly charismatic as Amael could actually stop the war.

Maybe he could actually but Amael knew that by stepping in the matters of Celesta would have Michael on his ass and he would really wish not.

”Tell us!” Lisandra spoke up impatiently and eager. ”Stop stalling and just say it!”

Amael looked between them, a small smile appearing.

”The quickest and cleanest way to end this war,” he said, ”is for both of you to die.”

Both women turned to stone.

”Are you...” Lisandra’s voice came out very carefully. ”...going to kill us?”

”No,” Amael said immediately, raising a hand. ”Why would I kill you? I said and meant presumed dead, there’s a difference.” He looked between them, letting the actual idea take shape and sink in. ”Think about it. Both of you are the reason your respective armies have any confidence at all. You’re their powerhouses, their symbols, the reasons your soldiers believe they can win. Without you on the field, without you ’existing’ as far as anyone knows, does either Kingdom have the stomach to keep grinding through this war? Or does the whole thing quietly run out of fuel?”

The gears turned behind both sets of eyes simultaneously.

Slowly, like the first light of something dawning, Lisandra and Alphonse turned to look at each other.