I Am a Villain, So What?

"Die! Die, you bastards!" "Hold the line! Don’t let them push you back!"

I lowered my rifle. I stopped shooting.

Below the barrier, right at the bottleneck of the open city gates, the prisoners were already engaged in a brutal, horrific melee. Blood and severed flesh splattered across the white snow. The fortress gates had been intentionally left open. The structural state of the outer wall was so poor that Commander Arthur had tactically decided to funnel the monsters into a designated kill-zone at the entrance, rather than letting them smash the fragile masonry.

My current goal wasn’t to play the shining hero and save everyone. My goal was to farm System Points by taking out high-value targets while spending as few magic bullets as physically possible. The divine-imbued ammo was incredibly expensive, and I needed to conserve my points for the real siege that was coming.

And most importantly... the men fighting and dying down there were ’death-row inmates’. They were murderers, rapists, and traitors doomed to die anyway. They were serving their final purpose.

I rested the barrel of my rifle on the cold stone and took a moment to look down at the faces of the prisoners fighting for their lives.

I wondered if my heart would change. I wondered if witnessing this sheer volume of casualties and hearing their desperate screams would finally break something inside me.

"...I’m not sure," I muttered quietly to the wind.

I really wasn’t sure. People were being torn apart right in front of my eyes. The metallic stench of blood was rising all the way up to the walls.

Whether my heart was rippling from the horror, or whether I was just pretending not to be shocked out of necessity... I couldn’t even tell anymore. My pulse was completely steady.

Was this the cold pragmatism required to survive the apocalypse, or was the original Lucien’s villainous apathy finally bleeding into my own soul?

****

After the final wave of monsters outside was completely cleared, the heavy iron gates ground shut. The remaining knights descended from the walls to tally the dead.

In the blood-soaked killing zone right in front of the main gate, it was a struggle just to find the buried human corpses. Men had to kick aside the massive, mangled bodies of various monsters just to pull their fallen comrades from the snow.

Unsurprisingly, almost all of the dead were the penal soldiers. The ’meat shields’ had served their brutal purpose. Those prisoners who had miraculously survived were roughly rounded up and dragged back into the prison block under the strict control of the guards.

A knight approached me as I slung my smoking rifle over my shoulder. It was the man from the waiting room—the one who had bet his month’s pay that I would die today.

"You seem to be in a good mood for a madman," he smirked, leaning against the frozen stone. "Congratulations. You made me lose my money."

"You lost the money," I replied, wiping a speck of soot from my cheek. "But you kept your life."

The man looked around the battlefield. He quietly observed the medics examining the corpses, the sergeants managing the surviving prisoners, and his fellow knights checking their chipped weapons.

"Yeah. Really. No one died," he murmured.

"..."

Yes, no one died. At least, not a single person among the knights and officers.

For now, I was winning the bet.

"Well," the knight chuckled, a cloud of white mist escaping his lips. "There are a few bastards in this knight order I’ve actually grown fond of. I suppose it was worth losing a few gold coins to guarantee I’d see their ugly faces again tomorrow."

He pushed off the wall and turned to leave. He still had that vulgar laugh, that crude, mercenary tone.

But as he walked away, I called out to his retreating back.

"Sorry, I didn’t catch your name."

"Huh?"

Without stopping or turning his head, the knight raised a gauntleted hand in a lazy wave.

"Roderic Whitmore. Memorize it, rich boy. It’s a name that will be remembered throughout the continent for a very long time."

Roderic... Roderic.

I racked my brain, filtering through the massive encyclopedias of the game’s lore.

And then it clicked.

The White Lion, Roderic.

’...The son of Commander Arthur Whitmore.’

He was hiding his noble lineage under the guise of a crude grunt. In the original timeline, after Winterguard fell and Arthur perished, Roderic would survive, inherit his father’s broken mantle, and become a legendary powerhouse. ’The White Lion who howls before the greatest beasts’—that was his future title. True to his bold claim, his name would indeed spread far and wide across the continent during the apocalyptic wars.

The invasions did not stop.

It was a natural, grim consequence. The monsters’ singular objective was to disrupt the engineers trying to repair the wall, so they threw themselves at the fortress in relentless, suicidal waves, day and night.

Despite our best preparations, the human casualties in the meat grinder below kept accumulating.

The enemy was the endless Wilderness itself. No matter how small the skirmish force, when facing corrupted beasts, deaths among the vanguard were unavoidable. Humans could feel their spirits gradually eroding just by standing in the freezing wind and watching another man get torn apart ten feet away.

Above all, these men had been fighting a losing war of attrition long before I ever arrived. Their physical fatigue had reached its absolute peak, and their mental fortitude was crumbling.

Yet, the knights who seemed ready to collapse at any moment were still holding the line with terrifying ferocity.

The reason was a shift in the battlefield dynamics.

"Hold the line!! Focus only on what’s in front of you!" Roderic roared, decapitating a plunging beast with his broadsword. "Dismiss the ’birds’ from your mind! The sky is covered! Just butcher the dogs on the ground!"

With my participation, the tide of the daily battles had fundamentally changed—most notably in aerial combat.

For knights and soldiers holding a shield wall, the psychological and physical damage caused by ’things with wings’ was devastating. Feral gargoyles and winged chimera could simply bypass the choke points and drop directly onto the ramparts. Regular arrows could hardly penetrate their thick, mutated hides, and simply tracking their erratic flight paths in the snowstorms was a nightmare.

When such creatures landed among the dense formations of knights, it resulted in total, bloody chaos. The soldiers weren’t just fighting the horrors in front of them; they were constantly, paralyzingly nervous about an ambush from above.

BANG! Thump!

However, I crushed the threat of the wings entirely.

My Blackwood rifle never stopped barking. Standing high on the command tower, I handled almost all the flying monsters by myself. The few that I intentionally maimed rather than outright killed plummeted to the ground, where the heavy infantry could easily surround and suppress them.

"Lucien! Shift your angle to the left flank!" Commander Viktor’s magically amplified voice boomed over the courtyard. "Blow their wings off! Make the heavy ones fall directly onto the enemy vanguard!"

"Copy that!" I shouted back, racking the bolt and adjusting my aim.

BANG! A massive, stony gargoyle shrieked, its right wing exploding into dust. It plummeted like a meteor, crushing three corrupted wolves in the enemy’s own front line.

Viktor specifically instructing me in front of the entire garrison was a massive shift. It was a public recognition of my abilities from the Commander of the Ashen Knights. His loud, precise commands were intentionally meant for the struggling prisoners and soldiers below to hear.

Hearing Viktor issue targeting orders to me meant the ’Madman’ was still active. It meant the sky was locked down.

The ground forces gradually became confident. As long as the rhythmic, deafening crack of my rifle echoed over the walls, they knew with absolute certainty that they wouldn’t be attacked from above.

And there was one more psychological anchor holding them together.

"As long as I’m in Winterguard, no knight will die."

My arrogant, seemingly impossible bet carried infinitely more weight with the knights than I had initially calculated.

Most of those who died in this frozen war were the expendable prisoners, but the life of even one trained knight was worth more than a hundred penal soldiers combined. Knights were the tactical anchors. They maintained the formations, rallied the breaking lines, and held their morale when the grunts panicked. If there was a gap in the knights’ ranks, it meant the structural balance of the entire defense would shatter.

But surprisingly, the words I had spoken to provoke them were still holding true.

It had been four grueling days since I arrived in Winterguard.

Among the formal knights and officers, the casualty count remained at exactly zero.

’He actually woke the men up,’ Roderic thought to himself, wiping black monster blood from his visor as he briefly glanced up at the tower where I was stationed.

Before I had arrived, the knights had been slowly surrendering to despair. They had accepted the grim mathematics of the frontier; they assumed it was only natural that some of them would inevitably die each week. They had normalized their own slaughter.

Then I had stood in their waiting room and asked the one question that broke their complacency: "Who among you thinks they’ll die? Is there anyone here who desperately wants to die?"

Someone was going to die. On this battlefield, it was a mathematical certainty.

Then who would it be? When faced with that blunt, insulting question, they were forced to confront the reality that they didn’t want it to be them, or the man standing next to them.

"Kill them! Cut down every last one of them! Don’t let them retreat!" Roderic bellowed, his sword glowing with Aura.

"Crush the heads of the ones that fall! Don’t let the necromancers raise them!" another knight ordered frantically.

"Those of you who can still walk, form a perimeter! Quickly drag our wounded back! Find anyone who’s still breathing!"

They fought like cornered wolves, refusing to let the ’Madman’ lose his bet.

And so, as the sun set on the fourth day, among the knights of Winterguard... there were still zero casualties.