I Became the Villain Alpha's Omega (BL)-Chapter 57: A Chase Through the Snow
The wind howled through the mountain passes, biting through even the thickest layers of fur and leather, but Zarius didn’t feel the chill. He was burning from the inside out, driven by an anger he wasn’t even trying to tame.
Beside him, Elios and a dozen elite riders were little more than blurring shadows against the moonlight. The steady thunder of hooves against frozen earth was the only rhythm Zarius paid attention to. He wasn’t watching the road ahead. His eyes were on the slush instead, following the deep, uneven wheel tracks that had no business being this high up the mountain.
They’d found the cart a mile back, abandoned near a bend in the pass.
The tracks had been deep at first, pressed hard into the ground. Then they changed, shallower, closer together. They’d switched to something smaller.
"The tracks are fresh, My Lord!" Elios shouted over the gale, his breath a plume of white steam. "They’re slowing down. The grade is too steep for a wagon with that kind of load."
Zarius didn’t answer. He wasn’t just following the tracks anymore.
He was following a scent.
It was a ridiculous, distracting thing to realize in the middle of a manhunt, but he knew exactly what Cherion smelled like.It wasn’t the kind of perfume the fancy nobles in the Capital drowned themselves in. No, the boy smelled like warm honey and soft vanilla, with a hint of something bright and sweet underneath. They’d been stuck together for hours, and his scent had seeped in, warm and familiar in a way he couldn’t shake..
He could smell it now. It was faint, buried under the stench of wet horse and pine resin, but it was there. And it was moving.
"There!" Elios barked, pointing toward a dark, crooked shape slumped in a clearing ahead.
The wagon had come to a dead stop. It sat lopsided, one wheel buried in a drift. As the riders swarmed the clearing, the scene that greeted them was... bizarre. Two men were rolling in the dirt, their screams muffled by the wind. They were clawing at their own faces, their eyes swollen shut and weeping a thick, viscous fluid.
"My lord... the wheel... The treads match the tracks we’ve been following."
Zarius slid off his horse before it had even fully halted, moving like he owned the ground beneath him. The soldiers instinctively stepped aside.
Elios yanked one of the men up by the collar. The guy screamed, his face bright red and swollen. "Where is he? The boy with the silver hair! Answer me or I’ll let the Duke decide which of your limbs is redundant!"
"I don’t... gah! My eyes! Everything burns!" the man wailed, his voice cracking. "The little demon... he threw something! It’s like fire! We didn’t know! We just wanted the gold!"
Zarius didn’t wait for the rest. His gaze was already locked on the edge of the tree line. There, stark against the pristine white of the snow, were a series of messy, uneven footprints.
Cherion was on foot. In this weather. Alone.
No.
He corrected himself as his boots sank into the snow. Cherion wasn’t alone. He couldn’t see that damn Soren anywhere.
He could be with him now. And gods knew what he was doing.
"Some of you stay with them. Don’t let them run away," Zarius gave the order, his mana flaring out in a jagged, dark pulse that made the horses whinny in fear. "Secure the perimeter. The rest follow me."
He didn’t wait for an acknowledgment. He plunged into the woods with Elio and a few soldiers.
The forest was a labyrinth of shadows and grasping branches. Zarius moved through it like a ghost, his boots silent on the snow. His lungs were burning, not from the cold, but from the sheer, suffocating pressure of his own panic. It was a foreign emotion, something he hadn’t felt since he was a child watching his father’s coffin lowered into the ground. He shouldn’t care this much.
Liar, his instincts hissed.
Branches whipped across their faces, snow crunching underfoot, but Zarius didn’t slow. His eyes were fixed on the footprints weaving between the trees, every step a frantic puzzle.
"Lord Cherion! Can you hear us? Lord Cherion!"
"Lord Cherion! Where are you?"
The soldiers were right behind him, boots crunching through the snow, shouting Cherion’s name, voices cracking with panic. Zarius flinched. If Soren was with the boy, all that noise could trigger him, but there was no time to think like that anymore.
He rounded a massive, ancient pine, and the scent of vanilla and honey suddenly spiked. He heard it then, the sound of breaking branches and a high, frantic voice that he would recognize in the deepest pits of hell.
And then he saw him.
Cherion was backed against a tree, his silver hair a mess of tangles, his face pale with exhaustion. He looked small and fragile. And looming over him was Soren, a narrow blade glinting in the moonlight.
Zarius didn’t think. He didn’t weigh risks or plan anything. His body just moved, fast and violent, like it had a mind of its own.
He lunged just as Soren swung. Zarius twisted in the air, throwing his huge body between the boy and the blade.
SHHHK
The sound of the dagger sinking into his shoulder was dull, almost underwhelming. Zarius felt the bite of the steel, a sharp, cold bloom of pain that sliced through his muscle, but it felt distant.
He landed heavily, his boots anchoring him to the earth like the roots of the tree behind him. He didn’t even grunt. He stood tall, his cloak fluttering around them both.
Cherion was staring up at him, his blue eyes wide, his mouth slightly parted in a silent gasp. He looked horrified, his gaze fixed on the blood beginning to soak into Zarius’s dark tunic. The boy was trembling, not from the cold, but from the sheer, staggering shock of it all.
Zarius felt a strange, terrifyingly soft pull in his chest. His anger faded, silenced by the sheer relief of having the boy within arm’s reach again. He didn’t care about the knife in his back.
He leaned down slightly, his shadow swallowing Cherion whole, shielding him from the wind and the moonlight. A dark, possessive smirk tugged at the corner of Zarius’s mouth, his eyes glowing with a faint crimson.
"Found you, little Omega."
