The Villainess Wants To Retire-Chapter 500: Desperation
The corridor was a dead space, a vacuum of sound where the only things that remained were two women and a debt that could only be paid in blood.
Eris stood as a pillar of white-hot intensity, her power no longer a flickering candle but a radiating sun. She was patient, her posture that of a predator that knew the prey had nowhere left to run.
"Well?" Eris asked. Her voice was terrifyingly calm, almost bored, as if she were waiting for a servant to finish a mundane task. "You threatened my son, Bianca. You spoke of destroying what I love. So, threaten me."
She took a slow, deliberate step forward, the heat from her skin making the air ripple like a desert mirage. A slight, cold smile touched her lips. "Come on. Show me. Show me what you think you can do against the woman you’ve spent months hating."
Bianca’s back hit the cold stone. She was trapped, and for a heartbeat, the old terror threatened to swallow her whole. But beneath the fear was a roiling, toxic pride.
She couldn’t back down. Not now. Not after Ophelia had treated her like a discarded toy. She needed to hurt Eris. She needed to prove that she wasn’t just a "useful fool."
She doesn’t know, Bianca’s internal voice hissed, a jagged rhythm of desperation and spite. She thinks I’ve been rotting. She doesn’t know what I’ve been doing in the dark.
For weeks, under Vetra’s tutelage, Bianca hadn’t just been hiding; she had been evolving.
Long before, Vetra had recognized the girl’s capacity for malice and had fed it with techniques that the Imperial Academy would have deemed heretical. Blood manipulation. Advanced thermal dynamics.
Bianca was not the girl who threw simple frost shards.
She straightened her spine, her chin lifting as she squared her shoulders. Eris’s dismissal, the way she looked through Bianca as if she were an insect, was exactly what Bianca needed.
"Finally," Eris whispered, seeing the shift in Bianca’s stance. "A little bit of spine."
Bianca’s hands moved with a speed that was almost blurred, her fingers weaving a complex, sophisticated pattern in the air.
This wasn’t the clumsy magic of a panicked noble.
She didn’t reach for the moisture in the air.
Instead, she bit her own tongue, the metallic tang of blood filling her mouth.
She slammed her palms together, and as she tore them apart, spears of crimson-tinged ice erupted from her very skin. They were beautiful and horrific, crystalline shards of frozen blood, sharp enough to part silk without a sound.
"Go!" Bianca shrieked.
A barrage of red spears launched simultaneously, converging on Eris from multiple angles.
It was a sophisticated, deadly flurry. If even one spear grazed Eris’s skin, Bianca’s connection to her own blood would allow her to work within Eris’s system.
Eris didn’t even move her feet. She raised a hand in a casual, almost lazy gesture. A wall of white flame erupted between them, a barrier of such intense heat that the air groaned.
The spears hit the fire and didn’t just break; they vaporized. There was a sharp, angry hissing, a cloud of steam that smelled of iron, and then—nothing.
"That’s it?" Eris asked, her expression unimpressed. "A few needles made of spit and blood? I expected more from Vetra’s lapdog."
Bianca didn’t stop. She was already into the next movement. The melted blood-ice from the spears hadn’t vanished; it had turned into water on the floor. And because it was her blood, Bianca maintained an absolute, singular control over every drop.
The water didn’t pool. It snaked across the floor with an intelligent, deceptive grace, moving around the edges of the fire wall. It reached Eris’s boots, seeping through the leather, searching for the warmth of skin.
Contact.
Bianca’s face split into a triumphant, jagged smile. Got you.
She snapped her fingers, activating the blood-binding. Inside Eris’s boots, the liquid began to flash-freeze, the ice spreading upward toward her ankles.
Eris’s eyes widened, a genuine flicker of surprise crossing her features. For a second, she felt the agonizing, jagged bite of the cold spreading through her veins.
"I can do this," Bianca whispered, her eyes glowing with a manic hope. "I can win. I’ll freeze your heart before you can even draw a breath!"
Eris stood perfectly still, letting the spell work. She felt the ice trying to take root in her blood, trying to claim the territory of her body. She looked down at her feet, then back at Bianca.
The look wasn’t one of pain. It was pity.
"Is that all?" Eris asked. Her voice hadn’t changed. It was still the calm, steady anchor of a god.
"No!" Bianca screamed, pushing more power into the connection.
The ice in Eris’s veins should have been her end. But Eris didn’t fight it with a spell; she fought it with her nature.
Deep within her, Pyronox’s essence responded to the intrusion. A surge of ancient, primal heat radiated from her marrow outward.
The ice didn’t just melt; it vaporized into steam inside her body, the backfire of the spell snapping the connection to Bianca so violently that the younger girl gasped, her own hands stinging with frostbite.
Eris began to walk forward. She stepped through her own wall of flames as if it were a beaded curtain.
"You tried to freeze a dragon," Eris said, her teaching tone more insulting than a scream. "Do you understand how foolish that is? I contain living fire, Bianca. Ancient heat. You cannot freeze a sun by throwing a cup of water at it."
Fuck, Bianca thought, It should have at least done a little damage but it didn’t, not even a scratch.
"You’re right, Eris," Bianca panted, her voice dropping into a low, terrifyingly confident register. She wiped a smudge of blood from her lip. "I can’t freeze you. I already knew that."
Eris stopped, her brow furrowing. Something was wrong. The air wasn’t getting colder, but it was changing.
Bianca’s hands began to move in a final, forbidden pattern.
This was not a spell meant to create ice.
It was negation.
