Villain Hiring: Help! Author Wants Me Dead-Chapter 41: Alter Ego

His lips parted, but no sound came out.

"The world is trying to correct itself, Noah."

I let that sink in.

Let him feel the weight of inevitability pressing down on his weak, fragile shoulders.

"Every time the story veers off course, someone pays the price."

His entire body flinched, like I had struck him with a bolt of lightning.

Good. Let him feel it. Let him drown in it.

"You thought you were saving them." I laughed, low and bitter. "But all you did was delay the inevitable."

His breath hitched violently.

There it was. The last bit of hope crumbling into dust.

I waited for him to scream, to curse, to deny it, but he just—

He just stared at the fire. Unmoving. Silent.

For the first time in a while, I felt something unfamiliar. He wasn’t reacting the way they usually did.

Interesting.

I saw a sardonic smile adorn his face as if all the fear and helplessness had been flushed out of his body.

My whole being shivered as I saw the shell of the boy I had merged my soul with completely flipping upside down.

Oh.

Now this was unexpected.

I had seen despair. I had seen rage. I had seen men crumble under the weight of inevitability, their souls shattering like glass beneath the merciless grind of fate.

But this?

This was something else entirely.

Noah did not cry.

He did not beg.

He did not even flinch.

Instead, a sound slipped past his lips—soft at first, almost inaudible. A dry, scratchy exhale.

Then—

"Kek."

My nonexistent form trembled.

This sound, I knew this sound..as well as what followed it.

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"Kek… kek."

There it was, growing, bubbling up from deep within him, an eerie, breathless rasp that sent a slow, crawling chill through my very soul.

This was the laugh only the most psychotic ones gave. And even in my whole life, I had barely heard it twice.

It was the sound of a truly broken person.

A villain in the making.

I had broken many before. Had watched men fall to their knees, and had felt their bodies shiver in horror as the weight of my words crushed them beneath my heel.

This was not that.

This was worse.

"Khek—"

And then it came. A grotesque, choked eruption of laughter, sharp and jagged, slicing through the silence like a blade.

"Ha! Haha! Hahaha!"

It was wild. Unrestrained. Twisted in a way that made something uneasy coil in the pit of my nonexistent being.

His shoulders shook, chest heaved, but it wasn’t from grief or fear. No.

It was something uglier.

Something primal.

His fingers curled into his palms, nails digging deep, knuckles whitening. His Hazel eyes shined with deep intelligence. One, this kid was not supposed to have.

Was it rage? No.

This was amusement. Genuine amusement.

I felt my soul twitch. This was wrong. This was so wrong.

He should have broken. He should have screamed. He should have clung to the last threads of his morality, kicking and screaming as I dragged him into the abyss.

But instead—

"Is this the best you’ve got?!" Even though he could not see me, and it was only his thoughts reaching my mind, I felt as if he could see through my soul.

The boy tilted his head back, shoulders loose, as that feral grin stretched across his face—lips curling just a little too far, just a little too sharp.

It seemed to take everything he had in him to not make a sound and wake Sylvie up.

FUCK.

Was it just my imagination or did my host actually have a split personality disorder?

Something cold—something I had not felt in centuries—trickled through me.

It was fear.

It was so absurd, so utterly ridiculous, that I almost laughed myself.

I, the harbinger of villains, the whisperer of doom, the one who crafted monsters from men—

I was afraid?

No.

No.

This was just an anomaly. A momentary slip.

I was still in control.

...Right?

And yet—

"You think," Noah murmured, his voice smooth, steady—far too steady for someone whose entire existence screamed crazy just a few seconds back, "that I don’t know?"

I froze.

He lifted his gaze, meeting the dying flames of the makeshift fire—not with dread, not with denial—

But with understanding.

"The god of this world," he said, tilting his head ever so slightly, "he’s after my life, isn’t he?"

My form crackled.

He stood up and took a step forward, closer to the bonfire; his grin widening.

"He’s been watching. Waiting. Pushing me into a corner, again and again, hoping I’d break."

Another step.

"But guess what?"

His voice dipped, slow and deliberate.

"I won’t give up."

Something in the air shifted.

I felt it. The sheer force of his will slamming into me like a tidal wave.

"I don’t give a damn about his little book," he spat, his lips curling in disgust. "I don’t give a damn about his fate, his corrections, his threats."

He exhaled, voice dropping into a whisper that felt like a promise.

"For I am Noah."

The world seemed to still.

"Noah. Fucking. Romero."

"And no one can take from me what’s mine. I put my hand on something? It’s mine.

My eyes see something I like? Its mine.

And when I say I like something?

It’s. Fucking. Mine.

And at that moment—

For the first time since my creation—

I realized something horrifying.

I was not the one shaping him.

No.

He was shaping me.

I did not know if the God who created this world even knew what he was dealing with.

This wasn’t just any Villain in the making.

No.

This way something more.

I felt it.

The weight of his words, the ferocity of his will, the madness bubbling beneath the surface—it all crashed into me like a tidal wave.

This was not the outcome I had expected. Not by a long shot.

For a moment, I felt it. That deep, bone-chilling realization that I was no longer the one in control.

I, the voice in the void, the system that guided the dark, had met my match.

Noah Romero was shaping me.

And yet, just as I began to process this shocking truth, I felt something shift.

A sudden change in the air. A fleeting moment of absurdity that I couldn’t quite understand at first.

Noah—who had just delivered a speech that could make even the darkest of gods tremble—paused.

His lips parted.

"You got a cigar, man?" he asked, his voice almost nonchalant now. "I could really use one right now."

For a second, my nonexistent form froze. The weight of the words he had just spoken vibrated through the silence.

The tension in the air, the soul-shattering pressure from before—shattered into a million pieces.

What?

Did he just... ask for a cigar?

I—what?

It hit me like a punch to the gut.

This was it.

This was the boy I had been trying to mold into the perfect villain, the one who was supposed to destroy the world.

This was the same boy who had just proclaimed his defiance with all the gravitas of a hero standing on the edge of fate.

And now he was asking for a cigar.

The system’s reality—my reality began to collapse under the weight of this absurdity.

A cold sense of frustration washed over me, followed by the most inexplicable feeling I’d had in centuries:

I felt... utterly ridiculous.

This boy.

This child.

This twisted, psychotic, broken vessel of potential—was asking for a fucking cigar.

I—I—the all-knowing, all-seeing force guiding his descent into darkness—

Had just witnessed a moment so completely absurd that it could only be summed up in one word:

"Goddammit."

Noah Romero, the "villain in the making," was indeed something more.

He was... a boy with a split personality disorder, and now, apparently, a cigar enthusiast.

I was no longer sure whether to be terrified or utterly done with him.

Either way, it seemed like I had underestimated Noah.

But one thing was clear:

No matter how twisted he became, no matter how much potential he had, this was still a boy.

And with that, I realized just how little control I truly had.

The darkness? The villainous future? It all seemed so far away now.

All because of one sentence.

A cigar.

God help me.

***

A/N:

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