I Became the Villain Chapter 133: A Command Carved in Ice

Chapter 133: A Command Carved in Ice

"NO! ZARIUS!"

The scream didn’t sound like Marielle. It was a raw, broken sound, like sothing inside her had snapped. For a second, the world was nothing but that sound and the terrifying, empty space where the carriage had been.

She didn’t think. She didn’t calculate. Her boots skidded on the treacherous, "rotten" lip of the ledge, her fingers clawing at the freezing air as if she could catch the tail of the wind and pull the world back.

"MARIELLE! NO!"

A pair of gauntleted arms slamd into her, the impact hollowing out her lungs. Elios tackled her back from the brink, the two of them crashing into the churning slush and jagged shale.

"Let go! Elios, let

go!" she shrieked, a wild, unrecognizable thing thrashing in his grip. She was stronger than she looked, fueled by a frantic, sorcerous adrenaline that made her fingernails dig into the steel of his pauldrons. "Zarius is down there! Cherion... they’re... I have to..."

Elios didn’t let go. He couldn’t. He hauled her upright, his hands clamping onto her shoulders with a force that surely left bruises through her thick winter furs. He shook her a few tis, a violent, jarring motion ant to snap the hysterical fog from her brain.

"Get a grip, Marielle! Look at !" his voice cracked like a whip, devoid of its usual honeyed charm. It was a knight’s voice now, cold and desperate. "We cannot afford to let another one fall. Do you hear ? Not another one! If you go over that edge, you aren’t saving them, you’re just adding to the body count!"

The word body seed to hit her like a physical blow. Marielle’s resistance died instantly, her body going limp as she stared past Elios’s shoulder at the swirling white void.

Around them, the vanguard had dissolved into a disjointed, echoing nightmare. It wasn’t the loud, cinematic chaos one might expect. It was a fractured, stuttering panic. Knights stood frozen, their hands hovering over swords they had no one to draw against.

"His Grace... he jumped," a voice drifted through the gale, thin and disbelieving. "The Duke went over. And the Lord Healer... the carriage just... it’s gone."

"Quiet!" Elios barked, his head snapping toward the murmuring n. "No one speaks unless it’s to report a life-sign! Scouts, to the periter! I want eyes on every inch of that slope that isn’t hidden by the mist!"

He turned back to Marielle, his expression softening just a fraction, though his eyes remained hard as flint. "Can you stand?"

Marielle didn’t answer. She simply nodded, her breath coming in short, shallow puffs of steam. She wiped a sar of mud and lted snow from her cheek, her eyes turning from a frantic, bleeding violet to sothing much colder. Sothing sharper.

Beside them, Reiner was vibrating. The boy was a ghost, his skin the color of parched bone, his gaze fixed on the broken edge of the path with a terrifying, unblinking intensity. He was replaying it.

"They’re fine," Reiner whispered. He wasn’t talking to Elios or Marielle. He was talking to the mountain, trying to bargain with the stone. "They’re fine. The Duke is the strongest Alpha in the North. He wouldn’t let anything happen. He probably caught him. They landed in a drift. A soft one. Deep powder."

He took a stumbling step toward the edge again, his hands shaking so hard they looked like they belonged to an old man.

"I should have made him get out first," Reiner choked out, a sob finally breaking through his bravado. "I got out. Lady Marielle got out. Why did I let him stay in there? If I’d just grabbed his arm... if I hadn’t been so... so slow..."

No one stopped him. No one had the heart to tell him that logic didn’t apply to a mountain falling apart. But no one agreed with him, either.

Marielle stepped away from Elios. It was a raw, broken sound, like sothing inside her had finally given way. She didn’t shout anymore. She didn’t weep. She beca terrifyingly, unnaturally still.

"Stop it, Reiner," she said. Her voice wasn’t loud, but it cut through the howling wind like a razor through silk. It was absolute. "Bla is a waste of energy. We don’t have energy to waste."

She walked to the very brink of the collapse, her boots inches from the sheer drop. Elios reached out instinctively, but she held up a hand, a gesture so commanding he actually froze in his tracks.

"We are going down," she stated. It wasn’t a suggestion. It wasn’t a question. "We will search every crevice, every ice-shelf, and every cave in this basin. We will find them. They will not be left to the crows."

She lifted her right hand, fingers spread wide.

"Elios, organize the descent. Use the heavy tackle from the third wagon. I want the most experienced climbers on the primary lines. The rest of you, start clearing the debris from the upper shelf. We need a stable anchor."

"Marielle, the wind..." Elios started, but he stopped when she looked at him.

Her eyes were glowing. Not the calm, analytical violet she was known for, but sothing harsher, brighter, and edged with sothing dangerous.

"I am not asking for your opinion on the weather, Elios," she said, her tone as brittle as frozen glass.

She turned back to the abyss, her hand beginning to glow with a strange, pulsing light. She closed her eyes, her lips moving in a silent, rapid-fire incantation. This was "Tracing Magic