I'm in Love with the Villainess!

She climbed to her feet, steadied herself against the fountain’s edge, and rolled her shoulders until her neck cracked.

"Fine," she said. "Let’s go find our fearless leader and ask him why teleporting us halfway across the continent without warning was the smartest move he could’ve made."

"He knows what he’s doing..."

"Then he should also know the murder I’m going to commit..."

Kevin almost smiled. Almost.

They walked toward the doors together, leaving the fountain and the painted windows behind. The bell on the pedestal between the doors had stopped humming now, sitting silent and innocent as if it hadn’t done anything at all.

Kevin didn’t trust it.

He pushed the left door open wider, just enough to slip through, and stepped into the forest beyond.

The trees were still.

The light was dim.

And somewhere ahead, he heard the sound of fire.

***

The forest didn’t try to kill them immediately, which Kevin took as a bad sign.

Vivianne seemed to agree. She walked close enough that their shoulders almost touched, her eyes scanning the treeline with the wariness of someone who’d grown up in a noble house and learned early that pretty things could be deadly.

"This is wrong," she said quietly.

"Which part?"

"All of it. We’re inside a building. There shouldn’t be a forest inside a building. There shouldn’t be a sky inside a building. And there definitely shouldn’t be..."

She stopped.

Kevin stopped beside her, following her gaze to the tree directly ahead. Its bark was split open along the trunk, revealing something that looked almost like flesh underneath—pale, veined, pulsing very faintly with every sound of the distant fire.

"Is that... breathing?" Kevin asked.

"I advise you not to touch it."

"I wasn’t going to..."

They moved around the tree slowly, giving it a wide berth. The other trees nearby showed similar splits, similar pulsing flesh, similar wrongness that made Kevin’s skin crawl.

"We should find them fast," Vivianne said. "I don’t want to be in here when whatever’s wrong with these trees decides it’s feeding time."

Kevin nodded and picked up the pace.

The narrow path twisted between the trunks, sometimes widening into small clearings, sometimes narrowing until they had to push through branches that felt too warm, too soft, too alive. The light from above shifted constantly, dimming and brightening like someone was playing with the clouds.

The further they walked, the more the forest changed.

Not in the way Cael and Evelina’s forest had, where trees twisted aggressively and roots lunged like serpents. No, this forest was different. Quieter. Colder.

The trees here didn’t move at all.

They stood perfectly still, their bark smooth and grey like old bone, their branches frozen mid-reach. No leaves rustled. No roots twitched. Even the air felt stagnant, thick with something that made Kevin’s lungs work harder than they should.

"Still no sign of them," Vivianne said, her breath fogging in front of her face despite the lack of cold. "Cael and Lady Evelina must be somewhere else."

"Split trials, probably," Kevin muttered.

The path forked ahead of them, splitting into three separate routes. Each one looked identical, grey trees, grey light, grey silence.

"Which way?" Vivianne asked.

Kevin closed his eyes and listened.

The fire sounds had faded now, replaced by something else. A whisper. Not words, exactly, but the shape of words. A voice that seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere at once.

One path tests the body. One path tests the mind. One path tests the heart. Choose wisely, for the library does not forgive mistakes.

Kevin opened his eyes.

"The body," he said immediately.

Vivianne raised an eyebrow. "You don’t even know what that means."

"I know what I’m good at."

"And your heart? Your mind?"

"I’ll figure them out later."

"You’re rushing this. We’re both mages, so mind should be the obvious choice," Vivianne countered.

"But we don’t even know if it refers to intelligence or willpower."

"And it’s not like you’re built for athletics either." Vivianne fought back again.

"I may not be, but you are."

Vivianne raised a brow at Kevin’s remark. "You’re planning to rely on me, aren’t you?"

"Well... yeah?"

"Bastard... but you make a fair point. Fine, body it is."

The moment they stepped onto the path, the forest changed.

Not subtly. Not gradually. But all at once, like someone had flipped a switch and replaced the world with something else entirely.

The grey trees vanished. And Kevin found himself standing in a wide, circular clearing surrounded by walls of twisted roots that rose higher than he could see. The ground beneath his feet was packed earth, hard and unyielding, marked with strange symbols that glowed faintly blue.

Vivianne stood beside him, her hand already raised, wind magic coiling around her fingers.

"What did we just walk into?" she asked.

Kevin didn’t answer.

Because across the clearing, something was rising from the earth.

It looked like a man at first. Tall, broad-shouldered, with features that seemed carved from the same grey bark as the frozen trees behind them. But as it straightened to its full height—easily eight feet—Kevin saw the cracks running across its skin, the faint glow of blue light seeping through like magma through stone.

And in its hands, a spear.

Not wood. Not metal. Something else. Something that seemed to drink the light around it, leaving a trail of darkness in the air.

"That’s a guardian, right?" Kevin said quietly.

"Must be," Vivianne replied.

The guardian didn’t speak, nor did it charge. It simply stood there, watching them with eyes that weren’t eyes, just two deeper cracks in its bark-like face, glowing with the same blue light.

"Hello?"

Vivianne approached it first, already taking on the role of the one who would carry them through this task.

"You sure this was a good idea?" she asked, glancing back as she second-guessed her own skill and looked to Kevin for support.

"You’re as strong as a gorilla. I don’t think you should worry."