I'm in Love with the Villainess!

The crack widened with a sound like breaking ice, sharp and crystalline, spiderwebbing across the wall of screaming faces. Through the growing gap, the shapes on the other side grew clearer. Not fully formed yet, still shifting between shadow and substance, but recognizable.

Others whose names I’d tried to forget.

The other me stared at them, his sword dipping toward the floor. His breathing had gone shallow, his chest rising and falling too fast.

"You see them," I said quietly.

"They’re not real."

"They’re real enough. For someone like you."

"I said shut up!"

He swung again, but his heart wasn’t in it. I caught his blade with mine and held it there, close enough to see the cracks in his composure. The sweat on his brow. The way his pupils had dilated despite the dim light.

"Those faces kept you up at night, didn’t they?" I pressed. "Every time you closed your eyes. Every time things got quiet. You’d see them. Hear them. Blaming you."

"I did what I could."

"You did nothing. We did nothing. That’s the point."

The shapes were solidifying now. Lucas stepped through the crack first, his crooked smile nowhere to be seen. His eyes were hollow, his clothes stained with blood I remembered from the report. The blood that had soaked through his jacket before the paramedics even arrived.

"Nathan," he said, and his voice was exactly the same. "You could have saved me."

"I wasn’t there."

"You chose not to be."

The other me flinched like he’d been struck.

More shapes followed. A woman with short hair and a scar above her eyebrow. A man who’d always laughed too loudly at his own jokes. Students. Colleagues. People I’d failed in ways large and small.

People we’d failed.

They circled us, their hollow eyes fixed on the other me. Not on me. On him.

"You," Lucas said, pointing. "You were the one in charge. You gave the orders. You sent us into that building knowing it was a trap."

"I didn’t know—"

"You should have known. That was your job."

The other me backed away, his sword held in front of him like a ward against the truth. His back hit the wall of screaming faces, and he pressed against it, trying to disappear into the stone.

"This isn’t real," he repeated. "This isn’t real. This isn’t—"

"It’s real enough."

I stepped forward, my own sword lowering. The false hydra’s heads had retreated, their invisible jaws closing as they sensed the shift in the room. This wasn’t a battle I needed to win with force.

"You’re me," I said. "The me who couldn’t move on. The me who wanted to bring her back so badly that you buried yourself in a fantasy novel."

"I don’t regret that."

"Neither do I. But you’re still stuck there. Still living in that moment. Still thinking that if you could just go back, just change one thing, just save her—"

"Shut up!"

"—then everything would be different."

The other me slid down the wall, his sword clattering to the floor. The shapes surrounded him now, their hollow faces close, their whispered accusations filling the air like smoke.

"You could have saved me."

"You should have been there."

"Why didn’t you come?"

"Why weren’t you good enough?"

I watched him crumble. Watched the version of me that had been frozen in time, trapped in the guilt of that single day, finally break apart under the weight of faces I’d long since learned to carry.

"Because you," I said quietly, "are not strong enough. Not yet. Not then. But I am."

The other me looked up at me, his eyes red-rimmed, his face slick with tears.

"How?"

I didn’t have an answer. Not a good one. So I gave him the truth instead.

"I faced worse."

I knelt in front of him, my sword vanishing back into shadow. The shapes pressed close, but they didn’t touch me. They weren’t for me. They were for him.

"Those people," I said, gesturing at the hollow faces. "They’re dead. Nothing we do will change that. Nothing we sacrifice will bring them back. But we can save the people in front of us. The ones who are still breathing."

"Trish—"

"Is already dead. She made her choice. I made mine. Living in the past won’t change either of them."

The other me’s face twisted, a sob catching in his throat. "But she’s alive now—"

"She’s Evelina now, and you know that."

"Fuck you..."

"Fuck you too."

I rose to my feet and took a step back, grabbing the book I dropped with me. This wasn’t mine to finish. I’d leave him to those illusions instead. Besides, I didn’t really have the right to be the one to end him.

Not when I still hadn’t let go of the past.

After all, I still saw Trish, Evelina, and Fiona as three different people.

Even if, technically, they were one and the same now.

"That still confuses the hell out of me..."

[Quadrant Complete]

"Good to know."

The words burned themselves into the air in front of me, gold letters that faded as quickly as they’d appeared. Behind me, the other me’s sobs grew quieter, muffled by the illusions dragging him inside the closing crack in the wall. The shapes retreated with him, their hollow eyes turning away, their accusations fading into whispers.

I didn’t look back.

The corridor ahead had changed while I’d been fighting. The narrow passage had widened into something grander, the walls lined with tapestries instead of screaming faces. These depicted battles, not torments. Victories, not failures.

The archmage’s idea of a reward, maybe.

Or another trick.

"You passed."

His voice was closer now, almost conversational, like he was walking beside me even though I couldn’t see him.

"It was fairly easy," I said.

"That still counts. That’s the thing about tests, boy. There’s no partial credit, even if it was easy."

"Says the person who almost killed us just because we completed his first trial too easily."

"The past is in the past, child."

The tapestries shifted as I walked, the scenes changing to match my pace. A battle here. A funeral there. A figure reaching toward a crown that always seemed just out of reach.

I stopped in front of one tapestry in particular.

It showed a woman with hair the color of ash and eyes like winter frost. She stood on a balcony overlooking a city I didn’t recognize, her hand resting on the shoulder of a man whose face had been deliberately blurred.

"Foreshadowing?" I asked.

"Just a tapestry," the archmage said, but his voice had lost some of its amusement.

"Definitely not suspicious."