Reborn As An Overpowered Villain

Lucien stood still, staring at a tear-streaked Eleena, his ex-fiancée with whom he had wanted to maintain as much distance as possible, but fate, it seemed, had other plans.

He had just exited the academy after handing the vice-headmistress over to her secretary, and on his way to the private building the academy had personally assigned him for lodging, he had sensed a familiar presence. Following that presence, he had ended up standing in front of Eleena.

He would not have cared much under any other circumstance and would have preferred returning to his room to sleep, for the day had exhausted him mentally. But, as fate would have it, he had followed that presence and ended up standing before her, gazing at her face that had frozen entirely upon seeing him, her eyes moving over him from head to toe as though confirming that he was indeed standing in front of her and was not merely a mirage conjured by her distressed mind.

Eleena's azure hairs were tangled and flowing loosely down on both her front and back, partially obscuring her face. Her eyes were moist with tears and her cheeks bore the glistening lines that crying leaves behind. Her red coat lay discarded beside her on the bench, and the uniform she wore was no less disheveled, with creased lines running all across her white shirt while her hands clenched the fabric of her red skirt tightly in her fists. She looked pitiful. If he had to describe her in a single word, that was the word he would have chosen.

And then he felt it, that dangerous and unwanted desire to close the distance between them and pull her into a tight embrace, to ask her who had made her cry, to hear her troubles and, if it came to it, to destroy whoever had dared to cause her this grief. He wanted nothing more than to draw this pitiful girl into a warm embrace and let her calm herself against his chest.

It was painful. Extremely painful to watch her like this. He wanted to resolve whatever crisis had reduced her to this state.

His nature, so deeply bound to order and cleanliness, wanted nothing more than to wipe her face clean, gather her loose hair and bind it into a neat bun, or better yet, a single ponytail the way she had always worn it, the kind that swung cheerfully behind her whenever she ran toward him when they were still children. He wanted to smooth the creases from her uniform and, if he could manage it, give her a fresh change of clothes entirely.

No. I can’t do this, Lucien shouted within the walls of his own mind.

He could no longer close the distance he had so carefully constructed between them. He had moved well past her and had to maintain that distance for the remainder of his life, because as a villain, he was bound to clash with the world, with fate itself, and with the main characters. Eleena was one of those main characters and she should not tangle herself with him, a villain whose end had already been written which he was desperately trying to change.

She was meant to forge a friendship with the hero, to join his team and face whatever calamity the future had in store, and he wanted nothing more than to ensure those heroes grew stronger than the story had originally made them, because at the end, in the original story, even the main characters had failed. They had died. The world had ended. The author was a psycho and he had felt so relieved back then at the fact that he had stopped reading the story earlier because otherwise it would have left him in trauma. But, his decision turned out to be a disastrous one.

I should have read the full story. Lucien lamented that particular failure of his past self. He could have learned what lay ahead and prepared accordingly. But he did not possess the fortune that seemed to grace other protagonists who were transported into fictional worlds with the complete knowledge of the novel tucked neatly inside their heads.

Lucien wanted nothing more than to reach out to his previous life, Evan and shout at him who had dropped the novel halfway, to demand that he keep reading, that he finish it no matter what. But that was no longer possible and the regret sat heavy in him, solidified by the fact that he had stopped reading precisely at the point of Lucien's death in the story, never knowing what came after.

And now, all he knew with any certainty was that Eleena should have been in her dormitory room, yet here she was, sitting alone on a bench in the dark, crying, which puzzled Lucien far more deeply than he cared to admit.

In the novel, the author had written the world almost exclusively through the hero's perspective and readers had been given very little insight into the inner lives of other characters, only occasional glimpses through brief point-of-view changes that had shed light on other corners of the story. But those glimpses had been so infrequent and fleeting that he had never once been given a window into Eleena's thoughts.

In the earlier portions of the story, the focus had rested almost entirely on Hero Mark who, alongside Judy, had gradually built a warm and genuine friendship with Eleena as time passed. That was how it was supposed to go.

But, the world was no longer following the script of the original story, and Lucien knew with quiet certainty that the source of that butterfly effect was none other than himself.

He was supposed to have arrived at the academy a full week after classes had begun, yet he had appeared the very next day alongside Melissa, and that single deviation had rippled outward with such force that it had disrupted the natural rhythm of the story. And in turn had done something which had left her sitting here alone on a bench in such a pitiful state that it was becoming difficult for him to simply stand here and watch anymore. She should have been fast asleep in her room, not weeping in solitude without a single sound that he might have missed her entirely earlier if his senses had not been sharpened by years of fighting beasts in the field.

He regretted coming this way and should have simply returned to his room when he still had the chance, but it was far too late for regret now.

"What is that?" Eleena cried out with a scream of disbelief that tore through the silence of the night like a blade. Her index finger pointed toward his neck with a visible tremble.

Lucien was pulled sharply from his thoughts. He raised his right hand and pressed it to his neck, searching for whatever had made her shriek so loudly.

His fingers stopped.

There was a bite mark there. Charlotte's teeth had gnawed deeper than he had realized at the time, nearly breaking the upper layer of skin and leaving behind a deep imprint. When he drew his hand back and looked at it, his palm bore a smear of red lipstick that Charlotte had pressed there and that he had apparently carried around ever since without noticing. He had forgotten to clean it entirely, having assumed the bite was minor and not worth attending to. Why in the world had Connor not said anything about this?

"It is a bite from the vice-headmistress," Lucien said, half to himself and half in answer to Eleena.

"Are you not satisfied with just one? How many bitches do you even have?" Eleena burst out, her voice barely containing the fury behind it, her eyes red and swollen from crying and now threatening to spill over again for an entirely different reason.

"What are you talking about? It is late. Go back to your dormitory and sleep," Lucien snapped, irritation sharpening his voice as he tried to cut through whatever nonsense was forming in her head.

Eleena rose from the bench and snatched up her red coat in one hand, then crossed the distance between them with a look that carried enough weight to give most people pause. Her eyes were burning with an anger whose origin Lucien could not identify.

She stopped just inches away from his face, and Lucien instinctively took a step back, unable to bear having her so close. Old memories that he had tried to suppress and not relive with so much effort were threatening to crack, and the last thing he needed was for his hands to begin trembling again the way they had in the morning.

"You are the worst," Eleena snapped with a voice filled with venom, stomped her feet and then she turned and walked away, leaving Lucien standing there alone and genuinely uncertain of what he had done to earn that.

Was it the anger from when he had called her and the others worms in the middle of class? Was it the mana restriction bracelets he had arranged to be placed on her and the princess, the ones that capped their mana circulation at fifteen percent? Or was it something else entirely, something he was not yet aware of?

Then his gaze fell to the red lipstick smeared across his palm, and the realization crept over him slowly, unfolding like something he should have seen from the very beginning.

She had misunderstood. Completely and thoroughly misunderstood.

Shit.

***

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