Never Die Villain

"Everyone should have gotten out by now..."

Leaning against the wall and breathing hard, Ilya could only laugh to himself.

He had realized by now that this was an entirely different situation from Helene, because even after she had Distorted, she seemed to retain some semblance of consciousness.

Helene hadn’t wanted to hurt him.

Ilya had understood that much during their encounter, and from it, he had come to the conclusion that people who Distorted still retained some part of their original personality.

Their minds might twist alongside their bodies and their emotions might manifest into something incomprehensible, but the person they had once been did not necessarily disappear altogether.

So what happened when a Distortion of the same level genuinely wanted him dead?

Crash——!

The answer was painfully simple.

It was nearly impossible to fight.

Ilya had entertained the thought that perhaps his newfound power could somehow become the key to defeating Distortions, especially after what had happened with Helene.

In hindsight, however, that confidence had been completely delusional because the only reason he had managed to subjugate Helene in the first place was that some part of her, despite what she had become, had allowed him to.

Boom——!

The wall behind him exploded.

Ilya threw himself forward before the impact could catch him, stumbling several steps as chunks of stone scattered across the corridor.

This was different.

This was the real thing.

A Distortion that had no reason to restrain itself and didn’t care whether the person standing in front of it was family, servant, knight, or innocent bystander.

Worse still, Aleksei wanted to hurt him specifically, and that difference alone had turned everything Ilya thought he understood about fighting them into something laughable.

There was no opportunity to retaliate.

Every time Ilya tried to stop long enough to gather his magic, another section of the mansion came crashing apart around him, forcing him to abandon the attempt and keep running.

His entire strategy had been reduced to running through the estate and keeping Aleksei occupied for as long as possible, desperately hoping that someone from the banquet would notice the commotion and arrive before his battered body finally gave out.

Another window passed beside him.

For a moment, Ilya looked through it.

He could escape.

One burst of the blizzard would shatter the glass, and from there, he could throw himself outside and use his magic to soften the fall.

It wouldn’t be graceful in his current condition, but compared to remaining inside with a Distortion tearing the mansion apart behind him, his chances of survival would improve considerably.

"...Not yet."

The servants had only begun evacuating moments ago, and Ilya had no way of knowing how many were still making their way through the grounds.

If he escaped now and Aleksei followed him outside, he would be dragging a Distortion directly toward people who had absolutely no means of defending themselves.

"Tsk."

Ilya clicked his tongue and ran past the window.

He didn’t need to remain inside forever.

He only needed to buy them enough time.

Right now, Aleksei’s attention was fixed entirely on him, and Ilya intended to take advantage of that for as long as his body could hold out.

Every corridor he led the Distortion through was another few seconds for the servants to get farther from the estate, and once he was confident they had put enough distance between themselves and the mansion, there would be no reason for him to keep playing bait.

"Haa... haa..."

Ilya rounded another corner and nearly slipped, catching himself against the wall before forcing his legs forward again.

His lungs were beginning to burn, his wounds had started aching with every stride, and judging by the increasingly destructive crashes behind him, Aleksei wasn’t getting tired nearly as quickly.

"Just a little longer..."

He couldn’t defeat Aleksei, but he didn’t need to. All he had to do was keep the bastard inside until everyone else was far enough away.

As the sound of dragging chains echoed behind him and Aleksei destroyed everything in his path, Ilya looked down once more.

Blood had begun seeping through his bandages, staining the white fabric around his torso and arms, yet he pressed on, knowing that stopping for even a moment would give Aleksei all the time he needed to catch up.

"Uh...?!"

Ilya threw himself to the side just as a blade tore through the corridor, cleaving straight through the space where his body had been only a second earlier. The strike continued through the wall without losing momentum, carving a deep line across the stone before Ilya hurriedly called upon the blizzard and used the wind to propel himself several meters away.

Crash——!

His back crashed into the opposite wall.

"Gah...!"

Pain shot through every wound Anastasiya had left behind, but Ilya barely had time to register it before he forced himself upright again.

He had nearly forgotten that Aleksei had been considered a gifted swordsman for good reason. If his cousin had taken their earlier duel completely seriously from the beginning, Ilya was certain he would have lost.

Now, however, Aleksei was a Distortion.

Whatever physical abilities he had possessed as a human had been amplified to an absurd degree, and even the oversized form he had taken did little to diminish the skill ingrained in his body through years of training.

If anything, the difference between them had only become greater, leaving Ilya to wonder exactly how much longer he could continue running before Aleksei finally landed a clean strike.

Another chain scraped across the floor.

Ilya immediately pushed himself away from the wall.

"Then stay there for a second!"

He extended one hand toward the narrow corridor separating them.

Rather than allowing his cold to spread indiscriminately through the hallway, Ilya compressed it into a specific section directly ahead of Aleksei.

Heat vanished from that point almost instantaneously, and the moisture hanging in the air crystallized as frost spread across the walls, floor, and ceiling.

Crack——!

Ice rapidly filled the passage.

Layer after layer formed upon itself, expanding inward from every surface until the already narrow hallway was completely sealed behind a thick barricade of frozen stone and ice.

It wasn’t the broad environmental freezing Ilya usually relied upon, but something far more concentrated, forcing as much cold as possible into one limited area until practically everything caught within it froze solid.

That was Frost Pressure.

It was another technique Ilya had developed while experimenting with Niflheim, based on the simple idea that he didn’t always need to freeze everything around him.

By rapidly removing heat from one specific area, he could freeze an opponent’s limb, lock a weapon in place, turn a patch of ground into ice, or interfere with an incoming attack without wasting power on the surroundings.

In this case, he had focused it on the hallway itself.

Ilya clenched his hand.

The temperature dropped even further.

The barricade thickened until the last visible gaps disappeared, leaving several meters of solid ice packed tightly between the walls.

Against an ordinary opponent, forcing their way through something like that would have bought Ilya more than enough time to put some distance between them.

Ilya turned around.

Boom——!

He stopped.

A crack split the center of the barricade.

"...Seriously?"

Boom——!

The entire wall of ice shook.

Cracks spread outward from the impact, branching through layer after layer as something on the other side continued striking it.

Ilya stared for only a second before deciding that whatever pride he might have taken in his newly developed technique could wait until he wasn’t being hunted through his own mansion.

"Good enough..."

He ran.

Behind him, another impact thundered through the corridor.

Boom——!

The barricade shattered.

Ilya didn’t bother looking back.

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