Never Die Villain

Ilya fell.

This was hardly his first time falling from such a ridiculous height, but unfortunately, it was the first time he had remained conscious enough to experience every second of it.

The wind screamed past his ears as he plummeted alongside shards of glass, and with nothing else available to him, Ilya poured every ounce of concentration he had left into the blizzard only he could perceive.

In actuality, he couldn’t see the ground at all.

The Whiteout had grown so thick that everything below him had disappeared behind an endless curtain of snow, leaving Ilya with no way to judge how far he had fallen or how many seconds remained before impact.

All he could do was manipulate the blizzard around himself, gathering the wind beneath his body and desperately trying to create enough upward force to soften the fall.

Unfortunately, even that was proving difficult.

Controlling several currents while falling through the blizzard was entirely different from using them to propel himself forward with solid ground beneath his feet.

Instead of simply slowing his descent, Ilya quickly realized that he was forcing himself diagonally through the air, his body drifting farther and farther away from the palace with every passing second.

"Ah, fuck..."

He tried correcting himself.

The wind shifted, and so did Ilya.

"Wrong way!"

Another current caught him from the opposite side, and rather than stabilizing his descent, the conflicting winds sent his body spinning through the whiteout.

Ilya clenched his teeth and forced himself to stop panicking, because throwing more wind around without any sense of direction was only going to make him hit the ground sideways at an even more impressive speed.

He needed something simpler.

"Up..."

Ilya extended both hands downward.

"Just fucking push me up...!"

The blizzard gathered beneath him.

———!

A gust of wind erupted upward, catching his entire body at once and sharply reducing his speed. The sudden change in momentum nearly knocked the air from his lungs, but Ilya maintained the pressure, continuously forcing the wind against his descent as the snow rushed around him.

Then something dark appeared through the snow.

Ilya’s eyes widened.

"Too fast...!"

He immediately increased the pressure.

The wind roared below, snow exploding outward before he had even reached the ground, but there simply wasn’t enough distance left to completely stop his fall. Ilya brought his arms over his head and reinforced his body with whatever magic he could manage.

Boom——!

He struck the ground diagonally.

The accumulated wind threw him across the snow rather than allowing him to take the entire impact vertically, sending Ilya tumbling several meters through the courtyard before he finally came to a stop.

For several seconds, he remained there on his back, staring into nothing but white while his already battered body attempted to decide which injury it wanted to complain about first.

"Ghh..."

Ilya groaned and slowly opened his eyes, expecting nothing more than the whiteout swirling overhead. Instead, several silhouettes were standing around him, their faces gradually coming into focus as he blinked the snow from his eyelashes.

"...."

His family was already there.

Valentin stood directly over him with several members of the branch families gathered nearby, while a group of knights had already spread throughout the courtyard with their weapons drawn.

Apparently, the evacuation from the banquet hall had brought practically everyone outside, and Ilya, in his desperate attempt to avoid landing anywhere near the servants, had somehow managed to throw himself straight into the middle of his own family.

Ilya looked at them.

They looked at Ilya.

"...Good evening."

"Explain the situation, boy," Valentin demanded.

And so, Ilya explained everything.

He left nothing out, recounting how Aleksei had entered his room, how their conversation had gradually turned strange, and how his cousin had begun speaking about a voice that only he could hear.

"...That can’t be."

The first person to react was Elder Karskin.

Aleksei’s father pushed through the relatives gathered around them, staring down at Ilya as though he had just spoken complete nonsense. His face had gone pale, but the disbelief lasted only a moment before his features hardened.

"You must be mistaken, Young Lord. For Aleksei to Distort over something as insignificant as losing a duel would be impossible..."

Elder Karskin shook his head, speaking with such certainty that it almost sounded as though he knew Aleksei better than Aleksei knew himself.

"I’m not making an assumption based on his behavior, Elder Karskin," Ilya said. "I watched him Distort in front of me."

"Then perhaps you misunderstood what you saw!"

"He grew several times his original size, covered himself in armor, sprouted enough chains to demolish half the corridor, and spent the next several minutes trying to kill me."

Ilya glanced down at his bloodied clothes before looking back at him.

"I’m having difficulty imagining what else I was supposed to misunderstand."

A few relatives nearby exchanged uneasy glances, but Elder Karskin’s expression remained firm.

"Aleksei has always been an emotional boy, despite my efforts to correct that weakness. Perhaps whatever occurred between the two of you caused his aura to run rampant, or perhaps there is some other phenomenon at work, but a Distortion..."

In truth, the news of people suddenly Distorting was so recent that it should not have properly reached the North yet.

Much of the family had been confused when Ilya announced that Aleksei had Distorted, with several of the younger relatives clearly having no idea what the word even meant in this context, but those who were better informed understood enough to know that this was no laughing matter.

The elders in particular maintained their own messengers and sources within the capital, and rumors of what had been happening there had already begun reaching their ears.

Distortions themselves were nothing new, and separate cases had been recorded throughout the Empire for generations, but the idea that an ordinary person could suddenly transform into one was a different matter.

Nobody understood the conditions.

Nobody knew what caused the transformation, why one person Distorted while another person experiencing the same grief or desperation did not, or whether the process could somehow be reversed once it began.

The reports coming from the capital had been inconsistent enough that even determining what was true had become difficult, with each new incident seemingly contradicting whatever conclusions scholars had drawn from the one before it.

For one of those incidents to happen here, during the Winter Assembly of all times, was almost too unbelievable to accept.

The Belozerskys had gathered nearly every important member of the family in one place. Elders, branch heads, heirs, knights, and children were all present within the estate, which meant that if Ilya’s warning had come even a few minutes later, Aleksei could have wandered into a banquet hall filled with practically the entire ruling structure of the North.

That realization gradually settled over the crowd.

"Your Grace," one of the elders finally spoke. "If the reports from the capital are accurate, then we cannot treat this as an ordinary magical incident..."

"I know."

Another elder frowned. "If Aleksei truly became one of those creatures, then there may be some secondary condition we aren’t aware of."

"You’re suggesting it could spread?"

"I’m saying we know too little to confidently say that it cannot."

The surrounding relatives became clearly unsettled at that.

Elder Karskin, however, remained silent.

Ilya noticed.

The man had gone strangely still, his attention fixed upon the palace as another distant tremor passed through the ground.

There was concern on his face, certainly, but Ilya couldn’t tell whether it was the concern of a father who had just learned something terrible had happened to his son, or that of a man realizing something he had kept hidden might soon be dragged into the open.

Then another impact echoed from inside.

Boom——!

Ilya turned toward the palace.

"...Wait."

Ilya’s expression changed as he looked back toward the palace, suddenly realizing that the relentless crashes that had accompanied Aleksei’s pursuit had stopped shortly after he threw himself through the window.

If Aleksei was no longer pursuing him, then something, or someone, had drawn his attention elsewhere.

"...Where is Anastasiya?"

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