The Villainess Wants To Retire-Chapter 451: Bleeding Weapon

The mask was gone now, replaced by a raw, bleeding anger. "Your ’lessons,’ Vetra. Your tortures. Do you think I’ve forgotten them?"

The memories flooded back, unbidden and vivid, washing over him with the force of an avalanche. He was six years old again, standing in a stone chamber that smelled of stagnant water and old blood.

Vetra stood by a massive iron basin filled with slush and jagged chunks of ice. Two guards, their faces impassive behind steel visors, held his small, shivering frame.

"You will learn control, Soren," Vetra’s voice echoed in the memory, cold and detached. "Your magic is a wild thing. It must be broken before it breaks you."

He remembered being stripped, the cold air already stinging his skin, before being dragged to the basin. He screamed as they forced him under.

The water wasn’t just cold; it was a physical assault, a thousand needles of ice stabbing into his eyes, his ears, his lungs. He tried to thrash, but the guards’ hands were iron.

He couldn’t breathe. His lungs burned, screaming for oxygen, but there was only the crushing, suffocating blackness of the ice.

Just as his vision began to fail, just as the darkness started to claim him, they would pull him up. He would gasp, a wet, desperate sound, only for Vetra to look at him with disappointment.

"Again," she would say. Back under. Hour after hour, until his skin was a bruised, translucent blue and his heart was a slow, dying drum in his chest.

When he was finally allowed to collapse on the stone floor, shaking so violently his teeth cracked, she wouldn’t offer a blanket or a kind word. She would simply say, "Better. Tomorrow, we increase the duration."

He remembered the isolation, weeks spent in a magically darkened room where the silence was so absolute he could hear the blood rushing through his own veins, a torture designed to ’master his mind’ that nearly shattered it instead.

He remembered the starvation, days without food followed by forced combat against grown men, Vetra watching from the balcony as he was beaten and bruised, telling him that ’weakness is death.’

He remembered the first time she made him kill, the prisoner, a man whose name he never knew, kneeling in the dirt while Vetra stood behind Soren, her hands on his shoulders, whispering that mercy was a luxury he couldn’t afford.

"All in the name of your ’love,’" Soren spat, his voice tight with a suppressed tremor. He let out a bitter, hollow laugh. "We both know that’s bullshit, Vetra. You didn’t love me. You loved what I could do for you."

Vetra didn’t flinch. She smiled, unapologetic and serene. "Yes," she said. "It was for your own good. No weakling could ever rule an empire like Nevareth. No boy with a soft heart could survive the vipers in this court. I did what was necessary to ensure your survival, and mine."

Her belief was absolute, a twisted logic that saw the destruction of a child as the only path to the creation of a king. 𝗳𝐫𝚎𝗲𝚠𝚎𝗯𝕟𝐨𝘃𝚎𝗹.𝗰𝗼𝗺

"That was no way to raise a child!" Soren’s voice cracked, the grief of his lost, shattered childhood leaking through the cracks of his fury.

"I was a boy, Vetra. Not a weapon. Not a tool. I was a human being who needed... something you were incapable of giving. You stole that from me. You reached inside and tore out the part of me that could feel anything other than this freezing void, and you did it because you were afraid of anything you couldn’t control."

Vetra watched him, her eyes calm, almost pitying. "You were not like any other child, Soren. You were the very essence of ice magic in human form. Even then, your existence was an anomaly. It made no sense. You were born with a power that should have consumed you before you could walk.

Do you really think a ’normal’ upbringing would have saved you?" She stood up, walking toward him until she was inches away, her presence an oppressive, cold weight.

"Soreth needed to be put down," she said, her voice dropping into a low, brutal honesty.

"He was a rabid dog, tearing this empire apart with his madness. And no mere man, no mere ice mage, could have ended him. So, I forged you. I put you in the fire and the frost until you were hard enough to endure the weight of the crown."

She leaned in close, her eyes gleaming with a terrible pride.

"I made you sharp enough to cut, Soren. Sharp enough to bleed. And sharp enough to kill. And you did. You did exactly what I designed you for."

She let the statement sink in, her gaze fixed on him as if she were admiring a masterpiece she had painted in blood and ice. The challenge hung in the air, a silent, mocking reminder that even as he sat on the throne, he was still standing in the shadow of the basin.

The silence in the cell grew heavy, almost tactile. Inside the storage chest, Bianca pressed her hand against her mouth, her eyes wide as she listened to the history of the man she had once admired and now feared. The air in the room felt thick with the ghosts of the boy Soren had been and the monster Vetra had always been.

Soren stared at her, the frost on his boots shimmering in the dying torchlight. He wanted to strike her. He wanted to freeze the breath in her lungs and watch her shatter into a thousand pieces. But more than that, he wanted her to be wrong. And yet, as he looked at his own hands, hands that had ended a god-like king and held a world in a frozen grip, he couldn’t find the words to prove her false.

"I am not your creation," he whispered, though the words felt hollow even to him.

"Aren’t you?" Vetra asked softly. "Then why are you here, Soren? Why do you still come to me when the shadows get too long?"