How I Became the Most Wanted Villain

The forest thinned by late morning, the ground beneath Vaun's boots shifting from wet moss to dry gravel. His limbs ached, but not from exhaustion. His body was adapting too quickly, like something inside was stretching further than skin should allow.

By midday, he smelled smoke.

Not the kind born from a ritual fire or the rotted drift of battle. This was cooking smoke. Oil and wood and ash. Human.

He crouched low and crawled up a slope until he saw it.

A camp.

Tucked behind sharpened logs and nailed planks, with canvas stretched over iron beams. It wasn't permanent. No banners, no fires too big. Just enough for warmth, for breathing. Maybe twelve people. All of them armed.

He waited and watched.

The first thing he noticed was the formation. Two sentries stood at the perimeter, facing opposite sides. Trained, but restless. One paced with a cracked rifle slung across his back, the other chewed bark and spit every few seconds.

The others moved slowly, tired, half-starved. A group of worn-down scavengers, survivors of something worse.

Vaun stepped out into the open.

He didn't raise his hands. He didn't speak.

The sentry with the rifle noticed him first. Eyes widened, then narrowed.

"Oi! Stop there!"

Vaun kept walking.

The second sentry raised a spear, poorly sharpened but long enough to gut a boar. They moved toward him, slow but deliberate.

"I said stop, you bastard!"

He stopped.

The camp stirred. People rose from crates and tarps, gripping whatever tools they had. A gaunt woman stepped forward from a tent made of stitched hides. Her hair was black and braided tight, her face split by a scar down her jaw.

She stared at him for a long time before saying anything.

"You look like shit," she said.

Vaun tilted his head.

She gestured to the others. "Let him through."

The men hesitated.

She didn't repeat herself.

The rifleman stepped back, and Vaun walked past him like wind through a gate.

Inside, the tension was thick.

Nobody welcomed him, but nobody tried to stop him either. He was given a place by the fire and a bowl of something grey and warm. He didn't ask what it was. He ate in silence.

The woman sat beside him. Her name was Senna.

"You're not one of the eastern guilds," she said, voice low.

"No."

"Prisoner?"

"Yes."

She nodded. "I thought so. Got that smell."

He didn't respond.

Her eyes flicked to the blackened lines on his arm. "They brand you in there?"

He didn't answer.

Senna didn't press.

Around the fire, others whispered. Two of the youngest looked barely older than boys. One had a club strapped to his thigh. The other, sharp eyes and a nervous leg bounce.

That one kept watching Vaun.

Hours passed.

People filtered out, back to their corners of tarp and bone. The fire crackled low.

Senna stood and stretched. "You're welcome to stay the night. But be gone by first light."

He nodded once.

The night was quiet at first.

Then whispers.

Vaun's eyes opened long before they approached. He'd pretended to sleep. His breath even, shallow. His muscles loose.

He could hear them clearly now.

"That's him. The one with the map," the nervous one whispered.

"Vuric pays high for Cravik blood. You know that," said the other. "We bring him in, that's food for a month."

"You sure he won't just kill us?"

"We don't try, we starve anyway."

Their shadows crawled over the tent's edge.

Vaun's hand moved to his belt.

His wound had reopened sometime during the walk. It throbbed now. A warm pulse, like a second heartbeat. As the blood slid down his ribs, something inside him lit like a fuse.

They bleed first, he thought.

That's the rule.

The flap opened.

He was already moving.

Vaun struck the first boy low in the stomach, knocking the breath out of him with the flat of his blade. The second lunged forward with a dull knife, but Vaun twisted and drove his elbow into the attacker's jaw, snapping it sideways with a wet crunch.

The boy collapsed, twitching. The first one scrambled to his knees and crawled backward, smearing blood in the dirt.

"No..please, I didn't mean—"

Vaun stalked forward, breathing slow, silent. He stared at the boy's face, the tears leaking from his eyes. But his own face held nothing. No rage. No pity. Only stillness.

What are you waiting for? the voice echoed in his skull, subtle as a breeze. Kill him. Feel it.

Vaun hesitated.

The boy's breath hitched. He looked younger now. A child playing at danger, suddenly aware of death's weight.

"Don't—"

The wound on Vaun's ribs throbbed again. A sharp tug beneath the skin. His fingers flexed against the hilt of his weapon.

His blood had awakened. It wasn't screaming. It wasn't begging.

It was guiding.

He knelt.

The boy tried to crawl away, but Vaun grabbed his ankle.

"I gave you a choice," he said calmly. "You took mine."

"No, I—"

Vaun drove the blade forward.

Blood splashed across his face. Hot. Familiar.

He didn't stop until the body stopped moving.

He didn't blink.

The fire was still burning when he stepped out of the tent, dragging the bodies one at a time.

The others stirred. No one intervened.

Senna stood alone beneath a half-collapsed awning, arms crossed.

She watched him dump the corpses onto a pit near the edge of camp and throw a lit cloth onto the heap.

The flames rose slowly.

"You kill them all?" she asked.

Vaun wiped the blood from his chin.

"Yes."

Senna didn't flinch.

She walked closer, boots crunching through gravel and ash.

"You a killer by nature, or just finding out?"

Vaun didn't answer right away.

He looked at his hands. At the stained fingertips. At the steadiness in his wrists.

"Maybe both," he said.

Senna nodded once.

"I won't stop you. But don't come back here."

"I wasn't planning to."

She paused, watching the fire spit sparks into the air.

"If you head north," she said, "you'll reach the ruins. Old place. Broken walls. Used to be a town, I think. Some say there's a black spire beneath it, buried in stone."

Vaun's eyes narrowed.

"A spire?"

She shrugged.

"Just a story. Might be worth a look."

He turned without another word.

Senna didn't follow.

As he disappeared into the trees, the flames behind him cracked louder, as if the dead were screaming in protest.

The road ahead was old, cracked by roots and storms, barely a memory of a path. Vaun followed it north, each step silent, each breath steady.

His body felt too light. His limbs too fast.

He moved like the wind knew his name.

And when he reached the first bend in the path, he stopped and looked back.

Not for Senna.

Not for the camp.

But for the part of himself he'd buried in that fire.

I told you not to bleed, he thought to himself.

But maybe that's how it begins.

By late morning, the sun broke through the trees, spilling pale light over the ridge ahead. Vaun found a brief rest beneath a crooked stone archway, half-swallowed by vines and rust.

He sat down and unwrapped the cloth at his ribs.

The wound had sealed. Not healed. Sealed. Like the skin had melted together from the inside.

Black lines veined outward, subtle but undeniable.

He touched the skin, felt it twitch beneath his fingers.

He didn't wince. Didn't recoil.

Instead, he watched.

Something shifted under the surface, like threads being pulled into place.

A wind brushed past him.

No leaves rustled.

No birds moved.

The silence felt like acknowledgment.

He stood.

And kept walking.

Sometime after midday, he passed a moss-covered road sign. The lettering was foreign, twisted and worn. But below the sign, someone had carved a mark into the wood.

A spiral.

He stopped.

No glow. No sound.

But the shape buzzed behind his eyes.

It's waiting.

He didn't touch it. He didn't linger.

Instead, he traced the shape with his eyes, then walked faster.

Something was ahead.

He didn't know if it was the ruins, or the spire, or something older.

But whatever it was, it knew he was coming.

And it wanted him ready.