The Villainess Wants To Retire-Chapter 516: Confessions

Vetra’s read on Soren began to degrade.

Her head darted back and forth, confused by the sudden loss of visual data.

But the cost to Eris was immediate.

Every small flame was a hammer blow to her chest. She could feel the cracks on her collarbone widening, the heat of the seal threatening to spill out and consume her.

Each flick of her wrist was a price paid in her own life’s blood, but she didn’t stop. 𝒇𝒓𝒆𝒆𝙬𝒆𝒃𝓷𝒐𝓿𝙚𝙡.𝒄𝓸𝒎

Fight better, Soren, she thought, her vision blurring. Make it worth it.

The exchange continued. It was an extended, grueling dance of shifting weights and desperate parries. Neither was winning.

Even with his divine ascension, Soren was fighting a woman who had forgotten more about combat than most men ever learned.

They were evenly matched in technique, two masters of the same school trying to out-think the other’s architecture.

Then, Vetra realized the mirrors were gone. She sensed the change in the air, the way Soren was suddenly landing hits she hadn’t predicted.

She abandoned her trained responses. She stopped being the Empress and became the beast. She went primal, letting the ancient, predatory instincts of the Syvrak take the lead.

This was harder to predict. There was no rhythm to her movements, only hunger and reflex. Soren tried to adjust, but he was still thinking in patterns.

A strike got through.

Vetra’s massive, jagged tail caught Soren squarely across the chest. The sound was sickening, a distinct, bone-cracking contact that echoed through the ruin.

Soren was thrown back several meters, his body skipping across the frozen ground before he landed hard and stayed down.

Eris’s instinct flooded through her like a tidal wave. Move. Go to him. The fire surged in her chest, a violent roar that made the seal fracture with a dramatic, visible snap. The light spilling from her skin was now a blinding gold. It hurt to exist.

She forced herself to stay still. She pushed the fire down, suppressing the urge to scream, suppressing the urge to run. If she moved, Vetra would finish them both.

The cost of holding back that much energy was enormous; her face went pale, her lips trembling with the effort of keeping the seal from exploding.

The silence held for a single, agonizing second.

Then, Soren moved. It wasn’t the frantic scramble of a beaten man. It was slow, deliberate, and inevitable. He rose to his feet, looking down at the place where the tail had shattered his ribs, then turned his gaze toward Vetra.

Something clicked in his mind. She had gone primal because her technique had failed. She was hiding behind the beast because she was afraid.

"There it is," Soren said quietly, his voice a low hum.

He shifted his strategy. He stopped trying to counter her patterns. He stopped using the techniques she had taught him.

He let the Aenithra part of him, the deeper, ancient dragon, take the lead. He matched her primal with something older than her entire lineage.

The change was visible immediately. The runes on his skin brightened until they were painful to look at, and the cold intensifying around him became a physical weight.

Ice began to form around him, not as a separate weapon, but as an extension of his own body. His arms became longer, his fingers tipped with crystalline claws. He was becoming the winter.

The tide turned. Vetra was losing now, and she knew it. Her wounds were multiplying; each exchange took a piece of her hide, a piece of her strength. She was deteriorating.

She stopped. She didn’t beg. She didn’t bargain. Her human voice, the one buried deep beneath the Syvrak’s roar, finally surfaced. It was labored and thin.

"You know what the cruelest thing is?" she asked.

Soren stopped. He gave her the courtesy of his attention, listening to the dying words of the woman who had ruined him.

"I looked at you when you were little," Vetra said, her voice small and exhausted. "And I thought... here is something that cannot be taken from me. If I make it strong enough. If I make it a weapon." She let out a dry, rattling breath. "I was so tired, Soren. So tired of having things taken. My father. My brothers. My sons."

The exhausted grief in her voice was a heavy, suffocating thing. "I made you into a weapon because weapons don’t get taken. They get used." She looked at him, and for the first time, the madness in her eyes was replaced by a hollow, agonizing regret.

It wasn’t an excuse. It wasn’t absolution. It was just the truth of her damage.

The silence held for a long time. Soren’s voice was quiet when he finally spoke. "You did what you thought was right." He paused, his eyes glowing softly. "But it still isn’t an excuse. You didn’t save me, Vetra. You just tried to hide in me."

He raised his hand. "Rest, Vetra."

It wasn’t said with hatred. It wasn’t said with warmth. It was neutral, an acknowledgment that she was human, and she was broken, and it had finally led to the end.

Soren moved. He drew everything into himself, every rune, every mark of the Frostmother, every ounce of the power he had borrowed. He didn’t use violence.

He called the ice, but not the ice he had made. He called the primordial ice that had existed before the first king, before the first empire.

The ground didn’t shatter. It opened like a door, the way ice retreats in a great thaw. Vetra’s Syvrak form didn’t explode; it began to dissolve.

It was like watching something ancient return to the elements from which it came. The scales became water, the water became vapor, and the vapor became nothing but cold, still air.

There was no sound but a long, final exhale.

When the light faded, there was nothing left. Not even fragments. The ground where the Empress had stood was unmarked, as if she had never existed at all.

The silence that followed was total. Soren stood in the middle of the ruined palace, the runes on his skin dimming slowly. His hair settled, and the glow in his eyes began to recede, though a spark of the inhuman remained. The enemies were gone. The Syvrak were deep underground. The war, for today, was over.

Eris was still standing. Somehow.