I Became the Villain Alpha's Omega (BL)

Chapter 322: The Wrong Genre

The transition from the stuffy, tense palace corridors to the open air of the garden terrace didn’t bring the relief Cherion had hoped for. Instead, the moment he, Zarius, and the others stepped out onto the wide stone overlook, they were met with a wall of chaotic sound.

Restless nobles were packed tightly along the balustrades like beautifully dressed, anxious birds, their fans fluttering frantically as their voices rose in a collective tide of high-society panic.

"Look there! They’re coming!" a marchioness gasped, pointing a trembling, jeweled finger toward the gravel pathway that cut through the manicured lawns.

In the distance, a line of imperial guards stepped out of the palace forest. They moved in perfect silence, their boots striking the ground in steady rhythm. The moment the crowd realized what the guards were carrying, every conversation died at once.

Between the four guards was a stretcher. A body lay on it, covered from head to toe with a plain white sheet.

"Good heavens, is that... a body?"

"Who is that?!"

"Is the palace under attack? First the Princess, and now this?!"

The crowd surged forward, spilling down the terrace steps toward the lawn. Some of the younger nobles turned away, pressing hands to their mouths in genuine terror, while the older lords pushed to the front, driven by an ugly, aggressive curiosity.

"Captain!" a high-ranking count demanded, barring the path of the lead guards. "What is the meaning of this? We are being kept here without any explanation, and now you carry a corpse right past us? We demand to know what happened!"

The Captain of the Imperial Guard stepped forward, his face a grim, exhausted mask. He held up a gloved hand, his voice booming over the chatter with tight, military authority.

"Lower your voices, please," the Captain commanded, his tone leaving no room for argument. "There is no immediate danger to the estate. The guards recovered the body of a palace maid deep within the forest. She was found dead there."

Another collective gasp erupted. Whispers exploded instantly, fans snapping open to hide pale faces as the lords and ladies exchanged horrified looks. A maid dead in the forest, right after the princess got poisoned. Just a bad thing after bad thing.

"A maid? Was she murdered? Is there a killer inside the walls?!"

"I cannot share any further details at this time," the Captain cut in sharply, his stern gaze sweeping over the demanding nobles. "The investigation is actively underway. For your own safety and to ensure the guards can secure the grounds, I must ask all of you to return inside immediately."

The guards pushed past, carrying the stretcher toward the lower palace entrance, leaving a trail of frantic whispers in their wake. The nobles drifted off, still grumbling under their breath hurrying back toward the safety of the glowing palace glass.

Zarius stood firmly at the edge of the lawn, his imposing presence a striking contrast to the panicking crowd around them. His sharp eyes weren’t on the body, they were on Karson, who was walking slightly behind the stretcher, his clothes damp from the forest mud and his face calm to the point of being unsettling.

As Karson crossed the path, Zarius stepped forward, his large frame blocking the crown prince’s aide’s path.

"Karson," Zarius called, his tone sharp enough to stop people in their tracks.

Karson stopped, his eyes meeting the Duke’s. For a fraction of a second, the sheer exhaustion on his face slipped through the calm he usually wore. He looked like a man who had reached his absolute limit for the day.

Before Zarius could even form a question about what they had found in the forest, Karson gave a tight, respectful bow, cutting him off with a quiet but firm tone.

"Excuse me, Your Grace," Karson said, his voice tightly strained. "I can’t speak on this right now. I have to report this directly to His Majesty immediately."

Without waiting for a dismissal, Karson straightened up and hurried past them, following the Captain straight toward the King’s private wing.

Cherion watched Karson’s retreating back, a profound, slightly numb sensation washing over him. He blinked, looking around at the beautiful palace gardens, then over at Zarius’s sharp, dangerous profile, and finally back toward the dark, pieces of the forest treeline.

He rubbed the back of his neck, a highly inappropriate, utterly bewildered thought popping into his head.

Wait a minute.

When he had first woken up in this world, he had been absolutely, one hundred percent convinced that he was trapped inside a trashy, Omegaverse romance novel. He knew the tropes. He’d read the tags. It was supposed to be a straightforward, brain-off story about a crown prince and his fated omega "overcoming a royal crisis" through the power of sheer smut and some sacrifices.

The plot should have been simple, a surprise heat cycle here, an out-of-control feral rut there, scent-marking, possessive growling, and enough wall-slamming, bed-breaking action to make a platform content censor sweat. It was supposed to be all hormones and zero thoughts.

So why the hell did it suddenly feel like he was trapped in a psychological mystery thriller?

First, a princess gets poisoned under everyone’s noses, and now, maids are turning up dead in the dark woods, imperial guards are running around sweating through their armor, and a massive conspiracy is actively unfolding right in front of him.

He hadn’t signed up to be a detective. He was just trying to survive the plot, not solve a serial murder case.

"Cherion?"

Zarius’s voice broke through his internal existential crisis. The Duke had turned back to look at him, his dark brows furrowed slightly as he noticed the blank, deeply conflicted expression on Cherion’s face. "Are you alright? You look pale."

"I’m fine!" Cherion said, maybe a little too quickly. He blinked, forcing his brain to reboot. He couldn’t exactly tell the guy that he was having a nervous breakdown because the plot was failing to deliver on the romance-novel quota.

He took a slow breath, desperately trying to put his ’normal person’ mask back on. "Just... a lot to take in, isn’t it?" he added, hoping that sounded like the reaction of a normal, horrified noble and not a guy suffering from genre-blindness. "Everyone’s losing their minds about the Princess, and now this? It’s just... a lot of bad luck in two days. And did you see Karson? He looked like he’d seen a ghost."

Cherion frowned slightly, his analytical side taking over for a split second before he could stop it. "It really seems like this wasn’t just a sudden accident."