Chapter 35 – How to Accidentally Break Your Villain

This dungeon was a total bust.

I stood inside a suffocatingly small chamber, the stone walls seeming to close in with every passing second. The only light came from a crack in the ceiling, a pathetic little sliver of sunshine that only served to illuminate the thick curtain of dust hanging in the air. My grand plan had been flawless. Lure the party’s designated betrayer into a trap, get cornered, and suffer a glorious, plot-advancing defeat.

Instead, I was stuck with him.

Siegfried stood opposite me, his posture ramrod straight. He looked like a cornered animal. A very shiny, very well-dressed cornered animal. He hadn’t said a word since the stone door boomed shut behind us, trapping us in this glorified closet. This was getting awkward. I needed to break the ice, to establish my role as the pathetic, sniveling baggage he was now stuck with. Time to activate my ultimate skill: being useless.

I forced a tremble into my knees.

I let out a shaky breath, making it whistle just a little bit.

I sniffled.

Siegfried’s eye twitched. His hand, which had been resting on the pommel of his sword, tightened its grip until his knuckles were white. He was probably getting annoyed with my cowardice already. Perfect. The seeds of contempt were being sown. My betrayal flag was about to sprout.

“So… uh… looks like we’re trapped, huh?”

He flinched, his eyes widening in what I could only assume was disgust at my pathetic attempt at conversation. He stared at me, his gaze intense, piercing. It was like he was trying to solve a puzzle. The puzzle, of course, was why he was stuck with such a loser. He didn’t answer. He just kept staring, his expression growing more strained by the second.

This was great. He hated me.

“It’s, uh, pretty dark in here. And small.”

I shuffled my feet, kicking a loose pebble. The sound echoed in the crushing silence. I needed to sell this. I had to be the most pitiful, non-threatening entity in existence. My entire revenge plot depended on him underestimating me, writing me off, and eventually sticking a sword in my back for being so annoying.

He took a sharp breath, almost a gasp.

“You did this.”

His voice was a low whisper, raspy and filled with… awe? No, that can’t be right. It must have been rage. Yes, pure, unadulterated rage. He was furious he got trapped with me. The plot was back on track.

“What? No! Of course not! Why would I do this? I’m scared of the dark!”

I waved my hands frantically in front of my face. I made my voice crack on the last word. It was a masterful performance. I deserved an award for this level of dedication to the craft. My future as an edgy anti-hero was practically guaranteed at this point.

Siegfried took a half-step back, pressing himself against the cold stone wall. A bead of sweat trickled down his temple. He looked terrified. He was probably scared of being stuck in a confined space with someone so clearly panicking. It was a legit fear. My panic might get him killed.

“Of course. ‘Scared of the dark.’ A test. This is another one of your tests.”

I blinked. Test? What test? The only test was my patience. This guy was supposed to be a straightforward, arrogant jerk. A simple, easy-to-manipulate NPC. Why was he trying to make things so complicated?

“A test? Dude, no. I’m just… scared. I don’t have any cool powers like you or Kenji. I’m basically just… this guy, you know?”

I gestured to myself, trying to project an aura of complete and utter lameness. I let my shoulders slump. I even tried to look a little bit constipated, just for good measure. A truly pathetic hero is one who looks like he needs to use the bathroom.

His breathing hitched. He was buying it. No, he was more than buying it; he was living it. He saw the pathetic worm before him and was recoiling in horror.

“You… you sealed the only exit. You trapped me in here with you. Alone.”

He said it like he was listing the charges at my murder trial. I mean, he wasn’t wrong on the facts, but his tone was all messed up. It should be contemptuous, not… whatever this was. This weird, terrified respect. It was gross.

“I didn’t seal it! The door just… closed! It was probably a pressure plate or something! I might have stepped on it by accident, I’m sorry!”

I bowed my head in a show of pathetic apology. I was really good at this. My past life of being a nobody was finally paying off. All those years of avoiding eye contact and apologizing for existing were my true superpower.

He stared at the floor where I had been standing. His eyes scanned the stone tiles, then darted back to me. The look on his face was one of dawning, horrified realization. Oh man, he must have realized just how big of a screw-up I was. He was probably calculating how my incompetence would actively endanger his life.

“An ‘accident.’ A flawless maneuver executed under the guise of foolishness. You lured me to this exact spot. You isolated me from the others. All without raising the slightest suspicion.”

I had to stop myself from facepalming. This was not going according to plan. This guy had some kind of weird persecution complex. He was the hero! The handsome, charming, popular hero! Why was he acting like he was the target of some grand conspiracy orchestrated by the class loser?

“No, you’ve got it all wrong! I was just following you! I thought you knew the way!”

I had to double down. My only hope was to be so relentlessly, mind-numbingly pathetic that it would overwhelm his weird paranoia. I had to weaponize my own uselessness.

He let out a dry, humorless laugh. It sounded like grinding stones.

“You thought I knew the way? You, who sees through all deceptions? You, who unmasked my ambitions with a single, disappointed glance? You play the fool so well it is almost indistinguishable from reality.”

Okay, this was getting bad. Really bad. My reputation was actively working against me. Reina and Kenji’s weird delusions about my secret genius had apparently infected this guy too. It was like a virus, and I was patient zero of a plague of misunderstanding. I needed to perform emergency surgery on this conversation before he started worshipping me or something.

“Look, man, about that whole thing with the fruit…”

I decided to address the elephant in the room. My one moment of “genius,” where I saw through his plan. I had to reframe it. I had to make him see that it was a fluke, a lucky guess from a coward.

He stiffened, his eyes wide with alarm.

“I was just trying to look cool! That’s all! I had no idea what you were really up to. I just saw you acting all shifty and I got nervous. I have, like, really bad anxiety. When I get nervous, I say weird stuff. It’s a problem. My mom says I should see someone about it.”

I put my head in my hands and shook it slowly, as if recalling a lifetime of embarrassing social gaffes. It was a deeply personal, deeply pathetic performance. It was also a total lie. I have zero anxiety. My resting heart rate is probably a solid 40 bpm of pure, unadulterated boredom.

Siegfried watched my breakdown with a clinical, detached horror. He looked like a bomb disposal expert watching a toddler run towards the explosive with a pair of scissors.

“Anxiety.”

He repeated the word like it was a foreign concept. Like he was tasting it, trying to decipher its hidden meaning.

“Yes! Anxiety! I thought you were gonna attack me or something! So I just said the first thing that came to mind to try and sound tough!”

This was it. The perfect justification. I wasn’t a brilliant strategist who saw through his schemes. I was a scared kid who got lucky. A fraud. He had to see it. He had to understand that I was not a threat. I was a liability.

He slowly, deliberately, pushed himself off the wall. He took a single, measured step forward. His face was pale, his expression grim. He looked like a man who had finally accepted his fate.

“So that’s your threat. You are telling me that even your most reflexive, panicked instincts are sharp enough to dismantle my life’s ambition. That your ‘anxiety’ is a weapon more potent than my sword.”

He let out a shaky sigh.

“To be so powerful that you must feign weakness not for deception, but simply to exist among lesser mortals without shattering their fragile minds… I… I cannot comprehend it.”

I just stared at him, my mouth hanging open. This was a nightmare. A waking nightmare from which there was no escape. I was trapped in a room with a man who was actively rewriting my narrative into something epic and terrifying, and there was nothing I could do to stop him. He was my biggest, most dangerously delusional fan.

My plot was in shambles. My revenge arc was dead on arrival.

I felt a sudden draft on my ankles.

I looked down. Siegfried was looking down too. A thin line of light had appeared at the base of the far wall. The stone was shifting. A low grinding sound filled the chamber as a section of the wall slowly receded, revealing a dark, narrow passageway.

Siegfried looked from the opening back to me. His eyes were filled with a new emotion. It wasn’t terror anymore. It was resignation. Total, soul-crushing defeat.

“Of course. You knew.”

“Knew what? I didn’t know anything! It’s a secret door! We’re saved!”

I tried to inject some cheerful, idiotic optimism into my voice. Maybe if I acted like a golden retriever who just found a tennis ball, he’d snap out of it.

“You knew this passage would open. You engineered this entire situation, this confinement, this… conversation… to break my spirit. To show me that even when I believe I am in control, I am merely a pawn moving on your board.”

He gestured weakly towards the newly revealed tunnel.

“After you, O Great One.”

He actually bowed. A short, jerky, terrified little bow.

I wanted to scream. I wanted to cry. I wanted to grab him by his stupid, shiny pauldrons and shake him until he understood that I was, and always have been, a complete and total loser. But that would probably just convince him I had some kind of secret battle rage ability.

There was no winning this.

With the heavy sigh of a man whose dreams had turned to ash in his mouth, I shuffled past the bowing fraud and into the darkness of the tunnel. It was damp, and the air smelled of moss and wet stone. I could hear the faint, unmistakable sound of dripping water somewhere up ahead.

At least there might be a place to get a drink.

My throat was incredibly dry from all the talking.