The Nightshade Terror (BL Harem)

"Really now?" Valentius was not amused. The hell was Albert thinking, using Valentius' pure Nightshade lineage to marry him?

"You don't know what's it like!" The boy didn't even sound like his usual self.

No, he sounded so, as if all that posh he had used to make the girls swoon had been beaten out of him.

"Albert… we are married now!" Valentius jumped to his feet. Didn't that boy understand that they were both, well, boys? "We have the same thing between the legs!"

"Good," Albert sounded so, as if that calmed him down. "You are probably not like Bartolomeo," the boy shuddered, then looked at his hands. "I need a bath. A long one."

"There are no streams nearby," Valentius had searched for one, but to no avail. Which had saved his life, he mused.

Wait! The mana berries had a secret! He needed to tell the book the secret! To get another piece of information for it!

He took the backpack off his back, only to see that there were no scorch marks on it.

Valentius smiled.

It must have protected his back from being burned! From the explosion, even!

"Where did you get that?" Was Albert trying to sound more like his old self? Valentius wanted to snap at the boy because he was Albert, he even sounded like that Albert who had told him he was never going to pass, but…

That Albert had died.

Had bled out from a bleeding shoulder. Where the slave rune had given birth to a new Albert.

One who was trying to be brave, but was still there, near a tree, and hugging his legs.

"I killed Lord Claudius of Wendel for it," Valentius didn't think that Albert would buy any lie he tried to sell him.

The boy was a healer.

Those needed to not only be able to read and write, but to know their anatomy, and herbs, and…

To be everything his parents had wanted of him, but he was not.

Albert whipped his head to stare at him, his eyes wild.

His smile showing the first hints of a mind gone sick with the worst sickness there was.

"Did you really?" Albert whispered.

His teeth were yellow. One of his canines was missing.

Beth had missing teeth as well, Valentius couldn't help but remember.

"I did. Turned his head into mush," Valentius didn't tell the boy how he had done it. He doubted that Albert found it important at all.

No. The night sky was filled with laughter. Laughter which Valentius wanted to draw out at any price.

He took out the book and began.

Because it wasn't fair!

It wasn't fair that the place where their hopes and dreams should have been nurtured had done that to Albert!

Valentius even though the boy had cut his pretty hair just to save himself…

Like a fox eating through his foot, just to save itself from the trap it had stepped in.

He wrote about berries, as the first raindrops fell on the page. He wrote about magical leaves, not even knowing what he could take for that information.

He just wrote.

With the hope that, should Albert stop laughing one day, he could go back to a happier Albert.

Valentius hated himself for thinking that the old Albert should never come back. The boy had not been completely rotten.

Bartolomeo had been his best friend…

The pen snapped, the jewels flying all over the grass.

Albert was still laughing and twirling around!

Valentius didn't know if there was any difference between the blonde and the headless ruin, who…

"Quit your crying," the pretty handwriting was back. But the words it was writing in its pale gold script were not kind.

Not as pretty as Valentius had convinced himself the person on the other side of this spell was.

"Nothing can be solved by crying," Valentius knew that. He didn't want to hear it.

He didn't need to know that he was going to die in the mud!

"If you don't fight, no one is going to fight for you," it was the truth, even.

Offered for… what?

Valentius blinked.

Telling someone who knew so much about mana what mana berries could do?

Was he a complete idiot?

That person probably knew more about the berries than Valentius would ever find out!

"If you want power," the person continued, a contract appeared before Valentius.

One which started with two crossed rings!

This person was vile, and cruel, and unlike the system, Valentius realized, refused to flash the contract before him.

To give him the comfort of feeling cheated.

"Then I can give it to you. You killed my former champion, but I think I can work with you," the lord had never taken a wife, a small voice told Valentius.

Why should he? The Collection of the Archdemon… Amos!

Amos! The youngest necromancer to ever become an Archdemon! The man was just five years Valentius senior!

And yet… he had more power at his fingertips than Valentius would have ever gotten, in the kitchen, peeling potatoes.

Or even in that Cave of Horrors, as he called it, fighting insects which had been just normal but nasty to him when he saw them doing the same things they had done to that headless boy to each other.

"No one but me will offer you power," Amos continued. "No one. You will just kill them."

"I…" Valentius began to read the contract. He would be the Archdemon's bride. Albert would be dragged into that, seeing as the blonde had been an idiot.

Albert… why wasn't Albert laughing anymore?

Valentius looked at him. At the blonde, who had his hands over his mouth and shaking his head.

"No," Valentius wasn't thinking about how hard life would be without the protection of an Archdemon.

He wasn't Lord Claudius, who beat up kitchen maids and slaves and did to them what no one should do to anyone!

He wasn't that dungeon core, who had given life to monsters who didn't even respect the dead!

Valentius was no Valentine! No Archdemon's bride!

"To hell with you!" He roared, taking a hold of Albert's still crackling staff.

Bringing it closer and closer to the book which could have given him the world on a silver platter…