A Match Made in Self-Defense
Well, this is fucked.
Cesare knew exactly what kind of man Lysian was—he had read the original novel enough times to know it cold. A thorough, glacial creature ruled entirely by whim and interest. Anyone who fell outside the orbit of that interest couldn't buy so much as a glance from him. For a man like that to send someone an invitation first, for purely private reasons, was rare enough to count on one hand.
In other words...
A single line of cold sweat trickled down the back of his neck. He's taken an interest in me.
The reason was obvious enough. Wasn't Cesare supposed to be Leoneld's sworn adversary, if the original had gone according to script? And now that same Cesare was suddenly showering Leoneld with desperate, earnest courtship. Of course it would catch the man's eye. Unpredictable, erratic behavior—there was no bait in the world better suited to hooking Lysian's attention.
And knowing Lysian's twisted personality, he had probably...
He probably found it entertaining.
Cesare dragged the corners of his mouth upward by force. Strength flooded the fingertips crushing the letter without his permission, and the paper split. With a sharp rasp, the shredded fragments crumbled away, as though giving voice to the storm of his feelings.
But in truth, the reason this situation was a genuine catastrophe lay elsewhere.
Come to think of it... those fanfics. The ones written by that utterly depraved author.
Digging through his memory, he recalled that besides Leoneld × Cesare, the woman had shipped every conceivable pairing under the sun. Leoneld with Lysian. Lysian with Cesare...
...Yes. Did you catch that?
There had existed a fic titled Lysian × Cesare: Omegaverse!
It's already hilarious that she paired up characters who barely shared a scene in the original, but...
Regardless, the real problem was that it came from the same author as the story he had transmigrated into. And if those two fanworks happened to share a single universe...
Fuck.
Cesare forced his face into stony composure and spoke. "I'm not going."
Riiip—
Watching the letter get torn in half without mercy, the butler spoke up, his face lined with worry. "Your Grace, but..."
"I said I'm not going. Must I say it twice before it sinks in?"
Thud— The pitifully halved scraps of paper were dropped into the wastebasket without a moment's hesitation.
"No matter what happens, I have absolutely no intention of attending. Make sure you understand that." Cesare snapped coldly, his brow knotted tight. Then, as if the matter deserved not one more word of his time, he turned sharply away—shaking his head with a desperate look that hadn't been there before.
If I get tangled up with him, I'm fucked.
Leoneld was one thing; their entanglement was fated, sooner or later. But Lysian was a man whose path had barely so much as brushed Cesare's even in the original. He could say this with certainty: the moment the two of them were shipped together, his chastity, his life, all of it would go up in flames. He was already tearing his hair out over the omegaverse framework alone—he had no desire to add another walking hazard to the list.
And of all people, it had to be that Fourth Prince.
Lysian le Aurelian. To sum the man up in a single phrase...
...a fucking bastard.
That was Cesare's honest reader's review after slogging through the long, long original. A psychopath. No other word in existence could contain him—humanity's dregs, plain and simple.
There was one legendary scene that had sent every last reader of the original into screaming faints, novels tumbling from their hands: the flashback in which Lysian, with his own two hands, killed the wet nurse who had doted on him through his childhood.
"...Tsk." Cesare clicked his tongue without meaning to.
He had only read it as text, and yet the scene had been so shocking that it still played vividly behind his eyes. Words on a page alone had been enough to turn his blood to ice—and now he was expected to face that man in the flesh? Every hair on his body stood on end.
Lysian had snapped the neck of the woman who was as good as his own mother. And the reason...
...Well, what does a reason matter to a bastard like that.
Cesare cut the memory short and exhaled a long, deep sigh. The man called Lysian stood far, far outside the bounds of sanity—which is to say, he hadn't done it out of anything so human as ordinary vengeance or hatred. A creature that moved on pure interest alone was simply impossible to gauge.
Either way.
A time bomb with not a single upside to being tangled up in. The answer had already been decided.
Avoid him. Absolutely, unconditionally.
Cesare settled on his conclusion with finality. But the world, as a rule, rarely flowed the way a man wanted it to.
Two days later.
"Your Grace, another letter has come from the Fourth Prince's Palace."
"...Throw it away."
And three days after that.
"Your Grace, another letter from the Fourth Prince's Pal—"
"Again? ...Dispose of it."
Four days later.
"Your Grace, it's come again."
"......"
"......"
The letters did not stop. One a day—no, two, then three... as the days passed, the volume of correspondence grew at an exponential rate, until the servants of the household could attend to no other duties whatsoever and did nothing from dawn to dusk but sort mail.
And so, one week later. The moment Cesare opened his office door, what filled his field of vision was a mountain of paper, stacked upon the antique desk with the imposing grandeur of a tomb. By now even the butler who carried the letters in had gone deathly pale.
"...Y-Your Grace. At this rate, they fully intend to keep sending them..."
"......"
Cesare looked at the towering stacks of correspondence and let out a hollow, disbelieving laugh. ...That lunatic.
For now it was merely a bombardment of letters—but a man capable of this much devotion was bound to escalate to something far more grotesque and far more menacing. Recalling the Fourth Prince's vicious, obsessively persistent temperament as depicted in the original, Cesare ground his molars together. Knowing that man's nature, if he kept up this wall of silence, the next delivery might well be a corpse. Or a curse doll. No—come to think of it, the man might simply seize him by the nape and drag him to the prince's palace by force.
...Fuck it. Fine. I'll go, damn it!
SLAM! Cesare brought his fist down on the desk in a burst of temper. If the board was rigged so that he couldn't escape, then he refused to sit there and simply absorb the blows. His bloodshot eyes gleamed as his mind began to churn. Turn the crisis into an opportunity. When he coolly weighed the gains against the losses, the arithmetic showed this wasn't purely a losing proposition.
Now that I think about it... a good idea just came to me.
Wasn't the single greatest threat hanging over him right now the possibility that he and Lysian might end up entangled—exactly as in one of the works that fanfic author had written? The only way to avert that massacre. A method to catch both of the enormous rabbits threatening his chastity at once—Leoneld and Lysian—had just occurred to him. Namely...
Wouldn't the whole thing resolve itself cleanly if I simply set Leoneld and Lysian up with each other?
The moment the thought crystallized, the corners of Cesare's mouth slid upward into a smooth, satisfied arc. He would unite the two of them in beautiful harmony, then make his own happy exit from the stage! Yes—this was it! Nothing in this world could be more perfect! A delicious thrill of electricity ran through him at the flawless scenario flashing across his mind.
Cesare gave the bell on his desk a light flick. At the clear chime, the door swung open with alarming speed, and his aide entered and bowed with crisp formality.
"You called, Your Grace."
Cesare wiped all traces of his earlier excitement from his face, arranged a deliberately solemn expression, and lowered his voice. "There is something I need obtained. Discreetly."
At his lord's grave air, the aide swallowed drily and clenched his fist. "Just give the word. I will procure it without fail."
Cesare cast a wary glance toward the office door, then beckoned the man closer with a crook of his fingers. The aide bent at the waist, bringing his ear down—and Cesare's whisper brushed against it.
"The thing I need you to find is..."
"......"
"—that."
As the words sank in, the aide's mouth slowly fell open. Only a faint, inscrutable smile remained on Cesare's lips.
And so came the day of the long-awaited ball.
"Your Grace, there is little time remaining in your heat cycle. Will you be taking suppressants?" asked the aide, bustling about with the preparations for the outing.
Heat cycle...
It was certainly a staple of every omegaverse setting he'd ever encountered... but what exactly did it entail again? Cesare mulled it over for a moment, then dismissively shook his head. He had no desire to swallow a drug whose properties he couldn't name, and surely nothing catastrophic would come of simply skipping it.
"I'm fine." Instead of suppressants, Cesare shrugged on a heavy coat and steered the conversation elsewhere. "The preparations I instructed you on—are they complete?"
"Yes. I have obtained everything you ordered. And..." The aide's face had sunk into a strange gloom, as though he still couldn't make heads or tails of it. "I have also delivered the letters to His Highness the Fourth Prince and His Highness the Thirteenth Prince, respectively."
At that, the corners of Cesare's mouth curved into a thoroughly satisfied arc. "Well done."
Everything was proceeding exactly according to plan. To the Fourth Prince Lysian, he had sent word to appear before the garden around the time today's ball began, bearing that item along with a bouquet of flowers. And to the Thirteenth Prince Leoneld, he had passed along a request to come to that same place, at that same hour.
By now, the two of them must be having their fateful encounter, bouquets in hand.
Granted, his chest twinged faintly at the thought of handing the protagonist he had watched across the printed page for so many long years over to some black-hearted bastard of a man... but what choice did he have? To keep his chastity safe and sound, there was no other way!