"The hell I will!" Lina shrieked, popping up like a possessed marionette. Her hair flared like she was charging a Final Fantasy limit break.
The Rabbit actually jumped, caught so off guard that his watch fell out of his paw and spun into the void like a spinning coin of doom.
"You little narrative gerbil," Lina snarled, stomping toward him. "Get back in there right now! I am not ending on a Ga Over! One failure is character developnt! Two? That’s a career killer!"
The Rabbit, backing up, held up his tiny paws. "Hey, hey, easy! Let’s not hop to conclusions—"
But Lina grabbed him by the shoulders with all the grace of a caffeine-fueled gar on a losing streak.
"You think I’m just going to walk away with a FAILED stamp on my permanent record? That I’ll crawl back to so boring B-Rank world and babysit a sad prince with daddy issues again?!"
"I rember there’s no world like that yet for you," the Rabbit muttered.
"That’s most of the gas I played before!"
Her eyes were bloodshot, her voice echoing into the infinite. Sowhere in the distance, you could almost hear the system’s UI whispering: "Warning. Protagonist ntal stability: critically low."
"I need that damn completion star," Lina growled. "I don’t care if I have to bet my soul, or fight ten Fredrichs in a romance dungeon boss rush. PUT. . BACK."
The Rabbit blinked, fur now a little rumpled. "You really don’t give up, huh?"
"I don’t have ti to give up," she hissed. "This is war. Narrative war."
He dusted off his coat and gave her a long look, adjusting his monocle that materialized purely for dramatic effect. "You know, most people cry and ntal breakdowns after dying in a love route gone wrong. You? You co back like it’s an ani season finale."
"I’m not most people," Lina said flatly.
"That’s very obvious."
They stared at each other.
". . . Fine," the Rabbit said finally, flipping through an invisible clipboard that sparkled with achievent icons and sarcasm. "You want a redo? I’ll give you one. One. But if you fail again, the system will deduct another ten stars which you don’t have right now, so you can’t go back there after you fail again. It’s back to B-rank worlds for you."
Lina narrowed her eyes. "Fine then."
"Good. Now get ready. I’m patching you back in. Sa world, sa starting point before you died. No tutorial. No cheats."
A swirling portal began to open behind him, glowing ominously like a loading screen from hell.
"And maybe," the Rabbit added with a sly smile, "this ti, try not to get murdered by your love interest, hmm?"
Lina rolled her eyes and adjusted her coat like a badass storming back into a final boss arena. "I let him kill after I get that completion star."
"Sure."
With a final glare and a dramatic hair toss, Lina marched into the portal, determined, mad, and ready to re-romance, re-fight, and reclaim her damn completion star.
The void trembled behind her, and the Rabbit sighed again, muttering:
"Glad she’s not too shaken by dying. Most hosts take it hard—end up depressed or ntally unstable. I just hope that doesn’t happen to her in the long run."
====
Lina was back in the sa lavish bedroom in Fredrich’s villa.
The moonlight filtered through the tall arched windows, casting silver shadows across the silk sheets and polished floors. It all looked the sa—golden, elegant, still—but she wasn’t fooled anymore.
Downstairs, the guards were hauling sothing again. The low hum of footsteps, quiet commands, and the subtle clink of tal echoed faintly from below.
Probably more "deliveries" to the mysterious underground level. She didn’t need to guess what was down there. She already knew.
Her mistake was letting her curiosity win last ti. Entering that basent had been a death sentence.
Literally.
She winced at the mory: the glass cage, the pale girl, Fredrich’s voice laced with obsession—and then, bang.
A gunshot.
Her.
Dead.
And then—poof.
A restart. Like a ga checkpoint she didn’t rember unlocking. Dying wasn’t fun, but apparently in this system, it ca with the tiny perk of rewinding the clock a few minutes.
Thank god for that.
She flopped backward on the bed, eyes staring at the ceiling. "So dying just rewinds thirty minutes, huh? Not the worst save feature."
But there was a catch—and not a small one.
She no longer had her ten stars. They were gone. Deducted. Penalized. Punished. Whatever the system wanted to call it. If she failed again, it was ga over.
Permanent return to the dreaded B-rank worlds.
B-rank.
She shuddered. Like being demoted from veteran to noob.
She wasn’t going back to those glitchy, plot-hole-filled nightmares with half-baked romance arcs and bugged side characters who constantly repeated the sa three lines. No. That wasn’t an option.
But of course, she was talking about the oto gas and not about Reid and Lyander.
"Not gonna happen," Lina muttered, rolling onto her side and glaring at the wall like it personally offended her. Though she felt a little better rembering those two villains from before.
But this ti was different. She might have to not like the villain at all. Though her goal remained the sa, and that was to make the villain win regarding her feelings.
Win this world.
And not die.
Simple, right?
Her eyes narrowed. Clearly, Fredrich was not the man he pretended to be. On the outside? Gorgeous. Sophisticated. Generous. The kind of guy who could be the romantic lead in every oto ga.
But on the inside? A red flag buffet.
He was a control freak with a god complex and possibly an emotional support basent girl. That was . . . not normal. Even for a dark romance setting.
Then there was Christian.
ntally unstable ex-boyfriend with abandonnt issues and a global tracking network. Fantastic. Like a mafia boss and a jilted K-drama lead had a baby and nad it Yandere.
"Seriously," she muttered, kicking the blankets off in frustration. "Are all the n in this world emotionally unstable? Is that the the? Should I be expecting the mailman to confess his love while crying into a knife?"
She groaned into a pillow, but a wild grin tugged at her lips anyway.
It was insane.
All of it.
But it was also a challenge—and damn it, Lina thrived on challenges.
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