Chapter 108: The Guy Who Does That

By the time Serena and I got back to the banquet hall, I had fixed my trousers and Serena had fixed her lipstick. Neither of us said a word. Hex looked up from her wine, glanced at the two of us, and very politely pretended not to notice anything.

"There you are!" She waved me over. "Kohaku, come here. There’s somebody you should meet, since you’ll be seeing a lot of him."

A thin man in a gray coat was standing beside her chair. He had neat gray hair, a neat gray beard, and a silver ring on his left hand with a small black stone in it. He smiled at me and bowed exactly as low as a man should bow to a commoner, which wasn’t very low.

"This is Secretary Anselm Pryce," Hex said. "He handles the Queen’s private correspondence, and he’s helping me with the engagement."

"A pleasure, Miss Sakana." He turned to Serena and bowed again, slightly deeper. "Lady Frostfall. You look radiant tonight. You must feel very lucky."

Serena’s hand closed tight around her new fork.

I shook Pryce’s hand. His fingers were cold and dry, and the black stone in his ring brushed against my knuckle.

Something in the back of my head went off like a bell.

The gray secretary twisted his black-stoned ring and smiled his serpent smile.

[OH, WAIT. WAIT, WAIT, THIS IS THE GUY THAT...]

I didn’t remember the rest of it. I only remembered writing that one sentence, and how proud I’d been of the phrase "serpent smile," and the feeling that came with it, which was that something terrible was about to happen.

"Excuse me," I said. "I need to use the restroom. It’s an emergency."

Hex blinked.

"Didn’t you just..."

I was already gone.

I locked myself in a stall in the ladies’ powder room and sat down on the closed lid.

"Status."

MANUSCRIPT — Lv.2Current MP: 95

"Show me the Cultural Festival. Everything on the final night, from the start of the play to the end of the night. All of it."

Scenes located: "The Princess of the Fallen Star" through "Ashes Beneath the Red Moon" (Chapters 71–73)Cost: 20 MP. Proceed?

I swallowed. "Yes."

Current MP: 75

The screen went white. This time, I read every word.

The first part was the same as before. There was the rain machine, Aldric’s marble-and-destiny face, and the kiss. Then came the line about Cassian slipping out the side door, and this time, the text kept going.

Cassian moved through the shadows behind the great hall. He had seen it during the second act, the glint of a black stone in the royal box, a hand reaching beneath a gray coat. His instincts had never once been wrong.

In the royal box, Secretary Pryce rose from his seat. The dagger in his hand was carved from black glass, and it drank the light. He was a servant of the Church of Lux, and he had waited eleven long years for this night. The Queen sat before him, unaware. All he had to do was strike.

But Captain Hexilia Frostfall saw him first!

She threw herself in front of her Queen with no time to draw her sword. The black glass blade pierced her heart. She fell without a sound, as the music swelled on the stage below and nobody in the great hall knew.

Cassian burst through the door a moment later. His sword flashed, crimson and terrible, and the traitor fell. But he was too late, and he knew it. He knelt beside the captain and closed her eyes.

Far below, in the front row, Serena Frostfall felt something tear inside her chest. She did not know why. She did not know yet.

The next morning, she found out. She did not cry. She went to her room and locked the door, and when she opened it again three days later, the girl who had been cruel only in small ways was gone. In her place was something cold, something that hated the Church, the kingdom, and the girl in silver starlight who had been kissing the prince while her sister died.

This was the night the villainess was born.

End of scenes.

I closed the screen.

My hands were shaking, so I sat on them.

[I killed her. That’s so cold! Fifteen-year-old me needed a reason for Serena to turn evil, so she made up a sister and then killed her off in one paragraph.]

Out in the banquet hall, I could hear Hex laughing at something. It was the kind of laugh that probably made multiple people fall for her at once.

And in three weeks, she was going to step in front of a black glass knife while I stood on a stage in a mask.

I washed my face, fixed my collar as much as it could be fixed, and walked back into the banquet hall like nothing had happened.

Hex waved me back to my seat.

"There she is! Feeling better?"

"Much better, thanks. It must have been the crab." I sat down, picked up a bread roll, and smiled at her. "Did I miss anything?"

"Only the duke explaining the history of his beard," Hex said. "You got lucky."

I laughed in the right place. Then, while Hex turned to answer someone across the table, I took a bite of bread and started doing the math.

The Manuscript had rules. I’d learned them the hard way. Whenever a canon plot point happened, no matter how stupidly or sideways it happened, the system paid me MP. Hexilia Frostfall dying on the last night of the festival was a canon plot point. In fact, it was the most important thing that happened to Serena in the entire novel. If I stopped it, that thread would be dead forever, and I had no idea how much the system would charge me for killing it.

But then...

[Do I even need it?]

"Kohaku?" Hex was looking at me. "I asked whether you’re nervous about the play."

"Oh! Yeah. Very." I nodded. "I have a lot of lines."

"I’ll be watching from the royal box. The Queen adores the Founder’s Play, and she never misses it, so I’m on guard duty that night." Hex grinned and nudged Serena with her elbow. "Best seat in the house. I’ll be sure to cheer for the fox."

Across the table, Secretary Pryce lifted his wine glass.

"I wouldn’t miss it either," he said pleasantly. "I’ll be up in the box as well, at Her Majesty’s side."

I smiled at him, and I nodded, and I ate the rest of my bread roll without tasting any of it.

Beyond the money, there was a bigger problem. If Hex didn’t die, then Serena never locked herself in her room for three days. The villainess never got born. Every single thing that happened after the festival in the original novel, every battle, every scheme, and every betrayal, was built on top of Serena hating the world. If I pulled that one brick out, I didn’t know what the rest of the wall would do. The story was already full of cracks, and some of those cracks were my fault.

I looked over at Serena.

She was sitting up straight with her hands in her lap, the way she never did for Dame Brask. Hex was telling some story about a horse that had eaten a general’s hat, and Serena wasn’t laughing, but she was watching her sister’s face the entire time. When Hex reached the end, Serena’s mouth curved up at one corner, very slightly, for maybe half a second.

I had never seen her look at anyone like that.

Then, I remembered the second notification in my Status screen, the one from the beach.

New Canon Established: The Fox, The Peasant, and the Villainess

The system had already accepted it. It had taken Lily’s harem and replaced it with three people, and one of them was Serena. Serena also had Dawnlight, the only sword in the world that could kill the Calamity Queen. For the new story to work, Serena had to make it to the final battle and stand next to Lily, on the same side.

The old story needed Serena to hate everything. My story needed her not to.

So, if I let Hex die, I’d be protecting the canon I’d already broken, at the expense of the one the system had actually accepted.

[Okay. That’s a really good argument. That’s a great argument, actually. I’m going to pretend that’s the reason.]

Hex laughed at her own story again, loud and warm, and stole another grape off Serena’s plate. Serena let her.

The real reason was much simpler than any argument. I had written this woman in one paragraph, to die, so that a fifteen-year-old’s villain could have a sad backstory. Now she was sitting three feet away from me, scratching her little sister behind the ear and calling her pup in front of a hundred and fifty nobles.

[Fuck it. I’m going to save her.]