Chapter 2: The Retirement Plan Lasted Eleven Minutes

A normal person, upon discovering she’d died and been reincarnated as an unnamed background character in her own teenage trash novel, would probably panic. Scream, maybe. Fall to her knees in the rain, perhaps, if rain was available.

I, instead, threw both arms up at the sky.

"THANK YOU!"

A passing pair of students flinched. They muttered something involving the word "weird" and kept going. I didn’t care. I spun in place and pointed both fists at the heavens.

"Whatever you are! Deity, system administrator, bored cosmic intern! THANK YOU! You had options and you chose correctly!"

This was because I knew something key: reincarnation was a lottery, and I’d written enough worlds to know exactly how bad my odds had been.

Seven novels. Seven possible destinations.

Let’s review the alternatives, shall we?

Blade Requiem. My moneymaker. A grimdark revenge epic where the average life expectancy of a named character was eleven Chapters, and the unnamed ones died constantly in the background. Chapter two featured a village getting rendered into paste. Chapter five featured a second village, because the first paste had tested well with readers.

If I’d woken up there, I’d currently be paste.

The Villainess Drinks Alone. Critically beloved. Also a story where the protagonist spent three hundred Chapters being framed, poisoned, exiled, and humiliated before her big fourth-act comeback.

[Sorry, Arianna. If I’d landed in your world, your author would’ve owed you an apology and a very stiff drink.]

Starfall Contract. A world where the magic system ran on debt. Literal debt. Souls as collateral, compound interest on curses, repossession demons. I wrote it during a rough patch with my landlord and it showed.

[Nope.]

Iron Covenant. Military fantasy. Everyone got drafted at fifteen.

[NOPE.]

Hollow Crown. Political intrigue where the smartest characters died first, because teenage me thought that was subversive. I was not confident I’d survive my own writing.

Red Harvest. The horror one. I wrote it in a month, on a dare.

[We don’t talk about Red Harvest.]

And then there was door number seven.

The Heroine’s Heart.

The trash. The trainwreck. The hormone-powered disasterpiece where the greatest threat for the first twelve volumes was a mean girl at a tea party. Food was plentiful, the weather was permanently spring, and the single most dangerous location in the entire setting was a magic school with a fatality rate of exactly zero, because seventeen-year-old me had been physically incapable of killing anyone the readers liked.

To put it this way, the lottery had seven balls in it. Six were painted with skulls.

And instead, God chose to hand me the one painted with a heart.

"Best isekai ever!" I yelled.

And the best part? The part that made me want to kiss the nearest fountain?

I was an extra.

No destiny. No tragic backstory. Okay, no plot armor, sure, but also no plot target painted on my back. A simple, carefree life was right there, within reach, and the plan came together like a religious vision. Like seeing Jesus’s face on a slice of toast!

Step one: walk out the front gate.

Step two: sell the uniform. The tailoring alone was worth a month’s rent.

Step three: countryside. Somewhere deep in Wildfolk territory, where a foxgirl wouldn’t get side-eyed by the church, and which I invented at seventeen for the express purpose of putting fluffy girls in my novel. Meaning it contained, canonically, by authorial decree, an above-average density of gorgeous futa fox women.

Step four: acquire a hammock.

And step five was where it all came together.

Step five was the hammock, plus me, in it, being fed peeled grapes by a rotating staff of slutty fox futas while somebody read me the local gossip. I’d write the occasional smutty pamphlet for beer money. I’d grow a garden. I’d nap so hard that napping researchers would travel from distant lands to study my sleep patterns.

[Retirement at twenty-something. Take that, gig economy.]

I got three glorious steps into my new life before a thought tapped me on the shoulder like an unpaid invoice.

[...What was the plot of this story again?]

I slowed down.

Right. I wrote The Heroine’s Heart nine years and roughly two million words ago. I remembered it the way you remember a fever dream, or your first kiss, or that one party in college.

You know, vibes, highlights, and a vague sense of shame.

I do recall the bones of it, though. So, Lily Everdawn, certified sweetheart, scholarship commoner, kindness rating of eleven out of ten, enters an academy full of rich pricks. The rich pricks underestimate her. She wins everything anyway, because I gave her every affinity, a divine gift, a unique skill, and the moral high ground.

Then, along the way, she collects a reverse harem of, in order: a prince with a godlike jawline, a trench coat with a boy inside it, a loyal and very dumb knight, and a mentor old enough to be legally embarrassing.

[God, my taste in men was theoretical at best.]

Oh, right, there was also the rival!

Serena Frostfall. Ice queen, tea party tyrant, secret half-wolf, the villainess I poured way too much of myself into. She and Lily clash for volumes. Escalating duels, sabotage, one extremely charged scene in a rose garden, two hundred Chapters of increasingly homoerotic dueling.

Then the twist. Lily discovers her real mother is the Calamity Queen, an ancient world-ending horror sealed under the continent, which, through logic I no longer remembered and possibly never had, made Lily a princess. The readers ate it up.

Serena dies in the final battle. Horrifically, I might add. Two whole Chapters of it.

[...Yeah. Sorry about that one, gorgeous.]

Anyway, then Lily, flanked by her all-male, all-jawline harem, takes down her own mother, punches the apocalypse back into its hole, saves the world, and marries... someone. I genuinely could not remember which boy won the harem war. I wrote three different ending drafts and posted whichever one was open when the deadline hit. That was my editorial process. Whichever file was open. Did I even go with one guy? She might have married all of them. Fuck if I know.

That was the story. Girl arrives, girl suffers mildly, girl triumphs, world saved, roll credits.

[Well, as long as the plot goes exactly as it did before, all of that happens with or without me. Lily meets her boys, beats her rival, punches her mom into the sun. The story runs itself. It literally cannot fail. I wrote it too stupid to fail. So I can just leave!]

I nodded to myself, satisfied, a woman at peace, a fox with a plan. I turned toward the front gate, took a deep breath of my new freedom, and got exactly one step.

A hand tugged my sleeve.

I turned around, and my brain performed a hard reboot.

[Holy shit.]

The girl attached to the hand was, and I say this as a professional describer of pretty women, unfairly constructed. God had a bias when he was making this cutie. Long blonde hair. Enormous blue eyes. Petite, elegant, and with a face so sweet it should’ve come with a diabetes warning, currently arranged into the polite distress of someone who was very, very lost.

My heart, fresh off killing me once, skipped a beat.

"Um, excuse me," she said, hands clasped, cheeks pink. "I’m so sorry to bother you, but I’m a little lost. They said all the new students are gathering at the Theater for the ceremony, and I’ve been walking in circles for ten minutes. Could you help me?"

Every functioning part of me had one job in that moment, and every functioning part of me abandoned it to flirt.

"Sure thing, beautiful," I said, my mouth moving before I ordered it to. I threw an arm around her shoulders and pointed past the fountain. "Follow the pillars until you hit the statue of the guy stabbing the, uh... dragon. Right. Left at the dragon, straight on till the big domed building. Can’t miss it, it’s the one that looks expensive." I winked. "Tell them the hot fox sent ya~"

She went pink from her collar to her hairline, which was, frankly, delicious.

"Thank you so much! You’re a lifesaver!" She bobbed a tiny bow and hurried off, blonde hair swinging.

I watched her go. I’m not going to pretend I didn’t.

[Freedom AND a cute girl thanked me. Ten out of ten. This second life is off to a phenomenal start.]

She reached the first pillar, paused, and glanced back over her shoulder at me with a bright little smile. I waved. She skipped inside. It was all very pleasant.

But then... Something came to me.

[Blonde hair. Blue eyes. Lost on day one.]

And that was when I finally noticed the bench off to my left, in the shade, where a boy in an unnecessary trench coat sat brooding at the middle distance.

Black hair. One red streak. He was positioned directly along the path that girl would have walked, if a certain foxgirl with new tits hadn’t been standing in the way.

[...Wait.]

Chapter one flashed before my eyes.

The lost heroine asks the brooding rival for directions on the morning of the entrance ceremony. Their fingers brush. He says something rude and unforgettable. Flag planted, romance route open, three hundred Chapters of tension born on the spot.

I looked at the girl, long gone now.

Then at the boy.

Then at the pillar.

Then at my own traitorous, direction-giving hand.

[THAT WAS LILY. I JUST DERAILED THE WHOLE PLOT!!!]