Chapter 7: Operation: Lose Like a Dog

[Well... I’m gonna die. Again.]

Across the ring, Cassian Holloway was warming up, and by warming up I mean he’d shrugged off the trench coat, handed it to a staff member like they were his valet, then conjured a fist-sized ball of black flame that orbited him lazily while he stretched his neck.

The crowd oohed. A girl behind me whispered "he’s so cool" with her whole chest.

Me? I was doing math.

See, here’s the thing about worlds with Systems, and I can speak with authority here since I built this one in a cave with a box of scraps. Power is a math equation. Numbers in, corpse out, and the beauty of math is that you can check it in advance.

So let’s check it. Cassian, S-rank, stats in the eighties, a Unique Skill, and a fire affinity I specifically wrote to be "darker and edgier than regular fire" because I was seventeen and that sentence sounded awesome.

Me, F-rank, MIGHT two, MANA one, and a skill that shows me my own cringy writing.

He was a blowtorch. I was a wet sheet of paper.

The equation resolved to "Kohaku dies in one hit," give or take a hit.

[Okay. So I can’t win. Wonderful. Liberating, even. The question isn’t "can I win," the question is: can I lose USEFULLY?]

Look at the board. The meet-cute was dead, but here fate was, handing me a do-over. Lily sat in the stands right now, front row of the scholarship block, hands clasped. Cassian was about to be publicly magnificent. All the ingredients were present. They just needed some... arranging.

My plan assembled itself in about four seconds, and it was, if I may, gorgeous.

Step one: lose.

But, lose so dramatically, so PATHETICALLY, that bards would refuse to sing of it. Trip over my own feet. Cry a little. Maybe wet myself if the momentum was there.

Step two: physics does the rest. Two things happen when a girl eats shit that hard in public.

Thing one: Lily, watching her only friend reveal herself as the single most embarrassing organism on campus, experiences second-hand embarrassment at a lethal dose, and her friendship with me dies on the spot.

I could picture it perfectly. Lily’s sweet face going flat in the stands, Lily leaning over to some other girl, whispering:

"Her? Oh, no, we’re not friends. We’re not ANYTHING. I share a room with that... thing, that’s all. I’ve asked to be moved."

[Perfect. PERFECT. Say it just like that, sweetheart. Break my heart, free yourself, FLY LIKE A MAJESTIC EAGLE!]

Thing two: with the embarrassing fox amputated, Lily’s gaze drifts across the ring to the victorious, brooding, recently magnificent S-rank in the tight black shirt. Boy meets girl, the route reopens, and somewhere eight volumes downstream the Calamity Queen catches a friendship-powered haymaker to the face, right on schedule.

Lose the duel, save the world. Bleed a little now so the hammock could live.

"Combatants, ready!" the professor called.

I drew my standard-issue training sword, pointed it at Cassian, and gave the crowd my most punchable grin.

[What’s the most embarrassing thing I could possibly say right now, before getting my ass kicked?]

I got it.

"Hey, Lily!" I winked at her. "Try not to fall in love with me too hard after this~"

I could see her blushing from here.

"BEGIN!"

Cassian moved first, and, yes, he moved like the S-rank he was, closing ten meters in a blink with the black flame streaking ahead of him. My brain served me one final note before impact:

[For the record, plan or no plan, this is really gonna hur—]

My body moved.

Let me be clear about the division of labor here. I, Kohaku, author, career chair-dweller, did not do anything. My body slid off the line of the flame bolt, let it crack past my ear, then met Cassian’s follow-up swing, which Cassian met with his own training weapon, blocking it.

The impact hurt like crazy. But, it happened. And it happened completely independently of my own intent.

[Okay... Whoever this foxgirl was before I came in, she may not have had the stats but she definitely was well-trained.]

The crowd roared.

Cassian’s eyes narrowed. He pressed, three more strikes, fast, and my hands kept answering, deflect, slip, deflect, my feet placing themselves in a rhythm I’d never learned. For about six glorious seconds, F-rank Kohaku traded swings with an S-rank in front of the entire first year.

"She’s keeping up?!" someone yelled from the stands.

"An F-rank is keeping up with Holloway?!"

It might have looked like that to them, but no, I wasn’t. Every blow I parried made my bones tremble. My stats weren’t lying, my MIGHT was still two, my arms were noodles, one clean hit was still checkmate.

And then the six seconds were over.

And math remained undefeated.

Cassian’s black flame flared, his blade feinted low, my noodle arms bought it, and the actual blow came flat across my side.

I left the ground. I squeaked like a dog toy under a boot, cleared a short but respectable distance, bounced once, and skidded to a stop face-down in the dirt with my tail flopped over my own head.

The crowd winced as one.

"W-Winner: Cassian Holloway!"

[...Ow. Okay. Ow. But also: perfect! Right on script. Pathetic, dramatic, faintly comical. Now, Lily, do your part. Recoil. Disown me. Notice the hot victorious man. The hot victorious man is RIGHT THERE and I am DIRT-FLAVORED. Compare and contrast, sweetheart.]

I heard running footsteps.

Then, small hands rolled me over. I blinked dirt out of my eyes, and there was Lily, kneeling over me.

She was furious.

"Kohaku! Don’t move, you might have broken something, oh my gods, your RIBS, I heard the hit from the STANDS," and then she twisted around, still holding my hand, and pointed the full wattage of that fury up at the winner, and the sweetest girl in all of fiction suddenly said, "YOU! What is WRONG with you?! She’s an F-RANK! You hit her like THAT?! It’s an EXHIBITION! Apologize!"

[What? No. NO. Lily, sweetie, angel, wrong script. I’m PATHETIC. Look at me. I’m dirt. He’s victorious. Go simp for the strong guy, the strong guy is the LOVE INTEREST—]

Cassian looked down at her. At the heroine of the entire novel, the girl written in stars and destiny, demanding he answer for his cruelty with tears of rage in her big blue eyes, which, I might add, was EXACTLY the kind of fiery-spirit moment his route was supposed to ignite on.

He shrugged one shoulder. Then he retrieved his coat from the staff member, put it on, and walked out of the ring without one word.

I watched the single most eligible brooding boy in three hundred Chapters commit route suicide in real time.

And I watched Lily watch him go like she was planning his murder. Her hands were shaking like she was wondering whether she could reach him before the professors could reach her.

"I’m going to put him in the ground," said the bubbly, naive heroine.

[... Well. This did not go as intended.]

---

The nurse’s office bed was, like everything else in this school, offensively comfortable.

Verdict: two cracked ribs, healed in about ten minutes by a bored Saint Course upperclassman, plus bruising, plus "mild everything," and I’d been sentenced to lie there for observation until evening. Lily had appointed herself my guard. She sat at my bedside with a little journal, writing intently, tongue peeking out.

"Whatcha writing?" I asked.

"A poem," she said, not looking up. "Writing helps me calm down when I’m upset. My mom taught me that."

I smiled.

[Well, she’s still the same sweetheart.]

"Is the poem about me?" I wriggled my brows at her. Even that hurt.

"It’s about justice."

[Cute. But... Honestly, I have no idea why she’s this attached to me. Lily’s boy-crazy by design. Literally bullet point two on her sheet: "falls for men easily, oblivious to women entirely." So, why can’t she just ditch me?]

Anyway. While Lily processed her feelings via literature, I stared at the ceiling and took stock, since a professional learns from her failures.

Attempt one, courtyard: dead.

Attempt two, mixer: dead.

Attempt three, today: dead, and Cassian actively joined in on the beatdown of his own route.

The Cassian route wasn’t just failing to start, it was actively developing an anti-fan.

Fine.

FINE.

Routes could wait, because, finally, an event was coming up that didn’t involve romance.

See, while I was lying there on the ground, being pathetic, I remembered the moment I’d been thinking about!

The tea party.

Tonight. Marisol Vantecca’s welcome tea, thrown by Marisol personally, open invitation, every scholarship student in the first year encouraged to attend, which sounds generous until you remember who wrote her, and how her seventeen-year-old author didn’t give a single damn about budgets.

In the original, Lily shows up in her rag-adjacent village dress, the guests let her in specifically to have something to laugh at, and they do laugh, for one whole Chapter, until a professor in attendance is so moved by pity and by Lily’s quiet dignity that she takes her on as a personal apprentice.

Humiliation in, mentorship out. A trade. A trade that everything downstream sits on, since that professor’s training unlocks basically all of Lily’s mid-game power.

[So the tea party has to happen, and Lily has to attend, and honestly this one runs itself, the invitation’s open, all I have to do is make sure she goes and maybe watch from a safe...]

I stopped.

[Wait a moment.]

I sat up in the bed.

There were two of us now.

In the original, Lily walks in alone, one shabby girl in a room of silk, a perfect little pity-portrait for the professor. But I was her friend, apparently un-fireable, and the invitation was open to every scholarship student, which included the fox. So the actual image at that door would be two broke girls in rags.

Marisol wouldn’t seat us for mockery, she’d have the staff turn us away at the gate, and no entry means no humiliation means no pity means NO APPRENTICESHIP, and there goes Lily’s entire mid-game, run over by my mere existence AGAIN.

Unless we came dressed.

But, dresses cost money. My net worth was one uniform, one training sword, and a nightgown.

[Okay. So we need money.]

I looked at the window.

Money, and fast, in a pseudo-medieval fantasy city, with no ID, no capital, and F-rank stats. My body had sword skills, but pit fighting felt like a last resort for a woman who folds in one hit.

So...

I threw off the blanket and swung my legs out of bed, ignoring the twinge in my freshly glued ribs.

"Lily! We’re going on a walk!"

She looked up from her justice poem, startled.

"The nurse said observation until evening!"

"The nurse isn’t here, and capitalism waits for no fox."

"What’s capitalism?"

"Never mind that. Lily, we’re going on a walk!"