Chapter 195: I Am Not Pathetic

"Oh, that’s very kind of you, but I don’t take favors. And I am enjoying my single life very much."

The statement hung proudly in the dust-filled hallway. Hearing those words come out of her mouth, the guys standing on the side—namely Ash and Max—were more than pleased.

A bright, unspoken glimmer of hope ignited in their eyes after realizing that the ethereal, pistachio-haired beauty was completely unattached.

Even Fredrinn looked at her with an extra spark of genuine interest. Though, to be completely honest, he had already guessed as much.

Her peculiar, analytical stares at him and his women, combined with her eccentric, slightly starved way of acting, had been dead giveaways from the start.

Still, hearing it confirmed out loud put a satisfied grin on his lips.

"No, no."

Rose shook her head with an impossibly warm, radiant smile. She stepped closer to Sophia, causing the green-haired girl to flinch back a fraction of an inch purely on reflex.

Her bruised ribs still ached, and her combat instincts flared, but Rose wasn’t looking to inflict more physical violence.

Instead, the demoness reached out with open fingers and gently patted the taller beauty’s shoulder.

She leaned in and spoke in a voice dripping with sugary sweetness: "Hubby told Rose that she should be good to humans, so Rose feels it’s only natural that she doesn’t bully a pathetic little girl that seems to be slightly off in the head... Rose isn’t a monster, after all."

"..."

Sophia was utterly, profoundly speechless.

Never in her entire twenty-odd years of lavish, sheltered living had she encountered someone so completely and effortlessly shameless.

Sophia had always considered herself thick-skinned, a little goofy, and remarkably unbothered by normal societal shame.

But this demonic creature didn’t just take the cake—she built an entire bakery out of unadulterated disrespect!

Rose wasn’t just being blunt or aggressively friendly. She was wielding a polite, childish persona as a razor-sharp scalpel purely for the twisted joy of psychological bullying.

"I am not pathetic," Sophia felt compelled to bite back.

Alas... it was a fatal mistake.

The defensive counter had already been mapped out and predicted by Rose five steps in advance, and the succubus had a devastating burn locked and loaded the instant those words left Sophia’s lips.

"It’s truly pathetic if you really need to defend yourself like this..." Rose murmured softly, letting her sentence trail off into an airy, mocking sigh.

She didn’t even need to finish the phrase. The implication settled over the hallway like heavy lead. It was more than enough to send Sophia’s blood pressure rocketing through the roof, throwing her into a state of silent, boiling internal fury.

Sophia took several deep, measured breaths through her nose to stop herself from lunging forward.

She forced another rigid, plastic smile onto her face, feeling like a ticking bomb on the very brink of detonation.

Inside her frantic mind, the universe felt violently unfair.

She could only wonder what kind of cosmic glitch allowed a vicious, rude, and bloodthirsty demon like Rose to walk around with a nice lover, while the graceful, endlessly sweet, ridiculously adorable, and undeniably more beautiful Sophia had spent her entire existence single!

(Please note: every single one of those glowing adjectives was strictly manufactured inside Sophia’s own delusional head. No authorial bias is present here... I promise!!!)

Regardless of the unfair cosmic math, Sophia realized that continuing a war of words with this venomous woman was a losing proposition.

If Rose had been even an inch weaker, Sophia would have happily summoned a few of ironwood branches to beat some manners into her skull.

But unfortunately, the demoness possessed the raw physical stats to back up every syllable of her razor-sharp mouth.

It was time to pivot to the one battlefield where Sophia held absolute, uncontested dominance.

"I will treat all four of you to breakfa—I mean lunch, considering how late you wake up," Sophia scoffed loudly, dramatically flicking her green locks over her shoulder with an air of wealthy arrogance.

If there was one singular metric where Sophia stood miles above Rose, finances sat uncontested at the very peak.

Through some strange, baffling quirk of the NPCs running the operations, the hotel’s bar and café still accepted standard, pre-apocalyptic fiat currency for everyday snacks and hot meals.

In a ruined world where monsters roamed the boulevards and humanity had collapsed into bloody anarchy, paper money was supposed to be completely worthless.

Well, Sophia couldn’t care less about their strange reasoning or why they still hoarded dollar bills.

For her, this bizarre setup was a match made in heaven.

She was filthy, disgustingly rich, and throwing piles of cash at the NPCs was easily the most sensible way to spend currency during an apocalypse.

Even if she had to liquidate the deeds to a multi-million-dollar downtown penthouse just to secure a few weeks of freshly prepared, steaming hot, healthy food, it was an absolute bargain in her book.

In a world where you could kick down the front door of any abandoned mansion and claim it as your own anyway, what good was real estate compared to a warm lunch?

"Rose is feeling quite hungry indeed," Rose hummed thoughtfully, resting her chin between her thumb and forefinger as she nodded with a regal tilt of her head.

She glanced back toward the bedroom doorway, her crimson eyes finding Fredrinn’s frame. "What do you say, hubby?"

"Lunch sounds good," Fredrinn replied, shrugging his broad shoulders.

He offered Sophia a warm, gentle smile, looking for all the world like a gracious, polite gentleman deeply touched by her noble hospitality.

Sophia’s upper lip twitched in sheer disgust at his performance. A gentleman? Please!

If this brute were even a fraction of the honorable man he was pretending to be, couldn’t he have stepped in two minutes ago and stopped his demon wife from completely dismantling Sophia’s pride in front of an audience?

Even if he didn’t stop the fight out of manners, he could’ve at least stopped the verbal nonsense!

For Sophia, those words were the things that were painful, since wounds had already been healed thanks to her powers!

Yet, as her eyes inadvertently drifted down from his handsome face, tracing along the wide cut of his shoulders and down to his bare, chiseled torso, her righteous indignation lost a significant amount of its momentum.

His physique was sculpted with lethal precision. His skin carried a warm, healthy glow, and the sharp, ridged contours of his abdominal muscles moved with effortless, predatory power beneath the open fabric of his ’gifted’ windbreaker.

’Tsk... no wonder the bastard has three girlfriends,’ Sophia grumbled bitterly to herself, swallowing a lump in her throat.

Forcing her eyes back up to a respectable height, she gave a decisive nod to him and the rest of the survivors idling near the broken walls.

"Let’s go to the café then!"

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A/N: Hey hey hey! Stop right there! I am noticing a significant lack of comments! Come onnnn! Don’t read so silently!

Of course, gifts and ’donations’ are always welcomed... XD!

Well anyways, thank you for reading!

Hope you’re liking it so far and if you aren’t well, suggestions are always welcomed as well.