Chapter 100: Under the Same Stars

I walked along the sidewalk, holding Eris’s hand.

The noise of the competition venue was behind us, but the applause still rang in my ears. Sometimes I caught our reflection in a shop window. Other times, I looked at the trophy in my hand and smiled again.

A staff member had handed it to me on our way out. I held its base in my palm and rested it against my body to avoid straining my injured arm. Even with Umbrella’s support, it was starting to feel heavy.

Still, I didn’t consider letting go of Eris’s hand so I could carry it more comfortably.

The five-star card was in my inventory too.

And there was the competition’s cash prize.

1,000,000 Veyra.

Thinking about that number made the corners of my lips rise again.

I could buy a new computer. Replace my broken belongings and make my apartment somewhere I could live again. I no longer had to worry about how to pay for everything Ron had destroyed in a single evening.

Maybe I would even buy a few new figures.

No, I definitely would.

A small laugh beside me interrupted my thoughts.

When I turned my head, I found Eris looking at me.

“What?”

“Nothing.” Her smile widened. “I haven’t seen you this happy in a long time.”

“It’s not every day hundreds of people applaud me.”

“It really shows when you look at your trophy every three steps.”

I lowered my eyes to the shiny surface in my hand again. My name was written on the base. I ran a finger over the letters.

“Before going onstage, I thought I’d be happy just to get out of there in one piece,” I said. “I didn’t expect holding this trophy to feel so good.”

I held it out to her.

Eris took it with her free hand. She must not have expected its weight at first, because her wrist dipped slightly. Then she brought it closer and examined the writing.

“Noctis Evernight,” she read.

“They forgot the ‘Great’ part. The organizers should be punished for that…”

Eris laughed.

With the trophy in her hands, the pressure on my arm eased. I carefully moved my shoulder and took a deep breath.

“My mother and father are going to lose their minds.” I didn’t even try to hold back my laughter. “Hahaha… I wish I could see their faces.”

I imagined my mother watching a replay of my speech. The anger she would try to hide behind her flawless appearance… My father turning toward the screen the moment he heard our surname…

I hoped Ron had watched too.

Especially the part where I received the trophy.

As my smile widened, I remembered something important.

“Speaking of my family…”

Eris looked up.

“Can I stay at your place tonight?”

“Of course.”

Her answer came so quickly that I stared at her for a moment.

“Because if they decide to visit me again tonight, I doubt I’ll get away with just a few broken bones and bruises.”

I added a small laugh at the end.

Eris’s fingers tightened around my hand.

“You’re not going home,” she said. “I’ll let Mom know.”

The certainty in her voice softened my smile a little.

“All right. The Great Noctis accepts your invitation.”

“When did I invite you?! You were the one who just asked to stay.”

“Don’t get hung up on the details. You’ll get old before your time at this rate.”

Eris didn’t answer. Rather than losing her temper, she shot me an angry look, then faced forward and kept walking.

But there was something strange about her expression.

Her brows had been furrowed while we talked about my family. Now the faint blush on her cheeks was becoming more noticeable again, and whenever her eyes drifted toward me, she quickly looked elsewhere.

I tilted my head to get a better look at her face.

“Hey, what’s wrong?”

“Nothing.”

“Your face is red.”

“It’s hot.”

A light breeze blew her hair across her face. With both hands occupied, she turned her head, trying to shake the strands away.

“Of course,” I said. “It’s definitely the weather.”

“Noc…”

“Those looks, those pink cheeks…” I couldn’t hide my smile. “You look like a girl in love.”

Eris stopped abruptly.

She pulled her hand out of mine and punched me in the stomach.

“Ugh!”

I doubled over. The blow wasn’t particularly hard, but the bruises from last night didn’t appreciate it at all.

“What nonsense are you talking about?!”

When I lifted my head, I saw that she was red all the way to her ears.

“Who would fall in love with a femboy?”

I looked at her for a few seconds.

The joke I had been about to make died on my lips.

Eris looked away. She held the trophy a little tighter, as though she expected me to answer with something ridiculous right away.

“Oii.”

My voice was calmer this time.

“Just so you know, when I said I loved you in the waiting room, I didn’t mean it as a friend.”

Her eyes returned to mine.

One red, one blue.

Both widened in surprise.

Her lips parted slightly, but no sound came out. She drew a breath as though she wanted to say something, then looked down at the trophy in her hand.

I swallowed.

Saying it was harder than it had seemed in my head.

I hadn’t been this nervous speaking in front of hundreds of people a little earlier. Now I was standing in the middle of the sidewalk, waiting for Eris to look at me.

“And right now, you’re breaking my heart,” I added.

Eris’s brows drew together.

“You…”

“Y-you can’t say things like…”

Her voice grew quieter toward the end. After glancing at two people passing us, she moved a little closer.

“Don’t say things like that in the middle of the street, idiot.”

“Where am I supposed to say them?”

“Noc!”

I tried to smile, but then let out a breath and looked at her.

“I meant it when I said I loved you, Eris.”

This time, I didn’t add anything else.

I wasn’t saying it to annoy her or get punched again. I remembered holding her in the waiting room. Her fingers gripping the fabric at my back, the way she had quietly listened while I thanked her…

After saying those words, I had run away without looking at her face.

I didn’t want to run now.

Eris kept her eyes on me for a while.

The blush on her cheeks grew deeper. She brought the arm holding the trophy closer to her body and raised her free hand, her fingers hesitating in the air.

Then she frowned and turned away.

“It’s getting late,” she said. “Let’s go home.”

“Eris…”

“Don’t just stand around out here when you’re injured.”

She reached out her hand.

This time, she didn’t wait for me to take it. Her fingers slipped between mine and closed around my hand. When she started walking, she pulled me along beside her.

For a while, we walked side by side in silence.

I couldn’t see her face, but the ear showing through her hair was still bright red.

I looked at our hands.

For someone who claimed she wouldn’t fall in love with a femboy, she was holding my hand awfully tightly.

My smile returned.

‘I guess this is enough for now.’

—

Miranda opened the door when we reached the Arclight mansion.

She had a small bowl in her hand. When she saw us, she took a handful of colorful paper from it and tossed it over our heads.

“Here’s our winner!”

Small, colorful pieces fell onto my hair and shoulders.

I blinked and looked at Miranda.

“When did you get all this ready?”

“It doesn’t take long to celebrate a victory.”

Her gaze shifted to the trophy Eris was carrying. She took it from her daughter and read the inscription, a proud smile forming on her face.

“You really won, Noc.”

It felt good to hear her say that.

I lifted my chin slightly.

“The result was obvious from the start. My competitors just took a little longer to accept it.”

Eris grumbled beside me.

Miranda laughed.

“Come inside. Let’s not keep the cake waiting any longer.”

A small cake sat on the dining table, with three plates and three glasses beside it. I smiled without meaning to when I spotted the bottle of lemon soda.

“I guess everyone knows what I like now.”

“Eris specifically told me to get this.”

I looked at Eris.

“What?” she said immediately. “You don’t drink anything else anyway.”

“I didn’t say anything.”

“You were going to.”

She was right.

Miranda placed the trophy in the middle of the table. For a few seconds, we all looked at it.

It had looked different beneath the lights in the competition hall. Here, it stood among a cake, a few glasses, and the phone Eris had left at the edge of the table.

Still, I couldn’t take my eyes off it.

As Miranda cut the cake, she set aside the largest slice for me.

“For our winner.”

“That’s not fair,” Eris said.

“And the second-largest slice for Eris, for helping with the preparations.”

“Yours is going to be tiny, Mom.”

“The person cutting the cake gets a head start in the kitchen.”

Miranda said it so seriously that I started laughing.

Eris couldn’t hold back either.

For a while, we simply ate cake, talked, and laughed. Miranda said her favorite part of the performance had been the birds taking flight. Eris, meanwhile, forgot about the fork in her hand as she described the piano appearing.

“When the coffin started changing, I couldn’t figure out what was going to happen,” she said. “Then he sat down and started playing, as though he’d been rehearsing it for days.”

“There’s no end to the Great Noctis’s talents.”

“You need to learn some modesty eventually. You used to be afraid to even answer people,” Eris added.

Miranda lowered her glass as she tried to hold back a laugh.

I wanted to tell Eris she was wrong, but my mouth was full of cake. When I raised my hand to protest, her smile grew even wider.

She reached for the trophy and turned it toward herself.

“If we get tired of you, we can use this instead. It has your name on it, and it doesn’t talk.”

I swallowed.

“I was thinking of giving you a share of the million I won.”

Eris looked up.

“You were thinking?”

“Past tense. I just changed my mind.”

“I was the one who helped you buy the materials.”

“And you were the one who signed me up for the competition against my will.”

I smiled as Eris returned the trophy to the middle of the table.

Miranda refilled our glasses. As she handed mine to me, her eyes briefly shifted to my cheek, then to my arm.

Her smile softened a little.

“Your room is ready, Noc. Get some proper rest tonight.”

I took the glass.

“Thank you, Aunt Miranda.”

She placed her hand on my uninjured shoulder and gave it a gentle squeeze.

When she turned back to Eris, she stopped looking at me, but I could still feel the warmth on my shoulder for a few seconds.

The celebration didn’t last long. There were only three of us, with no large crowd, loud music, or another performance.

Still, I kept laughing as I ate my cake.

For the first time all day, I could simply sit there without thinking about what to say, how I looked, or what I needed to do next.

—

Eventually, I took my trophy upstairs to the guest room.

After closing the door, I placed it on the nightstand. I stepped back to look at it, then turned it toward me so it would look better.

“I need to get a special shelf for this trophy or something…”

I walked over to the bed and dropped onto it.

As the mattress sank beneath me, I carefully brought my injured arm closer to my chest. I pulled a pillow underneath it and lay on my back.

Looking up at the ceiling, I took a deep breath.

If I had told myself this morning how the day would end, I wouldn’t have believed it.

The trophy I had won was only a few steps away. Eris and Miranda were downstairs. Tonight, I didn’t have to wait for my door to suddenly open and someone to kill me.

And I hadn’t even touched the reward I was most curious about yet.

I opened my inventory.

The line I was looking for immediately caught my eye among the blue text.

[5★ Card ×1]

My smile widened.

Five stars.

I lifted my head slightly off the pillow and focused on the card. I thought about the competition I had agreed to enter to win it, the preparations Eris and I had made, and the applause I had finally heard onstage.

It was mine now.

How long had it been since I came to this world?

A little over two weeks, I thought.

I remembered the unfamiliar face I had seen in the mirror that first morning, my blue hair, and the panic I had felt. I had even punched the mirror…

A small chuckle escaped me.

How could I have known that Rose, the girl I’d met that day when my hand was injured, lived just two apartments away? Or that the sweet angel I’d met at the park would turn out to be Caramel, the one who humiliated me in games?

My morning runs with Yukie, that strange night at Rose’s apartment, Talia’s piercing gaze… They all came to mind one after another.

I thought about the powers I had gained through the system and the Overlap I had entered. I had fought monsters with Umbrella and brought Cecilia out of there. Before, I couldn’t even do a single pull-up. Now I could last a few minutes against Eris.

Of course, I was still the one who ended up on the ground.

There were the streams too. Without my even noticing, something I had initially found embarrassing had become one of the things I looked forward to each day. I could say the same about the cosplay competition. I thought about how much fun I’d had preparing with Eris, and the applause I had heard onstage today.

The apartment Ron had ruined and the ache in my arm still bothered me. But on the nightstand…

And I had finally told Eris how I felt.

The corners of my lips lifted again.

“It hasn’t even been a month…”

It was strange to have experienced so much. On the first day, I had wondered how to escape this strange body and life. Now I was curious about what tomorrow would bring.

I looked up toward the starry sky beyond the ceiling—the sky I couldn’t see but knew was there—and reached out my hand.

“…”

—

A/N🧣: Hii, dear lemons! Volume 1 ends with Chapter 100.

Thank you all for reading this far.

Starting tomorrow, we’re moving on to Volume 2!

Are you excited? I’m not. Well, maybe a little ^_^

Unlike Volume 1, Volume 2 will focus more on action, growing stronger, and exploring the world.

Have fun reading this strange story!