The pink light didn’t just shimmer; it hit the ruined street like a glitter bomb inside a hurricane.
The three slime-and-bone dragon soldiers didn’t even have the dignity to scream.
They just sort of… hissed, a wet, rattling sound that vibrated through their hollow rib cages.
Their green eyes flickered wildly as the heavy sparkles washed over them like sticky, boiling acid.
The monsters staggered backward, their dark stone swords clattering against the cobblestones.
The sound of the metal hitting the stone was sharp and thin, completely swallowed by the heavy, trembling air of the burning capital.
Roxanne stood right there in the middle of the road, blinking her eyes rapidly.
Her nose was still twitching from the force of the sneeze.
Slowly, she looked down at her own hands.
They were glowing.
Great.
Fantastic.
She was a human glow-stick in the middle of a literal apocalypse.
“What the fuck was that?” she muttered under her breath, though it came out sounding more like a pathetic squeak than a curse.
[OMG HOST!!] the System suddenly exploded inside her skull, its bright pink text box flashing so fast it gave her an instant migraine.
[That was the most adorable, devastating blast of pure love I have ever recorded in the history of dating sims!!
The monsters are literally shaking because they can’t handle the raw feminine energy you just radiated!!
You’re melting their dark, cold hearts, girlie!!] “Shut up,” Roxanne hissed out loud, grabbing her own dark hair with her glowing fingers.
Thank god her hair wasn’t neon green.
She took a tentative step forward, her legs feeling weirdly light, almost too light.
“They aren’t melting because they’re in love, you total piece of junk.
They’re melting because my stupid allergy just sneezed out a tactical nuke.” Behind her, the four of them, Julian, Alistair, Ethan, and Malakai, were completely silent.
The heavy, protective knight aura and the white holy light they had been using to keep the monsters back just sort of faded away into the smog.
Alistair was the first one to actually move.
The giant Knight Commander took a half-step forward, his massive broadsword tilted down toward the dirt.
His grey eyes were fixed entirely on Roxanne, staring at her as if she had just transformed into a two-headed demon right in front of him.
He looked incredibly tired.
Not just “I’ve been fighting monsters all night” tired, but the specific kind of mental exhaustion that comes from watching your entire reality get bent completely out of shape by a girl in a ruined dress.
“Roxanne,” Alistair started, his deep voice cracking slightly.
Then he stopped.
He glanced down at the ground, where the slime-things were still twitching on the pavement, their dark forms bubbling, shrinking, and dissolving into black grease.
“How did you… that wasn’t holy magic.
That wasn’t a knight’s aura.
What kind of spell was that?” “It was a sneeze, Alistair,” she snapped, wiping her nose with the back of her wet sleeve.
“Do you want a lesson in basic human biology?
It’s not an ancient spell, it’s an upper respiratory reflex.
Fuck.” “A reflex,” Julian repeated from a few feet away.
The Crown Prince sounded completely dazed.
He’d dropped his perfect, righteous guard, the tip of his golden sword resting directly in the dirt.
He looked at the smoking grease spots on the road, then at Roxanne, then back at the burning imperial castle tower in the distance.
He looked like he wanted to yell, to arrest her for illegal magic, to do *something*, but he just stood there with his golden hair matted with grey ash.
“You claim you are just an ordinary noble daughter, yet you break iron ropes with your bare hands, jump across entire plazas, and now you destroy ancient dragon guardians with… with a bodily sound?” “I told you,” Roxanne said, turning her back on them and starting to march up the steep road toward the hill.
Her legs felt weirdly strong now, as if the system’s stupid sneeze skill had given her a physical boost.
“I’m just a student.
A very, very stressed student who wants to stop being hunted by giant lizards and angry men in armor.
Can we move?
The fucking eye in the sky is still looking for us.” [Target 1 & 2 are looking at you with such intense, bewildered longing right now, Host!] the System chimed, entirely ignoring her anger.
[It’s like they’ve never seen a girl with such mysterious, explosive charm!
Keep walking, you’re doing great!
Your dominance levels are off the charts!] Roxanne didn’t look back.
If she looked back, she’d have to acknowledge the way Ethan was staring at her.
The High Priest wasn’t even looking at the dead monsters.
He was just watching the way the residual pink light trailed off her skin like dust, his marble-like face completely unreadable.
His pale hand was gripping his silver staff so hard that the old wood looked like it might actually snap in half.
The walk up toward the Western Hill wasn’t a heroic march; it was a miserable, suffocating slog.
The steep streets leading away from the lower city were full of panicked citizens, overturned wooden carts, and dropped luggage.
The air carried the constant, vibrating hum of the burning green eye in the sky, a sound that made Roxanne’s teeth ache.
“Stay close to the walls,” Malakai murmured, suddenly appearing right beside her elbow.
He didn’t touch her, but his presence was heavy and cool, like a shadow that had its own physical weight.
His dual black daggers were still held loose in his hands.
“The main city guards are falling back to the inner gates.
Everything is collapsing down there.
If you really didn’t steal those core seal stones… then we’re all going to die in this city for a crime nobody actually committed.” “I told you three times, shadow boy, I didn’t steal anything,” she said, her throat feeling dry and rough from the smoke.
She felt the heavy weight of the *Key to the Secret Vault* sitting cold against her thigh inside her dress pocket.
It was a solid, real weight that felt like a massive lie.
She hadn’t even looked at what the key looked like yet.
She didn’t want to know.
“I just got here.
I don’t even know what a core stone looks like.” “We believe you,” Alistair said from behind her.
He said it a bit too fast, his boots heavy against the steep stones.
“Speak for yourself, Commander,” Ethan added, his smooth, cold voice cutting right through the thick smog.
He walked on the other side of Roxanne, his white robes surprisingly clean compared to the rest of them.
“But the energy she just released from her body… it did not come from the dragon.
It did not come from any known relic.
It felt… ancient.
Like the goddess’s own tears, twisted into something… bright and strange.” [Aww, the icy priest is trying to understand his intense feelings for you through old theology books!] the System giggled, dropping a big pink box right in front of Roxanne’s vision.
[He’s so cute when he’s jealous of your hidden power, girlie!
He wants to study you!] Roxanne wanted to scream.
She wanted to sit right down in the middle of the dirty street and refuse to move until the world ended.
“I’m not a goddess,” she muttered, dodging a large chunk of falling roof tile that crashed onto the stones just a few inches ahead of them.
Dust billowed out, coating her face in grey grit.
“I’m just Roxanne.
Stop putting heavy labels on me.
It’s incredibly annoying.” “Roxanne,” Julian said, his voice quiet as he kept pace directly behind her.
“If we reach the guest palace, if we actually get inside the hill seals… we have to talk.
About everything.
About the forged letters we found in your room.
About why you’ve suddenly changed so much.” “Changed?” She let out a short, sharp laugh that turned into a dry cough.
She thought about her laptop sitting on the library table back home, her lukewarm energy drink, and the three-hundred-page political science textbook she had been failing to read.
“I haven’t changed, Your Highness.
I just stopped being quiet.
You guys were just too busy trying to put me on an execution block to notice that I had a brain.” She looked at his face for a split second.
He looked so young, really.
Beneath the gold armor and the crown and the righteous prince attitude, he just looked like a college guy who’d been told a lie by his superiors and was now realizing the roof of his house was caving in on his head.
“Look out!” Malakai’s hand slammed into her shoulder, shoving her forward with brutal force just as a massive, corrupted tree branch, twisted by green magic into something that looked like a giant skeletal claw, slammed down into the street right where she’d been standing.
The shockwave of the impact knocked the wind completely out of her lungs.
Roxanne hit the hard cobblestones face first, her palms scraping painfully against the dirt and grit.
*SYSTEM ALERT: Physical damage detected from external nature hazard.
Activating emergency protection bubble.* A soft, ridiculous pink pop-sound echoed through the narrow street, and suddenly Roxanne found herself sitting inside a perfect sphere of shimmering, sparkling pink light.
It felt exactly like standing inside a giant, thick soap bubble.
The massive wooden claw scraped against the outside of the pink light, making a horrible, screeching sound like fingernails pulling across a chalkboard, but the bubble didn’t break.
“Get away from her!” Alistair roared.
The Knight Commander was there in an instant, his massive broadsword a complete blur of silver motion.
He didn’t use his blue wind magic this time; he just used raw, terrifying human strength.
He hacked directly through the twisted wood, his face distorted into a mask of pure, ugly rage.
He looked absolutely terrifying.
He looked like the exact reason people built thick stone walls around cities.
“Roxanne, get up!” Julian was suddenly at her side.
His hand reached right through the pink bubble, the strange light just sort of parted around his gauntlet like warm water, and grabbed her upper arm.
He hauled her to her feet, his face only inches from hers.
His breath smelled like hot metal and wood smoke.
“Are you hurt?
Did the branch strike you?” She just stared at him, her chest heaving.
The pink bubble was still shimmering all around them, casting a soft, weirdly bright pink glow directly across the bridge of his aristocratic nose.
“I’m fine,” she wheezed, her scraped palms stinging terribly.
“Stop worrying about me.
Just… go kill the giant tree monster.” “I am currently trying!” Julian yelled back, his face turning red.
Malakai was already moving through the smoke, his shadows weaving into the cracks of the twisted wood, tearing the branches apart from the inside out until they fell into splinters.
Ethan stood further back, his silver staff glowing with that cold, white energy, chanting an old prayer under his breath that made the very air feel heavy, like being trapped underwater.
It was all just too much.
The noise, the flashing lights, the green rot, and the sheer, unadulterated *stupidity* of the whole situation.
Roxanne felt the pink bubble pop with another soft chime, and her knees gave out for a brief second.
She slumped against Julian’s chest plate.
He didn’t push her away this time.
He held her up, his heavy iron arm wrapping around her waist like a hot band of metal, holding her steady against his side.
“Don’t do that again,” the Prince said, his voice sounding tight and strained near her ear.
“Don’t just stand there and watch it fall.” “I wasn’t standing there to watch it,” she wheezed into his chest armor.
“I was trying to survive.
There’s a difference.” [Host!
That was the most classic romantic save ever!] the System cheered, dumping a shower of fake virtual rose petals across her brain.
[Prince Charming protecting his villainous bride from the scary nature monster!
Your hearts are basically beating in perfect sync right now!
I’m adding ‘Romantic Shared Trauma’ to your permanent relationship logs!
This is going to be the best chapter yet!!] “It’s not romance,” she whispered under her breath as Julian helped her walk.
“It’s a massive, throbbing headache.” They finally reached the great iron gates of the Western Hill just as the sky-eye blinked again in the distance.
A massive pulse of green light hit the lower city streets below, followed by the distant sound of buildings sliding into the river.
The guest palace on top of the hill wasn’t just a regular house; it was a fortress made of white stone and thick ivy, glowing with a soft, protective amber light that seemed to actively hold the green darkness at bay.
The ancient gates opened for the Prince without making a single sound.
The five of them stumbled inside the courtyard, completely exhausted.
The sudden silence inside the hill’s seals was shocking.
No more dragon roars.
No more people screaming in the dark.
Just the loud, ragged sound of their own heavy breathing.
Roxanne broke away from Julian’s arm and walked straight toward the marble fountain in the center of the courtyard.
She leaned over the edge and splashed the cool, clean water directly onto her dirty face.
It felt incredible.
She felt like she could fall asleep right there on the stone floor.
“We made it up the hill,” Alistair said, his voice sounding incredibly hoarse.
He leaned heavily on his sword, his dark armor clanking against the masonry.
He looked around at the rest of them.
They were all dirty, bleeding, and broken.
“We made it,” Julian echoed, his blue eyes turning back to Roxanne as she wiped her face with her skirt.
“Now, we find out the actual truth about what you are.” Roxanne looked up at them through her damp hair.
Her dress was completely ruined, her palms were bleeding, and she was stuck in a world that made zero sense.
She looked at the four powerful men, the exact ones who had wanted to cut her head off three hours ago, and who were now, for some twisted reason, the only things keeping her breathing.
“Fine,” she said, her voice steadying as she stood up straight by the fountain.
“But I’m finding a kitchen first.
If any of you tries to interrogate me while I’m looking for a piece of bread, I will personally see to it that you never have a peaceful night’s sleep again.
Fuck this hill, and fuck that stupid eye.” She turned around and started marching right toward the heavy front doors of the guest palace.
[Aww, look at the way you assert your dominance over your harem, Host!] the System sighed happily in her mind.
[They’re so incredibly impressed by your appetite for survival!
Look at them staring at your back!
They’re absolutely smitten!] Roxanne didn’t look back to check.
She just kept walking, and for the very first time since she had woken up in this crazy world, she felt like she might actually be able to take a regular breath.
Just for a second.
Then, the solid stone floor beneath her thin shoes gave a violent, sickening lurch, and the white walls of the guest palace began to hum with a deep, subterranean sound that felt like the earth itself was preparing to crack open.
“So much for a quiet dinner,” Roxanne muttered to herself, and pushed the front doors open anyway.