Teaser:Mira and Rion get pulled into an old scene. Worse? The fans love it.
Mira's forced into a "comeback villainess" trope. Kael shows up as the mysterious love interest. The readers start shipping them.
Fanfic spreads.
Mira screams internally. The system is weaponizing popularity now.
---
The moment they stepped through the portal, Mira sneezed.
The air smelled like recycled plot and emotional stagnation.
A sign hung crooked above a mossy stone gate:
> **WELCOME TO ETHERIA: RISE OF THE REINCARNATED SLIME SLAYER (BETA)**
"Oh no," Rion muttered.
Mira squinted. "Beta?"
"This place never launched. Got abandoned mid-rewrite."
"Why?"
Rion gestured around. "You'll see."
The town looked like a parody of every isekai light novel ever written. Cobblestone streets. A giant floating crystal. NPCs with dialogue boxes hanging above their heads, frozen mid-sentence.
Mira poked one of them.
He blinked.
Then shouted, "WELCOME, HERO! PRESS 'A' TO ACCEPT QUEST."
Rion dragged her away. "Don't engage. You'll trigger a cutscene."
Too late.
Suddenly, a glowing circle formed beneath their feet. Trumpets blared. A voice boomed from the sky.
> "WELCOME, OH CHOSEN ONE—"
"Skip," Mira shouted.
> "SKIPPING…"
The light vanished.
"…NARRATIVE MOMENT LOST."
"Good," Mira said.
They kept walking until they reached the training grounds.
And there he was.
The hero.
Mid-twenties. Brown hair. Slightly spiky. Eyes full of defeat. His name floated above his head in sad, flickering letters.
> **Kai Ryugamine – Level 5 (Forever)**
He was fighting a slime.
Badly.
"Fireball!" he yelled.
Nothing happened.
He pulled out a sword. It turned into a spoon.
"Dammit, not again."
Mira raised an eyebrow. "That's the hero?"
"That's the protagonist of this world," Rion confirmed. "He's been here for 367 chapters."
Mira blinked. "Fighting the same slime?"
"Yep."
"Why hasn't he progressed?"
"System glitch. Author stopped updating the power system. His stats reset every morning. Same quest, same NPCs, same slime."
Mira walked toward Kai.
The slime bit his ankle.
He didn't flinch.
"Hey," she said. "You okay?"
Kai turned slowly. "Are you new tutorial content?"
"…No?"
"Then I suggest you run. This slime explodes when you kill it."
It did.
With a small *pop*, the slime burst, covering him in neon goo.
Rion called out. "How many times is that today?"
Kai checked a floating quest log. "Seventeen."
He wiped his face. "Let me guess. You're here to 'observe the failed world' for some narrative metaphor?"
Mira nodded.
"Then here's your metaphor," he said flatly. "I've leveled up five times. Total. In five years."
"That's not even one per year."
"I unlocked fire magic once," Kai said. "Then the patch rolled back. Now I summon mildly aggressive wind."
Mira winced.
Kai sat on a log, soaked and exhausted.
"Why haven't you left?" she asked.
Kai laughed. "You think I didn't try? Every time I get near the world border, the system resets the day. Like a sad, underfunded time loop."
Mira sat beside him.
"I didn't even know stories could be abandoned mid-plot."
"Most are," Kai muttered. "Some quietly. Some spectacularly."
Rion stood nearby, watching glowing vines slither along the fence posts. "We're looking for narrative fragments. Anything old. Maybe a draft anchor."
Kai looked at him. "What for?"
"To rewrite someone's arc," Rion said.
Kai's eyes lit up. "Rewrite? You can do that?"
"Not legally."
"I'll help."
"You can't leave the zone."
Kai grinned. "But I can glitch it for you."
He stood, cracked his neck, and summoned a glowing scroll from his inventory.
> QUEST ITEM: "Loop Anchor – Used for Unfinished Tutorial Zones"
"Here," he said. "If you break this over the crystal in town square, the zone will collapse. Everything frozen will reboot. You'll get maybe five minutes of raw system access."
Mira stared at him. "Why are you helping?"
"Because even if I can't escape," he said, "maybe the story can."
---
Two minutes later, Mira smashed the anchor against the base of the floating crystal.
The air shivered.
Time hiccupped.
All around them, NPCs unfroze—then glitched. Dialogue boxes crashed. One guy shouted all his lines at once and exploded into mana.
A massive system overlay appeared above the sky:
> SYSTEM RESTORE IN PROGRESS
> ARCHIVAL THREADS UNLOCKED: 5 MINUTES REMAINING
Rion threw down his crystal shard and pulled the threads.
Mira helped him weave.
Data passed through their fingers—names, scenes, choices, endings that were never published.
At the edge of it all was a string labeled:
> **MIRA ELEN – SCRAPPED VILLAINESS ARC (DRAFT 0.3)**
She froze.
Rion looked at her. "Do we take it?"
She hesitated.
Then nodded. "Yeah. I want to see what they tried to make me."
The world shook again.
A final pop.
And then everything faded to white.
---
When they woke up, they were in a cave full of memory fragments.
Kai was gone.
Only a note remained, written in glitchy ink:
> "I'll keep fighting the slime. Someone has to keep the system distracted. Rewrite her, so the rest of us don't stay stuck. —Kai"
Mira folded the note.
For the first time, she looked like she wasn't afraid of her arc.
"Let's go to the next world," she said.
Rion nodded.
"Next stop: Otome Zone."