Chapter 10 The Redemption Festival
The Festival Grounds were... deceptively beautiful.
Banners waved from towers.
Magical fireworks exploded in slow motion overhead.
Confetti rained like we were celebrating anything other than our potential erasure.
The rules were simple:
And everyone was invited.
The Heroine. The princes. The side characters.
Even a surprisingly bitter talking duck who claimed to be a cursed duke.
But Ashrin wasn't on the list.
He stood outside the barrier, arms crossed, flickering in and out like a bad signal.
"I'm not eligible," he said, tone grim.
"Companions don't get redemption. We're meant to support yours."
I stared at the barrier.
It shimmered with that same narrative signature I'd seen in my worst dreams.
It was like giving off the "you don't belong" energy.
"You have a real name now," I said. "You're not a bug anymore."
"That's not how the system sees it."
"Then we'll change the system."
"You're saying that like it's easy."
I looked up at him—his half-formed outline, his unstable smile.
"It's not," I said. "But I'm not letting you fade just because this world couldn't handle you loving me first."
His eyes widened.
Then—he laughed.
Glitched.
Laughed again.
Then kissed me right there through the barrier.
Sparks flew. Literally.
The code flared.
The system screamed.
But nothing corrected.
In fact, the barrier... weakened.
A crack was formed.
Ashrin blinked at it.
"Did we just—"
"Break the festival rules?" I said. "Absolutely."
We didn't have time to celebrate because the system retaliated.
My interface lit up.
A new objective was force-loaded into my arc:
"Wow," I said, deadpan. "Could they be more obvious?"
Ashrin's jaw tightened. "They want you to erase yourself."
"Well, joke's on them," I said. "I'm not good at begging."
I stormed toward the festival's central stage—the Trial Arena, a marble monstrosity where characters "earned" their place.
The Heroine was already there, center spotlight.
She looked at me, surprised. A little worried.
I took the stage and said, clearly, "I reject your redemption."
The crowd gasped.
The system tried to prompt a fallback:
"I don't need redemption. I don't need a rewrite. I need you all to understand: I survived because I changed the story. Not because I followed it."
As the barrier fully cracked now, Ashrin stepped through, holding a memory shard I hadn't seen before.
"This," he said, lifting it, "is from the first cycle. The first Verenia."
He placed the shard in my hand.
It showed a girl—me, but not quite—reaching for a figure in the dark.
She whispered, "Don't let me be forgotten."
He didn't forgot.
He never did.
Even as the world erased her.
Even as I replaced her.
I turned back to the crowd.
Look at the princes. The heroine. The system itself.
And I said, "We all have our own choices."
The sky cracked.
Code rained down.
And somewhere, deep in the Academy's spine, something ancient shut down.