Sweet Romance12 min read
Did I Really Just Kill an Ice-Cream King and Get a Demon Dragon?
ButterPicks16 views
I never expected a coffee and a small scoop of fate to rearrange my life.
"I ordered a latte," I said, more to ground myself than to the barista.
"One latte," the barista replied without looking up. "You want sugar?"
"No." I watched the steam rise, thought of nothing and everything, and then a voice like a machine ticked in my head.
[Adventurer Ayla Fitzpatrick will enter Infinite Worlds.]
"Did you hear that?" I asked the air.
"Nope." Elsie Longo, my sister, chewed a Danish and blinked. "You okay, Ayla?"
I smiled because that’s what you do when reality feels like a prank. "Yeah. Fine."
Then the world did what worlds in bad novels do. My body went thin like pixels and spilled away.
I opened my eyes and sunlight pressed through glass onto my face. The room smelled of detergent and the bed was too neat. A small clock on my wrist flashed data: single-player world: Ice-Cream Vendor. Main task: survive. Reward: adventure points. Failure: erasure.
I sat up. "What is this," I whispered.
"White hair again? Ayla, if you keep sleeping this long I'll tell mom," Elsie sang through the doorway before bounding in.
"Morning, you early bird," I said, flinching at the familiarity.
Elsie put both hands on her hips. "You said you'd take me out today. Don’t forget."
"I won't." I got up, pulling the clothes on like armor. The house was tight and neat. Edmund Bengtsson—my supposed father—read the paper in the blue shirt he always wore. Sandra Albert—my mother—moved with the polite frayed pretty of someone who stepped lightly around cost and opinion. The world tucked itself around me like a costume.
"Eat," Sandra insisted. "You need to keep your weight up."
"I'm good." I smiled the way you smile in a play: all the feeling is backstage.
Elsie tugged my sleeve and we went out because in this civilian life, the main thing to do was not stand out. We went to the park and into a small amusement area that looked as if someone had taken the idea of joy and put it in a thrift-shop box. It was quiet because it was a weekday.
"There's an ice-cream stall!" Elsie squealed and dragged me to a cart that hadn't been there before. A small, shadowed man in a dark cloak worked it. His beard was white and too long for his face. He moved like someone who had waited for a very long time for just the right customer.
"Old man," a little boy said. "We want the pink one."
"This?" the man croaked, and his voice scraped like a key down a lock. He showed them a glass jar of what should have been strawberry cream. It wasn't.
I froze. "Don't—"
"Here." The man handed the cone to the boy. "On the house."
The boy took a bite and his eyes closed.
I looked closer. The cream wasn't cream. It smelled like iron and cold earth. There was a hard white thing half-buried in the swirl. I leaned forward and saw a greenish bone, a finger with a long curved nail.
"That's—"
"Isn't it delicious?" Elsie said, innocent and bright. She held her cone like it was a treasure. My stomach flipped.
I stepped back. "We should go."
"No! This is free. Old man gave it to us!" Elsie hugged the cone to herself as if it were a new friend.
I nearly told her everything then. I nearly shouted at the little, bearded man to stop and run. But the rules pressed on me like a cool hand. Survive. Fail and vanish. The system didn't notify anyone that your sister had tasted a finger.
We went home. Night came and with it the sound that flattened the house like a fist.
"Knock knock!" There was a frantic hammering at my door. "Ayla! Open up!"
I didn't move. The window was being pounded by a dry hand. The shape at the glass had the same thin white beard. The house distorted like a mind trying to remember a face.
I held my breath and checked my watch. Minimize variables. Close doors. Seal windows. The pounding stopped at dawn and I slept in fits. I woke and the same routine restarted, the same jokes and the same bread. The world looped. The voice in my head ticked: single-player world. Survive.
"Ayla," Elsie chirped. "Let's go to the fair."
We walked because it was the script. This time the ice-cream stall was not served by an old man but a thin man with a long scar.
"Uncle, can I have the green one?" a boy asked.
"You may." The man offered a cone to a child. Every child cheered and crowded. He glanced at me, then handed me a cone with a polite nod.
I took it and tucked the small key I’d found earlier — gold and cold — into my pocket. It had slipped into the serving as if fate had persnickety fingers. I kept it. I tasted nothing. I watched Elsie. She ate. Her mouth trembled with joy.
That night the pounding was louder. The door burst. I found the keyhole behind a round stone plate. The key fit. The floor gave under my feet and I dropped into cold, stone silence.
"Get up. Move." Something laughed. The green light of old things rose and a beast slammed the door from above. I ran. The cold bit my ankle and I fell into a depth of pain. Behind me, something growled like old bones. I slammed a metal door and for a moment I thought I'd beat the monster.
I found a stone sarcophagus with the line inside the wall: Kill the Ghost King. Take the treasure.
"This is a grave," I said aloud, my voice thin.
"There is a sword," a whisper answered from the dark.
I opened the coffin and inside lay a peachwood sword. It was lighter than it looked, humming like a trapped insect. I held it like a promise.
"Who put a weapon in a tomb?" I muttered.
"Maybe the vendor expected someone brave," said a voice I didn't have to turn to hear.
I crawled into the coffin and clutched the sword. The ghost outside broke the door again and his laughter chewed the air. I waited for him by the open coffin and when he pushed in, bone and teeth, the peachwood found his throat before he could say the name the world had given him.
He screamed. Blood tasted of smoke. The thing that had been an old man turned into a monster and then collapsed. The dark around him uncoiled like a thought unmade. The air cleared. I felt the system ping.
[Adventurer Ayla Fitzpatrick, first completion of single-player world: Ice-Cream Vendor. Award: 300 adventure points.]
When I opened my eyes I stood in the clean white void the system gifted its players: a mall of light with a single pistol on a pedestal, cheap and certain. I used points. I bought a revolver that would hurt physical things half as well against ghosts. I bought bullets. I stored them in the system. The voice asked if I wanted to leave. I said yes.
I woke in a coffee shop. A second later, Elsie knocked at my apartment door, life arranged like a neat room with light.
"You're really awake," she said, knocking.
"Yes." I smiled, but I felt residue of the tomb in my bones. The system chimed: three days until the next world.
It came faster than I thought. Another dizzying pull. Another card: single-player world: XuanFantasy — Cultivation Academy. Task: become the strongest on the surface.
This time I woke inside another body: a noble girl, hair black as the stitched night, a palace to go with the name. The room smelled of incense. The voice read memory to me: She is Ye Qingli's sister—no, that family. My body belonged to a girl named Ye Qingli—no, the system used an alias that didn't matter. Real names were less important than rules.
"Where is my mask?" I asked in the quiet room.
"Do not play games in front of your elders, little princess," said a voice, and a man stood there—tall, frost-edged. His presence was like a hand placed on someone else's paper, precise and owning. His name was Leaf, I heard, but not that name—he was Elias Taylor here. He looked at me as if I were a collection of star maps he could read without being taught.
"My brother said you should rest," he said, and despite his cold he touched my forehead like a soft, literal anchor. "Don't strain yourself."
"Thank you." My voice was thin.
Elias's kindness sat in my chest like a warm stone. In the back of my head a part that had learned from coffins told me to watch him. People are not often both kind and complicated. The academy smelled of ink and river-sour tea.
I walked outside with a borrowed mask—ceramic with fox features—and a small, grumpy thing along for the ride. A voice in my head, wet and silver, chimed.
[You have bonded with a spirit: name self-claimed as "Branch": a dragon of ice named Enzo Morozov?]
"No." I blinked. "You can't be Enzo, you're the ice-cream vendor's name."
The voice-sized being that said it sounded amused. "I am not that man," it purred in my head. "I am older. My name is Braxton Wang in the old tongue. If you like, call me Brother."
"I prefer... leaf?" I tried to be rude and failed.
What came next was a flurry of contracts, a sip of star-ink logic. I bit my finger and let my blood draw the line. The dragon formed a sigil and promised me growth as I promised companionship. It was coercive, friendly, and necessary.
"Who are you, really?" I asked the small assembled companions. "And why did you bring me here?"
"We're students," said a girl in white silk who called herself Gianna Thomas. "We're here for a phoenix feather collection."
"We're not thieves," said a boy with video-sharp eyes. "We're hunters of opportunity."
"She's dangerous," the guild leader sneered. His voice rolled like a door slammed by the wind. "She nearly broke our rivals. We saw the traces of her star array."
That was the truth. In private rooms I had practiced a little constellation magic I had found in memory, and the world swallowed a little.
Then it happened—the cast of day's drama condensed into a small, private cruelty. A girl named Ye Moyan—my past-self's quiet friend—had been pushed into a river. The rumor quivered like a loose thread.
"Who would do such a thing?" I asked.
"She was jealous," a maid whispered. "She wanted status. She was dangerous."
Elias—no, the man whose smile was the kind that made assassins nervous—left without answering. Later I learned what he had arranged.
When I did nothing, when I watched the academy's politics like a clock, the thing about being invisible dissolved. People began to watch me. They paid attention to the power that flickered in my palms and the fox mask that moved like a living idea. Fortune will be attracted to those who are useful. Danger will be attracted to those who are dangerous.
One afternoon, a rumor burst into flame: dirt on Elias Taylor. Evidence, crisp and sharp, leaked in a way that can't be accidental. A clipboard. A servant's guilty hands. A hidden ledger. He had paid boys. He had bribed bathrooms. He had arranged for the push.
"You did this," I said when I cornered him in a hall where tapestries recorded too much.
"Evelyn—Ayla—what are you talking about?" Elias smiled the smile that used to warm rooms. "I don't know what you mean."
"Don't play the idiot." I said it in English and he seemed surprised by the slang.
"You're making accusations." His voice went from silk to creak. "On what grounds?"
I opened my palm and showed the ledger, the names, the receipts, the small carved token that matched the one on a chain he always wore. He had been certain of his plan. He had carved certainty for himself.
"Elias," I said and the world narrowed until we were just two people with history. "In front of the Academy Assembly, now."
"No!" His face red with the high heat of a man caught.
We did it in the grand hall—a place made of carved wood and the eyes of dozens. Banners drooped. Students came like moths to a flame. Tutors and masters sat like judges. There was a crowd because there is nothing sweet in watching a respected man fall. A servant announced my charge. "Ayla Fitzpatrick accuses Elias Taylor of arranging the attempted murder of a student," she said clearly.
Elias smiled. "Baseless." His teeth seemed to sharpen.
"Baseless?" I asked. "Is that what you call a list of payments? Is that what you call a ledger made in your own handwriting signed by your own seal?"
He choked on his composure. A hush fell. Some people begun to take out their devices—magical recorders in this world; others whispered. The headmaster narrowed his eyes, the way a man might fix a broken thing that was once perfectly well.
"Bring the ledger." The headmaster's voice was a gavel.
Someone pressed a clattering device that embroidered our words into tapes—an automatic scribe. The assembled masters leaned forward. Elias's face shifted through colors like a bad storm.
"It isn't true," he said, and his voice had that familiar first move: denial. "You have no proof."
I stepped close. "We have proof. We have witnesses. We have boys who were paid and a note that says your name. We have the stone talisman you left at the riverbank."
His expression slid from denial to confusion to the pale gray of panic.
"Someone's lying." He forced a laugh and it sounded like coins dropping in a well. "You're ruining my name. I will not—"
He tried to storm off. An older master called out, "Hold him."
Two guards stepped forward. The crowd leaned. The first stage was pressure.
"I didn't—" Elias began, but the ledger was placed in front of him and the headmaster flicked through the pages with a long finger. Names. Dates. Places. The red wax seal with the insignia he thought was private.
"How did you get this?" Elias demanded.
"A servant," I said. "A conscience."
"Shameful," someone hissed.
He looked at the faces around him—students, teachers, little ones who looked like they believed in the rules. His mouth tried to make laughter, but it crumbled like wet paper. His swagger was gone; he balanced like a man who'd been stripped of a jacket in a crowd.
"You're going to broadcast this," Elias said suddenly, voice small. "You can't—"
"It already is," I said. "Everyone will see the ledger. Recorders are on."
People pressed forward. Phones—crystal panes—recorded the fall. A murmur like a field rat chorus walked the room. Elias staggered. The spectrum of his emotions exploded across his face: disbelief, then anger, then the first small, dizzy breath of fear, finally a frantic scramble to denial.
"It wasn't me," he pleaded into the microphones he had once used to give benevolent speeches. "I never—"
Someone from the back whispered, "Look at the seal. That's his."
Elias's mouth curved into laughter and it snapped off mid-sound. He heard his name whispered as if it were a curse. Students took out their pens and tablets, hands shaking. Cameras lighted like so many small suns. They filmed him exactly as he fell.
"Elias," said the headmaster softly. "Kneel."
He made a sound like a wounded animal and at last sank to his knees. His suit, once immaculate, wrinkled. The hall hummed. A dozen students whispered accusations. Guardians covered their faces with shame or delight depending on where their loyalties lay.
"Elias, confess and apologize," the headmaster commanded. "State your deeds before the school and the families."
"I—" He swallowed. His eyes had gone hollow. Sweat beaded at his temples. "I'm sorry. I'm sorry, I—"
"But you didn't push her into the river," someone called. "You had the boys—"
He looked at me and the shame hit like weight. "I didn't mean for that," he said. "I never—"
I had to stop him. His words were thin and wrong and dangerous. I stepped forward, the hall quieting as if the room itself had to hear what I would say.
"This ends here," I said. "Elias Taylor arranged for the attack. He employed minors. He wrote the checks. The ledger says he did. You will be expelled from the Academy. The families will be notified. The city will be told."
His hands trembled. "No, please," he whispered, a child's voice realized in full panic. He looked to the crowd and his eyes pleaded for someone—anyone—to do what he had always been given: to be let off. He did not find the mercy he'd banked on.
"Elias." The headmaster sounded weary and almost—merciless. "You will stand in the town square at noon tomorrow. The families will be present. You will apologize before the townspeople and the families of Ye Moyan. You will return the funds. You will be exiled to serve the charity houses for a year without rank."
Elias made a strangled noise and tried to bargain.
"Please," he whimpered now, losing the last of his composure. "Please, I'll do anything! I'll step down—I'll leave the Academy—just not—"
A student from the gallery screamed the single word you hear when a person's image flips in the public sun. Some whipped out devices and let the world listen.
"You meant to kill a girl," someone shouted. "You meant to make her vanish."
He fell to his knees again. "I didn't mean to—" he sobbed.
The crowd watched. Phones recorded his begging. People filmed as the man who had been the face of a hundred polite committees and parents' nights crumpled into a pleading, collapsed thing. The progression was a small merciless play: smugness, confusion, denial, shock, pleading, collapse. Students took photos. Parents gasped. Some recorded his shame with a kind of joy that is ugly and clean at once. Others looked away.
"Take him out," the headmaster said.
"He will be held," someone answered. Two guards took him by the shoulders and dragged him away. He tried to beg as they moved. He cried. A few people in the crowd cheered; others were silent. Later, the videos of his fall would circle the city for days. The gossip-mills would wind and rewind, and his name would be a cautionary tale told in a dozen households.
When the hall finally emptied, I felt tired to the bone. I felt the residue of a victory: hollow and necessary. I went home with Elsie, who hugged me like I had braided a new story into our lives.
"Are you okay?" she asked.
"I am," I said. "For now."
That night, a machine voice clicked in the dark.
[Adventurer Ayla Fitzpatrick: main quest updated. You have completed a justice task. 500 adventure points granted.]
"Good," I muttered, and pressed my palm over my heart because the feeling of justice is not always kind.
Days blurred into scrimmages of power and study. Braxton—my dragon partner, who insisted on being called Leaf-Brother in public—practiced roars inside my mind. The fox mask warmed on my face like a small, deliberate transgression.
"You'll be careful?" Gianna asked.
"I will," I said.
And then the worlds tilted again.
This time the system awarded me a pistol kept in a cold white vault and a stock of bullets. I stored them in the void, safe and quiet.
The infinite worlds continued. I kept doing what the system wanted. I survived. I learned. I bound dragons and spirits and forged pacts of blood that felt like promises.
And yet, when I am old enough to look back, I will smell that strange ice-cream swirl and know the taste of survival. That peachwood sword still rests somewhere in that tomb. The watch on my wrist still tells me when the nights will be noisy. When the system voice sings in its mechanical voice, I listen.
"Three days to the next world," it told me once. I took a breath, tightened my hand on a fox-mask string and said, "Bring it on."
The End
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