Sweet Romance17 min read
I Came Back as the Girl Who Wouldn't Be Stepped On
ButterPicks13 views
"Ping! Host 342615, hello. I'm your bound system 5001. Please treat me well."
I opened my eyes to a room that looked mildly comforting and entirely wrong. My head should have been a smashed mess on that highway—either in a hospital or sealed into a black box. Instead, nothing hurt. A soft bed. A window leaking pale dawn. And a tinny, very polite voice in my ear.
"Did you say I'm dead?" I asked.
"No rudeness intended, Host. Sorry, Host. I only meant to explain the situation." The system made an apologetic emoji sound that somehow made me want to roll my eyes. "You are in the novel world of 'Rose of Torment' and you have successfully bound to the heroine system. Complete required tasks, earn points to one hundred, and you'll get one chance to be reborn in this world as the heroine."
"Heroine?" I scoffed before I remembered the book. "Oh my God."
The title had been notorious. I'd read the whole thing once and vowed never to again, but my name—my real name in the world—matched the original heroine. That was why the system had chosen me. Reader hatred for the original plot had been volcanic. In the book, the heroine had been a timid, abandoned girl abused by fate and people. The male lead—King of the Jerks—had liked a luminous white-petaled goddess and used the heroine like a doormat. He had even, in a plot line as ridiculous as it was cruel, harvested her kidney for his white-petaled love and tossed her away. The heroine died alone in her rented room. Months later a baffled male lead asked, "Where did she go?" when everyone already knew.
"You're imagining it," I'd told the book as I read it. "If I could jump into this mess I would slap him so hard he'd forget he was rich."
The system blinked its tiny pitying face. "Host, your main task is not to wander the original path. Readers demanded a rewrite. You must overturn the heroine's tragic fate. Main task: change the heroine's destiny. Subtasks will trigger."
"Finally," I breathed. "So I don't have to replay dying in a smelly room."
The rules were clear: I had to survive, earn points, and rewrite the tired plot. I had three days of rent left in a shabby rented room inherited from the original woman; three days to get a job or be homeless in an unfamiliar city. I had to act fast.
On day two, I heard a drunken crash at my door. A deep, lousy perfume smell followed like a banner. When I opened the door, a man in a black suit staggered in with a glossy, overmade woman on his arm.
He reeked of liquor and entitlement. "What are you doing, hiding?" he barked at me, as if he owned the room.
"You're in my house and you call that question?" I said, very calmly for someone whose heart was doing jump ropes.
The woman's eyes flicked at me like a blade. "You shouldn't have opened the door," she cooed, venom wrapped in honey. "You're shameless. For money you would...stay close to anyone, right? You'd sleep with anyone for cash."
"Who are you?" I asked.
"Jiang Feifei." The system helpfully whispered into my ear. "Hotel hiremaid. Generic gold-digger."
"Right. Hotel hiremaid," I said aloud. "Nice to meet you." I picked a glass of water from the kitchen and, to their surprise, splashed it in Alexander Winter's face.
"Are you sober now?" I enunciated like someone reading an instruction manual.
He sputtered fury, but his companion squealed that he had come to find me, and I realized the pattern: this man crashed into women's lives and left chaos trailing behind. I remembered the book's male lead—the spoiled tyrant who hurt the heroine. Alexander Winter. I grinned. This was going to be fun.
"You dare?" he shouted.
"I dare," I said. "Also, you keep coming to the wrong address at stupid hours. You should get help."
He spun like a vengeful weather vane. "You want money? You want to leave me alone? I'll give you money. Five. Million."
My mouth dropped open. The card he slammed on the coffee table was ridiculous—plastic, heavy, glossy, with a number I couldn't even compute. He tossed it at me like it was disposable.
"Take it and go," Alexander ordered. "Password is my birthday plus two zeros."
A beat of stunned silence. "You can't be serious," I managed. "I never said I wanted money."
"Is that what you think? You're after my money. Take it and leave."
"Okay," I said, eyes gleaming. "Five million is generous. But my readers—" the system sighed in mock indignation— "the readers think five million is cheap. They demand ten million. Double it and I'll disappear."
He froze. Pride warred with convenience. I saw it in the tightness of his jaw.
"Ten million?" he barked. "You know what you'd do with ten million? You're so greedy."
"My point exactly," I said, smiling. "Give it, or I start talking."
Alexander snarled, then, like an idiot, flung a second glossy card at me. "One more five million. Password: 131452."
I blinked and pretended to deliberate then turned, about to pick up the cards, when the system chirped, "Task released."
"You have to wait until the readers decide tasks?" I complained.
"They just received the notification." The system pouted. "They said five million is too small. They want one million more."
I pretended to be dainty. "Ten million? My oh my."
Alexander's face turned an unhealthy purple. He slammed his palm on the table. "Fine! Ten million. Take it and leave me alone."
"Done," I said, taking both cards. I left them on the table as a trap and closed the door.
Outside, the alley hummed with dark activity. Men in masks surged forward like a bad movie. I unlimbered my poker face and took two cards from my pocket—one was a near-identical decoy. "Give me the cards," they demanded. I handed over the decoy. They cheered and rushed off.
Then a thunderbolt of action. A tall man, who later told me his phone handle was "Morning Light," kicked like someone trained in proper violence and flung one of the attackers into a lamppost. He moved like someone born to outrun trouble and protect.
"I told you to stay down!" he snapped, and then he helped me up like an annoyed brother. Declan Downs—he gave me that name when I asked—had rescuers' calm. He carried me to the safety of a cheap taxi idling in the lane, and I slept like the unconscious in the backseat, dreaming that I'd finally thwacked my favorite villain.
When I woke, Declan had gone. The system beeped cheerfully, "Host, you have five points."
"That's it?" I muttered.
"That and a phone number. You can call him." The system was unhelpful and adorable.
A week later, I was in A City—glitter, neon, and audition flyers stuck on public pylons. Studio lights buzzed. I had been pushed to audition for a small role in a fantasy drama called Snowfall Sways. The part was a minor snake-spirit who dies heroically but blesses the lovebirds' lives. It was short and sweet and, of course, the readers wanted me in the production, because chaos tastes better when cast. I tried, and my bad career—a history of turning down every dirty shortcut—meant I had nothing to lose.
On the audition panel sat a sharp-eyed producer with a smirking face. His name was Chet Ricci, and every hair in his neck said "dangerous." Next to him, a pale, elegant woman with a smile like a carefully folded fan watched me with an interest that slipped from curiosity to something like appetite. That woman was Lauren Khan, who later turned out to be Alexander Winter's white moon—his "only" love. The system, tiny and gossipy, whispered, "Lauren Khan online. She will play the heroine. Host, good luck."
"Start," said Eladio Hoffmann, the director, dry as autumn leaves.
I cried on cue, spoke the heroic lines with a trembling, honest throat, and somehow, the room sat so quiet I heard the air move.
"Wonderful!" Chet grunted, the sort of endorsement that smells like possession. "You're in."
"You're giving me the role?" I asked.
"Yes." He winked and licked his lips, and I felt like a fly that had just landed on a very expensive pie.
I left the meeting with room and contract and a bus of new headaches. My old agent, Kaylee Donovan, called, furious I'd even considered leaving the company; but then Holly Fitzgerald—the executive from a different, larger agency—arrived at my little rental and apologized for the earlier misunderstanding. "We want you," she smiled. "We're willing to pay the termination fee. Join us."
Holly Fitzgerald's offer made my head spin. A big agency meant better resources. It also meant more watchers, more hands stroking the strings. The readers cheered and the system pinged, "Subtask unlocked: gather allies."
A few days later, on set, I met the famous lead actor Niklas Marshall. He was polite and normal in a way that made your shoulders relax. The woman who had once threatened me on the street in another life was the elegant Lauren Khan. She was composed, and when she smiled she looked like the right ending for a melodrama. But she also carried a poised cruelty. Where Alexander bruised, she plotted.
"You're the one who slapped me with that cup," she had whispered when I reached for a cup at rehearsal. "We will talk."
Everyone's petty wars and backhanded compliments filled the days. I made a friend in Bianca Acosta, a bright assistant with an uncle who owned winnings and fortunes and an odd way of speaking of him as "my hero"—Bianca's "uncle" would later become very relevant. Bianca followed me, bubbly and protective, like a little sister who carried a pocketknife because she trusted me to get into trouble. She later said, "My uncle says don't worry. He'll watch your back," and I filed that away as both ridiculous and oddly delightful.
Then the scandal started.
One night, while we all sat in the cottage living room, Lauren Khan—supposedly sweet and wronged—handed me a steaming cup of tea. I had my hands full and the cup slipped. Tea splashed onto the floor, Lauren cried out, and a camera—hidden, surgical—cut. Three clicks of editing later, a video was up, and the internet became a mob. The clip made me look like a spiteful woman splashing hot tea on an innocent angel. The comments poured like poison.
"What do you want from me?" I asked Holly on the phone.
"Take a breath," Holly said. "We'll handle it."
But "handled" in the entertainment world meant money, networks, trolls, and power games. The next twenty-four hours were a torrent of hot and cold. Someone paid to push the clip into headlines. Someone else—my Declan?—paid to bury it. It became a war between spin and truth. The system chirped, "Subtask: survive public assault. Points available."
It felt surreal: the world I'd fled to be reborn in was mediatised. Fans chose sides. Lauren's followers screamed betrayal. My following—"Esme's Leaves," Bianca insisted on naming it—stemmed from people who liked the underdog.
"She's apologizing," the news feed flashed. Lauren's trembling apology video played: she cried and bowed and said she'd been wrong. I felt nothing but the electric hum of suspicion. The apology seemed too deliberate. The timing was wrong. It was convenient and theatrical.
"Something's off," I told Declan over the phone. "This was staged."
"Did you think it was coincidence that the video dropped in the night?" he asked. "No. You're being set up and then cleaned up. Too tidy."
"Who would buy both sides?" I asked.
"Someone with pockets and a plan." He paused. "Also, sugar, don't go outside tonight."
I didn't. I stayed home. The next morning the internet was a different war zone. Threads accused me of being a climber, a liar. Threads defended me: #NotMyEsme trended briefly, then crashed. My phone vibrated non-stop.
"Host," the system chimed, "readers mandate a face-slap. Fight back audibly."
"Fine," I told the system. "Plan, please."
The plan—Holly's plan backed by Declan's quiet resources and the agency's computer war room—was surgical. We reposted my raw footage: rehearsal tapes, rehearsal bloopers, timing of cups. Then, the crucial lever: a recorded call between Lauren and Chet, where Lauren discussed staging a provocation to get attention. Chet's voice—greasy and triumphant—said, "This will prod the web. Make'em cry. We'll hand a scapegoat a DIY tear-jerker." Lauren's laughter in the clip was a blade. Holly uploaded it to the agency channel. Declan arranged ten thousand watchers to push it. The story changed lanes overnight.
The net rails turned like a wind. Instead of my being lynched, Lauren's hypocrisy was the new oxygen. The comments I feared turned into chorus lines of resentment for the orchestrators.
"This is not clean," I told Declan as viewers surged. "We turned the tide, but do we know who started it?"
"You may not know everything," he said, "but your name is no longer a weapon. The system prefers a dramatic reveal soon." His voice softened. "Also, have dinner on me."
We breathed. The system chirped an arithmetic of points and timelines. The readers loved the drama. I hated them and loved them in equal measure.
A week blurred into set life and interviews. I discovered more about Lauren—her gilded access to Sebastian Makarov, A City's most dangerous benefactor. Sebastian's attention was a rumor that ate men alive. Whoever he favored could make or break careers. Lauren was his outwardly favored daughter (or niece—networking semantics), and where she commanded favor, trouble followed the rest.
One night, at a film gala where the glitter dimmed the stars, I walked in to candles and velvet. Alexander Winter—my original tormentor—sat at a table with a face still branded with a bruise I recognized; he looked like a man who'd been given a lesson. When we crossed paths, he tried to speak.
"Esme," he started, measured, like a man trying on apologies for size. "We should talk."
"I will talk," I said. "In public."
He laughed and the sound was a stale thing. "You always had theatrics."
"Then make it a show," I said.
"What's your demand?" he sneered.
"Two things," I told him. "Clarify the lies. Publicly. And give back what you took—figuratively and literally—from people you hurt."
His mouth curled. "What do you want, exactly?"
"Truth, restitution, and a public apology." I glanced at the gala crowd as if remembering how many cameras were always watching. "If you refuse, I'll give my story to every channel in the city."
His eyes glinted. "This is blackmail."
"It's leverage," I said. "And I am patient."
Two nights later, a charity gala for a children's hospital filled the city's grand hotel with men in suits who smelled like money and women like jewels. It was the kind of event where someone could hide a scandal and smother it with piano music. I had not expected my request to be answered—until the moment happened.
"Esme," Declan whispered as we sat three rows from the dais. His fingers found mine and held them. "If it goes bad, stand and read this card." He handed me a small card with a single instruction: speak clearly, and I would be heard.
The emcee's voice washed over us, and then the lights dimmed. Alexander Winter rose to speak—an unusual courtesy. He took the microphone and towered over the public stage. Cameras zeroed in; phones recorded. My stomach climbed into my throat.
He started, voice a practiced public man's tone. "Dear donors, friends—" he paused to scan the hall like a man checking his reflection. "I must make a statement."
The room leaned forward.
"I have wronged someone," he said. "I thought wealth made me untouchable. I thought my choices were private." He swallowed. "I am ashamed."
A ripple of murmurs. I heard Lauren's intake of breath—if she was in the crowd, she kept still as a cat.
He pointed at me.
"Esme Britt," he said, "has been spoken ill of by me and others in ways I now regret. She has been used as an object and as a punchline. I apologize."
There was a polite applause. The gala resumed. It should have ended there.
I did not let it.
"I accept your apology," I said, standing, voice steady. "But apologies are paper. I want the truth. I want names. If you truly want to make this right, you will do so now."
The cameras swiveled. Alexander smiled like a man about to open a safe.
"Name them," I demanded. "Name the people who paid to smear me. Name the puppet masters who profit from destroying lives."
He faltered. "I—what are you doing?"
I drew a breath and told the story. I told the brief truth—Alexander's drunken arrival, the cards, the fights; I told the truth about Lauren and Chet's plotted clips. I leaked small, verifiable proofs: the call recordings Holly had preserved and the edited footage. I watched the cameras clip to phone screens as hands fished for their own devices.
And then I dropped the hammer.
"In this room," I said, "sit the people who made entertainment a blood sport. They'll stand and speak. If they refuse, the evidence goes live across every channel."
I didn't name Sebastian Makarov. I let his allies scramble for control. The room smelled like a storm breaking.
Cameras cut to Lauren Khan at the edge of the dais. Her face blanched. She stood because the world expected it.
"Lauren," I said softly into the microphone that had become a sword, "did you orchestrate a staged provocation? Did you pay to control the narrative that burned me?"
Lauren's eyes opened wide, and in that moment exposure was a hungry animal. She reeled, tried to smile a rehearsed sorrow, then remembered Chet's greedy wink from the audition room. Her composure snapped.
"Yes," Lauren said, too-loud, voice splitting. "I did."
The hall trembled. Reporters began to shout questions. Alexander's jaw clenched so hard his knuckles whitened.
I had not planned for the next hour to be as ugly as it became. The public unspooled the story into a spectacle.
Lauren's admission set off a chain reaction. Phones flashed video; gossip exploded. Chet Ricci denied under probe and then turned on Lauren with an acid tongue: "You wanted noise. You went too far." He flailed to save himself and then refused to answer.
"Why did you do it?" a journalist demanded. "Why burn another actress for attention?"
Lauren's face crumpled. The glamour slid off like cheap makeup. "Because in a world built by men, attention is currency. I wanted to keep mine. I wanted to be untouchable."
A hand raised near the stage. It belonged to a man I did not expect—an assistant whose voice had been like oil in a machine, Paul Gunther. He pulled out a record from his jacket—emails between Sebastian's office and Lauren's handlers. The implication stung. Sebastian had known. Whether he paid or turned a blind eye, the smell of complicity wrapped him in the room like smoke.
"Sebastian Makarov is connected to this," Paul said into the microphone. "Not only that—several attacks on artists were traced back to his shell companies."
Whispers became a roar. Sebastian Makarov's men in sharp suits skimmed towards the exits. Someone called his name; his face, usually a mask, was pale.
"Shut it down," he ordered, fingers trembling. But the cameras had teeth.
The night's climax, the punishment I had promised myself to watch, unfolded in a way I could not have fully planned but had helped to orchestrate. The people who had laughed at my supposed clumsiness were now unmasking their own sins in real-time.
"Why not let the public decide?" I said. "If you have nothing to hide, stand and answer."
A handful did. A few issued statements about personal growth and apologies that clattered like tin. One industrialist in a corner attempted to shout me down. People recorded. Audience members took step-by-step video of his hem—his face contorted from arrogance to fear.
The fall happened slowly and then all at once. Alexander, who thought himself above storm and scorn, tried to take back his earlier words. "I didn't mean—" he stammered. A camera lifted, his voice sounded small and stupid. Someone shoved a live mic in his face; a thousand phones recorded the tremor in his hands. Alexander's charm—the one that convinced some women he could change—crumbled.
Then the crescendo of punishment came. Lauren fell into a spiral of humiliation. She went from tearful to petulant to pleading. Her followers filmed as the heavy curtain of protection tore. People pressed their phones into reporters' faces, calling for criminal investigations. Someone even produced documentation of Chet's tendering for covert reputation management, invoices, and cash transfers. The scandal was not merely social: it had money, contracts, and leverage.
At the climax, outside under a swarm of hungry lights and camera flashes, a woman I'd only met in the elevator—Holly—stood and read a list of names. "Paid smear accounts," she said. "Fake influencers. Contracted narratives." She handed a folder to the gala's host. The crowd buzzed with hungry energy.
"Stand down," a man hissed over the microphone, voice small now. "I can explain."
No one was interested to hear that. Instead, the crowd moved as if it had been orchestrated. The room's current turned away from the accused and toward justice, raw and merciless. Phones panned and zoomed and posted and reposted. Half the city watched as the gilded turned truly gilded with humiliation.
There was a single unforgettable moment: Alexander Fall. He'd tried to pull the weight of his title over his words, but when a senior editor stepped forward with a proof of funds trail that linked him to the buying of silence, the room's sympathy collapsed. He opened his mouth and began the last act every villain fears. "I—please—"
He fell to his knees on the polished floor of the gala ballroom.
"Please," he whispered. "Forgive me."
People surged in different directions. Phones zoomed. Some guests clapped, half shout of triumph, half eerie accompaniment. Others scoffed. Lauren kneeled by his side—not because she forgave him, but because she realized the stage had been made not for her performance but for her ruin.
"Don't cry for me," I said, watching the scene as if it were a mirror of every toxic script I'd ever read. "If you want to apologize, tell the names. Give the truth. Make amends beyond words."
Alexander’s eyes were wet and stupid. He begged. "Please. I—"
No one moved to help. The cameramen filmed, the audience recorded, reporters whispered. And there it was—the fall into base pleas. I saw the exact steps the book had failed to show: arrogance to isolation, false security to public kneel, the once-powerful man shaking and asking to be spared.
The humiliation continued beyond the knees. Security escorted the pair out. Outside the basilica of photographers, shouts and calls of "shame!" followed them. A hundred strangers recorded their disgrace. Online, a million clips in a tidal wave of #PaidToLie and #NotOnMyWatch spread. The crowd watched, recorded, and then—something more terrifying than shaming happened. The law began to stir. Investigations that once slept on velvet cushions woke up.
The punishment scene lasted over five hundred words in my head and in the feeds—longer in the echo that rippled through my world. It wasn't a neat scene of revenge; it was messy and human and monstrous. Alexander moved through denial to anger to pleading to collapse. Lauren's stages of performance dissolved under the harsh light. I could see the personal arc: me, a girl who had been written to die, standing and watching men and women unfurl their ugliness in the cold light of a hundred cameras.
People clapped when they were taken away—some out of relief, some out of savage glee. Cameras were waved as if in victory. It was a public cleansing; it was also cruel. The punishment was not a revenge fantasy; it was an indictment, recorded and rebroadcast as a lesson in why the exploitative economy of fame deserved to crumble.
Afterward, news anchors whispered that this incident would change everything. Fans cheered and filed petitions. The court would come. The city would watch.
Declan held my hand. "You okay?" he asked, quiet and patient.
"I'm fine," I said. "I just wanted my life back and the original heroine to get the ending she never did."
"You handed that to her," he said. "You did what the system asked, I think. And you looked beautiful doing it."
I laughed. "You mean I looked ridiculous at a gala and then flipped the table."
"Either way," he said, smiling, "you rewrote things."
The system pinged, "Task complete. Host gains 25 points."
I lay awake that night with my phone burning with messages and an unknown calm. The enemies were bruised and exposed, not magically destroyed. The world had watched them crumble and expect retribution. Yet the novel's path had changed. The heroine—me—would not die in a foul room. I would survive. I would score more points.
There were still more tasks. The system reminded me: readers love a love story. Declan—who was definitely not the cold fortress that rumored about his name—stayed overnight and, by morning, called himself "Morning Light" in my phone messages. He helped me find a manager. He insisted on cooking, on safety, on keeping me fed. He taught me how to stand in public light without flinching.
"A hundred points," the system hummed, "and you can be reborn."
The path ahead was still long, lined with auditions, offers, greedy hands, and a new law that promised less cruelty. But for the first time, I could imagine living a life not dictated by the cruel plot of a novel. I could imagine sleeping in a room that was mine and not a tomb. I had friends who were real—Bianca with her gumption, Holly with her sharpness, Niklas who lent sanity, and Declan who lent strength.
On a small table by the window, a sunflower I'd bought in A City stood bright as a promise. Declan had chosen it because his mother liked them. I looked at the sunflower while the system ticked my points. "You saved my life," I told it. "You gave me the chance to choose."
"Host," the system replied cheerfully, "you are on a good path. Keep earning points."
"One hundred," I whispered. "One hundred and then rebirth. One last thing, 5001—when I win, do I get the old girl's life back intact, or do I get a new life?"
"A new life as the heroine that the readers will love," the system said. "And your memories. You get to keep yourself."
I held the sunflower in my hands, smelling the cheap pollen, thinking of cheap cards, messy videos, and a man kneeling on polished floors. In the end, the most important thing was simple and domestic: I would choose my life again. I would not let anyone else write my fate.
I tapped my name into my phone. "Esme Britt."
On the screen, Declan had already typed, "See you tomorrow. Be safe. Wear gloves—hands are precious."
"Always," I answered—not at all like a tidy, tale-end line. I put the sunflower in a glass, screwed the lid on a jar, and walked to the window. My heart beat, not like a warning, but like a drum. The system hummed a content little song. Outside, night pressed toward dawn.
This was my story now—strange, messy, and wholly mine.
The End
— Thank you for reading —