Sweet Romance15 min read
I Came From Nowhere, and I Made Them Eat It
ButterPicks10 views
I was eighteen when a power cut turned my life upside down and led me straight into a world of neon helmets, ruthless fans, and one very cold-eyed champion.
“It went out again,” someone shouted in the corner of the dingy net cafe. “As if New Year needs more bad luck!”
I took my headset off, popped a candy into my mouth, and chewed. The sugar crackled. Big cities had everything—except patience for old wiring.
A breathless woman barged in, flashlight wobbling in her hand. “Eliza! Your dad called. Your granddad—he’s in trouble. He attacked someone with a knife. They took him away.”
I bit down on my tongue so hard I tasted iron. “He’s supposed to be in the city visiting,” I said. “My granddad went to the city—he’s not like that.”
The woman’s eyes shone. “Declan said you have to come up right now. He said you better get yourself to the city, or your granddad will rot in jail.”
Declan Krueger. The name itself was a kind of cold. My father had always been more interested in climbing into someone else’s life than in his own family.
“You said Declan said he’d—what did he say?” I asked, voice low.
“That he wants you up here. Right now. And he says you’ll do anything if you don’t want your granddad to stay behind bars.”
I stood, every part of me suddenly alert. “Okay. Pack a few things. Get the tractor ready.” My voice surprised even me. “And take whatever cow dung you can find.”
People blinked. “Cow dung?” the woman repeated.
“Bring it.”
Whoever used me as a pawn would get the smell of it for a keepsake.
*
On New Year morning, I drove a rumbling tractor across the frost-silver town to a courtyard puffing with lantern light. A thin man with a sour mouth—Declan—came out and sniffed. He had married into a family that had luck and money; he’d left our little place to rot.
He folded his arms. “This isn’t your place. Don’t make a spectacle.”
I put the tractor keys in my pocket and smiled like a knife. “If it’s a spectacle you want, it’s a spectacle you get.”
A woman in a silk dress—Frida Russell—sat like an empress on a couch and pinned me with a smile.
“Eliza,” she said, “your granddad attacked our driver with a knife. He has people who saw it. Your granddad is in the station.”
“He provoked him,” I said, the truth a small brittle thing between my teeth.
Frida’s smile didn’t blink. “It can be arranged. You can save your granddad. You can marry for us, replace our daughter for a while. You do that, and we’ll make sure your granddad goes home.”
“You want me to marry who?”
“The Pearce family,” Frida said. She tapped the space beside her daughter, Gracelynn Fox—thin-lipped and soft-eyed. “A match set. The boy is… not healthy. He is volatile, broken. But we’re a family. We can place you.”
I felt the ground shift.
“You mean I replace her?” I asked.
Frida spread her hands. “We can do it quietly. You’ll be here in the city. You can earn money. Your granddad isn’t a criminal if we make him not be one.”
I looked at Declan. He had the face of a man who would sell the roof of his own life if the right price came along. My chest hurt with a fierce, hot thing.
“You are the ones who brought my granddad here,” I said. “You staged this to get me in. He’s been bullied by you all along, and now you want to swap me in as some living apology?”
Frida merely tilted her head. “You speak like a country child. But everyone gets their part to play. If you refuse, he stays in the cell. If you accept, he gets home. You won’t be alone in the city.”
I walked to the trunk and dragged two burlap sacks into the room. I ripped one open. A terrible, natural smell spilled out—two bags full of cow dung.
People gasped. Declan’s face went red with rage.
“You dare—” he started.
“I dare,” I said. “You wanted my family to dance. I gave you the music.”
I flung handfuls forward. The mess hit silk and marble. The servants shrieked. Frida stood, furious, and Gracelynn’s face curdled with shame and rage. But my choice had already been made.
“Send my granddad home. I’ll go.” I didn’t know then how little that promise would cost me.
*
The night I slipped into the city, hungry, cold, and smelling faintly of dung, I crawled into a net cafe full of people shouting at glowing screens. A pro match was happening: two gods of the game facing off in full-sensory helmets. The crowd roared.
I drifted to the edge and watched with the rapt attention of someone who had nothing to lose. On the stage of screens, a man with a black cap and a voice like a broken glass—Callen Parker—sat cool as ice. He was famous. He was "the Swallow", a legend who had once been king of the battlefield. Another player—Kai Mason, a retired pro who’d kept an arcade—sat tall but strained.
“Start it,” Callen said. His voice was flat. “I don’t have time for games.”
“Just play,” Kai said, trying to laugh.
The fight started wrong for Kai. The crowd leaned in. A young, furious player—Callen’s rival—ran a risky style. Everyone expected Callen to fold a little way in. But he pushed, and the match warped into an odd, impossible flow.
I stuck a roasted sweet potato in my mouth and watched, the taste lost under adrenaline. I loved games. Where I came from, a real screen was a dream. I’d watched videos hidden in cracked phones and learned control by memory.
The young guy had a style that wasn’t textbook but it was beautiful. He baited, danced, and in a blink he reversed a death, cut through Callen’s defenses and got the first blood. The crowd lost its mind.
He left his roasted potato on the table and strode to the counter to collect his winnings. People pushed away, murmuring. Callen took off his helmet and stared at the screen. He was not angry—he was intrigued.
Callen leaned back. He had a dangerous quiet the way a cliff had dangerous patience. “Who is she?” he asked a man by his elbow.
“She’s nobody,” someone said.
“Find out,” Callen said.
“Right away, boss.”
*
Two weeks later, I woke up, stuffed into a silk room with my head spinning and my heart slamming against my ribs. Someone had dragged me into the back door of the Pearce house; I’d been too tired and hungry to fight. I woke up in a strange bed and when I opened my eyes a man stood above me. He was enormous and uncomfortably still—Callen Parker. He was the “boss” everyone worshipped.
“Who are you?” he asked flatly.
“Eliza,” I said. “I’m—”
“You look like trouble,” he said. “You roughed up one of our security. You hit him.”
“I thought he was going to put me in the station,” I said. “I panicked.”
Callen looked at me as if picking a notch on a belt. “You got reckless. You’re lucky you’re not under arrest.”
“Lucky is not the word,” I said. I still tasted cooked potato in my throat. I felt small and furious at the way people could rearrange my life.
He pushed open the door and left. In an hour they told me I’d agreed—out of terror and love for my granddad—to stand in as a bride for a broken heir. They called me gentle words; they called it a courtesy. I called it a trap.
Callen tossed a black windbreaker to a man in the waiting car, and I was in a racing silver car that smelled like lacquer and money. He directed me to a place with a sign I could only gape at: "E·C·C Esports Club."
I sat in the back, dumb, and watched the city slide by. We parked before a giant blue glass shell that looked like a turtle dome. Inside was a whole other world: training halls, a gleaming gym, aromatics that made you dizzy—everything I’d dreamed of when I peered at vids on a cracked phone.
“You’ll work here,” Callen said. “You’ll train. You won’t tell anyone about the Pearce family. You won’t claim relations with them. You will be nobody.”
He handed me a skinny card. “You’ll get food. You’ll get a bed. You will earn your freedom.”
I didn’t believe him. But the food tasted like heaven. The bed wasn’t a sack.
Stefano Henderson—Callen’s assistant, who had the grin of someone always on the edge of a joke—took me to fill forms. He called me “sister” in a way that juked my guilt.
“You’re here to try out,” Stefano said. “Callen said so. Don’t blow it.”
“Okay,” I said, scrawling my name like a promise.
*
Living at E·C·C was a riot and a war at the same time. The teams lived like athletes and monks. People called Callen “Yàn Bùguī” for his style; others whispered his former victories. He was a champion of a league I had watched with almost religious hunger.
“I’m not your sister,” he said once in the car. “We have no relationship. You weren’t hired by family. But... perform and you’ll have food. Don’t fail anyone, and no one will make trouble for your granddad.”
“I’ll do that,” I said. I meant “I’ll try”. The word felt too small.
Callen didn’t smile much. But he watched me. He put things on the table and walked away. He expected us to be better than our past.
I didn’t have a coach, just the sweat of learning late into the night. I practiced until my fingers ached and Callen kept giving me impossible homework: timings of spawn, the exact seconds when monsters came back. He drilled me until I could do it in my sleep.
“You’re loud,” he told me once, placing a cup of tea near my hands. “Your mouth is sharp.”
“Loud voices make room,” I said. “I’m not here to be quiet.”
“Quiet is a skill,” he said. “You have to learn other skills too.”
I tried. But my mouth had made me what I was. When a team of fresh trial players came in—one of them was Gracelynn Fox—grins and offers and hidden claws, I felt the old heat of ugly things return.
Gracelynn’s smile was polite; her eyes were greedy. “Eliza,” she said, coming close in the mess hall, “you shouldn’t be here.”
I lifted my yogurt and drank it with a loud slurp. “Thanks, Callen,” I said, smiling at his empty-handed walk past. “Your yogurt is delicious.”
She grew rage then—hot, petulant. “You think you can mock me? I will have Callen know what we are worth.”
I sat back and cracked my gum like a royal. “You can try.”
*
Training is humiliation and triumph. My first week, I fought and lost and won. I bullied some younger trainees, intimidated others into respect, and made a name for myself in the drills. I became the “girl who sings and taunts and wins.” Callen watched the way I played and flinched sometimes. He was patient, which is a kind of power.
One night, steam foggy in the training rooms, I took off my headset and a young captain—Kai Mason—came up to me.
“You have some nerve,” he said. “You called them things in game that are... dangerous.”
“Names are tools,” I said. “If they talk, I speak. If they fight, I fight.”
Kai laughed. “You’re small, Eliza. But there’s something about you.”
That night I slept with my hand curled around a scratched medal someone had given me years ago. I had a ladder to climb.
*
They thought I was a village idiot. They thought I would sing a song in the hall if I lost. And the rumor that Callen might be my “suitor” or “savior” made my life into a story people wanted to watch.
One day, a new test. Gracelynn proposed a match—five on five—winner gets to humiliate the loser, right there in the hall.
“Lose and sing ‘Conquer’ in the main lobby,” she said. “And lose by more, and you kneel.”
“We accept,” I told my brothers and sisters of the screens. We accepted because we had nothing to lose and everything to prove.
The match was raucous. I stole a red buff from the other team with a grin so wide it hurt. Then I dove into their jungle and stole their dragon opportunity. The commentator voice in my head sang out—this was mine.
The game ended with my team’s name flashing victory. People cheered. Gracelynn’s face went white. Her team scrolled through phrases of rage like knives.
“That wasn’t possible,” she hissed at me in the hall later. “You’re just some lucky street player.”
“Luck’s a tool,” I said. “Use it when you can.”
“Yes,” she spat. “Fine. This isn’t over.”
“Then don’t be,” I said. “But if you decide to make trouble for my granddad, you’ll find it wasn’t only me standing here.”
She opened her mouth to say something, swallowed, and walked away. Her rage, unmourned, made the air thinner in the hall.
*
Rumors spread fast. Blood·M—a rival team—tweeted, insulted Callen, mocked his hands, called E·C·C a “team of cripples.” They thought they could bait us. They’d not met me.
I went into a ranked match like a cat going to hunt a dog. Blood·M’s jungler, a loudmouth named Mustafa Andrews on the card in my game, taunted while punching dragon. I noticed, watched, and struck. I grabbed a hero—a thunder mage I’d practiced years ago—and in the space of three spins, I blew the enemy jungler apart, we took the dragon, and the match turned into a carnival of penta-kills.
“Five!” the system roared. “Penta!” I grinned at my team and said, “Who wants yogurt?”
That day, a video hit the net: “Eliza trolled Blood·M into meltdown.” Callen’s account—he had commented once and the net exploded—liked my play and added, “Not brainless. She uses a mind.” The replies lit up in worship.
And then Callen—who had once climbed a throne of victory and stepped down with one broken limb—started to treat me differently. Not kindness, exactly. Maybe a steadying. He caught my mistakes, corrected me with a look and then taught me a combo in private.
“Buff spawns at 2:00, remember?” he said once. “Back up, count the seconds. Don’t be a walking ATM. You get ganked easy.”
“I’ll know,” I said. I practiced until I could recite buff timers in my sleep. He drilled me until my hands were sure.
“Ten minutes,” he said one day, cold as winter. “Finish that ranked game. I’ll wait.”
“Why you so mean?” I grinned. “Are you my brother, my father, or my personal torturer?”
He tapped the table. “One of them. Now go.”
I went. I played. I got better.
*
And when I was at my sickest—fevered, pale, the world a blur—Callen sat in the hospital chair and somehow became a presence I didn’t expect. He put his coat around me when I shivered and said, “Go to sleep.” His voice was rough with the worry he usually swallowed.
“Why are you so selfless?” I asked, drowsy, words sticky in my throat.
He shrugged. “I’m not. But if you cause trouble to people I care about, you’ll be trouble to me and you’ll lose the fight.”
“Do you—” my words turned to a plea—“do you know what it’s like to have nobody?”
He placed his palm on my forehead, cool and firm. “No. But I do know what it’s like to lose everything you love.”
That was the first night he let his hand rest, and I let it stay.
*
The contest season rolled on. More trial players arrived; another girl, Elena Morrison, tried out and did not hide her admiration of Callen. Gracelynn was still a thorn, venom tucked in polite smiles. We trained harder. We played harder. The city hummed.
Then I did something I promised myself not to: I stopped being ashamed. I laughed loud. I said the worst things as the best joke. I learned. And the thing that kept me going, through cold rooms and cold words, was the idea of seeing my grandfather on a TV screen someday, cheering for the girl who had fought to free him.
“What are you going to be?” Kai Mason asked me one late night. His voice was tired.
“Not quiet,” I said. “Not small.”
He smiled like it was the best thing I could be.
*
Months later, after a string of dark plays and bold wins, the Pearce family’s mask began to slip. Gracelynn had pushed too far. She had leaked a rumor about how they’d engineered my entry. She told a blogger that my granddad was a madman and that I had been placed in the club like a pawn.
People were shocked. A crowd formed outside the Pearce estate one wet afternoon—reporters, kids from the club, my team, strangers with phones. Frida Russell came forward, face pale as linen, and Declan stood at her side like a man made of excuses. Gracelynn, in a pretty blouse that morning, tried to project innocence.
Callen asked me, quietly, “Do you want me to—?”
“Let me,” I said. I had learned how to turn the smear into light. I stepped into the bright rain.
“It’s true,” Gracelynn said at the microphone, voice thin. “We had… issues. This is—”
“You staged my grandfather,” I said. “You bullied him. You thought that cow dung would shame my family and that I would kneel.”
Frida’s mouth opened like she wanted to cut me down. “You insolent—”
I lifted my face. “You used my granddad to control me. You tied my life to your filthy bargain. You deserve to be shown for what you are.”
The crowd murmured. A woman I’d beaten in a ranked match filmed with a phone. A trainer from the club, Callum Bertrand, stood with his arms folded. Kai and the other boys from the teams clustered, their faces tight.
“Confess,” I said, loud enough that the cameras caught the tilt of my voice. “Tell them how you invited my granddad, told lies, and used the law.”
Frida’s eye flicked to Declan for help. He shook, then stepped forward.
“It was never meant to be like that,” Declan said. “We only wanted what was best for our daughter—”
“You sold people,” I cut in. “You sold dignity in exchange for comfort.”
He laughed a broken, small laugh. The moment his laugh hit the air, the tide turned. A man in the crowd jeered. “That’s right. You used a knife to get what you wanted. Now we’re looking.”
Gracelynn’s composure cracked. “I—Eliza—”
“You should fall down and tell them how you laughed when my granddad was taken,” I said.
“It’s not true!” Gracelynn snapped. Her voice rose, then faltered. She looked from face to face and saw the cameras, the feeds, the watches. She saw the people who had been humiliated in the name of her family’s comfort.
“You pinned a man with a joke and sent him to jail,” I said. “Sort it out now. Tell them the truth, Gracelynn.”
At first she denied it. She tried to call on her father; Declan’s mouth formed words that became more and more panicked. He looked like a man whose ladder had broken.
“People who hurt someone to decorate their lives should be publicly known for what they are,” I said. “Not allowed to hide behind silk.”
The crowd began to chant my name. The reporters got louder. A video streamed of Frida’s manor, plastered with an old photo of my granddad in his fields. Someone read the evidence aloud: a statement from the driver previously called “injured,” which included his own note that he’d been shoved then stabbed by a man who had been pushed to the edge—and how Declan had coached him to say things that didn’t happen.
Gracelynn’s face went through stages—defiant, shocked, angry, finally a kind of pleading.
“Please,” she said, hands trembling. “Someone recorded me. I—”
The crowd’s mood flipped like a coin. People recorded her. Some spat. A woman in a winter coat yelled, “You get what you give!”
Gracelynn’s knees went weak. She tried to steady herself with a hand on a marble pillar. “I didn’t mean—” she began.
“You meant to use people,” I said. “You meant to be comfortable at the cost of someone’s life.”
She lost the last of her boldness. Tears broke loose like bad weather.
“I didn’t—no—” she tried to gather the old script of lies, but it ran out.
The crowd closed in. Someone pushed a microphone toward her. She held it like it would burn.
“Why did you do it?” a reporter demanded. “Why make a man a criminal to get what you want?”
“I—” Gracelynn’s voice stepped up the ladder of denial and slid off. Her shoulders shook, then she kissed her fingers, ironically like an actor seeking forgiveness she did not earn. Then she started to sob, not the coerced kind, but the kind that arrives after the mask slips.
Declan collapsed into the nearest chair, face ashen. He had been a man of schemes and it was as if every plan evaporated in a puddle of truth.
Frida’s eyes were sharp as stone. She tried to bargain—begged the crowd to calm, to accept an apology, to remember her family’s honor—but the sight of Gracelynn's public crumbling was a thing the city swallowed like a bitter pill. The crowd wanted spectacle and they got authenticity: a daughter forced into lying, a father who let her lie, and a matron who had arranged a web of comfort on the backs of others.
“What will you do?” a woman asked suddenly. “How will you make it right?”
Gracelynn whimpered, then tried to say something about paying legal fees, then stopped when someone shouted, “Paying doesn’t fix a life!”
The reporters kept their cameras on them. People filmed with their phones. For an hour the Pearce family went from marble to plaster, from silk to smear. They were no longer the family who could make other people vanish. They were a family of excuses and recorders.
At the end, Gracelynn—who had once threatened me with being exposed—was reduced to apology. She mouthed the words and then choked on them as the world watched. Declan’s proud face was gone. He shivered as people around him hissed. Frida, whose voice had once cut rooms, tried to hold the line and failed. She fell silent and then she apologised, but it sounded like someone reading lines from a text she had not believed.
The crowd filed away, the feeds slowed, and the sparks turned into the dull glow of ruined pride. My grandfather walked up, small but steady; his hand, scarred and rough, reached out to me. He did not look at Gracelynn. He looked at me.
“You did this,” he said, and he was not proud but he was whole. “You set things right.”
I hugged him, and for the first time in months I felt something close to victory—not because the Pearce family had been humiliated, but because the truth had been allowed to breathe.
Frida tried to stand tall in the pool of light, but when the whispers swelled and the flashlights clicked, she stepped back. She had lost the easy air that had once made others kneel.
That was public. That was punishment. It was not blood, but it hurt worse: it took away the credit and hid their faces in the crowd. It changed them from kings to the story people whispered about. Gracelynn’s pride cracked and the crowds of onlookers—friends, enemies, reporters—felt the shift. Someone clapped, quietly, then others joined. Not applause for the fall, but for truth.
They left with nothing fixed except the fact they would now be watched.
*
Later, when the city had calmed and the club’s neon sighed soft, Callen looked at me and said, “You did this because you had to, not for revenge.”
“Both,” I said. “I want him home. And I want people who use others to learn what we feel.”
“You were loud,” Callen said, the hint of irony in his voice like an old armor falling.
“And you?” I asked. “You taught me to count timers, to time the jungle, to not be a walking ATM.”
He almost smiled. “You were always not small. I only stopped you from being wasted.”
He started to teach me because he respected form. I started to teach him—ridiculous, stubborn things like how to laugh at bad jokes. We were two blunt instruments, trying to make something sharp and useful out of the world.
I never forgot those two burlap sacks. I used the smell as a personal talisman against men who would think of me as small. I used it to remember that if you’re pushed into a role, you can always rewrite the lines.
Later, in the stadium where lights and thousands met, I stood with my team. Callen stood near the console, his jaw set. He was colder than anyone I’d ever seen—but with me, sometimes he let something like warmth leak in. Kai laughed at us and shook his head. Stefano made a joke that sounded like a prayer.
“Ready?” Callen asked.
“Always,” I said. The word was simpler than I felt but truer than most promises I’d made.
I had come from nowhere: a town with a busted tractor and a stubborn grandfather. And now, in a city that had once tried to sell my life, I stood in the center of a crowd that applauded for skill and for truth.
I tightened my gloves. The headset descended. The world went soft.
“Let’s do this,” I said.
“Show them who from nowhere can turn the world,” Callen breathed.
I smiled into the black. My hands knew what to do. The timers ticked.
And when the first monster respawned at two minutes, I was ready.
The End
— Thank you for reading —