Sweet Romance13 min read
My Second Chance as Kaitlyn Vega (and the Trouble with a Dark-Hearted Protector)
ButterPicks13 views
I woke into another body with the taste of metal and rain in my mouth and a stupid AR prompt blinking in my vision. The voice in my head chirped like a broken toy and spelled out my life like a game menu.
"Welcome to Xianpath," the interface said. "Player identity: Kaitlyn Vega, junior sister of Grace Peak, sect: Lanchang. Choose your mode."
I blinked and said out loud, "Why is my life now a dating sim?"
"Choose," the game insisted, but the only active option lit for me already: "Kaitlyn Vega — junior sister. No exit."
I sat up on a braided mattress and found hands smoothing my hair. Gracelyn Wilson — my senior sister — hummed soft and steady. She had always smelled faintly of tea and morning wind.
"She's awake," Gracelyn said, beaming when my eyes focused. "Kaitlyn, you scared everyone."
"I am Kaitlyn?" I asked the ceiling like it might answer.
"Of course," Gracelyn patted my cheek. "You fell into the Abyss Pool. Rest. Master left for retreat and told us to keep you safe."
"An Abyss Pool took me out?" I croaked. "This is a lot for an onboarding tutorial."
Wade Meyer, our sect lord, knocked on the door and entered with a small, measured smile. "Grace, good. She wakes."
"Good," Gracelyn whispered.
I watched them fuss over me—pour tiny vials of green broth, coax my breath steady—and tried to slot what I knew into this plot hole. I had been a couch-hobbyist back home; now I was a low-grade junior sister who had apparently drowned and eaten dirt for a previous life. My AR game's little HUD informed me: TASKS: Protect Emmett Peng; discover Kaitlyn's true origin.
I looked at my hands. They were slender, with a shallow dimple on my left palm I remembered from profile pictures. I had been Kaitlyn Vega all my life for fifteen minutes.
"Why would the Abyss Pool make me die?" I muttered, and the HUD popped a warning: "Abyss interacts differently with demonic essence. Risk: high."
Without warning, someone knocked. A poised foot filled the doorway and the scent of peach liquor flooded the room. Leoni Owens, our second senior sister, smiled so warmly I could feel it in my stomach.
"Kaitlyn, you're awake? You must be exhausted," Leoni said, and then she frowned like she remembered something. "You look...different."
"Different as in better," Gracelyn told her, and everybody laughed. I tried to join in. My role in the book this world was made from? A troublemaking junior sister who got in everyone's way. In the original story, Kaitlyn had been loud, thoughtless, and then—spoiler—trapped and gutted for an internal elixir. I had read that book. So the HUD coldly informed me: you are a character with a low survival rate.
"Okay," I said to myself. "Step one: don't die. Step two: find out who will try to kill me and preemptively over-share cookies."
Someone else arrived quietly. He was impossibly pale and moved like a breeze through crow-feather curtains. Emmett Peng. My HUD tagged him for me: KEY NPC — Emmett Peng, the lone prodigy of the Poison Peak, rumored to be fragile but dangerous.
Emmett smiled like he wanted to hide a saw, and when our eyes met I felt that odd prickle—like something in him had changed. He stepped closer, and his presence smelled like old incense.
"Kaitlyn," he said softly. "You shouldn't have woken so soon."
"Why? Is there a problem that escalates when I breathe?" I joked, because apparently humor is how you don't cry when you're trying to be the hero in a simulation.
Emmett didn't laugh. "There may be people watching you."
He wasn't wrong. Emmett's arrival was no accident. Later my HUD whispered: TASK POPUP — Emmett Peng: Protect at all cost. Kaitlyn: Protect him too.
"Protect him? Are we swapping roles?" I asked Gracelyn later as we read old medical scrolls to build my stamina.
"Emmett is strong, but..." Gracelyn hesitated. "He carries something in him that hunger might crave."
"He sounds delicious," I said dryly. "Like forbidden fruit."
"You joke, child, but some people seek power in...people," Wade said. "We keep watch. For now, we train."
I learned sigils, I learned a little defensive formation, and I learned the most useful thing for survival: to be loud enough to be noticed—and clever enough to be underestimated.
"Emmett," I asked one night when we were alone beneath a cliff of peach blossoms, "you came to check on a puddle-drowned junior sister? That seems too theatrical."
Emmett's jaw tightened. "It was not the pool alone. I read the ripples. There were traces of a demonic thread."
"Demons rope-crashing pool parties," I muttered. "Lovely."
"Do you think I would risk myself for a joke?" he said.
"No, for gossip," I answered. He blinked. Up close, Emmett's skin shimmered faintly. "Is something wrong?"
He didn't say. He closed in a fraction, and I thought, stupidly, of my old life and how many times I had avoided trouble by being deceptively casual. "If someone tried to hurt me," I said, "they will have to get through four people—Gracelyn, Leoni, Wade, and me. Also, cupcakes. I bake."
He smiled then, a brief thing, like a cat baring a single tooth.
We were an odd party. Emmett and I rode with Gracelyn and Wade when the sect called us down to the mortal realm. The kingdom we visited, Azurewell, smelled of ash and hollow gold. I felt small and important at once, like a pebble thrown into a banquet hall.
"The posters read 'Help,'" I told Wade as we approached the city gates. "That sounds dramatic."
Wade's eyes narrowed. "The court is arranging a dinner for us tonight. The King wants to entertain the sect."
"An invitation," I sniffed. "To better poisoning."
Emmett's fingers curled for a second. "Caution."
At the palace, they poured wine and smiles in equal measure. The king—Cesar Bauer—was ostentatious and rusty as old brass. He poured two goblets of amber wine, and his attendants looked like cracked dolls.
Cesar's smile had a mechanical shudder. "Welcome, honored guests. Please drink, for my humble country—"
"—is grateful," Gracelyn finished like a practiced incantation.
Emmett's eyes flicked to the cups. "Don't be polite with strangers," he murmured to me.
I did the thing a junior sister should not: I ate the food like I intended to live through a sequel. My HUD chimed: TASK—Drink to protect Emmett. "I can protect him," I whispered, and swallowed. That was the system's first little joke. I was meant to throw myself into the role.
"You look tired, Emmett," the king croaked. "A delicate flower deserves a special cup."
A silk thread was visible for a blink under the king's sleeve—sash-made strings that crept like puppeteer lines. Emmett's jaw went hard, and he either noticed it or pretended not to.
"That man is not what he seems," I said too loudly. The table fell silent. "He is comfortable with cruelties."
"Careful," Wade warned, but his arm was a quiet anchor.
Cesar poured one goblet to me and one to Emmett. "To friendship," he said in a voice like rustled newspaper.
"To not being murdered by wine," I corrected, and drank on purpose. I felt whatever he had slipped in sway past me like a sleepy wind—and next to me Emmett's hand tightened and he twisted his face into something that tasted like pain.
"Let me," I heard Emmett say. "I am fine."
"No," I insisted. "You are not fine. Let me take it."
I raised Emmett's goblet and, with the flourish of a fledgling actress, drank for both of us. He leaned back as if the weight of that simple gesture mattered more than a dozen men in silk.
My HUD ticked: TASK COMPLETE? — partial. The story progressed with new dialogues. Outside, a shadowed figure watched through lattice—someone in black whose sleeve trembled like a coiled snake.
That night we stayed at a little inn. The city smelled of winter and closed doors. Emmett and I shared a room because the plot put us there like reluctant centerpieces.
"I can't believe stairs are still invented," I muttered as I curled on the mattress. "Also, who thought two people sharing a room was a good plan."
Emmett's voice was gravel-soft in the dark. "You owe me one."
"For keeping me alive?" I said. "I'll give you a lifetime supply of bad jokes."
He exhaled a laugh that was almost human. "You are not as useless as you look," he said. "That is worth something."
I wanted to say something true back—a thank you or a dare—but the night made my eyelids heavy and the my HUD hummed an incoming notice: SECRET TASK — Secure Emmett's secret. I grit my teeth and pretended to sleep.
We moved like that through the first section: a little rescue by me, a little rescue by Emmett, Gracelyn and Wade fanning the safe edges. A puppet master in the city sent teams of masked men—marauders who used soul-threads to turn people into mannequins. The kingdom had been hollowed from the inside. The king was not merely avaricious; someone had given him a map to twist people's hearts.
"Who gave him the map?" I asked Leoni when we planned.
"No one gives the map willingly," Leoni said. "They trade something else. Blood, nightmare, an essence. This is not normal."
"We dig, we look?" I asked.
"You get to learn how to knot rope," Wade said, but I heard pride like a string pulled taut.
Emmett and I were sent to scout the ruined village signposted "Greenwell". It felt like walking into a dream where the dream had decided to use more poison. Women at doorways moved like something inside them was sleeping. A man with a missing face held a lantern of black flame that whispered.
"These are not merely puppets," Emmett said. "They keep one part awake—their need. They starve their minds."
I knelt beside someone in a corner, a youth who once trained goats. I felt his empty gaze and it clicked like a puzzle piece: some central mind was harvesting people’s sparks and weaving them into weed-matted illusions.
"Who wants to harvest souls?" I asked aloud. The HUD knew too. It blinked: TASK ADDED — Expose the puppeteer and humiliate.
That last part made me snort. "Humiliate? My game's ambition is petty."
We followed a string of silver threads into a rusted manor. Inside, a figure sat beneath a curtain of willow roots—Cesar's court magister, who transmuted the living into dream-anchors. He whirled and screamed when he saw us.
"How dare you enter?" the magister bellowed. "King Cesar gave me leave!"
Emmett stepped forward, his eyes black as ice. "You will stop. Or I will burn what you weigh."
"You think you can chain a king? You are children," the magister spat. His hand darted, but Emmett's shadow-feather blade sang and the magister's whispers were cut.
At that moment, the manor opened up like a throat, and voices from the town streamed in—people we'd rescued earlier, no longer blank but furious. They had seen us, or perhaps our presence had been a mirror.
"Let's humiliate him then," I murmured. "Publicly."
We dragged him to the town square. The magister protested and flailed; his robe of curtains trailed like theatrical defeat. The people gathered—tired but hungry for truth. The magister had been siphoning their joys to fuel the King's illusions and line his palace with mirages.
It was time for the game to deliver on its cruelty clause: a full public unmasking.
I mounted a wooden stand. "People of Greenwell," I called, "this man stole your nights and sold them to the King. He made you dream and never wake."
Some of them cried. Some spat. The magister gabbled about loyalty and rumpled old stories. Emmett pressed a hand to the magister's chest and a small pearl of light leapt from the magister and ballooned into a screen of rippling memory. It showed the King and the magister laughing as they manufactured hunger.
The crowd gasped. A woman, whose weeping had been a permanent loop, raised a hand. "They sold my brother's laughter," she said. "To what end?" She lifted a cup of wine and flung it at the magister. It splashed over his head like rain.
"Confess," Wade intoned, his voice steady as iron. Emmett pressed harder and the magister's face contorted as he remembered his crimes. His arrogance cracked into fear.
"Please—" he wailed. "It was Cesar's command. He said men needed songs! He said the markets would bloom if people were content!"
"Is that all?" I asked.
The magister choked. "No. He made deals with the void. He promised the King that he would secure order. In return, the King promised his relic—"
He swallowed a spit of blood, and Emmett flicked a curl of shadow aside like a curtain. "You took their bones, their laughter, and you sold them a lullaby," he said. "You turned lives into merchandise."
"You will face everyone's eyes," I declared.
And so the punishment began.
I told myself it would be quick and declarative—unmask the puppet, let the law do the rest. But the story expected spectacle. The town wanted reckoning. They wanted the magister to feel the small and hot embarrassments of being hated by those he'd hurt.
"Stand," I commanded, and the magister was forced onto a cart. The crowd pressed in close. Those he had drugged—with dreams of gold and ridiculous content—stepped forward with quiet vengeance. They took from his pockets the little tokens he'd used to lure them—flowers woven of root-sap that smelled like sleep, mirror-patches, cups stained with forgetfulness. They held them high.
"On this cart," I said, and Emmett and Wade and Gracelyn stood with me, "you will be paraded to the palace. Not to be executed—no. To be seen. To be watched by the same man who signed the orders. You will be paraded, and every single neighbor you hurt will name what you took. You will hear it, and you will be required to apologize until your voice breaks."
The magister's eyes bulged. "You cannot! I will beg the King!"
"Then he must hear too," I said.
We moved through the streets like a procession of thunder. People spat the names of things they'd lost: laughter, a son's voice, a love letter, a mother's face at dinner. The magister's shoulders sagged under the weight of accusation. He first laughed—because men who build machinery to drug others usually have a laugh in reserve—then he cried, then he denied, then he tried to puppeteer the crowd away with old spells, but spells that once moved men only made them angrier.
The humiliation was not a simple crowd-pleasing bloodlust. It was detailed. People stepped up and read aloud letters he had used to convince them to trust him. A baker took out a batch of charred rolls the magister had used to stabilize appetites and smashed them into his face. A young woman who had been made mute by dream-draining climbed onto the cart and, with trembling lips, recited a poem the magister had stolen from her during the sleep. Her voice was thin but true. He flinched as if each syllable struck.
He begged to kneel, to be spared, to be hidden. I said, "No. Stand and hear." The crowd swelled. They recorded on the little stones they carried the names of his crimes. They cursed him. He tried to bargain with money; they vomited it back into his lap.
"How does it end?" he screamed at me finally. "What punishment do you want?"
I walked up close. The air smelled of rain and ember and something like mercy that floats in the space between rage and justice. "You will be outed," I said. "You will be stripped of your office and all honors. You will be forced to make restitution: teach what you taught to others how to mend, not maim. You will work with those you hurt. You will sit and listen to every story until you can repeat them without your tongue trembling. Only then will you be allowed to speak in public again."
He laughed like a broken bell. "You cannot do this!"
"We did," Emmett said calmly. "And the King will watch."
We delivered him to the palace gate, and Cesar Bauer stood there with folded hands and a face like ravened paper. He had been told secrets, but not yet forced to watch with eyes open. When they dragged the magister forward the King noticed the people on the cart—their faces, red with grievance. He paled.
"You brought a fool to me," he said with a cracked smile.
"We brought your magician," I replied. "He only did what he was told."
The King swallowed. We unfurled the memories on a sheet of light: the magister and Cesar cutting deals like a sliced fruit. The citizen who'd been bankrupted by the King's new taxes watched on; his hands dropped to his sides like two exhausted birds.
The punishment turned public spectacle into political exposure.
I remember telling the King, looking him in the eyes, "You are not above your people. You traded their nights for palace comfort." The throng behind me looked like a slow tide.
Cesar's face went from composed to shocked to frantic. The magister, his former voice flayed, started to beg on his knees. He said every ugly thing he had been hiding: the King's name, the promises, the salty comfort of luxury. He said he had done it because he was hungry, because Cesar had needed order, because greed needed an architect.
The public punished them the way a town might teach a child to stop picking at a scab: not by killing them, but by removing the comfort that nurtured cruelty. The King's petty jewels were unearthed; his private ledger was read aloud. Servants bowed where they would normally shout. His advisors were dismissed publicly and forced to return the wealth they'd stolen.
Cesar tried once to rally the palace guard. "Seize them!" he hissed, but his guard hesitated. A leader who had hollowed the trust of his people has no leash.
The humiliations unfolded for hours: Cesar was made to hand back pieces of cloth he'd taken as taxes; the magister was made to write the names of each person he had drugged and then kneel before them. Each name read forced him to hear the sting he'd inflicted. Men whispered. Children peered.
I watched Emmett's face as the King crumpled. For a long second his mask was down. "You were safe," he said softly to me, and I felt the warmth of being held and hurt at once. That public punishment satisfied an itch the novel had always kept beneath the surface: villains must be undone not merely by law but by the eyes of those they wronged.
Afterward, the King was forced into exile from any positions of power, the magister stripped of privileges and ordered to teach restitution. In the market, they placed a sign over the palace gate: "Here stood the one who sold our nights." The people spat clay on it and shouted. It was a public funeral for a false comfort.
In the days that followed, there was work to do. We didn't consummate victory in a single cleanse. The heart-rot ran deep. But I had done something I had never allowed myself to do in life one: I stepped onto the stage and spoke.
Emmett and I grew close by degrees that were awkward and honest. He taught me a breathing form that let me touch my magic bones without flinching. I taught him the small stupid things: how to laugh when a stew goes wrong, how to keep loyalties when the world wants to take them away.
"You were brave," Gracelyn told me once, as we sat by a small fire. "You used your head."
"I used my weird, loud head," I said. "And a system that likes to nag."
"And you used Emmett's darkness," Wade said, voice flat and kinder than his smile. "You held him and he held you."
He did. He kept my back in the cold nights we spent moving between villages. He kept the deeper hunger in check. It cost him something to do it every time—the way someone might run their hand through barbed wire for someone else—but he did.
And because the HUD loved theatricality, it added a final reward—an option I never expected: "Kaitlyn, you may save a memory. Pick one."
I thought of college nights, of my mother calling to ask if I'd eaten, of a perfect, ridiculous golden retriever who loved breakfast more than law. And I thought of Emmett's face when he hesitated to reach for me, and of the King's shame spilling like rotten wine.
"Pick both," Gracelyn whispered.
"I can't," I said, though I wished there were more than one save.
My choice felt like a life step taken in front of a crowd. I chose the dog—the small human love that had been mine alone—and also the memory of the King handing back a simple bowl to a woman he had wronged. The pain of real people relieved mattered more than any win in a game.
Emmett watched me when I made that choice, and his eyes softened. "You chose well," he said.
"I chose to keep some of my old world," I told him. "And I chose to keep this—people who are more complicated than their reputations."
We left Azurewell changed. The King was not executed; the King's accountability was a different kind of punishment. The magister learned to sew and speak names of people he'd hurt until their pronunciation grew like a rope he could not untie.
Emmett and I grew into something that felt like tender policy: we argued about stupid things, we shared small meals, we saved each other in front of crowds and in empty rooms.
Months later, when the system announced a new objective—find the true origin of the dark shard Emmett carried—my heart jumped. More danger, sure. More plot. Also more reason to stick. When the HUD pulsed menacingly, I held his hand.
"Whatever it is," I said, "we fix it together."
He squeezed once, and that was all the promise we needed.
The End
— Thank you for reading —