“Prologue”

“So, you’ve been waiting for our first night together?”

Linia swallowed hard as she looked at Grand Duke Huslan’s face, backlit against the light before her.

His jet-black hair gleamed like a blade in the moonlight, and between the strands, his gray eyes flickered eerily like a pale full moon.

Anyone watching might have thought this was a horror story, but remarkably, this was the inside of a romance fantasy novel.

Huslan smiled with the face of someone about to kill, and spoke.

“To think you’ve been eagerly awaiting this very night, my heart is truly racing. You are the first woman in my life to say such a thing to me, and the first time I have ever felt this way.”

He caged Linia, who lay on the bed, between his muscular arms, and slowly lowered his head toward her face like a predator closing in on its prey.

Linia squeezed her trembling eyes shut and tried to enjoy their first night together.

But at that moment, she spotted something by the moonlit window and her eyes flew wide open again.

Perched on the windowsill was a plain-looking little white bird, staring in their direction.

The bird, which looked as though it had been sloppily drawn in MS Paint, gazed at Linia with what seemed like a mocking expression and let out a small, derisive chirp.

A bird couldn’t possibly laugh, but that was unmistakably a scoff!

Linia stopped mid-kiss, bolted upright from the bed, and grabbed the crossbow she had left in the corner of the room.

‘I have to shoot that morning bird on sight!’

She swiftly fired an arrow toward the window. The bird’s eyes went wide as it fluttered away in a panic, but Linia absolutely refused to let it escape.

Hanging from the windowsill like a crazed monkey and engaging in a fierce struggle with the bird, she finally managed to land an arrow tipped with red ink on the bird’s wing.

With its eyes rolled back, the bird dramatically tumbled down into the garden with a thud.

“……Did I get it?”

Linia planted one foot on the windowsill and exhaled slowly, catching her breath. Her legs were exposed in a rather bold fashion beneath her flipped-up white nightgown dress.

She raised her arm to wipe the cold sweat from her brow, and at that moment, Huslan’s voice came from behind her.

“What are you…… doing right now?”

She came to her senses and turned around to find Huslan sitting on the bed, wearing a loosely draped black night gown, staring at her with a bewildered expression.

His muscular chest was visible through the open robe, with only his lower half barely covered, which was devastatingly attractive. Yet somehow, he looked rather pitiful and absurd, like a lover abandoned on their wedding night.

Linia tucked her disheveled hair behind her ear and said as casually as she could manage,

“Ah. Well, the bird seemed like it might be a bother.”

She chose not to mention that the bird’s name was “Morning Chirp,” and that it was practically the greatest “enemy” in all-ages novels, a recurring fixture without fail.

When Morning Chirp cried out, the entire grand night narrative between the male and female lead would be wiped out entirely.

A full edit cut in a situation that called for an adult scene, how could that possibly make sense!

As the one wearing the paper crown, she absolutely had to prevent that from ever happening.

But Huslan, being a character inside the novel, had no way of knowing any of that.

He simply believed the bird was a new type of magical beast born from the empire’s strange phenomena.

Watching her act with such excessive bravery against what he thought was a magical beast, he muttered blankly,

“You truly are unlike ordinary women…… Reckless, intense, and utterly unpredictable.”

What kind of woman would pick up a crossbow to hunt a magical beast on her wedding night.

On top of that, the line she delivered after the successful hunt was equally baffling.

‘It seemed like it might be a bother’……

Any other woman would have been too busy screaming and running away at the mere mention of a magical beast, even if it was just a bird.

No, she would have fainted at the doorway before even seeing the beast, just from the sight of him lying on his side with his face propped on his hand in bed. For in this empire, he was a being feared just as much as any magical beast.

She was the only person in this empire who did not flee from magical beasts, or from him.

“……That is what makes you all the more special.”

As he finished speaking, Huslan stared intently at Linia in her pure white slip. His gray eyes, like those of a dead fish, gleamed as he gazed at her.

They were eyes that, had he been the male lead, would surely have been described as “shining like stars,” but since he was the villain, the wording somehow felt like it needed a slight revision.

But what did it matter? Even those dead-fish eyes were exactly her type.

Huslan swept Linia up from where she stood by the window and carried her back to his bed.

Setting her down on the bed was a whole different matter from the princess-carry, full of overwhelming force. It was the kind of force that might make an onlooker think he had thrown her.

“Tonight is going to be a very long night.”

Linia swallowed hard as she watched the broad-shouldered, solidly built man come at her like a beast.

But for a moment, she had overlooked the law of this world, and its death flag.

That saying words like “Did I get it” or “Is it over” would ensure it was never truly over, and that a counterattack would always follow.

Morning Chirp, whom she had believed to be dead, slowly lifted its head from the windowsill at her words, like a zombie resurrected by an ancient incantation.

In all-ages novels, Morning Chirp was an existence akin to an immortal phoenix, tenacious and possessed of tremendous power.

The red eyes of Morning Chirp, one wing severed, gleamed with meaningful intent.

It was a fierce, burning gaze, as though it were only waiting for the chance to cry “chirp,” just as a film director waits to call “cut.”

—

Chapter 1

– Finally dead, that villain scum.

– Author, thank you for this satisfaction! I couldn’t stand him all this time, now I feel like everything’s been cleared out.

– Is it just the happy ending for the female and male leads now? Can we start the celebrations?

When midnight arrived, the novel she had been following was updated.

As the comments flooded in like mad, Iseo alone sat in shock, covering her mouth as tears streamed down her face.

Grand Duke Huslan was the sub-male lead who had gone mad with obsession over the female lead, and the most powerful villain in the entire story, always getting in the way of the main couple.

She had been growing increasingly anxious as he kept crossing the line with ever more outrageous acts against the main couple, and to think his end would be such a miserable, lonely death……

Iseo, who had been frozen in shock for several minutes, gathered her courage and typed a comment with trembling hands in the comment section where everyone was cursing Huslan and leaving nothing but praise.

– Author, you’re not really going to kill Huslan off like this, are you……? He’s going to get right back up when the sun rises like nothing happened, isn’t he? Right? Please tell me that’s the case……

But the moment she posted her comment, the downvotes skyrocketed and replies attacking her began pouring in.

The betrayal felt twice as sharp, coming as it did from nameless readers she had spent a full six months reading alongside, feeling a sense of inner camaraderie and fellowship.

It seemed she had been the only one who liked and rooted for Huslan all along. She felt she could now understand, just a little, how he must have felt being persecuted by everyone within the novel.

Iseo soon closed the novel window and lay down in her single-room apartment, staring up at the worn ceiling.

To pay off her snowballing debt, she had no choice but to abandon her dream of becoming a writer and work nonstop from morning until night.

Amid all of that, this novel had been her only refuge, but with Huslan’s death, it felt as though the one joy in her life had vanished in an instant.

She too had once dreamed of debuting as a writer and penning a wildly successful novel. There had been a time when she would finish work each day without even noticing how hard it was, come home, write until dawn, and fall asleep full of dreams.

But now, dreams and all else aside, she was too busy just scraping by.

A perennial aspiring writer, she was, in every sense of the word, someone whose life had gone off the rails.

Iseo took a beer from the refrigerator and drank it down alone in big gulps.

Tonight of all nights, this tiny single room felt like a prison, or rather, like a coffin.

—

She must have drifted off without realizing it, drunk on the alcohol. Suddenly, a man’s groan from somewhere jolted Iseo back to her senses.

The very first thing that entered her vision when she opened her eyes was a dark stone wall. Around her, a cold and damp air hung in the atmosphere, and the sound of dripping water rang out clearly.

She had certainly fallen asleep in her single room, yet when she opened her eyes, she was in a cave.

Unable to make sense of the situation, Iseo lay on the cold floor, blinking blankly.

And then it happened.

“Hah…… hah……”

A man’s groans leaked out intermittently from deep within the dark cave.

Iseo swallowed hard and quietly rose to her feet. She peered into the depths of the cave, and her eyes went wide.

Inside, a man drenched in blood had collapsed on the ground.

With black hair and a torn black uniform, he was, astonishingly, Grand Duke Huslan.