Chapter 227: All my lives
The angry flush on Alice’s face abruptly drained, leaving her skin pale.
Her jaw quivered. Her blazing eyes began to shake violently, losing their focus on Eren entirely. It was as if his words had just struck her mind, shattering a dam she had desperately tried to hold together with blood and spite.
"How... how do I know?"
She took a step backward. Her boots scuffed against the gravel, nearly tripping over the edge of her torn mantle.
"Yeah... how do I know all of this?" Her hands rose slowly from her sides, fingers trembling as they reached for her temples. "How do I know the exact imperial routes for The Substance? Why do I know the Empress will be dragged to the scaffold... why do I know Princess Seraphina will join the demon army?"
She clutched her head between her palms, fingers digging so hard into her hair. Her breath hitched into ragged, panicked gasps.
A sickening, familiar throb surged behind her eyes—the exact blinding migraine that had split her skull open a month ago.
"How do I know..." Alice’s voice cracked, "...that Violet is going to die?"
Eren’s irritation vanished on the spot. The sarcastic quip died before it reached his lips. His blue eyes narrowed with sudden alarm.
"Hey," Eren said, stepping toward her, his tone dropping in concern. "Alice. What the hell is going on with you?"
She didn’t hear him. She stumbled back another step, her spine slamming hard against the cold stone of an ancient tomb.
"Violet’s going to die..." she whispered, her chest heaving as tears welled in her eyes, spilling over bruised cheeks. "No. No, that’s not it. It’s worse. I’m going to kill her."
Eren froze, genuine confusion in his expression. "What? What are you babbling about?"
"I KILLED HER!"
She collapsed to her knees on the floor, curling in on herself, clutching her skull as if trying to physically squeeze the visions out of her brain. The tears flowed freely now, washing clean pale tracks through the grime and dried blood on her face.
The memories weren’t abstract thoughts; they were vivid, visceral, and burning. She could smell the iron stench of blood. She could hear the grotesque, wet tearing of mutated bone.
She could feel the divine light in her hands, driving a radiant spear through the chest of a weeping, deformed abomination whose purple eyes were still begging for help from inside.
"She was crying..." Alice sobbed hysterically, her nails tearing her skin, rocking back and forth. "She was trapped inside... The Substance turned her... and I drove the blade in. She looked right at me, Eren! She begged me to stop! And I burned her to ash! It was me! I’m the killer! She died because of me!"
Eren dropped to one knee in front of her, firmly catching her trembling wrists, forcibly peeling her bloodstained fingers away from her own hair.
"Alice! Pull it together!" Eren’s voice cut through the damp crypt, firm and grounded, though his pulse was hammering against his ribs.
He had seen panic before, but this wasn’t battle fatigue. This was the raw, broken hysteria of someone drowning in grief for a grave that hadn’t even been dug yet.
"Look at me," Eren insisted, his grip tightening just enough to anchor her, shaking her hands slightly to snap her out of the spiral. "Listen to the words coming out of your mouth. Violet is completely fine! She’s sitting in the royal academy dorms right now, probably worried about where we two had gone for days! She’s not a monster! She’s not dead! Stop talking like she’s already in the dirt!"
Alice didn’t push him away. She didn’t have the strength to. Instead, her fists clamped into the bare skin of Eren’s forearms, her nails biting deep enough to draw blood as the dam inside her cracked and shattered into a thousand jagged pieces.
"You don’t understand..." she sobbed, her voice hitching on a ragged breath that echoed through the room. "You don’t know how many times I’ve watched her die! Over, and over, and over again—I can’t count them anymore, Eren! Every single time, no matter what I do, she rots from the inside out! She cries, she screams, and then I have to be the one to hold the blade!"
Tears poured down her cheeks, pooling at the curve of her jaw, hot and relentless.
"I tried everything," she choked out, her head shaking in frantic, desperate denial. "I thought... I thought if I changed who I walked beside, the world would finally shift. I gave up Theo—sweet, foolish Theo, who would have torn down the heavens with a smile just to see me safe..."
She let out a broken, self-mocking laugh.
"And do you know what changed? Nothing. Only my misery! Only the man standing at my side! But Violet... Her ending never changed! Not once!"
Eren’s breath hitched in his chest. His hands remained anchored to her trembling shoulders, but he was frozen.
The capturable targets. The primary romance routes of the damn otome game.
Eren stared down at her, his blue eyes dilating in disbelief. The words weren’t the fever dream of a traumatized girl; she was listing the canonical branches. She was reciting the exact character arcs of the original scenario.
"It felt like... like my body wasn’t even mine," Alice whispered, her shivering voice dropping into a hollow, terrifying cadence. Her fingers loosened their grip, sliding down to clutch at her own chest as if trying to rip an invisible string out of her heart. "For years, Eren... I was a puppet. I’d stand in the courtyard, watching myself smile at men I didn’t care about, speaking words I never chose, taking steps I didn’t want to take. It was like some invisible, suffocating hand from beyond the sky was pulling the strings, forcing me into a script I couldn’t escape."
She looked up at him, her tear-drenched amber eyes burning with an agonizing mix of terror, sorrow, and raw, frantic defiance.
"Then... a month ago... the strings snapped."
Alice drew a shuddering breath, her knuckles white against her tunic.
"The ache tore through my skull, and for the very first time in my existence, the voice went quiet. The hand vanished. I woke up in my dorm room, looked at my own hands, and realized I could finally move. I could choose. I could run, I could fight, I could tear this entire rotten continent apart with my bare hands if it meant saving her."
She choked on another sob, burying her face against the bloodied hollow of his collarbone, her tears burning against his skin like holy fire.
"I don’t care if I’m a saintess or a monster, Eren... I don’t care about the church, or the crown. This time, I’m the one making the choices. And I can’t let her die again... I can’t do it again..."
Eren sat there completely paralyzed, listening to the desperate, weeping breaths of the canonical protagonist soaking his chest in tears.
’She isn’t just an awakened character,’ the thought surged through his stunned mind. ’She’s a broken, regressing protagonist who just escaped the player’s control.’