Beast Gacha System: All Mine-Chapter 133: Romcom Galore

"A-ah, don’t worry, it’s a misunderstanding! I’m just tripping over my own foot!" Ruby chirped immediately. She pushed herself up, her movements were flustered as she began gathering her scattered books. "We weren’t even bumping that hard!"

She smiled up at the concerned faces. But from her downcast eyes, the watching students could catch a flicker of something else. Fear.

"S-sorry, Cecilia..." she mumbled, the apology aimed at the floor.

Ruby looked devastatingly cute. Her hair was in stylish double pigtails, and a collection of trendy, pastel-colored keychains dangled from her belt loop, clinking together with every slight movement.

Cecilia blinked, momentarily sidetracked. She looked at the style, the accessories... and liked it. She wanted those keychains too! They were so adorable! And those dainty little beaded bracelets stacked on Ruby’s wrist?

Ah.

Ahh. So that was why, in the whispers of the real world, people often accused Cecilia of ’copying’ Ruby’s aesthetic. Their tastes, it seemed, were similar.

Strange how people only knew Ruby as a child before she was missing and could judge the similarity. But apparently, it was this similar?

"Is this how you try to gain my attention?" Arzhen’s voice cut through her musings. It was calm, but the undercurrent was dark. "I know my father likes you. But he should have married you himself if he wants you in the family so badly."

Oh!

Were they... engaged in this timeline?

"Arzhen, come on, let’s not make a scene," Ruby whispered, tugging gently on his sleeve, deploying her softest, most conciliatory tone to play the peacemaker and pull her knight away.

Man, Cecilia hadn’t even opened her mouth, and the whole tragic backstory of this high school AU was being dumped in her lap via public melodrama.

Arzhen finally relented, allowing himself to be guided away, but not before his gaze lingered on Cecilia for a heavy, charged two seconds longer than necessary.

The scene, however, wasn’t over. Nikolas remained, his cold eyes tracking the way Ruby led Arzhen away with this invisible string connecting them.

Classic love triangle!

Then Nikolas turned his icy glare on Cecilia. His lip curled in a sneer of pure disdain. "Can you stop being so pathetic?"

As if he wasn’t being pathetic himself. Aaaahh... the projecting...

Only when Nikolas finally stalked off did the rubbernecking crowd begin to thin, the spectacle concluded for now.

Cecilia let out a quiet sigh. There had been no real tension in her from the start. But when she glanced to her side, where Eastiel had been standing silently through it all, she flinched.

Huh?

The boy beside her was gone. In his place stood someone else.

The posture was different. Taller, straighter, vibrating with a coiled, dangerous energy. The blush and teenage frustration had been scorched away, replaced by a coldness that seemed to radiate from the set of his shoulders to the icy fury in his golden eyes.

It was a look she knew intimately.

This wasn’t Bully!Eastiel anymore.

This was her Eastiel.

"East?" she breathed.

DING!

[You’ve succeeded in the task: Make him remember the life outside of this scenario!] 𝒇𝒓𝙚𝒆𝔀𝓮𝓫𝒏𝓸𝙫𝓮𝓵.𝓬𝙤𝙢

[Reward Rank 7]

- [5 Stars Skill Orb: Leathersmith]

Grant him enchanted leathersmithing skills!

DING!

[Unlock Rank 7 to gain this reward!]

[Would you like to roll?]

...

...

Cecilia stared at the frozen, furious profile of the man beside her, then at the System notification hovering in her vision.

"System..." she thought, "I didn’t even do anything, and I accomplished the last task before everything else?"

The man turned to her. His appearance was still that of the high school boy. The shorter hair, the uniform, the youthful planes of his face. But everything else had changed. Everything.

The air around him crackled. The golden eyes that met hers were not those of a flustered teenager, but the burning coals of a king.

"Cecilia..."

His voice was a low, dangerous rumble, so unlike the arrogant drawl of moments before. It was a tone that promised consequences. Of violence. Of the heat of the sun.

Cecilia unconsciously flinched back a step. This... this Eastiel was... terrifying!

It was the raw, unrestrained essence of him, stripped of the scenario’s soft-focus lens and thrust into this absurd setting.

"What in the world," he hissed, the words full of a sinister, barely-contained rage that made the few remaining students in the corridor instinctively recoil, "is this?"

Cecilia’s survival instincts, honed across life, death and three husbands, kicked into overdrive. Panic overrode pride. Explanation could come after de-escalation.

She didn’t think. She leapt.

"AAAAAAAH! I CAN EXPLAIN!"

Launching herself forward, she wrapped her arms around his waist, burying her face in his chest. A scream ripped from her throat.

"PLEASE DON’T BE MAD!"

The shriek was so piercing, so undignified, that it sliced through the lingering tension of the previous scene. Down the corridor, Ruby, Arzhen, and Nikolas, who had been almost out of sight, stopped dead and flinched in unison, turning back toward the source of the commotion.

Their eyes widened at the sight. The prim, top-student Cecilia Araceli was now clinging to the infamous bully Eastiel Edengold like a koala to a tree, her entire body vibrating with frantic energy.

"Aaaaahh, Eastie, pwease, lemme explain? Okay? Okay? Okay?" she babbled, her voice shifting into a high-pitched, wheedling whine she didn’t ever know she could produce. "I can explain it! Don’t be mad? Don’t be mad or I’ll be mad! Don’t be mad! DON’T BE MAD!"

She roared the last few syllables... hard.

Internally, she was screaming at the System. How could this narrative love trope let him remember too early?!

"Hubby, I know...! It’s my fault! I should’ve warned you!" she cried, shaking him slightly. "Awwww, don’t be mad! DON’T KILL THEM PLEASE! I WANT THE REWARDS!"

The final, desperate shout echoed in the now utterly silent hallway.

THUD—THUD-THUD—

A little way off, Ruby’s books tumbled from her arms once more.

She stood frozen, mouth agape, all pretense of cute fluster gone, replaced by pure shock.

Arzhen and Nikolas simply stared, their earlier anger completely forgotten. Their faces... you could imagine.

What... in the nine hells... was going on?