FUUUUUCK!"
The keyboard hit the wall before Logan even realized he’d thrown it.
He stood in the middle of his apartnt, chest heaving, staring at the screen like it had personally wronged him. Because honestly? It had.
Five years.
Five years of outlines and rewrites and all-nighters, of skipping social events he wasn’t invited to anyway, of surviving on instant noodles and the delusion that this — this novel — was going to be his ticket out.
Three loyal readers.
That was his reward. Three.
What absolute garbage.
He dragged a hand through his tangled hair, the anger slowly curdling into sothing worse: exhaustion. The kind that settled deep in the bones.
The novel was done. He’d made sure of that.
Not the ending he’d once dread about, the triumphant one where the protagonist stood victorious over everything and the readers scread in the comnts for a sequel.
No.
What he’d written instead was a massacre.
The Demon Emperor had gained a sudden, unreasonable power surge and killed the protagonist in a battle he was supposed to win. Otherworldly invaders materialized without a shred of buildup and wiped out the remaining cast.
Logan had burned his own world to the ground.
If I can’t win, neither can you.
A bitter laugh left his mouth. He dropped into his chair, and the last of the tension went out of him like air from a punctured tire.
Life really is just a graveyard of unfinished dreams.
He stared blankly at the screen.
School dropout. Orphan. No family worth contacting, no friends who’d stuck around, no plan for whatever ca next. Just the empty cursor blinking in the docunt where the final Chapter sat, cold and brutal.
Should I write another one?
The thought arrived and he imdiately hated it. The idea of starting over, of pouring more years into another project only to reach the sa hollow destination...
His chest tightened.
"Forget it." He slamd his fist on the desk. The cup beside his monitor rattled.
He wasn’t even doing it wrong! He’d studied top authors obsessively, dismantled their structures, reverse-engineered their hooks, cloned their pacing.
Nothing.
He’d tried sothing completely original, sothing bold and strange.
Also nothing.
So what was the point?
He was about to curse again when a faint sound stopped him.
A soft, steady hissss.
Logan glanced toward the corner of the desk.
At so point during the ltdown, his coffee had tipped. Dark liquid crept slowly, almost patiently, toward the tangled ss of wires and extension cords against the wall.
"Oh—"
The small explosion wasn’t dramatic. It wasn’t cinematic.
It was just enough.
---
Darkness. Then light.
Logan’s awareness ca back in pieces, like a loading screen that kept buffering.
...Where am I?
The mories followed imdiately after, cold and clear.
Didn’t I just... die?
"Yes," said a voice. "You did."
His eyes snapped open.
She stood a few feet away, and Logan’s mind went genuinely blank for a mont — not out of fear, but because his brain simply could not process what it was looking at quickly enough.
The woman wore a slip of crimson silk, the kind of garnt designed less to cover and more to suggest. The fabric moved with her like it was alive, clinging where it wanted to, falling where it chose. A slit ran up one thigh, unhurried and deliberate.
She floated toward him with the quiet confidence of soone who had never once in her existence needed to rush.
She stopped close enough that Logan could sll her — sothing floral underneath sothing heavier, sothing that made his thoughts go sideways.
Her eyes were dark and heavy-lidded, and she was looking at him the way a cat looks at sothing it’s already decided to play with.
"Who are you?" Logan asked. His voice ca out steadier than he felt.
Her lips curved.
"I am many things." A pause, perfectly tid. "But most know as the Goddess of Lust."
Logan stared at her.
"...Right."
She tilted her head. "You don’t believe ?"
"I’m not sure I believe any of this." He looked around, taking in the soft, sourceless light surrounding them. "I just died from a coffee spill and an extension cord. Forgive for being disoriented."
A laugh escaped her — genuine, surprised, like she hadn’t expected that.
Then she leaned closer, and Logan held very still.
"Perhaps," she said, her voice dropping to sothing quieter, "you know by another na."
Her fingers brushed his jaw, barely touching.
"I’m perverteddream."
The na hit him like cold water.
Logan searched her face for a joke. Found nothing.
That userna. The one that showed up on every Chapter within minutes of posting. The one that left comnts when no one else did, that kept coming back even when the numbers tanked, that never — not once in five years — missed an update.
Of all the things to find in the afterlife.
He let out a slow breath.
"I had no choice," he said. "It was either finish it or let it drag on forever going nowhere. I was suffocating under it."
Sothing shifted in her expression. Not anger. Closer to genuine disappointnt, which sohow landed worse.
"For years," she said quietly, "I followed that story. There were arcs unfinished. Characters with room to grow." A beat. "And you burned all of it."
"I know."
Silence settled between them.
Then the corner of her mouth pulled upward.
"I have a proposal."
Logan raised an eyebrow.
"I’ll reincarnate you," she said, "into your novel."
He stared at her for a long mont.
"You do know what kind of novel it is, right?"
"The protagonist grows stronger through conquest," she said simply. "Each arc more indulgent than the last. The kind of story that makes readers co back just to see what happens next." She tilted her head. "Including this goddess."
Logan processed this.
"So the standard move," he said slowly, "would be for to go in as a side character and steal the heroines from the main character."
She laughed again. The sound did sothing unreasonable to the air around her.
"Author," she said, leaning in just slightly, "you’re thinking too small."
Her eyes glead with sothing that could have been amusent and could have been danger. Possibly both.
"I’m not sending you after the heroines."
A pause.
"I’m sending you after their mothers."
Logan went completely still.
"...Excuse ?"
"Think about it," she murmured.
Then she closed the remaining distance between them, and her lips pressed against his — warm and unhurried, carrying a weight that had nothing to do with physical force.
Logan, to his credit, did not hesitate.
He kissed her back with everything he had.
When she finally pulled away, she was smiling. Slowly. The kind of smile that ant she’d already won sothing.
"Complete your first mission," she whispered. Her fingers trailed along his jaw as she pulled back. "Then you can have ."
His vision began to fade at the edges.
The last thing he registered was her smile.
First mission.
The words followed him into the dark.
User Comments
0 comments from readers