Ding!!
[System Reminder: 5 hours remaining before end of day.]
[Objective: Find someone to fuck with, Host, or you will die.]
[Thank you.]
The cold mechanical notification echoed in the cramped room, bouncing off the plain walls like a death sentence. Axel froze. For a heartbeat he simply stood there, stiff, staring blankly at the glowing window hovering in front of his eyes. Then
"Ohhh noooo… I'm so fucked!"
His voice cracked as the words tumbled out. Panic surged through him in hot waves. Axel stumbled back a step, then another, before he shot upright like a spring. He began pacing frantically, almost running in small hopeless circles around the room. His breath grew ragged, and sweat prickled down his spine. Both his hands flew up to his head, fingers digging into his scalp as if he could physically hold his spiraling thoughts together.
"What should I do… what should I do?!" he muttered again and again, his voice thin with fear. "I just got the system! I should get at least twenty-four hours! Why.. why the hell is the timer already running?!"
The glowing countdown blinked at him mercilessly.
Five hours remaining.
"Five hours," Axel whispered irritated. "It's literally about to be night. How how am I supposed to find someone to have sex with?! What does it think I am, some kind of playboy with a list of sex friends on standby?!"
He tried mimicking the system, his tone strained, desperate, almost cracking into hysterical laughter. "'Find someone to fuck with, Host'who talks like that?! Like,'. Yeah, sure. Easy! Like I'm swimming in partners or something!"
He spun toward the window, yanked the curtain open, stared at the darkening sky like it had personally betrayed him.
"Five hours! The sun is literally setting! Stores are closing! People are having dinner! Normal people! Not… not losing-their-soul-to-Lilith people!"
His thoughts flashed toward his girlfriend.. his only girlfriend the one he had been with for ten years. A whole decade. But reality crushed the momentary hope just as quickly.
"No," he whispered. "We're not even… in that kind of physical relationship yet. Not even close. I… I can't just ask her to" He swallowed hard, throat tightening. "She'll think I've lost my mind…"
And deep down, Axel didn't even understand why she was still with him. He didn't get why she stayed. He didn't get why, after everything after all the years she hadn't walked away.
"It's… complicated," he whispered to the empty room.
Well Complicated didn't even begin to cover it.
Their story wasn't simple afterall
Axel had been with a girl for ten years now Rebbica. Childhood love that somehow refused to fade, stretching all the way into the present. But the story of how it all began… it wasn't sweet, not really. It came from a boy who well.. was a dumbassssss .
He lost his mother at four. His father at seven. No relatives who cared, no warm home to be handed to just a small, withdrawn boy wandering through life with a dull ache in his chest. He grew up quiet, almost invisible, the kind of kid who always looked like he was standing in cold rain even on sunny days just richer. School was his only escape. His only distraction. The only place where he could pretend, even briefly, that life wasn't collapsing around him.
And that's where he saw her.
Rebbica. The most beautiful girl in his class. Not just in looks though even one glance at her could stop his breath but in everything. She was radiant, the type of person whose laughter filled a hallway and made everyone turn. Top of the class, adored by teachers and students alike. Friends everywhere, smiles everywhere. Axel couldn't explain why she drew him in so fiercely… maybe because she was everything he wasn't. Light to his gloom. Warmth to his cold world.
He fell for her almost instantly. Hard.
He wasn't popular, wasn't confident, wasn't anything that stood out. But one day something inside him snapped maybe courage, maybe desperation and he thought, fuck it. If he never tried, he'd never know.
But finding a moment alone with her was impossible. She was always surrounded by friends, orbiting her like planets around the sun. And Axel couldn't bring himself to confess in front of anyone else. So in the dumbest, most reckless burst of determination, he even walked into the girls' bathroom to look for her only to find it empty.. And yeah he caught her alone in the there, and before he could talk himself out of it, he blurted out that he liked her maybe even loved her and asked if she would… be his girlfriend.
Well intresting thing was.. that she blinked in surprise. And… she didn't say no. She didn't say yes either but .. Yeah its a win still.. she said she needed time to think. She seemed distracted, troubled, but her gentle smile lit a spark of hope in him he didn't even know he could feel anymore.
From zero hope to a tiny sliver of possibility. Axel held onto that like it was life itself.
But days passed. Two, then three. She didn't answer him. She kept looking sad, exhausted. He'd catch her eyes sometimes across the classroom she'd look away quickly, almost guilty. The hope inside him dimmed little by little.
A week later, he finally found out why.
Her mother was in the hospital, in urgent need of an operation. They didn't have the money. Her father had died when she was very young, and her mother was all she had. The situation was desperate. And Rebbica had been carrying that weight alone while trying to smile through it.
Axel well something inside him tightened painfully. He knew what it meant to lose parents. He knew that hollow, endless grief that claws at your chest. The idea of Rebbica going through that of another kid becoming like him.. hit him harder than anything.
He didn't think. He just walked up to her the next day and told her he wanted to help. That he could pay for the surgery.
She stared at him like she couldn't understand what she had just heard. well anyways whatever she looked cute even then at that time
And where did tht money came from? Definitely not his, not money he even understood the value of back then, but money his parents had left behind in a savings account. Four hundred thousand dollars. Their last gift to him.
And he gave seventy-five percent of it away without blinking.
Three hundred thousand dollars. Just… handed over, because she needed it. Whether it was kindness, naïve devotion, or the desperate desire to stop a tragedy he knew too well he never figured it out even years later now.
Sometimes he regrets it. Sometimes he doesn't. But the truth is, at that age he wasn't thinking of consequences anyways.
Now, ten years later, the money is long gone. The remaining hundred thousand vanished slowly into everything life demanded school fees, rent, food, clothes, surviving day to day. Bit by bit until one day he checked his bank account and found nothing but an empty balance and the familiar sense of being alone again.
So he worked. Cashier jobs, random shifts, anything to keep himself afloat. Life for him always.. just been a life? He doesn't really know
And as for whether she eventually became his girlfriend
yeah, she did.
After Axel helped her, after he paid for the surgery that saved her mother's life, everything changed in a single moment. He still remembered the way Rebbica cried really cried sobbing as she hugged him so tightly her small arms trembled. She thanked him again and again, clutching his shirt, burying her face in his chest. For Axel, who had lived years with no one touching him with affection, the feeling was overwhelming. Her tears soaked into his shoulder, her breath shaking, her voice breaking as she whispered gratitude and relief and disbelief that someone had saved her world.
And then she kissed him.
A tiny kiss on his cheek. Soft. Warm. Trembling. She pulled back, cheeks wet, eyes shining, and said yes to his confession.
Just like that, they became boyfriend and girlfriend.
And after that, ten long years passed. A full decade of being with her the most beautiful, most admired girl in school. Then in high school. Then all the way into university. Always the center of attention. Always the girl everyone wanted. The hottest girl on campus, the one boys bragged about liking even though they knew she'd never look at them. But she always stayed by Axel's side.
Ten years.
And yet.. yeah, they still weren't in a physical relationship.
The most they had ever done was kissing. Lip kissing, yes, but nothing beyond that. And Axel had no idea why. Or maybe he did, but he never admitted it to himself. There was always this invisible line he never dared to cross. A boundary he tiptoed around. Every time things got too close, too intimate, his heart would shut down and his mind would drown under waves of doubt.
He kept telling himself excuses. Telling himself it wasn't the right time. Telling himself she wasn't comfortable. Telling himself he respected her pace. But deep down, he feared something else entirely
that she didn't stay with him because she loved him.
That she stayed out of guilt.
Maybe she was only with him because he had helped her at her worst moment. Maybe it was just a sense of responsibility. Maybe she felt indebted and didn't want to hurt him. Those thoughts dug into him for years, curling like vines around his heart, tightening, suffocating.
Because realistically… what did he have?
What did he offer?
He wasn't cool.
He wasn't rich.
He wasn't popular.
He wasn't even like.. he doesn't know but definitely not at level where she is.
Like, she was the most wanted girl in the entire university. Guys far richer, far better looking, far more charming circled around her like moths to a flame. Sons of millionaires. People whose families could buy entire buildings without blinking.
Compared to them, Axel was… nothing.
That was why he always felt he didn't deserve her. That she could do so much better. That she stayed not because she wanted him, but because she felt trapped in the responsibility of a child's promise and a debt she never asked for.
Sighing at the thought, Axel rubbed his face. He hated this part of himself, this constant storm of self-doubt. But it only got worse when he remembered the darker side of things that Rebbica wasn't just protective.
She was obsessive.
Extremely obsessive.
People joked she was a hidden psychopath. He wasn't sure it was a joke.
Even though she never acted that way around others, with him she was intense. Overly protective. Extremely jealous. Terrified that he'd fall for someone else. Terrified he'd leave. Terrified he'd betray her. Terrified that his affection wasn't real.
But Axel always convinced himself she acted like that because of her image. Because she didn't want to be embarrassed if he did something stupid. Because she was the popular girl with standards, and he was the guy she had chosen, so if he made a mistake, she would be the one shamed.. like yeah maybe that sounds stupid but hey think about it.. why would someone super rich and wanted by all want you.. when you guys get together because of some stupid shit in first place and that too in childhood.
like literally she had tried to kill him three fucking times
Not metaphorically.
Not jokingly.
Like literally.
Once because he liked another girl's picture on Instagram.
Once because he smiled at a cashier a friendly, polite smile, nothing more.
And once because, while sitting beside her in the cafeteria, he accidentally opened a porn tab on his phone.
She didn't hesitate even a second those times.
That was who she really was beneath the perfect smile and flawless appearance.
So how the hell would she react if she knew he thinking to have sex with someone else?
She would kill him. No question. Probably instantly.
And worse, a twisted part of his mind whispered that maybe she'd do it not just out of jealousy but because it would finally free her from guilt. From debt. From obligation. Because if he messed up big enough, maybe then she wouldn't owe him anything anymore.
"Stupid thoughts…" Axel muttered under his breath.
He shook his head hard, trying to clear the storm inside his skull. This was not the time to get lost in spirals about his ten-year relationship. He had bigger, more immediate problems. Life-threatening ones. A literal countdown ticking toward his death.
"As for what I'm going to do now…?" he muttered weakly.
He had options.
Terrible ones.
Both life-ruining and sanity-breaking.
The first was the dumbest and most impossible one:
Call his girlfriend and tell her he needed to have sex right now or he would die.
He imagined the scene. Imagined her expression. Imagined the blade she'd pull out from don't know where before he even finished his sentence.
"Yeah, no," he whispered instantly.
He shook his head so fast it almost hurt. That idea was too ridiculous to even fantasize about. It was suicide disguised as honesty.
He needed another plan. Any plan.
"Let's do something else…" Axel exhaled.
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