Chapter 24: Messing With the Prince for my Mental Health

Once again, I found myself entering a party that was destined to kill me, but that didn’t bother me this time, as this was the tenth loop in a row where I attended the party. I had been anxious the first time as I struggled and ultimately failed to move the conversation as I wanted. However, every loop that followed got me a bit closer to my goal. I now knew exactly how the prince would respond to every word I said, to the point where this was less of a conversation and more of a cutscene. However, I still had yet to achieve my ideal ending. I had gotten close in the previous loop, but it still wasn’t perfect.

With steady and confident steps, I walked toward my spot on the stage the prince had laid out, directly below his balcony. As always, he began by condemning me, though this time, I had no intention of letting him finish.

“Liliana Florencia Thorn, for the crime of bullying Holly, my true love, I hereby annul our engagement...”

“I thank you ever so much for granting our request, your highness,” I declared, interrupting his speech at the exact planned point, while also doing my best to sound overwhelmingly grateful.

“Our request?” he asked with the same confused turn of his head that I’d seen in the last seven loops. It was so comical that I had to stifle a laugh to ensure I looked genuinely sincere.

“The request of Roman and myself,” I explained, and while Roman clearly wanted to interject, I didn’t let him. The man was as smooth as a seal, and he’d easily wiggle himself out of any situation if I let him get a word in. Thankfully, he wasn’t too concerned yet, or he would’ve been much more forceful. That was his mistake. He underestimated me. He underestimated how much I hated him and just how far I was willing to go to hurt him. “Ever since we finally confessed our feelings for one another last year, he’s been looking for a way to end this engagement. That’s why he introduced you to Holly.”

The room exploded as I painted the story of a prince betrayed by his own fiancée and best friend, who had then manipulated him into ending his engagement. It was a scandal of the highest order, and the people were eating it up, though the prince himself seemed less than thrilled by this revelation. He glowered with rage at both me and Roman, whose easygoing smile proved to be his undoing. That look never left his face in the more than a decade that I’d known him, and while I had initially read it as friendly, I now knew it was designed solely to read as friendly. No more than a hint of emotion was ever visible on his face, and that served him well. While he came off as friendly, he was nearly impossible to read. It was a clever strategy for someone who would one day be leading a church, but here it was his undoing.

The prince had turned to him, looking for a denial. He had wanted to see his friend refute these accusations with overwhelming disgust, but instead, he saw only a smile. Maybe his anger had made him forget just how well trained Roman was in maintaining that smile, or that such horrible accusations would make even him falter. Either way, he interpreted that smile as a betrayal, and if I let things play out, as they had in the last loop, he would be arrested and I would be executed.

I wasn’t particularly thrilled about that difference in treatment, but I had no intention of letting things end there. I needed to push the dagger in just a bit more, so just as Roman went to open his mouth again, I spoke up, and all eyes turned to me.

“Oh, that’s right,” I said, sounding casual, and as if I was a bit too ditzy to actually read the room. “I still owe you an apology, Holly. Sorry about all the bullying, but Roman said it was necessary to bring you and the prince together.”

I ended those words with a lighthearted chuckle and silently prayed they would be enough. Thankfully, it was. The prince’s expression went from anger to outright fury. This was no longer simply a matter of cheating on the prince, which was already a serious crime. I had now pinned every act of bullying Holly, the very thing I’d been repeatedly executed for, squarely on Roman’s shoulders.

That was finally enough to break Roman’s smile and replace it with pure terror, but it was too late. None of his excuses or pleas were heard, and for the first time, since the loops had started, I watched as someone other than me died at the hand of the prince’s divine magic. It was a truly terrifying thing to witness as the center of his body turned to ash, which then spread until it had consumed his entire being as he watched on helplessly.

However, before he was entirely devoured by the spell, he looked toward me. I expected anger or malice, but all I saw was a look of betrayal, as if he couldn’t understand why I had done such a thing to him. In an earlier loop, that would have likely hurt me or caused me to reconsider my hatred toward him, but I had died too many times because of his stupid scheme to write the prince into a love story, so instead, I laughed.

It started as a small snicker, but quickly erupted into a full-on cackle. All eyes in the room, which had before been glued to what remained of Roman, now slowly turned to me. Perhaps they thought I had lost my mind after seeing my lover die, but the truth was far more twisted than any of them could have imagined. Still, I didn’t bother to correct them. I’d have time for that, and for now, I just wanted to appreciate that this silly little plan of mine had actually worked.

It had all started with the paper cut idiot, whose love story had proved to be perhaps the most ridiculous thing I had ever heard across both my lives. As it turned out, his knife trick wasn’t just an attempt to win over a girl. It was his attempt to win her back, or to be more accurate, it was his fourteenth attempt to win her back. Previous efforts had included running laps around campus until she forgave him (he was at this for twelve hours before he realized that he never told her he was doing this), promising to master spatial magic to win her back, despite failing to learn even basic-class spatial magic during class, and trying to make her jealous by pretending to date someone else.

That last one struck me as particularly stupid, as she had specifically dumped him for cheating on her, with that very same person. I had no idea how he expected any of that to work. Still, despite the massive headache his story had given me, it had also inspired me. What if I made the prince jealous? Just how far could I push him? Well, I had my answer, and so did everyone else.

“Has the loss of your lover driven you mad, harlot?” the prince asked accusatively, as he lifted a hand to strike me down next, but my next words stopped him in his tracks.

“Oh, sorry, that was just a joke,” I said with a shrug. “Roman wasn’t my lover.”

“What?” the prince asked in nearly a whisper as his hand began to tremble.

“Nothing ever happened between us,” I reiterated.

“You’re lying!” the prince accused with shaking hands, as his eyes darted over to what remained of Roman.

“I’m not,” I assured coldly.

“Why?” he asked in a voice that sounded almost like begging. He wanted me to tell him that I was lying and that he’d been right to execute Roman, but that wasn’t how I’d written this story to go. Instead, this was only the beginning of his suffering.

“For them,” I said, gesturing to the entire room, much to everyone’s confusion. “You arranged tonight to tell a story that would paint your betrayal in the best possible light and let you walk away a victim, but these people, who will one day serve under you as king, deserve to know exactly what kind of man you are and what kind of king you’ll be. Now they know. You’re a man who will kill his own best friend based on nothing but the words of a woman who despises him. You’re nothing more than a fool and a tyrant.”

Upon hearing my words, the prince’s eyes scanned the crowd. Few people made eye contact with him, and those who did seemed utterly terrified. Finally, he turned to the spot where his best friend always stood and looked for reassurance, but found only ash. His face paled, and it seemed as if he might be physically sick any moment, but I wasn’t done quite yet.

“You have lost your closest ally, the support of the Church of Eros, and the trust of the people. I cannot say if you will ever sit on your father’s throne, but if you do, you will be the last. The royal family ends with you!”

With that declaration, my vengeance was satiated for the time being, as I finally found what I considered to be the first good ending of my game. Of course, I still died at the prince’s hand mere moments later, but I had destabilized the royal family in a way that no one else had done in their two-thousand-year-long history. If the loop ended here, I would be content. I still wanted to achieve my own happy ending, but I decided then that if the loops ever did break me, I would find a way to ensure that this was the ending to my story.