step into the end

“She felt as if she'd been run over by a truck. But the pain began to fade as she slowly regained control over her fingers, her shoulders, her jaws. Blinking fatigue out of her eyes, she gazed upon an orange-tinted sky and the familiar, ruined landscape that was always in the backdrop of CGs from her favourite otome game, A Study on the Former Love Interest. Standing at the edge of the crumbling city where the sun never set, she felt her heart sink in her chest.”

Recalling those lines, Orion took a deep, shuddering breath.

Now, isekai wasn’t real. It was a nice wish-fulfillment fantasy that was perfect for the days he really wanted to quit his job. In the comic, the woman reborn as Eilah dealt with the hand life had dealt her like a champ, but as for him? He’d much rather keep his life and the comfortable monotony that came with it, thank you very much.

This couldn’t be happening. It had to be a dream.

It had to be a horrible, elaborate prank, Orion decided, bracing his palms against the uneven ground to pull himself upright. Then he paused. His hands seemed to be fitted with a pair of gloves that he definitely wasn’t wearing when he passed out. Huh. Not only that, everything he was wearing was weird. The tightness around his chest that he’d mistaken for some sort of blunt force trauma earlier was a belt. Several belts.

For a moment, he considered lying back down and going to sleep.

Everything was too vivid to be a dream, too uncomfortable to call it the embrace of death. He could keep trying to justify this situation, each excuse growing more and more outlandish—just like Eilah had done. But even that line of thought was proof enough of what had happened to him. Dread bubbled up in his throat, acrid and sour.

Orion could feel his overgrown bangs tickle his eyelids when he blinked, an unfamiliar sensation when he’d worn his hair close-cropped for as long as he could remember. The waterproof fabric of the long coat hanging off his shoulders rustled noisily as he shifted. His bearings were all wrong in a vague, unsettling way. It reminded him of his growth spurt the summer he turned thirteen. Like something about him had changed, fundamentally and irrevocably.

It took him three tries to stagger to his feet, but even then he could barely stand properly. He blinked hair out of his eyes and then tried to tuck his bangs to one side. No one ever told him how awful, unpleasant, and disconcerting it was to be wearing the skin of a different person. But then again, if people were transported into another world after death, it wasn’t like they could ever come back to share the news.

Isekai, huh. Well, it could’ve been worse.

If he wanted, Orion could peer into one of the sealed-off pools a few paces away and be acquainted with his new appearance just like Eilah had done. That groundwater gimmick was such a convenient plot point, really. But he was already aware of the identity of the man he’d been reincarnated as, and it was starting to feel like a sick joke.

Orion Magnoalia, one of the heroine’s four love interests in the original otome game. He was just some forgettable, nice guy in a cool jacket and too many belts like everyone else in the cast. For some reason, he also had bangs covering one eye because the character designers wanted him to look edgy or something like that.

(But he really was just a boring nice guy.)

Brushing those accursed bangs out of his eyes, Orion took a deep, unsteady breath. Better start getting used to this before he decided to dunk his entire head inside the water for fun. His gaze flitted to the wide stretch of mesh that barricaded what looked like a small but very normal pond. Actually, he never really thought about it much because the worldbuilding in the webcomic sucked, but what was in that contaminated water anyway? Acid? Arsenic?

There was a pool of it literally right there, next to the crumbling buildings just up ahead. What was the worst that could happen? Orion had already died once.

He found himself approaching the water, brimming with a morbid curiosity. Ah, there it was, the reflection of the Orion from the webcomic. In the hazy orange lighting, his visible eye was a weird shade of maroon, gazing up at him expressionlessly. Orion brushed the bangs out of his other eye again, and Orion Magnaolia did the same, black-gloved hand against pale, almost-blond hair.

“Magnolia-coloured,” a voice in his head intoned, “like petals of the flower blooming in late spring.”

Startled, he nearly lost his footing. There was no way he’d remember a line like that from the webcomic of his own volition. No, it was more like someone else’s voice in his head, but it wasn’t a voice at all. Visuals? Text? Some sort of weird, invasive entity in his mind? It was difficult to explain after experiencing it for the first time. But at the same time, something clicked in place.

A Study on the Villainess's Love Interest was the only comic of its kind that Orion had ever read in his lifetime, but there was no shortage of villainess isekai fanatics at his workplace. So he was aware of a handful of tropes—most of them against his will—and one of which was that the otome game plotline sometimes existed as a tangible entity to guide the protagonist. The voice in his head gave him that kind of an unnerving feeling, and he didn’t like it at all.

Now, Eilah wasn’t even given that luxury when she was transported into the game. It was the heroine, Halie Viriadian, that the world had chosen. That all four love interests—Orion Magnaolia included—had chosen. The plotline condemned the villainess, despite Eilah’s best efforts to fix the narrative. Sure, this made the story and conflicts more interesting, but the unfairness of it all sometimes angered Orion.

“Halie Viriadian is the protagonist,” the entity’s voice intoned, with a sense of finality. It left no room for discussion, but—

“Do I look like I care?” Orion spat.

This was the first time he’d spoken aloud, he realized, as his voice echoed unnaturally across the ruins and off the rippling surface of the water. The pitch of his voice was a notch higher than usual, throwing him off. Unsurprising, considering he’d been turned into a generic marketable anime boy, but it was going to take some time to get accustomed to. The entity that spoke in his head did not give him another response after that, but he wasn’t expecting one. That was fine.

There were several things he wanted to confirm, and he had a recklessly stupid idea in mind to hit all of them. Like he’d established earlier—he had already died once. He had nothing to lose here when he’d already lost his phone, his Eilah keychain, and his life.

The net that was cast over the water of death was only held in place by slabs of rubble. Orion reached down, firmly gripped the edge of the fraying rope, and pulled hard. If there really was some higher power, surely it’d stop one of its precious male leads from diving in and making a fool of himself.

If the plot truly favoured Halie and her harem of generic-ass men—

“Orion! You idiot! What are you doing?!”

The high, shrill shriek that pierced his ears was so unexpected that it nearly sent him lurching forward toward the water. It didn’t help that he still wasn’t accustomed to this body yet, but he managed to catch himself before committing to exactly what he’d intended to do three seconds ago. Guess he wasn’t so ready to die after all.

Orion looked around wildly for the source of the voice—a real voice, sounding in his ears instead of his mind. There. Across the wasteland, a flash of movement caught his eye. There was someone hurtling toward him, vaulting over rubble and the puddles of water, arms waving madly.

He never believed in fate. He never believed in isekai, either. But if he had really ended up here, in her world, in a place he never thought truly existed outside of fiction, then maybe it was all for this moment. Maybe Orion had been sent here to meet her.

“Halie Viriadian is the protagonist.”

“Orion…I…finally…” The high, sweet voice that filled Orion’s ears as the sound of running footsteps grew closer wasn’t Eilah’s. The mousy brown hair tied into a loose ponytail wasn’t Eilah’s. Her gaze was viridian—he knew that even before their eyes met.

“...found you.”