Chapter 1: Seven Was, In Retrospect, A Bit Much

I hit "publish" on the final Chapter of Blade Requiem at 2:47 AM and leaned back in my chair.

"Holy shit." The words left my mouth on their own. I grinned, eyes fixed on my screen.

Three whole years. One hundred and eighty-two Chapters. Four romantic subplots, two of which I’d invented specifically to spite a commenter named SwordDaddy88 who said there was "too much gay in here".

Yep, this was my masterpiece.

The comments started rolling in within minutes.

"NO WAY SHE ACTUALLY KILLED HIM"

"author I hope you step on a l*go"

"So, when’s the sequel?"

That grin of mine got wider.

[Ah, yeah. That’s the good stuff.]

I stretched until my spine popped in three places and surveyed my kingdom: a one-bedroom apartment with a desk, a bed I hadn’t used properly in two days, broken AC, and a takeout bag from that one place with the good dumplings.

Being a completely, utterly mid novelist was great! You never got famous. Nobody stopped you on the street. No production company optioned your work for an anime that would inevitably betray the source material in season two. But if you were consistent and shameless enough? You could afford to order takeout every single day.

Meanwhile, my old writing group was out there subsisting on rice, dignity, and the phrase "my novel is really more of a literary meditation." Rest in peace, you beautiful starving auteurs. I’ll eat a soup dumpling in your honor.

I reached for my drink and found that the can was empty. So was the one next to it. And the one next to that.

Seven cans of Voltage Max Ultra (Sour Gummy flavor) stood on my desk in a loose semicircle, all facing me, like a jury.

[... Don’t look at me like that. I had a deadline!]

The seventh can was still a quarter full, actually.

Well...

... What kind of person would I be if I let it go to waste, am I right?

I finished it while scrolling through my author dashboard, because there was no better dessert after finishing a novel than looking at the pile of novels you’d already finished.

Blade Requiem. Complete, as of ninety seconds ago. My revenge epic. My magnum opus. The premise was basically "what if a swordsman was, like, sad about it the whole time?"

The Villainess Drinks Alone. My most popular work by a landslide, which, incidentally, taught me everything I needed to know about my audience. You could write a decade-spanning war saga and they’d shrug. You wrote one wine aunt villainess who bullied the male lead at parties, and suddenly you were "a voice of a generation" on three different forums.

Starfall Contract. The one where I learned that if you kill the love interest in Chapter 40, you will, in fact, receive death threats, and if you bring him back in Chapter 41, you will receive more death threats, but also a 300% revenue spike!

I kept scrolling. All the way down to the bottom of the list.

The Heroine’s Heart.

And then, I smiled wryly.

[Ah... there you are. My ugly, untalented firstborn.]

I clicked on it.

Oh. Oh.

This shit was bad-bad.

This mess was written when I was seventeen years old and running entirely on hormones and anime opening themes. It had EVERYTHING. A perfect heroine with a secret royal bloodline, because why settle for one cliché when you could collect them all. A prince with a perfect jawline and no personality. A brooding rival in a trench coat. A magic system I invented on the spot and casually patched every time Lily needed a new way to win, which meant it had mana, affinities, rankings, bloodlines, spirit contracts, divine gifts, AND unique skills, stacked recklessly on top of each other.

I smiled.

[Exquisite.]

Oh, and the best part flashed through my mind: The Heroine’s Heart’s antagonist, Serena Frostfall. My beautiful, hateable ice-queen villainess, designed with such loving detail that, in hindsight, it said a lot about a girl who hadn’t figured herself out yet. White hair. Red eyes. An hourglass figure described so thoroughly a modern editor would’ve flagged it as a cry for help.

[Years before I knew I liked women, I sat down and built my perfect type from scratch, then killed her off in the finale for the drama. Seventeen-year-old me was out here doing self-discovery in public.]

The reviews were still there. They would outlive me.

★☆☆☆☆ "the author introduced a magic system in ch 12, forgot it by ch 20, and introduced a DIFFERENT one in ch 31. i am in awe. one star. i read all 300 Chapters."

★★★★★ "this is the worst thing i’ve ever read"

★★☆☆☆ "Why is there a beach episode during the WAR ARC"

[Because beach episodes are peak fiction, you coward!!!]

God, it was trash. Certified, grade-A, free-range trash, with plot holes you could drive a wagon through and with a plot so shallow puddles would beat it in a depth contest. And I loved it anyway. It was the first thing I ever finished, back when the words "target audience" meant nothing to me.

I went to a random Chapter. In Chapter 214, Lily "gazed at the ethereal moon with eyes like saphires."

Yes, saphires. With one p. Nine years, and I never fixed it. At first out of laziness, then out of spite, and eventually as a monument.

I smiled... and then, my chest promptly imploded.

That’s the only way I can describe it, really. One second I was fine. The next, an invisible sumo wrestler did a cannonball on my chest.

"ACK!"

CRASH

I hit the floor.

My arm had gone numb and tingly. My jaw ached. My phone was on the desk, but the desk may as well have been a thousand miles away.

Suddenly, my vision was going dark.

[No...]

I tried. I tried so hard. And, in my last conscious moment, with my whole life available for review, my brain chose its final message:

[I never fixed the typo. Chapter 214. "Saphires." It’s going to say "saphires" FOREVER. NO. WAIT. I DIDN’T FIX THE TYPO!!!!]

And everything went black.

---

Suddenly, I could feel the sun on my face.

There was a breeze that smelled like flowers and freshly-cut grass. Instead of sweat and swamp ass from spending several hours writing.

[... I’m dead. Well, the afterlife sure smells nice.]

I opened my eyes to blue sky, white marble spires, and about a dozen faces peering down at me in a loose circle.

Beautiful faces. Uncanny, unreasonable faces, actually. A silver-haired boy with a lethal jawline. A girl with drill curls the size of my forearm. Every single one of them wore the same uniform, white and gold with a star-shaped crest on the breast, and every single one looked very confused.

"She’s waking up," someone said.

"Did she faint? During the entrance ceremony?"

"How embarrassing~"

I sat up on what turned out to be a marble courtyard, in the shadow of some grand academy.

[Okay, okay... Fantasy world. Magic academy. Absurdly attractive students. Star-shaped crest.]

I stopped.

[Wait a second. Star-shaped crest?]

I knew that crest. I designed that crest at sixteen, on my highschool notebook.

[This is... This is Stellaris Royal Academy! This is The Heroine’s Heart! I died and got isekai’d into my own trash novel!!!]

I damn near had a second heart attack.

[Okay, OKAY! Calm down, let’s... Let’s process this. You’re in your own novel... So, who are you?]

The first thing I registered was the view, in the sense that there wasn’t one, because two enormous obstructions were in the way. I was looking at my own chest, and my own chest was looking back, straining against a student blouse that had given up on the top two buttons.

My tits were HUGE!

"Um," I said. "W-What!?"

That wasn’t my voice. It was younger and brighter, like it hadn’t yet had the optimism snuffed out of it by modern society.

I patted my chest, purely for scientific reasons. Holy shit, these were real! No silicone at all! Premium naturals right here!

I patted my head next, and my fingers found two large, triangular, extremely fluffy ears where no ears had any business being.

Something brushed the back of my legs. I looked over my shoulder and found an orange tail moving on its own, connected, I confirmed with mild relief, to my lower back and not my butthole.

My hair was orange too.

So, taking stock:

Fox ears, tits like water balloons, a tail, and a uniform trying desperately to keep it all covered.

So, clearly, I was...

[... Who am I?]

I ran through the main cast in my head.

The heroine was a blonde human. The villainess had white hair. The mean girl had dark curls and was also a human. And, clearly, I wasn’t one of the guys.

[Uh... Am I forgetting someone?]

No, I wasn’t. My memories of my first novel were hazy as hell, but I could confirm one thing:

There was no foxgirl. In three hundred Chapters, in a cast of over sixty named characters, I never once wrote a foxgirl.

[No.]

My hands went up to my head.

[No, no, no, hold on, hold ON.]

I wasn’t the heroine. I wasn’t the villainess. I wasn’t even Nameless Classmate C, and Nameless Classmate C had a line in Chapter 8, which was more than I could say.

I was...

I was an extra.

---

Author Note:

Okay, hope you liked that one! A few warnings:

1. In case you didn’t see it in the synopsis, and somehow read past it in this Chapter, futanari characters are a thing. This is a yuri/futa novel. The MC, herself IS going to be one. Out of the two main love interests, one is (Serena), the other is not (Lily).

2. Asterisks (*) in the title of a Chapter indicate sex scenes, just so you don’t end up getting jump-scared by one at work or something.

Without further ado, enjoy!