Chapter 5: My Villainess Can’t Be This Hot

I’ll be honest, I was down.

Down, but not out!

That was the mantra I repeated to myself as the ceremony ground on and Lily talked into my ear at church volume.

"...and the dorms are supposed to have hot water on EVERY floor, which is amazing, back home we had to heat it in a pot, and my neighbor said the food hall serves meat every day, EVERY day, Kohaku, and..."

"Mmhm," I said, hearing maybe one word in five.

Up on stage, the faculty were introducing themselves one by one, each professor stepping into the spotlight to describe their course. Right, I wrote this school’s curriculum with zero understanding of what those look like.

The Knight Course instructor promised "combat, glory, and the forging of unbreakable bonds." No mention of homework.

The Mage Course professor promised "the unraveling of the world’s deepest mysteries," which meant blowing up a field on Tuesdays.

The Saint Course instructor talked about "healing, grace, and inner light" while looking one strong breeze away from being kidnapped.

Nobody mentioned desks. There probably weren’t any.

[Six hundred students, a billion-gold campus, and the entire academic program is "vibes." The taxpayers in this city should riot.]

While Lily narrated the miracle of indoor plumbing, I was doing real work behind my eyes.

[Okay. Think. Day one had four beats. The Cassian meet-cute is dead. The prince’s speech needs nothing from me, his jawline does the heavy lifting. The Sorting runs on rails. Which leaves beat three: the Serena encounter.]

I sat up straighter.

[YES!]

That was the play.

In canon, at this very ceremony, Serena Frostfall makes her grand entrance, spots Lily, is mortally offended that a commoner exists within her line of sight, and delivers an insult vicious enough to launch the greatest rivalry in the novel. Boom, two hundred Chapters of petty rivalry ensue.

That rivalry was the engine of the whole first arc. Lily’s growth, her drive, half her power-ups, all of it ran on wanting to wipe the smirk off one specific beautiful face.

[The Cassian route can be re-railed later. Boy meets girl is easy. But the rivalry starts TONIGHT, and if it starts clean, the story holds its shape. I just have to make sure nothing gets in the way. Serena could find Lily in a blackout. Hating commoners is her favorite pastime!]

The headmistress had taken the stage, mid-sentence in a speech about tradition and excellence.

Then the doors at the back of the hall slammed open.

Both doors, thrown wide with a bang that cut the headmistress off cold, six hundred heads turning at once, and in the doorway, backlit, stood the villainess of my very first novel.

Teenage me fucked up a lot of things. The magic system. The pacing. Four tournaments in one school year. But standing in that doorway was proof that once, that hormonal little disaster knocked one out of the park.

White hair, loose past her waist. Red eyes, half-lidded with contempt. Tall. Built like the exact spot on the hourglass where the sand loses its mind. She stood there letting the room enjoy the privilege of looking at her, chin high.

At seventeen, I hadn’t figured myself out yet. So when I designed my "hateable villainess," I worked backwards from one question: what would rattle me most in a woman? The answer, built with loving, obsessive detail, was a cold, cruel, devastating beauty who could step on my neck.

I then spent nine years discovering my relationship with dick was negotiable. Attached to a dude? Gross. Attached to THAT? Goodness gracious.

In other words: years before I knew my type, I wrote it down, gave it a tragic backstory, and killed it in the finale.

And now she’d been made manifest and was walking toward me.

Serena came down the aisle, heels striking marble, sweeping the rows with a look you’d give a fish market in summer. Students shrank as she passed. Somewhere a boy whispered "that’s the Frostfall heiress" in case anybody wasn’t aware.

[Okay. Here we go. She’ll spot Lily any second. Blonde, sweet, visibly poor. Prime target. Come on, gorgeous. Say the line. Bully my heroine!]

Serena’s eyes tracked across our row, passed Lily entirely, and landed on me.

She changed course, an actual ninety-degree turn, straight at my seat, and my entire nervous system stood up and started filing conflicting reports.

She halted beside me, looked down from her considerable height advantage, and let her gaze crawl over my ears, my tail, my everything.

"Tsk. Didn’t know they let mutts in these days."

Total, theater-wide silence. Six hundred people watching me get racially profiled by the most beautiful woman I ever created.

[...What? Why is she talking to ME?]

I knew I should say something. In canon, this insult belonged to Lily, whose scripted response was to tremble and hold back tears, which fed Serena’s satisfaction, which fed the rivalry, which fed the plot. Fine. I could improvise.

Here is what I actually did: nothing.

I kept my face perfectly stone, not a single twitch. To six hundred witnesses, it must have looked like ice-cold badassery, the lone foxgirl deciding the Frostfall heiress didn’t deserve a response.

The truth was I locked every muscle in my body because I didn’t trust a single one of them. My brain had flooded with exactly one sentence, "please skullfuck me," and if I opened my mouth even a crack, some version of it was coming out. Possibly with my room number, which I didn’t have yet, so I’d have to ask her to wait.

And then a new report came in from a district I forgot I owned.

[...Huh. What’s that?]

Pressure below the belt, significant, insistent, straining against my uniform skirt.

[Oh. OH. Right. The body came with one of those, and apparently its first-ever message is that it works great. Now? NOW?! We’re in assembly! The headmistress is RIGHT THERE!]

So, final tally: face of a war statue, dick harder than the marble under my feet.

Serena’s eyes narrowed at my silence.

"Serena," a warmer voice said, and a hand settled gently on her arm.

Golden hair, glass-cutting jawline. Prince Aldric Stellaris-Vane himself had materialized, guiding her away.

"The ceremony. Come, they’re holding our seats."

She threw one last look at me, let herself be pulled, and glided away down the aisle.

The theater exhaled, and the headmistress cleared her throat and resumed as if nothing had happened.

I sat there, stone-faced and throbbing.

Only then, as my blood redistributed itself back to the organs that pay rent, did the situation land on me.

[The insult went to me, not Lily. The rivalry flag... I ate it. That’s beat three, dead in a ditch. Day one had four beats and I’ve personally strangled two.]

I wanted to scream.

---

The rest of the ceremony went by in a haze.

Aldric gave his speech. The jawline performed as designed and a wave of sighs rolled through the hall’s female population. Lily spent the speech asking me whether the dorms allowed pets. Not one sigh for her future husband.

Then came the Sorting: staff called names, names got Courses, Courses got dorm assignments. No talking hat, no glowing crystal. Clipboards. I invented a fantasy academy and gave it the DMV.

"Kohaku!" a staff member called. "Knight Course. Dormitory East, room 204."

By the time I trudged up the East Dormitory stairs, key in hand, I had two items left on the day’s agenda, and I’d earned both.

Item one: field-test the new equipment, for science, and because after the Serena incident it was less "want" and more "medical necessity."

Item two: sleep for eleven hours.

I reached room 204, unlocked the door, and pushed it open, already pulling at my collar.

There was someone inside.

Blonde hair, blue eyes, sitting on the left bed in her nightgown, mid-way through brushing her hair, lighting up at the sight of me.

"Kohaku!" Lily bounced off the mattress. "We’re ROOMMATES! Isn’t that amazing?!"

[You’ve gotta be shitting me.]