The Unwanted Pact With My Enemy
To keep her art scholarship, Vesper had to complete a life-size woodcarving for her final project.
But her randomly assigned model was Slade Forrester, the arrogant basketball captain who had shattered her grandfather's priceless antique carving tools freshman year without a single apology.
When Vesper blackmailed him with a ten-thousand-dollar property damage claim to force him into the studio, Slade mercilessly turned the tables.
"I'll be your model, but you're going to do something for me in return."
He demanded she carve a custom piece to help him woo a girl who hated his guts, and forced Vesper to act as his personal spy.
The target turned out to be Vesper's own roommate.
To make matters worse, Slade caught onto Vesper's terrifyingly deep, secret crush on his polite roommate, Julian.
He ruthlessly weaponized her anxiety, mocking her stuttering panic and trapping her in a twisted mutual-blackmail deal that left her completely suffocated.
Exhausted, humiliated, and desperate to escape this nightmare, Vesper logged onto the university portal at 2 AM to register for a quiet online elective where she wouldn't have to see anyone.
But the system lagged, locking her out of every normal class and leaving only one open seat in a brutal varsity physical conditioning course.
With her required credits and scholarship on the line, she had absolutely no choice but to hit register.
Then the syllabus loaded on her screen.
The Teaching Assistant for the class was Slade Forrester.
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Chapter 8
The freezing night air hit Vesper's face like a physical blow. She wrapped her arms around herself, desperate to get back to the safety of her dorm room.
"Vesper."
The low, raspy voice came from the shadows.
Vesper froze. She turned her head. Slade was leaning against the brick wall of the dining hall, half-hidden in the dark. The glowing cherry of a cigarette illuminated his sharp jawline as he exhaled a thick cloud of white smoke.
Vesper wanted to run, but her legs refused to move. She slowly walked toward him, stopping a few feet away.
Slade dropped the cigarette onto the concrete and crushed it beneath the heel of his boot. He looked up, his eyes locking onto hers.
"You like Julian," Slade said. It wasn't a question. It was a brutal statement of fact. "You look at him like a dying idiot looking at a cure."
The words hit Vesper like a physical punch to the gut. Her breath hitched. "I-I don't know what you're talking about."
"Stop lying," Slade snapped, taking a step toward her. "The stuttering. The spilled water. The way you practically had a seizure when his finger touched yours. It's pathetic."
Vesper's defensive walls completely shattered. Her shoulders slumped, and she squeezed her eyes shut. The humiliation was absolute.
"Please," Vesper whispered, her voice cracking. She opened her eyes, looking at him with raw desperation. "Please don't tell him. Don't tell anyone."
Slade frowned, the harshness leaving his face. "Why? If you like him so much, why act like a terrified mouse?"
Vesper let out a bitter, self-deprecating laugh. She gestured to her paint-stained flannel and her dusty boots. "Look at me, Slade. Look at him. He's the Student Body President. He wears cashmere. I smell like sawdust and cheap acrylics. We aren't in the same universe. If he knew, I'd just be a joke to him and his friends."
Slade stared at her. Hearing her tear herself down sent a hot spike of anger straight into his brain.
He closed the distance between them in one stride. He didn't touch her, but he took a step closer, blocking her path entirely. He loomed over her, his presence suffocating and absolute, his voice dropping to a low, intense murmur that demanded her full attention.
Vesper gasped, her eyes flying wide open as she looked up at him, her heart hammering wildly against her ribs at the sudden proximity.
"You are not a joke," Slade said, his voice a fierce, low growl. His dark eyes locked onto hers, refusing to let her look away. "You're ten times smarter than anyone at that table. You don't bow your head to anyone, you understand me?"
Vesper stopped breathing. The sheer intensity radiating from him was palpable, a heavy weight pressing down on her shoulders even without physical contact. The raw sincerity in his dark eyes was overwhelming, stripping away the biting autumn chill.
Slade suddenly realized what he was doing. He realized how close he was, how he had unconsciously leaned in so far that he could smell the faint scent of sawdust and vanilla clinging to her hair.
He jerked back as if he had been electrocuted. He took a massive step back, shoving his hands deep into his jacket pockets to hide the sudden, inexplicable urge to actually reach out and touch her.
He cleared his throat, instantly throwing up his walls of arrogance.
"I have a proposition," Slade said, his voice flat and controlled.
Vesper hugged herself, still feeling the ghost of his touch. "What kind of proposition?"
"I keep your secret," Slade said. "And I'll even help you. I live with the guy. I know his schedule. I can set you up."
Vesper's eyes narrowed suspiciously. "In exchange for what?"
"You finish the woodcarving," Slade said. "And you help me get the girl I'm making it for."
Vesper scoffed, the absurdity of the situation hitting her. "You need my help? You literally have girls screaming your name in the gym."
"This one is different," Slade muttered, looking away. "She hates my guts. She thinks I'm an arrogant prick. I need someone on the inside to tell me what she actually likes."
Vesper weighed her options. The thought of her secret being exposed made her physically sick. But the thought of having Slade-Julian's roommate-as a wingman? It was the opportunity of a lifetime.
She took a deep breath, the cold air burning her lungs.
She nodded once. "Fine. We have a deal."
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8.8
I am the best esports jungler in the league, but I've been hiding a severe wrist injury just to keep my team alive in the semifinals.
Right in the middle of the crucial tie-breaker game, our mid-laner deliberately walked into the enemy team and died without casting a single defensive spell.
He was match-fixing for offshore betting sites, throwing away our entire season for a massive payout.
Because of his betrayal, we had to sub in two terrified rookies, and we were absolutely slaughtered. The stadium crowd booed us out of the arena. The internet exploded with pure vitriol, trending hashtags calling me a washed-up fraud who hid on the bench to save my own stats. The media demanded I retire immediately. My physical therapist gave me a grim ultimatum: my shredded nerves only allow me four hours of playtime a day before my right hand completely locks up.
I destroyed my own body for this team, only to be sold out by a coward and crucified by the very fans I bled for. Why should my legacy end in total disgrace because of someone else's greed?
I refuse to step down. I forced the traitor out, ignored management's safe roster choices, and locked my eyes on the most toxic, universally hated streamer on the platform.
"He's a walking PR nightmare," my coach warned.
I don't care. He is an arrogant, unhinged killer in the game, and I am going to make him mine.
8.4
Cari Butler woke up in a damp, smelly dorm room, realizing she had transmigrated into the body of a disgraced fake daughter who had just been kicked out of a wealthy family.
Before she could even process her reality, the real daughter's friends kicked her door open to mock her, flaunting a custom Tiffany necklace that supposedly cost a mere eighty cents.
Cari thought they were crazy, until she saw the news: a top Manhattan mansion had just sold for a record-breaking $3,500.
The entire world's currency value had shrunk by ten thousand times!
This meant the original owner's bank balance of $854,000 gave Cari the purchasing power of eight and a half billion dollars.
But a mysterious system froze her funds, forcing her to work demeaning gig jobs to unlock the money bit by bit.
While working as a hotel server for twenty cents a day, she caught her ex-boyfriend kissing up to the real daughter, mocking Cari for being a desperate beggar.
Even her snobby roommates laughed at her, claiming she couldn't afford a ten-cent iPhone.
What truly angered Cari wasn't the humiliation, but receiving a five-cent transfer from her poor biological brother, who was starving himself just to keep her fed.
Yet, the system strictly forbade her from giving her unlocked billions directly to her family.
Looking at the restrictive system and the arrogant elites who thought they owned the city, Cari's eyes turned icy cold.
"If I can't just hand them the cash,"
Cari sneered, pulling out her phone to outright buy the luxury hotel and fire everyone who wronged her.
"Then I will just buy the entire world and place it at their feet."
8.3
EDEN
8.3
Elianila, an AI Architect, is part of an elite team tasked with designing a global system meant to prevent threats, manage disasters, and distribute resources to vulnerable regions. After five years of tireless work with her colleagues, she uncovers disturbing anomalies, code-named, X-variables, that flag individuals according to criteria she never programmed.
As Elianila digs deeper to understand what the X-variables measure and where their origin, she finds herself in direct conflict with the authorities. Soon, the System marks her and her daughter as threats - targets to be eliminated.
With a small band of colleagues and dissidents, Elianila goes on the run, hiding in places beyond the Systems reach. As they evade surveillance, they race against time to warn others, expose the truth, and fight back against the omnipresent authority of the System.
9.4
My retirement was finally approved, and I was supposed to be sipping drinks on a sunny beach.
Instead, a cold system voice forced me into a nightmare scenario: "Cursed Mates Who Want Me Dead." I woke up in a stinking cave, trapped in the body of a psychopathic tribal princess.
The memories that flooded my brain made me sick. The original owner of this body had forcibly marked seven of the continent's most powerful beast-men and reduced them to tortured pets. She had ripped the shimmering scales off Jordi the Merfolk prince, gouged out a proud wolf-man's power crystal, and snapped an eagle-man's magnificent wings.
Now, Jordi was a mutilated, terrified mess hiding in a corner. He was so traumatized that he tried to slit his own throat just to escape me. His sister was actively trying to assassinate me.
To make matters worse, the system warned me that if I didn't heal these seven ticking time bombs, my soul would be erased. Yet the future timeline clearly showed that these men would eventually unite, burn my tribe to the ground, and dismember me alive.
I was paying for a monster's sins. Every time I tried to show mercy, they thought it was a sick new torture method. Words were useless, and my very presence was a trigger.
But I am a Tier-S operative, and I don't play the victim. I forced the system to unlock my powers and strapped on my tactical gear.
"Stay here and don't starve."
I left the trembling Merfolk behind and walked into the deadly primitive forest, heading straight for the powerful Oasis Tribe to take back his stolen scales by force.
7.2
I am a top-tier Alpha from another universe, but a spatial jump error dropped me straight into a high-security military isolation chamber.
Right in front of me was a terrifying, silver-haired wolf-beastman Admiral, completely losing his mind to a lethal biological heat cycle.
To survive in this strange dimension where my powers were restricted, I had to pretend to be a helpless, terrified girl.
Surprisingly, my mere presence and scent instantly cured his incurable madness.
But this backfired horribly. He became obsessively possessive, treating me like a fragile, priceless treasure.
When I managed to sneak out to the city's lawless slums to gather intel and accidentally saved a dying panther boy, the Admiral went completely feral.
He brought an entire war fleet, blotting out the sky, just to "rescue" me.
He nearly slaughtered the boy out of blind jealousy, forcing me to throw myself into his arms and cry fake tears to stop the bloodshed.
"I'm taking you home. No one will ever hurt you again."
He brought me to his flagship's secret medical bay and ordered the Empire's chief doctor to run a full genetic classification test on me.
I panicked. If they discovered my true identity as an off-world Alpha, I would be dissected or executed.
I immediately commanded my AI system to fake my blood data, aiming for a perfectly average, forgettable Omega result.
But as the machine processed my blood, the alarms blared, and the system overloaded.
The old doctor fell to his knees in absolute worship, and the terrifying Admiral looked at me with wild, starving eyes.
My system had overcompensated. I wasn't registered as average. I was just classified as the only SSSSS-grade Omega in the history of the universe.
9.3
Grace finally decided to end her toxic, one-sided relationship with Adelbert, the arrogant heir to a global empire, by texting him to terminate their family trust.
His response was a single, freezing word: "Done."
When they accidentally bumped into each other in a law firm elevator, Adelbert looked right through her.
"I don't know her," he stated coldly to his frat brothers, treating her like invisible trash.
Humiliated and completely exhausted, Grace sought an escape in a brutal shooter game called PUBG.
But by a sick twist of fate, the random matchmaking threw her into a squad with Adelbert's frat brothers and a god-tier, toxic player named 'Ø'.
'Ø' relentlessly mocked her terrible skills, humiliating her and calling her a "pig" over the voice chat.
Yet, during the final shootout, this ruthless player suddenly threw his character in front of hers, taking a fatal barrage of bullets just to keep her alive.
Grace soon uncovered the terrifying truth: the top-ranked 'Ø' was actually Adelbert himself.
She was utterly confused and furious.
Why would the untouchable billionaire who ignored her legal texts and publicly humiliated her suddenly sacrifice himself for her in a cheap video game?
Refusing to swallow her pride in both the real and digital worlds, Grace sent a direct challenge to his gaming profile.
"I'll prove I'm not a pig."
Across the city, Adelbert stared at the notification, a dark smirk curling his lips, and clicked accept.