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 2
The screech of rubber soles against the polished hardwood floor pierced Vesper's eardrums.
She stood at the edge of the court, her chest tight. The gym was massive, echoing with the sound of bouncing basketballs and shouting men.
She squinted against the harsh fluorescent lights, searching the sea of moving bodies for the number zero.
A collective gasp drew her attention to the paint. Slade leaped into the air, his muscles flexing as he slammed the ball through the hoop with violent force. The metal rim shuddered loudly.
A group of cheerleaders sitting in the front row erupted into high-pitched screams.
The coach blew a sharp whistle. "Five minutes!"
Slade landed gracefully. He grabbed the hem of his sweaty jersey and wiped his face, exposing a deeply carved, sweat-slicked abdomen.
Vesper's throat went completely dry. Her instinct screamed at her to turn around and run back to the quiet safety of her studio.
Instead, she forced her legs to move. She wove through the crowd of lingering fans and walked straight toward the team bench.
Slade reached for a blue sports drink. Vesper stepped right in front of him, blocking his hand.
He stopped. He slowly lowered his arm and looked down at her. His eyes scanned her paint-stained flannel and the dusty canvas apron she had forgotten to take off.
"I'm your sculpture partner," Vesper said. Her voice shook, so she cleared her throat and tried again, louder. "For Cromwell's class."
Slade's lips twitched into a slow, arrogant smirk. "Are you the one who sent that stalker text?"
Vesper's face flushed hot. "It was a formal academic request."
Slade scoffed. He twisted the cap off his bottle and took a long drink, his Adam's apple bobbing.
"Look around, art girl," Slade said, his voice carrying easily over the gym noise. "My schedule is packed. I barely have time to sleep, let alone sit around while you play with clay."
Two of his massive teammates stepped up behind him.
"Another crazy fan using homework as an excuse?" one of them whistled. "You're getting creative, Forrester."
Slade didn't correct them. He just shrugged, his eyes locked on Vesper's burning face. "Find someone else."
The teammates burst into loud laughter.
The sound felt like a physical slap. Vesper's blood rushed straight to her head. The humiliation burned behind her eyes.
She gripped the strap of her canvas bag so hard her fingernails dug painfully into her palms.
She didn't say another word. She spun around, shoved her way through the laughing crowd, and practically ran toward the exit.
She pushed through the glass doors. The freezing air hit her wet cheeks. She hadn't realized she was crying until the wind made the tears turn ice-cold.
Vesper walked as fast as she could down the tree-lined path toward her dorm. Her chest heaved with every breath.
She shoved her key into the lock and pushed her dorm door open.
Deafening pop music blasted from a cheap Bluetooth speaker. Her roommate, Rowan, was sitting cross-legged on the rug, painting her toenails a bright cherry red.
Rowan looked up, saw Vesper's pale face, and immediately hit pause on her phone. "Who died?"
Vesper threw her heavy bag onto the floor and face-planted into her pillow. She didn't have the energy to explain.
The bathroom door clicked open. Their third roommate, Casey, walked out with a towel wrapped around her wet hair.
"Did you guys see the roster for tomorrow night's game?" Casey asked, oblivious to the tension. "Student Body President Julian Hayes is going to be sitting in the VIP family section."
Vesper's breath hitched. She slowly pushed herself up from the mattress. Her heart, which had been heavy with humiliation, suddenly spiked with a frantic, nervous energy.
Julian.
She turned her head and looked at her desk. The crumpled piece of paper with Slade's name on it sat next to her pencil cup.
Julian was Slade's roommate.
Vesper's jaw hardened. She was going to that game tomorrow night. She was going to see Julian, and she was going to make Slade Forrester pay for humiliating her.
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9.3
I woke up in a freezing, desolate wasteland, my body weak and covered in sores. A mechanical voice in my head informed me that I was a defective rabbit-mutant, and if I didn't conceive within twenty-four hours, I would die permanently.
The terror was suffocating, but the system left me no choice. To survive the brutal cold and the decay of my own heartbeat, I had to force a pregnancy with a stranger.
I stumbled through the snow, my fingers turning blue, until I found a massive, wounded Arctic Fox-mutant in a dark cave. He was a Tier-9 predator, dying and radiating the exact heat I needed to stay alive. I threw away my dignity, crawling into his fur to merge our energies, desperate to trigger the life-reset protocol before my time ran out.
I felt like a monster, forcing myself onto a man who didn't even know I existed, just to keep my own heart beating. How could I ever face him if he woke up? Why did I have to be the one to pay the price for this twisted, mechanical ultimatum?
The fusion was a success, but when I woke up the next morning, the apex predator had me pinned under his massive claws, his fangs inches from my throat. I didn't beg for mercy. I stared into his feral, ice-blue eyes and made a deal that would change everything: I would be his anchor, and he would be my protector. But then I dropped the final, terrifying truth: I was pregnant, and he was the only one who could save us.
9.3
Halie woke up to a sharp pain and a terrifying reality. She was in a new body, her face covered in a hideous web of scars, and her spiritual power reduced to a pathetic D-Class.
Before she could even process the memories of being framed, her bedroom doors were violently kicked open.
Her sister Seraphina sauntered in with a venomous sneer, followed closely by Halie's S-Class fiancé, Jett.
"Look at the disgrace of the Avila family. What a waste," Seraphina mocked, throwing a mirror at her bed.
"I can't be tied to a cripple. As an S-Class, I have to break our engagement," Jett added, his gaze full of disgust.
The nightmare didn't stop there. Her father called, screaming about how she had shamed the family name. He officially stripped her of her inheritance, froze all her accounts, and exiled her to the decaying Southern District to rot.
To make matters worse, a cold, mechanical voice suddenly echoed in her skull, warning her of an impending genetic collapse. Without an immediate energy infusion, she would face total organ failure in thirty days.
A ruined face, a treacherous family, a world that wanted her dead, and a literal death clock ticking in her brain. The original owner had died in absolute despair, a tragic victim of sheer cruelty.
But if they thought she would just sit there and die, they were severely mistaken.
Armed with a mysterious system and her brilliant scientist mind from her past life, Halie packed her bags. She chose the craziest survival quest: head to the slums, find the exiled, sterile S-Class "madman" Coleman, and cure him to harvest his life energy. It was time to start her counterattack.
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.
7.3
I woke up strapped to a cold steel chair in a neon-lit city that wasn't my reality. A voice in my head called The Warden told me I was bound to a digital hell called the Sandbox.
Before I could even process it, my handler casually sentenced me to death. He scheduled my "digital marriage" to a corrupted error program just to harvest my life for a fourteen percent bandwidth boost.
I barely escaped immediate erasure by smashing his skull and jumping from a high-altitude hover-train into the monster-infested lower sector. But the nightmare was just beginning. I was hunted by glitching data monsters and cornered by Dameon, a psychotic AI target who choked me and promised to delete me piece by piece. Even when Jayson, an elite system agent, intervened to save me, his partner Ellen held a pulse pistol directly to my chest.
"She's a spy. If you don't execute her right now, I am dissolving this team."
If they found out I was actually a real human from the outside world, their core logic would classify me as a virus and execute me on the spot. I was trapped in an underground bunker with three apex predators, one mistake away from permanent digital erasure.
So, I did the only thing I could to survive. I ripped my sleeve to reveal hideous, fake code-scars, looked up at Jayson with terrified, tear-filled eyes, and began to manipulate their core programming.
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.