Chapter 4

Leonard Vance dipped a spoonful of medicine and tested its warmth against his wrist before bringing it to my lips.

"It tastes worse cold. Drink it, and I'll change your dressings."

He held the spoon to my mouth.

"Once your wounds are stable, I'll depose the empress and make you my empress."

"From now on, of all this vast realm, you are the only one I will let stand beside me."

I lowered my eyes, hiding the killing intent in them.

"All right."

I feigned obedience and leaned my head toward him.

Leonard's breath caught, and he brought the bowl closer.

I lifted my right hand from where it hid in my sleeve,

the iron sliver I had lifted at the north gate clenched between my fingers, and drove it straight at his throat.

A single drop of blood rolled down the side of Leonard's neck,

but my hand stopped.

The point pressed into the wound, and no matter how hard I pushed, it would not sink another fraction.

An alarm blared through my mind.

【Warning! Warning!】

【This is a sweet-romance world. The heroine may not act to endanger the male lead's life!】

【World laws forcibly intervening!】

I stared, eyes wide with shock.

Leonard set down the bowl, caught my wrist, and pressed the side of his neck against the blade.

"You still want to kill me?"

His voice was very low, and for just an instant something bitter surfaced in his eyes before he hid it.

"Lisa, so what if you hate me? Your body can't bear to hurt me."

"Admit it, Lisa. Even a little, you have me in your heart."

Watching how certain he looked, I suddenly understood.

This world, locked around its male and female leads,

had, at its very foundation, stripped away any chance of the heroine killing the hero.

As long as I was still the heroine, I would never be permitted to kill him.

I would forever be a plaything turned over in his palm.

Leonard ignored the blood on his neck and pried my fingers open to check whether the sliver had cut into my palm.

"How could you dare hide something like this in your sleeve. Don't hurt yourself."

"Leonard Vance."

I looked at him, and suddenly I laughed out loud.

"You're right. This body really can't kill you."

The smile had only just begun to rise in his eyes when I twisted my wrist back.

I stopped fighting the resistance of the world's laws.

I went with the force instead, and slit open my own throat.

"Shhk——" flesh peeled apart.

The world's laws could stop me from killing him, but they had not stopped me from killing myself.

Hot blood surged out all at once and splashed across his face.

Leonard's smile froze on his face.

He lunged and clamped his hands over the wound, his palms soaked through in moments.

"Lisa?"

He called my name, as if he could not believe it.

The hand that had always held life and death in its grip shook for the first time, unable to hold the wound closed.

"The physician! Send for the physician!"

The doors slammed open, and attendants and physicians dropped to their knees in a heap.

Leonard cradled the side of my neck and said only two words.

"Save her!"

The words had barely left him when a mechanical alarm cut through the hall.

【Host body destroyed. Forced logout sequence initiating!】

Time, in that instant, snapped to a halt.

The physician's terrified tears hung on his cheeks.

Leonard was frozen mid-air.

A beam of blue light pulled free of Lisa Henson's corpse.

Leonard's pupils tightened, bit by bit, as he looked toward the light.

A woman in a trench coat and fine high heels, her face nothing like Lisa Henson's,

her presence like that of a god, stood in the air on unseen steps.

I looked down at Leonard from above.

I raised a hand and, in the empty air, opened a screen of deep blue light.

"Leonard Vance, Emperor of the Great Yuan. That's you, isn't it?"

My voice had gone cold to the bone.

"I've had enough of swallowing this humiliation for three days."

"Now I'm bringing my main account online."

"Time to settle the account for how you tortured and killed my best friend, and killed me."