"Anna......?"
"Miss......"
Anna, never one to be shaken, called me in a trembling voice, and after a long pause, barely managed to speak. "Why didn't you say anything until this happened?"
Anyone would be frustrated. I would have been too.
If I hadn't been under such bullshit constraints that I couldn't say anything about how I was being treated at the Riegelhoff, I would have finally told someone.
But for those who don't know and can't understand, a plausible excuse is needed.
"How could I tell you that?"
I turned around to see Anna's brow furrowed. I've never seen her expression change so dramatically.
And with that one word, she understood everything and didn't ask more.
She is an example of an astute maid.
"I apologize for my rudeness, I will apply the medicine."
I flopped down on the bed and let myself be held by Anna's hand.
'It's good that I got rid of Sophia...... but I'm afraid of the repercussions of this.'
There were still a few more episodes left of Sophia's story, and I was afraid of how that part would morph and attack me.
But one thing has been lingering in my mind with satisfaction since earlier.
'Killian kicked Sophia out for me because he knew I couldn't do it myself......'
He must have noticed my predicament inside the Riegelhoff.
Here I am, beaten by a maid, and Count Riegelhoff sends a carriage to bring Sophia back in one piece rather than worry about my safety.......
It's hard not to notice. Even Anna seems to have noticed.
But instead of turning his back on me, the worthless hostage, Killian threw Sophia out.
'This is the part where I can be hopeful, right?'
Of course, I hardly expected Killian to throw me out.
I'm more of a lead character than Sophia, and my narrative is more important than hers.
There's still a lot left for me to do, and I have faith that the flow of the story doesn't already exclude me.
Still, it was comforting to know that Killian hadn't ignored my situation and taken action.
'You have to be on your toes at times like this. You see it in movies and dramas where people let their guard down and mess things up.'
I don't know how much sympathy Killian had for me, but I do know that he saw me as a woman who would use her body to cover her faults when she was at a disadvantage.
'So in the future, I should never flirt with him and keep a clean distance, and maybe one day he'll realize that I'm not that kind of woman.'
Then he'll hate me less, and once he learns what happened to me, he might even forgive me when the Riegelhoffs meet their demise.
'Great, let's do it!'
I squirmed a little from my giggling, and Anna thought I was crying, so she put her hand over mine and patted me on the back.
Well, this isn't so bad.
***
The original author.
He calls himself K.
[T/N: The identity of K is still unknown here, so I used the pronoun he.]
He had long forgotten his real name, but that doesn't bother him.
What matters to him is this world.
A world of his own creation, the perfect Lizé Sinclair.
K loves Lizé Sinclair, the female lead he created.
She is the perfect protagonist, the fulfillment of his every wish, to the point where he wonders how he could have created such a lovely being.
So much so, that when he died and reincarnated into this world, he thought he was blessed by God.
What a joy it was to be able to live in a world where the characters he created were alive and well.
The beloved Lizé is so beautiful, and the male leads for her are the epitome of fantasy.
Watching their life and love unfold before his eyes was thrilling.
But at the point of living the same life for the fifth time, K realized for the first time that this might not be a blessing, but a curse.
A loop where he wakes up at the beginning of the story and everything is a blur at the end of the story and then he's back to the beginning again......
K is stuck in an infinite loop hell.
But K, who loves the story and the characters he creates so much, denies it.
'The world I've created can't be hell, so...... yes, let's give the story a twist!
K realized that the story needed to change in order for her to survive the constant repetition of life, but his desire to make Lizé stand out didn't diminish.
The solution was simple.
'I need a more lively villainess.'
So K spread this story to other dimensions of the universe.
And whoever read it and found it interesting would possess Edith Riegelhoff.
It had an interesting effect.
'As expected, I wasn't wrong.'
The new souls, who had read the original story and quickly accepted that they had fallen into a Rofan novel, showed interesting behavior.
At first, they rejoiced at the thought of them possessing a villainess.
Then they tried to be good, unlike Edith in the original story.
However, if the flow of the original story didn't change, and the comparison with Lizé continued, she became a fresh villainess that was incomparable to the original Edith.
It allowed K to forget about the boredom of his repetitive life, while Lizé became a more prominent protagonist each time.
It was K's pleasure to make Lizé look her most attractive.
But he didn't feel he was being unfair. After all, the new soul had died and was now possessing the dead as well, and he had created a system that allowed Edith to go against the flow of the original story.
The system is called the "three-level exception condition," and whenever the condition at each condition is met, K's control is weakened and an exception situation favorable to Edit occurs.
However, each time the opposite happens, the flow of the original becomes stronger.
Of course, it is not easy to meet the exception conditions because it is a game that is advantageous to K. However, there were nine Ediths who met the first exception condition.
That was fine. It actually made the story more interesting.
But K, who had treated all the Ediths as if their lives were nothing more than ants, was feeling a strange tension with the thirteenth Edith this time.
'This one is different.'
This Edith is hard to define in a word.
I thought she would give up soon, but there was something strangely persistent about her.
Most Ediths started to panic and break down when they were framed as the culprit in the document leak.
In particular, this time, in order to make Edith the culprit, I even gave a new setting, "Do not use tables in formatting," so I thought other characters would also push Edith to be the villainess harder.
Edith, however, was unfazed. She calmly looked at the evidence that incriminated her as if to say, "Let's see what happens," and then brought in the documents she had organized and even her own diary, which she compared to the writings in the forged letter, to prove her innocence.
Her reasoned arguments convinced the others, and the episode that was supposed to show Edith as a spy came to a screeching halt.
So I thought she was persistent, and then suddenly, as if she had given up on everything, she went into Killian's room in the middle of the night and did what Edith did in the original story.
'I didn't realize that's how she met the first condition.'
Even the way she met the condition, "Follow what Edith failed to do in the original," is different from the other Ediths did.
Whereas some other Ediths met the first condition by being clingy to Killian or following Count Riegelhoff's orders.
They were trying to save their own lives.
However, the thirteenth Edith simply kissed Killian.
She only passed level one because the act of kissing was part of the original Edith's failed plan, but her true intentions were far from the original Edith's.
In any case, once the first condition was met, the person who faced Edith's behavior at that time, Killian, began to change.
Quantifiably, K's control over Killian dropped from 100% to 70%.
Up until this point, he wasn't worried about Edith passing level one which resulted in his control over Killian diminishing. This was because other Ediths had never caused Killian to change his feelings.
This time, however, Killian has begun to show interest in Edith.
How surprised he was when he realized Killian had spent the night with her, a character he'd created and yet one that felt foreign.
'Even though Killian is a character with an impulsive side......'
This is the first time I've seen a character move out of my hands, the author.
And it was all an exception situation that happened because of the probability created by the thirteenth Edith, and that was the biggest reason why K felt nervous about this Edith.
There is also something else that makes this Edith different.
'I don't know if she realized it, but she involved extras whom I had no control over.'
K may have created this world, but he is not a perfect god.
The main force driving the world is the "flow of the story," followed by probability, and K is just an author trapped within the story.
Nevertheless, he can control the small setting of the story and control the characters. The more meticulously he creates the characters, the stronger his control becomes.
Therefore, many unnamed extras are not under his control.
This is why he was able to have so many different people possess Edith.