Chapter 3: A Mountain of Corpse 3
The bodies shifted under me again, a wet slide of flesh and broken bones, and for a second I thought I was going down with them. My boot slipped on some poor bastard's chest cavity, ribs crunching under my weight, but I caught myself and steadied the revolver in my hand.
Click—bang.
One more head snapped back, spraying blood against the alley wall. Another shout, another scream cut short.
The street was drowning in gun smoke. It stung my eyes, burned my throat. My ears rang so bad I could barely tell the difference between the muzzle flash in my hand and the bursts from theirs. Didn't matter. I just kept shooting, arm jerking, barrel flashing.
I don't know how many were left. A dozen? Two dozen? Every time I thought I'd cut them down to the last man, more shadows crawled out of the dark, pistols waving, knives flashing. It was like fighting the ocean—wave after wave, trying to drag me under.
And somehow, I was still here.
Still bleeding. Still standing. Still killing.
"Motherfucker's not human!" someone screamed.
"You first in, then!" another barked. Nobody moved.
I spat, blood and saliva mixing, and leveled my gun at the closest one. "If I'm not human, what's that make you? Meat."
Bang. He dropped.
The rest flinched like I'd slapped them. Nobody wanted to be next, but I wasn't giving them the choice.
I swung, fired, fired again. Every shot bought me another few seconds of breathing. Every kill made this mountain just a little higher under my boots.
And then, right in the middle of it—the gun smoke, the screaming, the blood slick on my hands—my mind wandered.
Don't ask me why. Maybe it was the blood loss. Maybe I was finally cracking. But as I reloaded, shoving rounds into the cylinder with fingers that barely worked anymore, I remembered it.
That stupid game.
Eternal Roses: The Bonds of Ten Hearts.
---
Picture this: me, Jimmy Bellic, professional bastard, a wolf in a suit, a man who could snap your neck before you blinked—sitting in a shitty apartment, controller in hand, staring at the TV while some animated pretty boy prince offered me a bouquet of glowing roses.
The guy had hair like spun gold, eyes bluer than the goddamn ocean, and a smile so soft it could've made angels weep. And me? I'm sitting there like an idiot, bleeding from a knife fight earlier that night, whispering to myself:
"Don't you dare choose the wrong dialogue option, Elena. Don't you fucking dare."
Absurd, right?
But in that moment, I swear to god, it mattered more than anything. It was a world where nobody was shooting at me. Nobody was stabbing me in the back. Nobody was dying in my arms.
Just roses. Just love confessions. Just a wide-eyed heroine and ten men who wanted to lay the world at her feet.
The exact opposite of my life.
---
Bang. Another one down.
The memory kept rolling in my skull even as I fired. The time I actually shouted at the screen when the White Rose priest got too close to Elena. The time I punched my couch when the Black Rose outlaw betrayed her in Chapter 8. The time I damn near cried when the Blue Rose scholar sacrificed himself in one of the bad endings.
I hated myself for it. But I couldn't stop.
Because when the shooting stopped, when the blood dried, when the whiskey didn't drown the silence—Eternal Roses was there.
And now, standing on this mound of corpses, bleeding from a dozen holes, it was still there.
My last comfort. My last goddamn thought.
---
"Reloading!" one of the mobsters yelled, ducking behind a trash can.
I snapped back, fired at the can, punched holes clean through it. He didn't come back up.
"You fuckers ever play otome games?" I rasped, my throat raw, voice shredded.
The silence that followed was almost funny. Confused muttering rippled through the shadows.
"Otome what?" someone shouted.
"Shoot him already!" another barked.
I laughed. The sound was wet, broken, but it was real. "Figures. None of you know what you're missing. Ten princes. Ten hearts. All of 'em prettier than your mothers, and every last one wants you. Now that's war I can stomach."
They thought I'd lost it. Maybe I had.
But as more bullets zipped past, I just kept grinning, kept remembering. Kept hearing that game's stupid title screen music in my head—those tinkling piano notes, that fake romantic orchestra swell.
Eternal Roses: The Bonds of Ten Hearts.
The irony of it almost killed me harder than the bullets.
I ducked behind a fresh body, jammed more bullets into the revolver. My hands were slick, shaking, but I forced them steady.
"Why the fuck's my luck so bad?" I muttered. "Spend half my life carving my way through scumbags, and the only happiness I find is in a damn dating sim."
Bang. Another kill.
Bang. Another.
The blood on my boots was up to my ankles now. The bodies beneath me groaned as they settled, the stink of rot already in the air though most of them were still warm.
And yet, above it all, I kept seeing roses. Red, black, white, blue. Ten colors, ten hearts.
I was still in the fight. Still standing. But in my head, the game was waiting.
If hell was next, maybe I'd get lucky and take the cartridge with me.