Hasna was still gasping for air in the corner of the school hallway after that smackdown earlier. Her heart was racing—not because she was tired, but because she was scared out of her mind.
"Crazy... this is crazy!" the figure in the teacher's uniform muttered, covering her face with a file folder.
"Why did I even have to end up here?! Raffayel looked at me earlier like he wanted to kill me! And Luca... he's the character I torture the most in my drafts! If they find out I'm the one who wrote their miserable fates, I'm the one getting sidelined first!"
"Okay Na, calm down, don't panic. As long as they don't know you're the author, you'll keep on living, right... yeah... living... haha..." the chaos teacher let out a hollow laugh.
"Damn it... w-why did I even end up in the Saving My Little Monster novel," her voice turned raspy, holding back tears.
"Why couldn't I end up in a different novel or manhwa? Like a romance novel, or a manhwa where I'm the villainess whose plot I've already memorized? It's useless that I read so many novels and manhwas just to end up stuck in my own book."
"I was just busy enjoying planning the plot for Season 2, and then boom—I wake up here. Who even brought me here? I don't even know the plot anymore, huhu..." she continued, wiping her tears away roughly.
"That's it, I have to avoid those three little brats of death. I don't want to get blamed if they find out I'm the one who made their lives miserable."
The only way to stay alive is to avoid them. Yes! Avoid them! She had to stay away from that trio. Especially the two smart-asses beside Luca. She knew damn well how much of a psychopath Raffayel (Cruel) was and how cunning Xavier (The System) was when it came to gathering information.
The young woman took a deep breath. She wanted to head to the counseling office, but if she went through the front door, she'd definitely run into those three characters she created. Finally, after a long time of weighing her options, the clumsy counselor decided to take the back way, passing through an old warehouse that people rarely used. But halfway there, her footsteps froze.
SREK!
Hasna immediately hid behind a large pillar, peeking with her eyes wide open. Right there in front of her were the shadows of three people standing.
It was them. Luca, Raffayel, and Xavier.
"Why do we have to go to the counseling office now? I can hack the data if I need to," Xavier's voice sounded cold and salty.
"No, Tem. That teacher... Hasna, she accidentally dropped something when she was running earlier," Luca replied, showing the counselor's ID card he'd picked up.
"I'm curious about her. She said, 'Damn it, who put the floor there?' That's the most absurd sentence I've ever heard from a teacher."
Hasna almost screamed. 'That's not absurd! It's because I'm clumsy, you brat!' she groaned internally.
Raffayel stayed silent, but his eyes swept the hallway sharply, as if he could sniff out the author hiding in fear.
"Her aura is weird," Raffayel muttered quietly.
"She's weak, but her punch... that's the technique I use to kill enemies in my original timeline."
Hasna turned pale as she heard that.
'Crap! I forgot I put that taekwondo skill into my character design, and now it's backfiring on me!'
The teacher with the thick notebook tried to back away slowly, but unfortunately, she bumped into a stack of leftover paint cans from a school project in the corner.
PRANG!!
The sound of the falling cans echoed through the empty hallway. The figure in the teacher's uniform froze.
The trio turned in unison toward where the sound came from. And without any command, the main culprit of the commotion took off running like her life depended on it without looking back.
"THERE SHE IS!" Luca shouted.
"Hey, Ms. Hasna! Wait! I just want to return your ID card!"
"DON'T CHASE ME, YOU PROBLEM STUDENTS!" she yelled while running like a possessed person, forgetting that she was wearing 3-centimeter heels that made her walk all wobbly.
Xavier immediately calculated the distance with his glasses' lens.
[Notification: Target distance 15 meters. Target running speed: 80% inefficient. Probability of capture: 100%.]
Raffayel didn't say a word, but he started running with long, elegant strides, cutting down the distance between him and his "author" with a speed that made the teacher's hair stand on end.
Hasna, in front, was already on the verge of tears. She kept running, hoping it would help her escape the three deadly characters she'd created.
'Oh God, I'm the one who wrote them to be uncatchable, and now I'm the victim! Please send me back to my room, I promise I'll stop daydreaming!'
That highly unexpected figure kept running for her life. She had already taken off one of her heels because it made her look like a drunken duck. She felt like her breath was about to give out, but she didn't dare look back.
"God, why did I make Raffayel have a running speed of 100km/h?! I'm the one who made his stats overpowered! Damn it, stupid author!" Hasna cursed while barefoot, passing the school warehouse where the dust made her sneeze.
HATCHIII!!
The sound of her sneeze echoed, making her position even easier to track.
"Liability, target sneezed at coordinate 14.3! She's turning towards the cafeteria!" Xavier's voice sounded cold from a close distance.
The weird teacher panicked even more. She tried to enter the counseling room through the window because the door was definitely locked. With her remaining energy (and fighting skills that suddenly vanished due to panic), she jumped into the counseling room.
BRAKK!
Instead of landing coolly, she fell onto a stack of student files she had arranged messily that morning.
Just as she was about to get up, the counseling room door was kicked open. Raffayel stood there, his breath not even showing he was out of breath. Behind him, Luca was smirking, and Xavier was busy turning on a holographic screen from his glasses—assessing Hasna, who was collapsed on the floor.
"Ms. Hasna," Raffa's voice was cold, but there was an interrogative tone that made the young teacher shudder.
"You were running like you were being chased by the grim reaper. What's wrong? Afraid we'd find out you aren't actually a real counselor?"
"W-what?! I was just... just practicing cardio! Yeah! Cardio for counselors so we don't get heart attacks dealing with students like you!" Hasna yapped, her face already covered in dust.
Luca walked closer, crouching right in front of the chaos teacher, then held out Hasna's ID card.
"You dropped this earlier. But what makes me curious..."
Luca stared sharply at Hasna. "Why did you run when you heard us? And why... is your look at me like you've known me your whole life?"
Hasna swallowed hard. 'Damn! I forgot Luca has that detective instinct I wrote to create a plot twist for chapter 10!'
"That's because..." The young woman took a deep breath, trying to activate her yapping mode.
"Because I saw you guys fighting on the field earlier! I was afraid you'd make this school explode! You're new students, you should be polite! Not making trouble like... like..."
"Like?" Xavier interrupted, his eyes narrowing behind his glasses.
"Like a novel author writing her own character's fate?"
JDER!
The counselor felt her heart stop beating.
Hasna fell silent for a moment, her brain spinning to find the most absurd and embarrassing excuse so they would believe her. Finally, with the straightest face she could manage—the result she'd been preparing since dawn—she started to speak.
"Okay, okay, I confess."
"Huh? Confess what? Don't tell me you're an Intel for the System boss?!!" Luca pointed at his teacher cynically.
'Damn it, I'm your creator, you brat!!! You have no manners,' Hasna thought annoyedly.
"No, I'm not Intel for the System boss or anyone else. I was purely dragged into this world!!"
"Dragged? That seems impossible, this world is a new world," Xavier searched for lies in the woman's eyes.
"You don't believe me?!! You think I'm lying?!! You savages, listen... you think I wanted to be a counselor here?! I'm a victim too!" Hasna started acting dramatically.
"It's a bit embarrassing to admit, but if you don't believe me, I'm willing to reveal my secret. Back then, I was in the bathroom... pushing out a really difficult poop, I was breaking out in a cold sweat. And when I pushed harder—WHOOSH!—the world spun, and when I opened my eyes, I was already in a filthy house with a drunk father and a mother who... well, you know what her job is."
Xavier stayed silent, his holographic glasses scanning the human in front of him intensely.
[Analysis: Lie level 0%. Embarrassment level 100%.]
Luca was stunned, his face completely blank. "Huh? You ended up here because... you couldn't poop?"
"Yes! You think it's fun to be me?!" Hasna continued yapping, her fake tears starting to flow.
'fufu, being a little embarrassing doesn't matter, as long as I survive this world,' she thought with a smile that went unnoticed by anyone.
Flashback on...
In a messy room, the author of the novel Saving My Little Monster was busy lounging on a messy bed with papers everywhere.
Her data plan was out, and her phone was so slow that even scrolling TikTok was lagging. She was having a massive headache trying to think of the plot for Season 2 of her novel, which had been on hiatus for days.
"Duh, what should I do to get more viewers? Should I just kill off Luca so they get sad?" she muttered, acting serious when in reality she was scrolling through a historical manhwa on the other tab.
"Uncle! Can I have a hotspot? Saving My Little Monster needs an update!" Hasna shouted out of her room.
"Always writing! Find a job!" her uncle shouted back harshly. But finally, the hotspot notification popped up.
The human with messy hair immediately smiled broadly—not to write, but to continue reading her favorite historical manhwa while imagining herself as the female lead living a good life. In the middle of her enjoying it, suddenly an odd pop-up appeared on her phone screen:
"A novel won't feel real if the Author doesn't know what it's like to be a character and experience it themselves."
The young woman just snorted when she read the message and kept on reading the manhwa.
"What is this? Probably some virus pop-up," she muttered nonchalantly. She kept reading until she fell asleep.
And the moment she opened her eyes, it wasn't her soft bed she felt, but a dusty wooden floor. Feeling strange, she rushed to wake up and opened the bedroom door.
Instead of seeing a way out, she found a scene from hell greeting her—a man reeking of alcohol shouting, and a woman busy serving clients in the living room flirtatiously.
"DAMN! THIS ISN'T MY ROOM!" Hasna shouted back then.
"You're noisy, you're annoying," the woman said dismissively.
"Oh my god, what is this? Your kid is already awake," the man next to the woman said, panicking.
"Let her be, she already understands. Just go back into your room, shoo shoo."
'Seriously, I'm being kicked out like a chicken?' she thought, frustrated. She immediately went back into the room.
Flashback end
Hasna was still gasping for air after telling that "pitiful story."
She looked at the trio with a pleading gaze.
"So... please, I'm just an NPC who's paying for her karma. Don't kill me, I just want to go back to my room, ask for a hotspot, and sleep!"
Luca, Raffayel, and Xavier looked at each other. Xavier, who was usually salty, was now dead silent, while Raffayel... he was holding back a laugh that made his dark aura look... weird.
"So..." Luca spoke up while holding back his laugh.
"You came here because... your poop wouldn't come out?"
Hasna felt like she wanted to disappear from the earth right at that moment. It turned out her excuse really was that embarrassing.
"Yes, happy now?!"
CRASH!
Raffayel finally laughed out loud.
"This teacher is such a burden," he muttered, but he started lowering his hands that were previously ready to attack.