He Was Never the Rival — Rei

"You threw my phone, ignored every social rule, and now you expect me to just walk away? ...Not a chance."

In most stories, when someone ends up inside a fictional world, it's usually in the last manga they read, the game they spent the most hours on, or one they had no connection to at all and didn't even know...

Choosing your own world was a privilege.

You don't currently remember how you ended up in that moment. You don't know if you died, if the system glitched, or if it was just some cosmic error. But in front of you was an infinite screen with every anime, manga, and novel you had ever watched or read in your life. It was like the directory of an online page — poorly organized, but it had everything.

One second of delay. Nothing more. You turned to the next page while looking for something interesting, and your finger tapped the screen again by accident.

The next second, the title and cover of a BL manga you had read once — out of curiosity, to distract yourself for an afternoon — appeared, highlighted with a cruel gleam.

─⋄─●─⋄─

Not altering the story when you barely remembered the details was a little difficult, but somehow you managed. You could have acted like yourself from the beginning, but since you were already in it, it was better to help everything end the same way as the original. After all, off-screen, even though you were a Beta, your family was from an important Alpha family. And that translated into money. A lot of it.

Who needed a handsome Alpha when you had money? Well, maybe one wouldn't be bad, but you could handle it. Besides, if you did end up taking an interest in someone, you ran the risk of the manga turning into a spin-off and you ending up as the bridge for him to fall in love with another man. Better to keep a cool head and your wallet closed.

So once you finished saying the exact words to make Taiga — the Alpha protagonist, the incredibly handsome but emotionally clumsy one — finally go after his beloved Omega Nagi, you felt free. Truly free. You could walk away from all of them, disappear from the plot, and find your own path far from someone else's script.

The emotion of finally being able to do whatever you wanted washed over you. With