Chapter 46: God Is A Capybara

The world ended in a wave of purple silence.

One moment, I was lunging for Lilith. The next, a blast of pure energy washed over the grand hall. The music died. The laughter froze. Every student was a statue, caught mid-motion. The spinning lights overhead sputtered and went dark. All sound, all life, was sucked into a vacuum.

This was it. The reset.

My blood ran cold. A familiar, gut-wrenching dread seized me, so powerful it buckled my knees. I knew this feeling better than my own name. It was the icy prelude to my own personal hell. My life’s work, my desperate, pathetic attempt to escape this narrative cage, was gone.

Flashes of past failures assaulted me. The sting of Elizabeth’s blade slicing through my chest in a sun-drenched courtyard. The suffocating burn of Lilith’s poison turning my lungs to acid in a dark laboratory. The dozens of other deaths, each one unique in its execution but identical in its crushing finality. All of it was for nothing.

Eksu, my shield, my one-in-a-million chance, was a failed experiment. Sophia, with her gentle smile and the promise of a normal, quiet life, would be erased. She wouldn’t remember me. We would be strangers again, and I would be too terrified to approach her, knowing how it would all inevitably end.

It was all gone. Back to square one. Back to the beginning.

A transparent blue window materialized in my vision.

My heart sank.

I squeezed my eyes shut, bracing for the sickening lurch of time rewinding.

But then, something went wrong.

The system message flickered. It glitched, letters dissolving into static before reforming.

The world didn’t rewind. It dissolved. The frozen party, the grand hall, the very floor beneath my feet disintegrated into nothing. It all bled away into a piercing, absolute whiteness. There was no floor. No ceiling. No horizon. Just an endless, sterile void that hummed with a low, mystical energy.

This was not part of the reset. This was new.

A form began to coalesce in the nothingness before me. It shimmered into existence, painted into the void by an unseen hand. I tensed, every survival instinct screaming. I had no weapon. No power. I was utterly exposed.

A single question formed in my mind.

“Who are you?”

The figure sharpened into focus.

It was a capybara.

I blinked. It was just a capybara, about four feet tall, sitting on its haunches in the middle of infinite white space. It had coarse brown fur, sleepy-looking eyes, and a profoundly unbothered expression on its face. It just sat there, emanating an aura of absolute, unshakable chill.

My brain tried to process the scene. Had I died for good this time? Was this the final penalty? Was my eternal soul to be judged by a giant, semi-aquatic rodent? After everything I had been through, it somehow felt disappointingly appropriate.

Damn. I was dead for good.

The capybara blinked slowly. A calm, masculine voice echoed in the void, seeming to come from everywhere at once.

“I’m Carrara. The writer. Nice to finally meet you.”

The words hung in the white space. The writer. My fear, my confusion, my despair—it all vanished in an instant. It was replaced by a surge of pure, white-hot rage that was so intense it made me shake. This… this creature was the reason. The source of my endless torment. The lazy god who had penned my suffering and then abandoned me in the first chapter.

My hands clenched into fists at my sides.

“You!”

The word was a strangled gasp.

“You’re the one who made my life hell. It was you!”

The capybara yawned, a slow, deliberate motion. It didn’t seem angry, or defensive, or even particularly interested. It was like yelling at a furry, four-foot-tall boulder.

“Calm down. I know you’re angry. Deservedly so.”

The voice was maddeningly reasonable.

“But I have a message. Before I send you back, I want you to know what’s going on.”

A sliver of my rage subsided, replaced by wary curiosity.

“Someone is interfering. An outside variable. They made Lilith’s emotions explode. That wasn’t supposed to happen. Not like that.”

The capybara shifted its weight.

“Get it over with.”

My mind reeled. What did that even mean? Get what over with? Stop the interference? Stop Lilith? How? He was giving me an impossible task with zero details.

“Wait! What do you mean, just fix it? Who is…”

The white void shattered like glass.

I was back in the grand hall. The music was thumping. The lights were spinning. I stumbled forward, catching myself on the edge of the food table. I looked up, my heart pounding.

Lilith stood by the punch bowl, looking sad and clutching her glass. Across the room, Eksu and Elizabeth were just beginning their clumsy dance. My father was nowhere in sight. The explosion hadn’t happened yet. I had time.

A lazy god just gave me a mission with no instructions.

Damn author. Useless, even in person.