Chapter Text
Boasting beautiful graphics, intriguing storylines, and more importantly—extremely hot love interests, Heart4Heart quickly became the most popular dating sim on the market.
It tells the story of a commoner girl who is blessed with powerful healing magic and is lucky enough to be accepted into the Magic Academy. There she meets Till, the son of a Baron and the epitome of the childhood friend trope, Ivan, the Duke of the North who hides a soft heart underneath his cold exterior, Luka the Crown Prince whose playboy demeanor covers a much darker soul, and many other love interests. All in all, Heart4Heart was an amalgamation of horribly overused tropes and recycled dialogue, but in a way that made it incredibly endearing to its audience.
Till is not part of this audience.
He doesn’t know what prompts him to grab a copy of the game on his way home, but the terrible loading music and the pink heart-filled screen already have him regretting it. Internally he mourns the twenty dollars he spent.
Still, he presses start and hopes it’s not as bad as it seems.
Eight hours later, Till is ready to take everything bad he said about this game back. It’s a goddamn masterpiece.
Underneath the glitter and shine, there are several intricate murder plots and surprisingly insightful social commentary. He wishes there were less intricate murder plots though because he’s getting rather tired of getting stabbed at every turn. Or poisoned. Or drowned. Or strangled by a random ferret. The writers were clearly on the good stuff; these deaths were getting creative.
On a whim, he had picked Ivan as his target since romancing a character who shared his name felt a little creepy and Luka as a guy was even more creepy. He plays as the commoner girl named Mizi, who’s clumsy, bubbly, and a little naive, but as a series of murders overtake the academy, she grows into Till’s favorite character.
It starts with Sua, Mizi’s first friend at the academy and in Till’s opinion, barely concealed lesbian crush. Mizi thinks Sua is beautiful, Sua thinks Mizi is adorable, and something something, honestly Till was not paying attention to all this, slice-of-life was never his genre.
It's all fine and dandy until an abrupt turn when Sua is found dead in the ballroom, dangling from the chandelier like an angel without her wings. That’s the part that really clues Till into the fact that this isn’t a normal romance game.
Yes, the player must complete one of the love interest’s routes to win, but with each subsequent murder, the list of available love interests only grows shorter. Every time the attraction bar had raised above 50%, the character had ended up dead and Till was ready to tear out his hair in frustration.
After dying once again—though to be accurate Sua, Till the character, and Ivan had died before Mizi had followed—he faces the Game Over screen. Then, it blinks bright, neon pink, replaced with something new.
In his bleary state of half-awakeness, Till searches for the new game button.
He faces a cheerful [You Are Out Of Lives. Please Wait To Play Again! ] instead, complete with its own mini soundtrack and sparkling hearts. Till blinks, he hadn’t known the game had limited tries. He gets it though, they have to make money somehow.
He looks at the time at the corner of his screen, sees the lovely 4:13 am, and resolves to continue it tomorrow. Fuck, he has an 8 am in the morning. He really should have stopped playing earlier. He hasn’t gotten any closer to finishing a route or figuring out the killer.
In his exhaustion, he forgets to turn off the game. The pink screen glows brighter.
…
[You Are Out Of Lives. Please Wait To Play Again!]
…
[Please Wait While Game Updates!]
…
[New Game Starting!]
…
The lights are so bright.
Till groans, rubbing his eyes as he wonders if he left the lamp on. Fuck. The electricity bill is going to be high as hell.
He props himself up against soft pillows. Pillows that he does not own. Till’s eyes burst open.
What the fuck.
He looks around at what appears to be a college dorm on steroids. A college dorm if the college was rich as fuck and Barbie was the head designer. A dorm that also looks suspiciously familiar. He squints.
Then it hits—it looks like the dorm rooms from Heart4Heart.
He starts laughing because actually, what the fuck.
“Are you alright?” A voice asks from his left. Oh yeah, these are shared dorms. He forgot about that part.
Till whips around, coming face to face with quite possibly the most attractive man he has ever met. Okay look he might have said he only went for Ivan’s route because the man was the least creepy of the bunch, but honestly, Ivan being, to put it simply, hot as hell, definitely helped.
Till is forced to avert his eyes, this is too much for what he presumes was three hours of sleep. Maybe he’s finally lost it.
He hopes he hasn’t died, spending his afterlife in the dating sim he played right before the end seems vaguely pathetic, even for him. Damn it he has an 8am to get to though, maybe death is preferable over that.
He has to take a moment to collect himself. What does one do when they are either hallucinating from a lack of sleep or arguably worse, randomly dropped into a dating sim where everyone dies? Hypothetical question. For a hypothetical situation that is looking a lot less hypothetical by the minute.
Ivan continues to stare at him with his unfairly sculpted face and dark piercing eyes. Look, Till is mid-breakdown right now he does not need this judgment. Belatedly, he remembers Ivan had asked him a question.
“Yeah, I’m alright man. Perfectly cool. Never been better, “ Till says in a way that makes it clear he is not alright nor perfectly cool and has definitely been better.
Ivan—bless his heart Till knew there was a reason he chose his route—doesn’t question it.