Charisma 100: My Academy Life As A Heartbreaking Commoner Chapter 265: Canvas

[I fucked up.]

That was the first thought. Standing in a hospital hallway, staring at a dying girl through a window, and the only thing Aegis could think was that she’d miscalculated somewhere and now her life was flashing before her eyes like a cheap movie.

The hallway shifted.

She was in a hospital room. Not looking through a window anymore, but inside, sitting in the chair next to the bed. Emily’s phone was on the side table, screen dark. No notifications. No missed calls. No texts. Her birthday had been three days ago and the only person who’d acknowledged it was the night nurse who’d drawn a smiley face on her meal tray.

[Right. This part.]

The scene moved. Emily flirting with Nurse Jessie during a blood draw, making the woman laugh so hard she almost missed the vein. Emily staying up until three in the morning grinding Queen of Hearts, trying to unlock the secret ending she’d never managed to hit. Emily staring at the ceiling at four AM, thinking about all the things she’d never get to do, all the places she’d never see, all the people she’d never meet.

A lonely girl in a hospital bed, dying by inches.

Then the scene swapped.

Aegis, Day One, bullshitting her way through the Assessment Exams with game knowledge and a smile so bright it could blind a bitch. The look on Valdris’s face when Aegis scored a perfect hundred. The moment Talia realized she’d been beaten by a commoner and her eye twitched so hard Aegis thought she was having a stroke.

The scene changed again. Aegis and Talia rehearsing for the play, running lines in the music room, Talia’s cheeks going red every time she had to say something even remotely romantic. Aegis feeding her the line wrong on purpose just to watch her get flustered. Talia throwing the script at her head.

Another change. The Masquerade. Serilla’s dress on the floor. Serilla’s back against the wall. Aegis’s hands on her hips, fucking her so hard the painting above the bed rattled, Serilla’s legs wrapped around her waist, both of them grinning like idiots between moans because they were both too competitive to let the other one finish first.

[Those are good memories. Really good memories... Please don’t let this be the end of them.]

The hospital disappeared. The memories faded. Everything went black.

Not dark. Black. A void, depthless and silent, stretching in every direction with nothing to orient by. No floor, no ceiling, no walls, but Aegis was standing on something solid, so there was that.

And in the middle of it, sitting on a stool that had no business existing in a metaphysical void, Lune Solana was painting on a canvas.

Her long black hair hung loose around her shoulders. Her pink eyes were focused on the canvas in front of her, her brush moving in small, careful strokes. She didn’t look up when Aegis approached. She just kept painting.

Aegis stood there for a second, watching her, and then something in her chest cracked open. She walked forward, wrapped both arms around Lune from behind, and held on tight.

Lune’s brush paused.

"What are you doing?" Lune asked.

"Recharging my battery," Aegis murmured against her shoulder.

"... That’s not a real thing."

"It is now. Shut up and let me hug you."

Lune didn’t hug her back, because Lune rarely hugged back, but she didn’t pull away either. She just sat there, tolerating it, her pink eyes blinking once or twice.

After a long moment, Aegis let go, stepped back, and ran both hands through her hair.

"FUCK!" Aegis shouted into the void. "I was so sure that was gonna work!"

"You’re very loud."

"I absorbed the whole thing! Every last drop! The cycling was perfect, Rosanna’s technique worked, the pathways held, and then I just, what, died anyway!? That’s bullshit! That’s complete and total—"

"Are you done?"

"No! I had a plan! A really good plan! I practiced every single day for three weeks and my MP hit eleven hundred and I did everything right and—"

"Aegis."

"WHAT?"

Lune looked at her. Just looked, with those flat pink eyes, and Aegis deflated like a balloon with a hole in it.

"Am I dead?" Aegis asked.

Lune turned back to her canvas and resumed painting.

"Have you ever tried to paint before?"

"... What?"

"Painting. Have you ever tried it?"

Aegis sighed.

"Yeah, once or twice."

Lune gestured to the canvas.

"Show me."

"Show you what?"

"Anything."

Aegis stared at her, then at the canvas, then back at her. She picked up a brush from somewhere, she wasn’t sure where it came from, and stepped up to the canvas.

She painted stick figures. A tall one with big hair that was supposed to be her. A shorter one with a crown that was supposed to be Talia. A muscular one with red scribbles for hair. A pink-haired one with exaggerated tits.

Then, because she was Aegis and she couldn’t help herself, she drew two stick figures off to the side, one bent over, the other behind it, with little motion lines.

Lune stared at the canvas for a long, silent moment.

"Even now," Lune said, "your mind is in the gutter."

"I’m consistent. It’s a virtue."

"It is not a virtue."

"Agree to disagree."

Lune set her own brush down and looked at Aegis.

Her pink eyes, usually so flat and unreadable, held something warmer now. Something she’d learned to express over the past year, piece by piece, through watching Aegis live and fight and love with reckless abandon.

"Hasn’t all of this been painting, though?" Lune said. "In a way?"

Aegis frowned.

"What do you mean?"

"Since you arrived in this world, you’ve been creating something. Not on a canvas. But you’ve been building a life, stroke by stroke. The friendships, the romances, the alliances, all of it. A life where you’d never be lonely again."

The words hit Aegis square in the chest.

She thought about Emily’s phone with no notifications. About the hospital ceiling at four AM. About a dying girl who’d poured four hundred hours into a game about building relationships because she didn’t have any real ones.

And then she thought about Talia, and Liora, and Scarlett, and Kanna, and Nazraya, and the twins, and Serilla, and Selene, and Rosanna, and Sophie, and Lune herself, and every single person who’d become part of her life because she’d chosen, deliberately and with every ounce of her hundred Charisma, to never be alone again.

"... Yeah," Aegis said quietly. "I guess it has been."

She hugged Lune again. Tighter this time.

"Thank you," Aegis whispered. "For giving me the chance."

Lune was still for a moment. Then, gently, she placed her hands on Aegis’s shoulders and pushed her back.

"You’re not done painting yet."

"What?"

---

The void shattered.

Light. Sound. Cold marble under her knees.

Aegis gasped, her eyes snapping open, and the world rushed back in.

Sylceris was standing five feet in front of her, staring, her dark eyes wide, her mouth open. Behind her, Selene had her sword drawn and raised, frozen mid-step, her face a mask of confusion. The inquisitors flanking her had stopped moving entirely.

Aegis looked down at herself.

Her skin was covered in black-green energy, crackling faintly across her arms, her hands, her chest, pulsing in slow waves like a second heartbeat. The marble beneath her knees was scorched in a perfect circle, hairline fractures radiating outward like a spiderweb. The air around her hummed with dense, raw power.

She was alive.

She looked up. Looked around. Looked at the scorched floor, the cracked marble, the horrified faces staring back at her.

[... Okay then.]

A notification appeared in her HUD, large and bright, pulsing at the center of her vision.

Choose Your Ending