Ansys walked into the Silver Lily wearing his waiter's uniform and approximately three hours less sleep than he would have preferred.
Marta looked up from behind the counter. "You're late."
"I woke up late," he said. "Sorry."
She studied him for exactly one second, decided the explanation was sufficient, and went back to her ledger without another word.
He took his place behind the counter and began wiping down the tables.
The Framework had told him last night that gifts were coming — compensation for the interference, delayed but on the way. He had no idea what that meant in practical terms or when exactly soon was supposed to arrive. For now there was nothing to do but work and wait and try not to think too hard about an unknown number of dangerously obsessive women scattered across a reality he was supposed to navigate without losing his mind.
Straightforward enough.
He was halfway through the second table when he noticed it.
The shift in the room. The way conversations slowed without stopping, the way eyes moved and then stayed. It was not dramatic. It never was. Just that quiet, collective pull — like a current changing direction — that happened every single time he stepped into a space and people registered that he was there.
Women mostly. Though not exclusively.
Enchanted was probably the right word for some of the expressions. Helpless was accurate for others.
Ansys kept wiping the table and did not make eye contact with any of them.
'These looks are going to be a serious problem,' he thought. 'An unknown number of heroines with obsessive personalities and a face that apparently short-circuits people's common sense. Wonderful combination.'
He moved to the next table and said nothing.
---
It had taken him about three days after arriving to understand why people reacted to him the way they did. He had caught his reflection in a shop window one evening on the way home — properly caught it, stopped and actually looked — and the picture had finally made sense.
Eighteen. Hair the color of dulled silver, pale and muted like ash stirred into faint moonlight, refusing to catch any shine regardless of what light fell on it. Features calm and precise, carrying an unsettling symmetry that made people look twice without understanding why they had done it.
Eyes a washed silver-grey — quiet, still, reflecting without engaging. Meeting his own gaze had felt oddly intrusive, like looking at something not quite meant to be observed too closely.
He did not look powerful. He did not look divine.
He looked inevitable.
Marta had looked at him for three seconds the morning he walked in and said you'll bring in customers with the flat certainty of someone who had already run the numbers. She had been right in ways that had exceeded even her expectations. Within two weeks she was turning people away at the door.
Ansys found it uncomfortable in a way that had never entirely gone away.
---
"Excuse me?"
He recognized her before she finished the words.
Serina. Eighteen, maybe nineteen, auburn hair pulled back in a practical braid, amber eyes carrying that open curiosity that never quite bothered hiding itself. Well-made traveling clothes, worn in and broken in the way that suggested old money with nothing left to prove.
Two weeks of the same routine — always alone, always the window seat, always gone within the hour. Polite, quiet, and a habit of watching him from the corner of her eye when she thought he was not paying attention.
Not unsettling. Just curious. Like he was a question she had not yet decided to ask out loud.
A minor heroine. Easy to miss. Tucked so far into the background that most players walked past her route without knowing it existed. Simple enough to unlock if you chose the right protagonist — which was exactly why most players never bothered.
Ansys had played her route once.
'And now she is standing in front of me in the real world,' he thought, 'and has apparently been watching me for two weeks.'
"Window seat?" he asked.
Her smile came up slightly wider than it needed to. "Please."
He led her over, set the menu down, and was already turning back to the counter.
"The usual?" he said without looking.
A short pause. Then — "You remember."
"Silverleaf tea, lightly steeped, no sugar. Same thing every time." A small shrug. "Harder to forget than you'd think."
"Most people here don't pay that kind of attention."
"Most people here aren't taking the orders."
Something shifted in her expression — warm, quiet, quickly contained. Like warmth was something she had learned to be careful with.
"Thank you —" She trailed off, leaving space.
He had never given anyone his name here. Had not seen the need. But refusing now would only read as strange.
"Ansys," he said.
"Ansys." She said it slowly, like she was deciding something about the weight of it. "I'm Serina."
He nodded once and went to prepare her order.
When he set the cup in front of her she wrapped both hands around it immediately — not like someone cold, but like someone steadying themselves. A small unconscious thing. The kind of habit that forms around a feeling a person has gotten used to carrying alone.
She was watching him again in that quiet sideways way. Amber eyes that caught more than they let go.
He nodded once and stepped back.
---
An expensive carriage rolled to a stop outside the window.
He noticed Serina's reaction before he noticed anything else. The way her eyes found it through the glass and something dangerous moved through them for just a second — a flash of color that did not belong on the face of a girl quietly drinking tea — before she pulled herself back into composure.
'Right,' Ansys thought. 'That's the heroine for you.'
The front door slammed open.
The café went silent.
A young man in silk robes trimmed with gold walked in with two guards at his back and the expression of someone who had decided before leaving the house that today was going to go badly for someone. His gaze swept the room, found Serina, and then found Ansys.
It stayed there.
'Vestin Greymore.' The name arrived without effort. 'Son of one of the most powerful dukes in the region. Her fiancé. The exact kind of obstacle that, in the original game, made Serina's route trivially easy to unlock — because all you had to do was treat her like a person and let him do the rest.'
'In the original timeline the prince one of the protagonist walks in and takes everything from him without breaking a sweat,' Ansys thought. 'Probably barely notices Vestin exists.'
"You," Vestin said.
"Can I help you?"
Vestin crossed the floor fast and grabbed him by the collar. The grip was harder than necessary, which seemed to be a consistent personality trait.
"Every single day she comes here. Every day she watches you instead of keeping our appointments." His breath carried wine consumed too early. "What did you do?"
Ansys opened his mouth.
And then something happened that he had not expected.
A wave of irritation moved through him — sharp and immediate, rising from somewhere in his chest before he had consciously registered it. Hot. Personal. The kind that made hands want to do something about whatever was causing it.
He blinked.
'Wait.'
He looked inward for a moment, genuinely confused.
'That is not mine.'
The emotion was real — he could feel it clearly — but it did not belong to him. It was coming from somewhere else. From the body itself. Like residue from a previous occupant, old feelings written into muscle and bone, rising to the surface when the situation pressed the right points.
'This body has its own emotional memory,' he realized. 'And apparently it really does not like being grabbed.'
Fascinating. Also inconvenient.
He was still processing that when Vestin's expression shifted from fury to something uglier, and he reached for the sword at his hip.
The blade cleared the scabbard.
The café erupted.
Chairs scraped. Someone knocked over a cup. Two women near the back stood up without seeming to realize they had done it.
But the reaction that caught Ansys's attention was not from any of them.
Serina was already on her feet.
Not scrambling. Not flinching. On her feet the way someone gets up when they have already made a decision and their body is simply carrying it out. Her hand had moved to her side — reaching for something that was not there, the instinct arriving faster than the reality — and her amber eyes had gone flat and bright at the same time, stripped of the warmth she usually kept carefully in place.
The girl who watched him from the corner of her eye over silverleaf tea was gone.
What was looking at Vestin now was something considerably different.
Time did not stop — not literally — but the next half second stretched in the particular way it does when the body understands something sharp is moving in its direction and would like the mind to please make a decision immediately.
And then, with genuinely extraordinary timing, a familiar screen materialized directly in front of his face.
[ Your gift has arrived. Would you like to open it? ]
Ansys stared at it.
The sword was mid-swing. Vestin's face was arranged in the expression of someone who had decided consequences were someone else's problem. The café was frozen in collective horror.
And the Framework had chosen this exact moment.