The Wind In The Willows

It's all just a game. Iyon ang itinatak ni Aleira Estrella sa isipan. She was born with a silver spoon on her mouth and everything was easy to get. Kung may isang bagay man na hindi niya kayang tibagin, it's her mother's words. She's the woman she respects the most and she wouldn't dare disobey her. Kaya nang sabihin nitong magpapakasal siya sa isang lalaking hindi kilala, she was willing to oblige. After all, the past relationships she had were nothing but games. For her, love is nothing but an extinct sentiment and marriage for convenience is practical. But then... how could someone so sure of her plans doubt her principles? Is it really worth it? To follow the plan and give up all of her? To abide her family and give up everything? To give up something she unconsciously learned to love?

My husband's childhood sweetheart kills my parents in an accident due to drunk driving. I want to call the police, but my husband blindfolds me and takes me to the cellar. I'm tormented and subjected to inhumane treatment for the next three years. After each torture session, an icy male voice will ring out in my ear. "Do you still hate her, Sabrina?" One day, I finally cave and submit to the icy voice. "No, I don't. I don't hate her anymore!" I hear my husband's joyous laughter on the other end of the line. On the day he welcomes me out of the cellar, I avoid his embrace. Yet he loses his mind when I ask him for a divorce.

"I want to forget everything! I want to forget you! Why the hell did you came back?!" I shouted at him while we were both crying under the rain.

It was the climactic moment of my game, but the enemy's flash bang blinded me. After I reopened my eyes, I found myself in the world of the post-apocalyptic underdog comeback story I'd ranted about to my friend the day before. No, I wasn't the protagonist with a cheat for a system. Instead, I was the cannon fodder who suffered the worst fate. He also had my name. I found myself locked outside the armored vehicle while a swarm of high-level zombies had surrounded me. 'Blast,' I thought. 'All this just because I flamed them? And I just made a pentakill after my 8-win streak!' I told myself to calm down and let my mind do its work, but then the laughter of this body's wife echoed from the walkie-talkie. "Stop covering for him, gunners! We're livestreaming to the whole camp. My husband's going to rip these Tier Six zombies to shreds!" Then, the woman's useless male best friend buzzed with excitement. "I'll have a permanent spot in the inner city if he distracts the horde and they rip him apart in the process, babe!" If this went the way of the original story, I'd beg for help only to get no answer and be ripped apart by the zombies. Fortunately, I wasn't the same coward this guy used to be. The woman kept egging me on. I sneered. I didn't spend years playing competitive games for nothing. And so, I grabbed a high-frequency concussion grenade that could get the attention of every single zombie in a 3-mile radius, smashed the ventilation valve of the armored vehicle, and hurled the grenade inside.

After receiving the beating of my life, even after playing it safe when making all life decisions, I never would’ve thought the scales could be so out of balance until, that is, the night I met my lost family and how powerful I could actually be married to the most dangerous and feared man alive.

When I defeated Natalie for the tenth time and claimed the Supermodel Champion title, her childhood sweetheart, Jared Johnson, proposed to me. With his devastatingly handsome face, he walked on stage and kneeled on one knee with a ring in hand. “Will you marry me?” I smiled and said yes. That very night, he became mine. Throughout seven years of marriage, I stepped away from the runway. Instead, I gained three beautiful children. They inherited my supermodel figure and their father’s stunning looks. Together, the four of us turned heads wherever we went. On my birthday, Jared handed me the registration form for the “Supermodel Showdown”. I knew he wanted me to live in Natalie’s shadow and be nothing more than her backdrop. However, I signed my name without hesitation. I already had the best of his genes, after all. Now, it was time to take back the crown that belonged to me.

Nora Ainsley didn’t sign up to play hero. As a rogue-born tracker for hire, she works solo, stays broke, and minds her business. But when a missing pendant leads her into the heart of a conspiracy tied to the murder of the Silver Ash Pack’s Luna, she gets dragged into something way bigger than she ever wanted. Now she’s a suspect, a target, and holding a magical artifact every side wants to kill for. Worse, the only person offering help is Roman Vale—a masked stranger who’s got his own twisted ties to the very pack that wants Nora dead. She didn’t ask for this war, but if she doesn’t fight back, she won’t survive it.

The entire ward could hear the thoughts of the beautiful intern nurse, Sonya Row. When a patient kept vomiting nonstop, and I suggested increasing the pain medication, she stood nearby, sighing. [What should I do? Should I tell the family this painkiller can be addictive and really bad for the body? If they just wait a few more minutes, he'll recover on his own. There's no need to spend money at all.] The room fell silent in an instant. Everyone's gaze shifted toward me, and the family quietly refused my treatment plan. After that, I became the joke of the entire department. Every patient specifically asked not to be assigned to me. Later, while comforting a terminal stomach cancer patient, I followed her family's wishes and lied, saying it was just gastritis. Sonya complained about it in her thoughts. [The patient's practically dying already, but she's still saying she can be cured. It's obviously just to trick this old woman into draining her life savings on treatment.] That night, the old lady jumped off the building so she wouldn't burden her family. Her family thought I had revealed the truth and driven her to her death. They reported me directly to the hospital director, and I was stripped of my position as department head. Then, on a holiday weekend, the hospital admitted a pregnant woman with a suspected amniotic fluid embolism. To save her life, I had no choice but to remove her uterus. At that moment, Sonya's thoughts rang out again. [She doesn't have an amniotic fluid embolism at all. She was on her phone during surgery, which caused this. Now look what happened. This baby's a girl. This family wanted a son, and now they'll never get one.] The family attacked me on the spot, recorded it, and posted the video online to harass me. The desperate husband, obsessed with having a son, stabbed me to death to vent his rage. When I opened my eyes again, I was back on the day Sonya first revealed her thoughts. This time, I could hear her thoughts, too.

Alexei McKenna, a man who's engaged and has experienced many things in life at a very young age. He's also known as a very cheerful person but no one knows how much he's hurting inside. His parents are divorced, from that moment on he wanted to live by himself without contacting anyone in his family. But when he met Lucien, he thought that he's the perfect guy until he cheated on him. The things that happened in his life had been his downfall, but then he met another man. Who he became his fiancee, his name is Atticus Montgomery. He's a very generous person and has a very lovely personality. Everyone would think of him as an angel, I am too. Through the years, everything is going smoothly until he meets the man who makes him weak in his knees. Tantalising eyes, that always burned desire for him and only him. Those hands that wanted to touch his body. And those lips that he wanted to taste. A man named Jace Dawson suddenly showed up in his life, a man whose dominant enough to make him kneel. A man who knows how to make him weak. Alex has found the man who knows exactly how to make him bend his knees and rules. A man whom he finally sees living with him in the future. But knowing he's engaged, what would happen to the desire he felt for the man who makes him weak? Will their love bloom? Or will their love for each other destroy one another?

A hacker has stolen the encryption keys and hacked through the data firewall at the bank my fiancee, Nancy Cost, and I work at. Chester Gardner, the intern Nancy has hired, insists on using a program he made to track down the hacker. But in doing so, the bank's clients lost 200 billion dollars' worth of assets. I do everything in my power to put the system on emergency maintenance so that I can retrieve the lost assets. Chester ends up getting punished by the bank. He also gets blacklisted by the entire industry. Nancy tries to plead for him, only to be stopped by me. "Pleading for Chester is equivalent to committing career suicide! You won't be able to stay in the finance industry if you do that!" Unable to withstand the torment any longer, Chester chooses to jump off the building. Before he dies, he sends Nancy an accusatory text for not defending him. But Nancy doesn't care about the text at all. Instead, she showers me with more care and love. We end up getting married. I do everything I can to elevate Nancy to the position of a finance powerhouse as her core technical support. But the day she attains her status is the day she frames me for hacking into the bank's system and stealing hundreds of millions' worth of assets. As a result, I get thrown behind bars and tortured till I die. When I open my eyes again, I've returned to the day Chester presents the self-made program to track down the lost assets. This time, I choose to sit by and watch. What they don't know is that the richest man in Cantfield, Felix Watch, is the one who has lost his assets. Those who made him lose money in the past are all rotting in hell now.