Riches and Bitches: I have a gate to an isekai and leveling-up system!

"Cassie, please, wait!"

The voice was unnervingly familiar. And Cassie knew it much better than she wished she did.

'Irene…'n/ô/vel/b//jn dot c//om

Gritting her teeth, Cassie shook her shoulder, forcing Irene's hand off right as she hurried her steps.

"Cassie, please, wait!" Irene called out again, speeding up just enough to move her hand to Cassie's shoulder again…

Only to have Cassie repeat her actions from before, shrugging Irene's hand off and speeding up.

"Leave me alone," Cassie barked, refusing to even look back at her former friend.

"Stop it!" Irene cried out. She then reached out again and grabbed Cassie's shoulder for the third time.

This time, however, she collapsed her fingers over Cassie's flesh and held on tight enough to prevent the girl from shrugging her off. And then, as if not satisfied with just holding Cassie in place, Irene tugged on her former friend's arm, forcing her to turn around and face her.

"Aren't you a little unfair?!" Irene cried out with her face twisted in a complex mixture of all sorts of negative emotions. "How was I to know…"

"You are right, there's nothing fair about what I'm doing right now," Cassie admitted, refusing to let her former friend hold her down in place when she pressed her lips together and pulled her shoulder off to the side, jerking it free of Irene's hand. "But life isn't fair. And whether or not you are as innocent as you claim, I no longer have any desire to associate myself with you."

There was no hesitation in Cassie's voice nor there was any doubt in her cold eyes.

"But…!"

Now that she couldn't hold Cassie without escalating the encounter into an altercation, Irene threw both of her arms down along her waist, squeezing her hands down into fists in a fit of powerless anger.

"Maybe you really only had my best regards in mind when you coaxed me to go to that party. Maybe you thought Peter wasn't the one for me and saw it as an opportunity to split us apart. Maybe you really only ever had the best of wishes for me, maybe you really thought Peter needed our help just recently…"

Cassie's voice grew more and more tense as she spoke, as if her emotions were gaining more and more momentum with every bit of them she unloaded upon her former friend.

"But whether you wanted to help or harm me, doesn't matter. I care not if this was all but a sequence of extremely unfortunate coincidences that led us to where we are now."

Not even once, Cassie denied Irene's claims of innocence.

After their earlier argument that exploded after the failed attempt at rescuing Peter from the people that didn't hold him captivate at all, Cassie knew all that Irene might want to say or claim.

And she knew better than to try to deny her or to even join any sort of conversation led by her former friend.

"Regardless, whether you really are as innocent as you claim or not, there's one thing that neither you nor I can deny," Cassie continued with her offense, even starting to slowly move towards Irene as if to better pass on the strength of her resolve that she fully infused into her voice.

"When I'm with you or around you, regardless of your true intentions, I somehow always end up taking the easier but ultimately wrong paths. Maybe your presence weakens my resolve to do things properly? Maybe your words and actions influence my own decisions? Or maybe you are just a convenient straw man for me to put all the blame for what happened on?"

Cassie shook her head before staring right into Irene's deep, dark eyes in silence.

"I don't care what's the real reason. But with you around, I keep fucking my own life over and over again. And now that I've finally managed to pull myself by the bootstraps, I no longer have any wish to allow you to do as you did before."

Irene's face darkened.

"So it's all my fault after all, isn't it?" she asked with an irony-soaked voice. And with Cassie holding nothing back, even Irene started to slowly show signs of getting tired of the cold treatment.

'What an ugly grimace,' Cassie thought as she noticed Irene slightly baring her teeth as the anger started to erode her calm.

"I don't care if it's your fault or just me projecting my own shortcomings on you. Maybe, in the end, it was all on me and you just happened to be in the wrong places at the wrong times giving ill-fated yet good-willed bits of advice?"

Cassie shook her head and retreated a single step before putting on a small, strangely relieved smile.

"Whatever is the truth, I don't care. But with you nowhere around, I've finally started to put my life back on track. And even if you are fully innocent, finding out whether it's true or not comes at a cost I'm no longer willing to bear."

With that said, Cassie rolled her eyes and turned around on her heel, ready to leave.

'Good, now, as long as I can leave before she can stop me again…'

Cassie honestly didn't care whether Irene was the real reason for how her life went to shit or if she just was unlucky enough to always be by her side when she would make the decisions that only pushed her life down the drain.

Whether it was all planned or just a sheer coincidence, there was no denying the bad influence Irene had over Cassie's life. And now that she finally took the plunge and decided to work hard to slowly fix the shithole she found herself in, keeping Irene around was the last thing Cassie wanted.

"Isn't this hella fucking convenient?!"

Refusing to acknowledge her former friend's decision to distance herself, Irene started to struggle to keep her emotions in check. And seeing how Cassie started to leave, she hurriedly rushed up and grabbed her shoulder for the fourth time.

"Let go!" Cassie instantly demanded, refusing to let Irene affect her life any further.

Yet, right as the two were about to start throwing hands and right as the onlookers started to give them weirded-out looks while some even started to approach them to break the fight before it would really happen…

Cassie suddenly froze, when a distant echo of a familiar scent reached her nose.

"You," following the scent, now it was a familiar voice that nearly instantly plunged Cassie into a state of emotional limbo where she couldn't even figure out whether she should be freaking out, scared, anxious, or impatient.

'It's him…'

Freezing all over, Cassie gulped her saliva down when she turned her head and noticed a strangely unfamiliar figure.

Over the mere last few weeks, Peter has changed.

'Is it because he broke up with me?' a hopeful thought struck Cassie's mind… She couldn't find any other reason for how her ex could bulk up and refine his body so much in just a few, short weeks.

"You," Peter spoke out with an empty and strangely… tense look in his eyes.

Seeing her former boyfriend's uneasy expression, Cassie took a shallow breath, not sure what to think.

'Could it be…' a spark of hope lit up in her soul as she weighed the potential reasons for Peter's nervous state.

"We need to talk," he said…

Only for Cassie to realize he wasn't looking at her when he said those words.

He wasn't looking at her…

But at Irene instead.