“Wait… He dies?!”

She stood center stage, spotlight cutting a clean circle around her like a cage of gold. Her fists clenched the script tighter than needed—not from anger, but from disbelief. The sleeves of her dress were already fighting a losing battle, her arms so dense and overgrown with veiny mass they strained the fabric with every twitch.

She stared at the page.

Once.

Twice.

Her jaw slackened. Her lower lip quivered.

“…W-Wait…” she stammered, her eyes tracing the sentence again. A single tear rolled slowly down her cheek, catching the light as it trailed toward the corner of her mouth. She sniffled. “He… He dies?”

Her voice cracked, delicate in pitch but loaded with a punch of emotion.

From the front row, someone offered gently, “Well… yeah. That’s Romeo and Juliet.”

But she wasn’t hearing them.

Her massive arms, knotted with tension, started to tremble—not from fatigue, but from the raw, sudden sadness swelling inside her. Her fingers twitched, and thick triceps coiled like a rope pulled too tight as she pressed the crumpled script to her chest.

Another tear followed. Then another.

“Oh my gosh… Why would he do that?” she whispered, choking on the words. She was genuinely heartbroken. Like she’d just realized she wasn’t going to get a happy ending.

Her forearms—bulging like sculpted tree trunks—tensed again as she wiped her face, making no attempt to hide the tears. Her shoulders rose with a shaky breath, but even that motion sent veins rippling down her biceps like lightning over granite.

“I-I practiced the balcony scene so hard…” she sniffled. “I thought we were gonna kiss in the end!”

She looked back at the script, then toward the unseen “Romeo” offstage.

“…I don’t wanna do the dagger part. I just wanna… hug him really tight and tell him not to drink it…”

Someone coughed awkwardly in the front row. “You’d probably… crush his ribs.”

“…Good,” she muttered, sniffing again. “He deserves it for leaving me like this.”

And with her arms still swollen with frustration and heartbreak, she turned away, script trembling in her hands—and tears still streaming down cheeks flushed with emotion.