My Five Beast Wives Want Me Dead in the Apocalypse

"You killed me over a burger."

Kyle Cole stood in a white void that stretched endlessly in every direction, his voice bouncing off walls that did not exist. His chest still burned with the phantom sensation of a chunk of meat lodged in his throat, and his eyes were bloodshot from the memory of suffocating on a college cafeteria floor while thirty people watched and did nothing.

A flat, robotic tone filled the empty space around him.

[System Response: Death was caused by a calibration error in Host's choking reflex. The System acknowledges fault.]

"You acknowledge fault?" Kyle's voice cracked, high and sharp, somewhere between disbelief and pure fury. "I was twenty two years old. Twenty two. I had three finals left. I hadn't even kissed a girl yet, and you're telling me I died because your calibration was off by a decimal point?"

[System Response: Correct. A formal apology has been logged.]

"A formal apology." Kyle laughed, but it came out strangled and wrong, like something breaking inside a machine. "Great. Wonderful. Log that right next to my obituary. Kyle Cole, beloved son, died choking on a five dollar burger because the universe had a typo."

He paced in a tight circle, running both hands through his hair until it stood up in every direction. His reflection did not exist here. Nothing existed here. Just white and silence and a disembodied voice that apparently had the emotional range of a calculator.

[System Notification: As compensation, Host will be reincarnated into an alternate world. Preparing transfer.]

Kyle stopped pacing. His stomach dropped before his brain even caught up.

"Alternate world? What kind of alternate world?"

[System Response: Zombie apocalypse survival setting. Host will retain full consciousness and memories.]

"Zombie." Kyle stared straight ahead at nothing. "You want to send me, a guy who pulled a hamstring getting out of bed last Tuesday, into a zombie apocalypse."

[System Response: Confirmed.]

"Look at me!" He grabbed the front of his own shirt and yanked it, showing off a body that looked like it had been assembled from leftover parts. Narrow shoulders, arms like wet noodles, a chest that caved inward slightly when he breathed too hard. "I'm a hundred and thirty pounds soaking wet. I can't do a single pull up. My mile time is fourteen minutes, and that's with a downhill finish. You're sending me to get eaten alive."

[System Response: Host's physical concerns have been noted.]

"Noted? Noted?!" Kyle dropped to his knees and slammed both fists against the invisible floor. "I don't want them noted! I want them addressed! Give me a different body! Give me muscles! Give me a weapon! Give me literally anything that doesn't end with me being a zombie's afternoon snack!"

Silence stretched for a long, agonizing beat.

[System Response: Due to the severity of the calibration error, the System is authorized to offer additional compensation. Five S Class female bodyguards will be assigned to Host upon arrival.]

Kyle's mouth was still open, mid rant, when the words sank in. His fists slowly uncurled against the floor.

"Five?" His voice dropped to almost a whisper. "S Class?"

[System Response: Confirmed. Displaying bodyguard profiles now.]

Five high definition images materialized in the air in front of him, floating like glossy magazine covers in the white void.

The first showed a woman with dark green scales running along her collarbone and down both arms, her serpentine eyes glowing amber through a curtain of black hair. Blood streaked across her jaw. Battle scars marked every visible inch of skin, and she still looked like she could tear a man apart with her bare hands.

The second was a girl with snow white hair that fell past her waist, two soft, pointed cat ears poking through the top. Her eyes were a pale, frozen blue, and her expression carried the kind of cold beauty that made your chest tighten even through a screen.

The third was lean and athletic, black hair cropped short, standing in a fighting stance with both fists raised. Her body was built like a weapon, all sharp angles and coiled power, with a predator's stillness in her dark eyes.

The fourth was softer. Rounder. A gentle faced girl dusted with flour, holding a tray of bread with both hands, her brown curls tucked behind one ear. She was smiling, but the smile did not reach her eyes. Something fragile lived behind that warmth.

The fifth burned. Red hair like a wildfire, golden eyes narrowed with open challenge, her chin lifted and her whole posture daring someone, anyone, to try her.

Kyle Cole stared at those five images until his eyes dried out.

"I'm typing one," he breathed. "Where do I type one? Give me a keyboard. Give me a screen. Give me a rock and a wall, I'll carve it in."

[System Response: Verbal confirmation accepted. Initiating transfer in 3... 2... 1...]

The white void shattered.

Cold hit him first. Then noise. Then the smell, a rotting, wet stench that punched straight through his sinuses and into the back of his throat. Kyle's feet hit broken asphalt, and the world around him was fire and ruin. Overturned cars, crumbled buildings, smoke pouring from every direction, and the groaning, shuffling sound of things that used to be people closing in from all sides.

Zombies. Dozens of them. Forming a loose circle around him with that awful, jerking gait, their dead eyes locked on fresh meat.

Kyle opened his mouth to scream.

A hand grabbed the back of his collar and yanked him so hard his feet left the ground. The world blurred. Wind roared past his ears. When his vision cleared, he was twenty feet away from the horde, dropped on the ground like a sack of garbage. A girl stood over him, white hair catching the ashen light, cat ears flattened back against her skull.

Riley Fox.

She looked down at him the way someone looks at something stuck to the bottom of their shoe. Her pale blue eyes held nothing warm. Nothing soft. Nothing even close to the beauty he had admired in that floating screenshot. Just open, burning disgust.

"You actually came outside the safe zone." Her voice was low and sharp, each word bitten off clean. "What was the plan? Walk into a horde and let them finish what your stupidity started?"

Kyle gasped for air, flat on his back, staring up at her. "I... what?"

"If you want to die so badly, just sign the divorce papers first." Riley's lip curled. "At least let us live."

Divorce.

That single word landed like a hammer to the center of his skull, and everything that came after was agony. Memories that did not belong to him flooded in like a dam breaking open, thousands of images, sounds, voices, all pouring into his brain at once. Kyle grabbed his head with both hands and screamed as his knees buckled and he crashed face first into the dirt.

He saw everything.

This was not just an apocalypse. This was a novel. A romance novel set inside a zombie apocalypse, and he had been dropped into the body of the most hated man in the entire story. The original Kyle Cole. The vicious, jealous, pathetic supporting male lead whose entire purpose in the plot was to be cruel and then to be destroyed.

In this world, men were rare. Protected by law. Every surviving male was matched through a government terminal with multiple beast wives, women who carried the blood of ancient creatures. The original Kyle had been matched with five. An injured black serpent. A beauty obsessed cat. A black panther. A timid sheep. And a small red bird.

But his neighbor, the novel's golden hearted male protagonist, had been matched with a dragon, a tiger, a snow leopard, a wolf, and a peacock. Every single one of them stronger, rarer, more powerful than Kyle's wives.

And the original Kyle had lost his mind over it. He screamed at his wives for being weak. He beat them for being inferior. He told them every single day that they were worthless, that they were garbage, that a real man would have been matched with something better than a broken snake and a scared little sheep.

The memories kept coming. The slaps. The thrown plates. The nights he locked them outside in zombie territory just to punish them for existing.

And then the final, worst memory of all. The law. Written in black ink across every government terminal in the settlement.

A wife cannot divorce without her husband's written consent. And if the husband dies, every wife registered under his name will be buried alive beside him.

Kyle lay in the dirt with someone else's sins burned into his skull, and one thought cut through everything else with sickening clarity.

Surviving the zombies was going to be the easy part.