Stepping out of Salon Bu Tati carrying a reinforced concrete helmet for a head and a face cased in the abstract surrealism of high art, Mira marched back to her boarding house with a sluggish, weary gait. The next phase of Operation Ex-BF Wedding Revenge (O.E.W.R.) officially commenced: donning high heels.

On the dingy white-tiled floor of her three-by-three-meter room rested a pair of nude stilettos boasting a heel height of roughly twelve centimeters. These shoes were stolen loot borrowed from her cousin—an automotive exhibition cigarette SPG whose hobbies apparently included torturing herself with footwear shaped like sharpened earth-anchors.

Mira lowered herself into a slow squat—a tense, high-stakes acrobatic maneuver because her heavy concrete coiffure nearly threw off her center of gravity and sent her face-first into the floor. Holding her breath, she crammed her feet, clad in thin cotton socks, into the narrow toe boxes.

Creak... the joints in Mira’s feet groaned in sharp protest.

"Ugh! Is this shoe actually footwear, or a torture device straight out of the Spanish Inquisition?" Mira grumbled, wincing in agony. Her toes inside the shoe were crammed together tightly, stacking up against one another in an unyielding union protest against physical oppression.

Yet, driven by a mission to uphold national dignity and strut like an international runway model, Mira clenched her jaw shut. She rose slowly while clutching the edge of a peeling wardrobe for dear life.

Inside her head, Mira mentally queued up a looping instrumental track of a Paris haute couture fashion show. Thump... tap... thump... tap...

"All right, Mira. Deep breath, tighten the core, hold the head high—just don't lean back too far or your neck will snap clean off under the weight of your steel-helmet updo," Mira coached herself in front of the cracked wardrobe mirror.

She decided to run a trial simulation walking down an imaginary catwalk stretching from the edge of her foam mattress all the way to the room's door. The first step initiated with a fake, effortless grace. Her left heel tapped lightly against the ceramic tile. Click.

"Well, not bad. Still under control," Mira muttered.

Step two: her right foot glided forward gracefully. Click.

"Good, maintain that Victoria's Secret angel posture... stay focused, don't wobble..."

Convinced she had fully mastered the laws of gravitational physics championed by professional models, Mira stepped up her tempo to something a bit more flirty, swaying her hips dramatically from left to right. She rested a hand on her hip, sporting a stiff Pepsodent grin beneath her crimson-painted lips.

Suddenly, a minor disaster struck right over the uneven tiles near a pile of laundry wash-buckets.

One of the floor tiles in the boarding room happened to sit at a slight angle—a legacy left behind by an amateur handyman three years prior. Without warning, the razor-sharp tip of Mira’s right stiletto heel slammed directly into an uneven grout line at a forty-five-degree angle.

Crack!

Time seemingly stretched out for a fraction of a second. Mira felt a bizarre sensation beneath the sole of her right foot, as if a breaking object had just transmitted a violent shockwave straight up to her tailbone.

"Uh... um... why does it feel like I'm leaning to one side?" Mira gasped in panic.

Her international model hip-sway instantly mutated into an emergency breakdance routine. Her arms flailed through the air like a possessed ballerina desperately hunting for a patch of wall to grab. But it was far too late. Newton’s law of gravity executed its duties with ruthless, unbridled cruelty.

Thud-crash!

Mira hit the floor in an utterly unglamorous slump directly on top of a damp, squishy welcome mat. The hollow thud of her body colliding with the tile floor sent a calico cat outside her window scrambling into the distance in absolute terror.

"Ouch! My royal queenly backside just shattered into a million pieces!" Mira wailed, rubbing her lower back with a face twisted in acute pain.

Carefully, Mira hooked her right foot toward her to inspect the condition of the primary culprit. Sure enough, the twelve-centimeter right heel had completely snapped off its shaft, leaving behind a jagged, exposed iron spike protruding aggressively from the sole.

Mira stared blankly at the detached heel, then glanced up at her left shoe, which was still standing tall with arrogant verticality.

"This is genuinely insane," Mira hissed with top-tier frustration. "I haven't even taken a single step outside my room yet, and destiny is already telling me to turn around, go back inside, and weep in a corner. Why are auto-show exhibition shoes built like fragile glass?"

She picked up the broken heel stub, trying to shove it back into place using sheer willpower and spit, which predictably yielded a grand total of zero results. The shoe was now permanently crippled: the left side stood tall like a NASA rocket, while the right side rested flat and parallel to the ground like a fresh pair of cheap flip-flops bought at a local convenience store.

"If I limp out to the motorbike taxi stand looking like this, people are going to assume I'm a disaster victim fresh out of an evacuation zone," Mira complained, massaging her throbbing temples.

Amidst this acute panic, a sharp knock rattled her boarding room door from the outside.

Knock... knock... knock!

"Mira! Good grief, what on earth are you doing in there? That crash sounded like a wardrobe collapsing! Your ride is waiting outside the gate!" Maya’s voice hollered through the thin plywood door.

Mira whimpered softly as she stared down at her crippled footwear. D-day for the wedding had barely begun, but her physical and mental suffering had already peaked. With the absolute last dregs of her remaining dignity, Mira pushed herself up onto one good foot and one broken stump, ready to face the first wave of transportation terror.