UPDATED!!
Lysander Vale was never meant to matter.
In the novel he once read, he was nothing more than a background character — an extra who died before the real story even began. No name worth remembering. No role worth filling. Just another body in the early chapters.
Then he woke up inside it.
Reborn into the world of that unfinished story, Lysander carries one advantage and one problem. The advantage: he knows what happens next. The problem: he only read the beginning. The story he's now living inside of is one he never finished — and the further it moves forward, the darker the things he doesn't know become.
He has no blessing. No noble lineage. No divine favor. What he has is a sword that shouldn't exist, a system built from the authority of a god the world decided to forget, and the knowledge that several people around him are scheduled to die.
He doesn't intend to let that happen.
Not because he's a hero. He's not. He's a background character who survived his own death scene and is now moving through a story he only partially understands, changing outcomes one deviation at a time, trying not to draw attention he isn't ready for.
Inside Eclipse Hunter Academy — where noble heirs, blessed prodigies, and future legends gather — Lysander starts at the bottom of the rankings and climbs slowly. His technique is unusual. His element is unremarkable. His luck, according to the system that tracks such things, is catastrophically bad.
But fate has a problem with him.
Every time it moves, he moves first.
And the god who was erased from history is watching with something that looks a great deal like interest.