Chapter 1: Prologue: An Extra's Awakening
They say hard work never betrays you.
I used to believe that.
Back when I was still naïve enough to think the world rewarded persistence, back when I thought losing everything could be fixed if I just tried harder, back when I thought my suffering was only temporary. But belief is a fragile thing. It cracks under the weight of reality, and once it breaks, it never fits back together the same way again.
My belief shattered the night my parents died. I was fourteen. One moment, they were smiling at me from across the dinner table. The next, they were broken bodies on the road, victims of some drunk bastard who stumbled into his car after too many drinks. He walked away with a fine and a slap on the wrist. I walked away with silence.
No relatives. No warm hands reaching out to me. Just loneliness and a bank account that bled slower than I did.
At first, I thought I could fight back. I studied harder than anyone. I buried myself in textbooks until my vision blurred and my body trembled. There was a scholarship—just one—that could let me enter University A, the only place close enough for me to even dream of attending.
So I clawed for it. Nights without sleep, meals skipped, friends left behind. I convinced myself it was worth it. That this pain, this sacrifice, would one day bloom into something meaningful.
But effort is worthless in a world where talent and influence dictate the winners. The scholarship went to someone else. A boy with lower grades but with a father who shook hands in the right places.
That was the day I understood the truth: hard work betrays you the moment it stops being useful to someone powerful.
I was furious. Broken. But most of all, I was tired. I dropped out of the chase for education and began working part-time jobs to survive. At first, I thought I could hold it together. But the body deteriorates faster than the spirit can heal. Hours on my feet became unbearable, and food became my only comfort. The pounds piled on, each one another chain dragging me down.
I lost my breath, my health, my youth. One day at a time, I traded my future for a miserable present.
And in that misery, I found an escape: stories.
I drowned in manga, light novels, and webnovels. Pages became my oxygen. I devoured tales where the weak became strong, where orphans became kings, where forgotten extras rose to rewrite destiny. The cruelest part? I believed them. I believed them more than I ever believed my own life.
One novel in particular hooked its claws into me: The Hero Returns.
It was the kind of story people mocked for being cliché: portals, mana, demons, factions of elves and orcs, a lone hero destined to fight against the world's destruction. But I clung to it. Not because it was unique, but because it was everything I wasn't.
The hero had what I never did: purpose. Talent. A world that recognized him.
I memorized its arcs, its lore, its factions: the rise of humanity after the Great Cataclysm, the fragile alliances, the bloody battles. I envied every word. Even the supporting cast and their pain, their triumphs felt like lives worth more than mine.
Meanwhile, my reality was a gray blur of labor.
I stocked shelves in convenience stores until my back gave out. I delivered packages until my knees screamed. I washed dishes until the skin on my hands cracked and peeled. Always the same routine: wake up, work, eat, collapse, repeat. Days bled into each other like ink on wet paper.
The only thing that reminded me I was alive was the bitterness. The constant gnawing resentment that never dulled, never left.
Sometimes I wondered if I was already dead, if this body was just a machine running on fumes.
And then one night his death came for me properly.
It wasn't dramatic. I wasn't struck down by lightning or swallowed by some fantastical beast. It was just headlights cutting through the rain and the sudden realization that I didn't have time to move.
The sound of tires. The impact. The breath ripped from my lungs.
For a moment, I thought: Of course. Even my death is pathetic.
The world went black.
---
Chirp. Chirp.
I opened my eyes.
Sunlight streamed through a cracked window. The room was small, the floor wooden, the bed rough. The air smelled faintly of dust and earth, not the sterile tang of a hospital.
I sat up slowly, half-expecting pain to tear through me. But there was nothing. No broken ribs, no crushed organs. My body felt lighter than it had in years.
"…What the hell?"
That was when the screen appeared.
=== Status ===
Name : Kael Arden
Rank : G
Strength : G
Agility : G
Stamina : F
Intelligence : G
Mana Capacity : G
Luck : G-
Charm : G-
--] Profession : [Axemanship Lv.1]
==================
I froze. My eyes devoured the words, every line etching itself into my skull.
This was impossible. This was fiction. This was…
The Hero Returns.
I knew it. I had memorized it. And now I was standing inside it.
For the first time in years, something stirred in my chest. Hope? Excitement? I didn't know. All I knew was that I was here. In the world I had dreamed of.
But then reality struck.
The name on the screen: Kael Arden.
Not the hero. Not even a rival. I rifled through my memory, scanning every arc, every chapter. There was no Kael Arden. No extra by that name.
I laughed. A hollow, broken laugh that echoed off the walls.
Even here, in a world I knew better than my own, I was nothing. An extra so insignificant the author hadn't even bothered to write me down.
Fate hadn't given me a second chance. It was mocking me.
My stats were trash. My rank, bottom of the barrel. My profession? Axemanship Lv.1.
An axe. A weapon of brutes and laborers. Not swords fit for heroes, not magic fit for prodigies. Just an axe.
But one thing stood out. Stamina: F.
Slightly higher than the rest. A cruel joke, or the faintest ember of possibility?
I clenched my fists.
Maybe this was still meaningless. Maybe I was doomed to remain an invisible background character. But for the first time, I didn't care.
If this world wanted to laugh at me, then fine. Let it laugh.
I would carve my name into it with my own two hands.
Even if I was only an extra, I would not disappear.
Not again.
The status screen faded slowly, as though the words had seared themselves into the back of my eyes.
================
Name: Kael Arden.
Profession: Axemanship Lv. 1.
=================
A name that wasn't mine, a title that felt more like a mockery than a destiny.
I sat there for a long time, staring at the floating text until it flickered and dissolved into nothing. The silence that followed was unbearable. Only the faint chirping of birds outside the window reminded me I was still alive or at least something close to alive.
My breath came unevenly. Each inhale brought with it the weight of questions I couldn't answer.
Kael Arden.
I mouthed the words like a foreign phrase. The syllables tasted strange, hollow. Who the hell was Kael Arden? Not once, in all the chapters of The Hero Returns I'd read, had that name been mentioned. I had read carefully, obsessively, tracing every side character, every footnote in lore. Kael Arden was no one.
Which meant that was who I was now: no one.
My gaze drifted to the window. For the first time, I caught my reflection, faintly imprinted against the glass.
A stranger stared back.
The man or rather, boy had sharp black hair that fell messily over his forehead. His skin was pale, not from health but from a life lived in shadow. His eyes were the worst part: gray-blue, dulled like steel left out to rust. They didn't shine, didn't command attention. They were the kind of eyes that passed unnoticed in a crowd.
I lifted my hand slowly, watching the reflection mimic the motion. The fingers were leaner, calloused at the base. My palm trembled. This wasn't me. My old body had been bloated, heavy, dragged down by years of fast food and sedentary misery. But here I with this body was wiry, too thin, yet functional. A vessel someone had once tried to shape into something more, but abandoned midway.
An unfinished life.
I stood up, legs wobbling under me. The moment I put weight on them, pain spiked behind my eyes.
"Ghh—!"
The room tilted. I staggered, my hand clawing for the wall to keep me upright. Then it hit me with a migraine so violent it felt like my skull was splitting. My knees gave out, crashing to the floorboards.
Heat, pressure, fire.
Memories not mine but it forced their way in.
A boy swinging a crude wooden axe in a frost-bitten yard. His hands blistering, knuckles raw, but the strikes weak, always weak.
A father's disinterested glance, a mother's silence.
The laughter of other children as he stumbled in the dirt, his axe too heavy for his frame.
"Kael! Useless again!" a voice shouted in the distance.
I gasped, clutching my temples. These weren't hallucinations. They were Kael Arden's memories, and they were tearing through me like shards of glass.
A thousand humiliations, stacked one on top of the other. Always training, always failing. Always forgotten.
"Stop—!" I croaked, but the flood didn't stop.
I was drowning in him.
---
The pain receded as suddenly as it came, leaving me sprawled on the floor, chest heaving. Sweat dampened my shirt. My hands shook as though I had survived some violent storm.
Slowly, I pulled myself upright, back pressing against the wall. The room around me came back into focus: the cramped bed, the chipped desk, the lone wardrobe. A room that belonged to no one important, just like Kael himself.
And now, me.
I drew a ragged breath, letting it shudder out of me.
"So this is it," I whispered. "This is the life I get."
The words felt bitter, heavier than the silence that followed
I sat slumped against the wall, the faint echo of Kael's memories still rattling through my skull. They weren't mine, but they were inside me now, clinging like parasites. Every breath reminded me of his weakness. Every beat of my heart carried the weight of his failures.
It was almost poetic if life had ever been kind enough to offer me poetry. I died as a failure on Earth, forgotten and bitter. And now, reborn into another world, I wore the skin of someone destined for the same obscurity.
Kael Arden.
The axe-wielding nobody.
Not hero, not villain, not even a side character. Just a ghost in the margins of a story that was never his.
I forced myself to stand. My legs wobbled, but I managed. There was a small mirror nailed crookedly to the wall above the desk. I stumbled toward it, each step slow, dragging, like I was learning how to walk again.
When I finally looked into it, I froze.
The boy in the glass had a face too ordinary to matter. Thin cheekbones, a sharp chin that would never become distinguished, lips set in a permanent line of exhaustion. His hair was unkempt, sticking out in tufts. His eyes those dull gray-blue eyes were the worst.
There was no fire in them. No ambition, no arrogance, not even desperation. Just emptiness.
I touched the mirror. The cold glass met my fingertips.
"This isn't me," I whispered. But my reflection mocked me with silence.
( To be Continue)