My life was unremarkable in every sense of the word.
Viktor Chen. Twenty-six years old. Software developer at a mid-tier tech company. My days blurred together in an endless cycle of coffee, code, debugging, and more coffee. I lived alone in a cramped studio apartment where the rent took half my paycheck, and the closest thing I had to a social life was arguing with strangers on internet forums about plot holes in fantasy novels.
Pathetic? Maybe. But it was mine.
My escape, my one true escape, was reading. Light novels, web novels, fantasy epics, anything that could pull me out of the gray monotony of corporate emails and sprint planning meetings. I'd stay up until three in the morning, eyes burning, just to finish one more chapter. One more arc. One more world that wasn't this one.
That's how I found 'Rise of Hero'.
It had everything I wanted. A richly detailed world called Teluca, where magic intertwined with medieval society, where adventurers could rise from nothing to become legends. The protagonist, Beckham Morwen, was the chosen one, prophecy-bound, sword-gifted, destined to unite the fractured kingdoms against the encroaching Demonic Incursion from the north.
Classic stuff. I ate it up.
The magic system was intricate, with multiple tiers of spellcasting and unique affinities. The world-building was immersive, from the politics of Kingdoms to the mysteries of Dungeons scattered across the lands. The side characters had depth, dreams, and motivations that made them feel real.
But then the author started killing them off.
Not just any deaths, wasteful ones. Characters with potential, with backstories carefully crafted over dozens of chapters, cut down suddenly to raise the stakes. To show how "serious" the threat was. A talented mage who could have turned the tide of battle? Dead in an ambush. A strategic genius who had been building an intelligence network? Betrayed and executed before he could use it. A healer with ancient knowledge of purification magic that could counter demonic corruption? Killed off-screen.
It wasn't tragedy. It was waste.
I remember the exact moment I dropped it. Chapter 347. A character named Bram Carillon, a minor extra, a nobody background character who'd appeared maybe twice, was mentioned as having died during a skirmish. Just one line. "Among the fallen was Bram Carillon, a soldier of the third battalion."
That was it. No ceremony. No weight.
And something about that final, careless death broke me. I closed the tab. Unsubscribed from the updates. I was done.
"What a waste," I muttered to my empty apartment that night. "All these people who could've mattered. Who should've mattered."
Three weeks later, I was walking home from a convenience store at eleven PM, plastic bag dangling from my wrist, when I saw the intersection ahead. The light was green for pedestrians. I stepped forward.
I didn't see the truck until it was too late.
There's this thing in the online novel community, we joke about it. "Truck-kun," the divine entity that isekai's protagonists into other worlds. We laugh about it. Make memes. "Watch out for Truck-kun!"
I never thought I'd actually meet him.
The impact was... strange. Not painful, exactly. More like everything suddenly disconnected. My body went flying, I knew that intellectually, but I couldn't feel it. There was a screech of brakes, distant shouting, the acrid smell of burnt rubber.
And then nothing.
Darkness. Complete and utter darkness.
Was this death? An absence so total that even thought seemed impossible? I couldn't feel my body. Couldn't see, hear, or sense anything. Just... void.
How long was I in that void? Seconds? Hours? Years? Time had no meaning there.
'So this is it', I thought, or maybe I didn't think at all. Maybe I just existed in that non-space between existence and oblivion. 'This is how it ends. Viktor Chen, dead at twenty-six, his greatest achievement being a three-star rating from his manager and a half-finished argument about magic systems on Reddit.'
'What a waste.'
Then, sensation.
Pain.
God, the pain.
It hit me all at once, like my nerves had suddenly remembered they existed. Sharp, piercing, unbearable pain radiating from my center. I tried to scream but my throat was raw, producing only a wet, gurgling sound.
My eyes flew open.
Gray sky. Heavy clouds. The smell of copper and earth.
I was lying on my back on cold ground. No, not just ground. Mud. I could feel it, cold and wet, seeping through... through what? Not my hoodie and jeans. Something rougher. Coarser.
I tried to move and immediately regretted it. The pain intensified, white-hot and consuming. My vision blurred with tears.
'What's happening? Where am I? The hospital? Did I survive?'
I forced my head down, fighting through the agony, and looked at my body.
Blood. So much blood. It pooled around me, mixing with the mud, turning the ground into a crimson-brown soup. And there.
No.
'No.'
A sword. An actual sword, crude and iron, was buried in my abdomen, pinning me to the ground like an insect in a collector's case.
"Help," I croaked, my voice unfamiliar, higher pitched, younger. "Help me! Someone!"
Nothing. Just wind rustling through grass and the distant caw of a crow.
I tried again, louder. "HELP! PLEASE!"
Silence answered me.
'I'm going to die here. I died once and now I'm dying again. This is it. This is really it.'
The edges of my vision started to darken. The pain was becoming distant, which I knew wasn't a good sign. My breathing was shallow, rapid. Shock, probably. Blood loss.
'At least... at least it'll be quick...'
And then, impossibly, words appeared in my vision. Not on a screen. Not on anything physical. They simply existed in my field of view, hovering there in crisp, blue text.
[SYSTEM INITIALIZATION COMPLETE]
[Welcome to Teluca, Bram Carillon]
[Status: Critical - HP 3/245]
[Analyzing situation...]
I stared at the words, my fading consciousness struggling to process what I was seeing.
Teluca.
'Teluca?'
The world from 'Rise of Hero'. The world I'd read about. The world I'd abandoned.
And that name, Bram Carillon.
The extra. The nobody. The soldier who'd died in one throwaway line in chapter 347.
Through the pain, through the shock, through the absurdity of everything, one thought crystalized in my dying mind with perfect, terrible clarity:
'Oh, you've got to be kidding me.'