The last thing Leo remembered was the blinding glare of truck headlights, the screech of tortured rubber, and the profound, shattering impact that felt less like an end and more like a… transition. A violent editing of his existence.
He didn't wake up so much as he reassembled. A dizzying lurch of consciousness, a sensory overload of sterile air smelling of ozone and cold metal. His body felt wrong—lankier, weaker, with a persistent ache in his lower back that a twenty-two-year-old esports enthusiast definitely shouldn't have.
He blinked, his vision swimming into focus. He was standing in a cavernous, dimly lit laboratory. Wires snaked across polished floors like metallic vines, coiling around humming server racks. In the center of the room, a holographic display flickered with complex schematics of something that looked like a trash can with pincers.
And then he saw the mirror.
It was a full-length panel of polished chrome, reflecting the room's cold blue light. Staring back at him was a stranger. A man in his late thirties, with a pallid, almost sickly complexion, sharp cheekbones, and a neatly trimmed black goatee that framed a perpetually sneering mouth. The man was tall and painfully thin, swimming in a pristine white lab coat that did little to add substance to his frame. His eyes, a piercing, unsettling ice-blue, were wide with a confusion that mirrored Leo's own.
Leo took a hesitant step forward. The reflection mimicked him. He raised a hand—a long-fingered, elegant hand he'd never seen before—and touched his face. The cold, smooth sensation of his own fingers on a stranger's cheek sent a jolt of pure, undiluted horror through his system.
"No," he whispered. The voice was different too; a dry, baritone rasp, laced with a haughty intellect that was utterly alien. "This is… this is a dream. A weird, post-mortem VR demo."
His eyes darted around the lab, searching for clues, for a logout button, for anything. They landed on a workbench cluttered with tools and a half-disassembled drone. Next to it, propped against a monitor, was a small, silver-framed photograph. He stumbled towards it, his new limbs feeling clumsy and uncoordinated.
The photograph showed the man in the mirror—him—standing with a smug, possessive arm around a girl. A girl with sparkling sapphire eyes, chestnut-brown hair in twin tails, and a smile so bright it could power a small city.
Yuki.
The name surfaced from the depths of his memory, followed by a tidal wave of context. Heartthrob Academy. His little sister, Mia, had spent the entire last summer glued to her Nintendo Switch, squealing over this very game. He'd mocked her relentlessly for it, for the cliché tropes, the predictable romance routes—the stoic student council president, the fiery delinquent with a secret heart of gold, the sweet childhood friend. And the villain… a one-dimensional, laughably inept mad scientist named…
"Dr. Alistair Finch," Leo breathed, the name tasting like ash on his tongue.
He was Dr. Alistair Finch. The cannon-fodder antagonist. The guy whose entire role in the narrative was to create a single, poorly designed robot to kidnap Yuki, only to be effortlessly thwarted by one of the love interests, thereby proving their heroism and landing himself in prison for his troubles. A footnote. A plot device.
A fresh wave of panic, hot and acidic, rose in his throat. He was dead. And his afterlife, his reincarnation, was a cosmic joke. He had been transmigrated not as the hero, not even as a love interest, but as the designated loser.
His heart hammered against his ribs, a frantic, trapped bird. He gripped the edge of the workbench, his knuckles turning white. The urge to scream, to smash the entire lab to pieces, was overwhelming. This was worse than death. This was narrative hell.
Then, his gaze fell on the central holographic display. The schematic for the trash-can robot—"Unit KR-0, Kidnap Protocol," the label read—was still rotating slowly. It was even more pathetic up close. A single, weak-looking pincer arm, treads that looked like they'd get stuck on a carpet, and a sensor array that probably couldn't distinguish Yuki from a fire hydrant.
A memory, sharp and clear from his sister's playthrough, flashed in his mind. The cutscene where Finch would be led away in handcuffs, sneering about how he'd be back, while the chosen love interest comforted a trembling Yuki. The game would then promptly forget he ever existed.
"Is this it?" he rasped to the silent, mocking lab. "I get a second chance at existence just to play the role of a laughingstock? To be the tutorial-level boss everyone forgets?"
The panic began to curdle, transforming in the crucible of his geek soul. It wasn't just fear anymore. It was a profound, soul-deep offense. He was a connoisseur of stories! A devotee of the Hero's Journey! He'd written fanfiction with more intricate plots than this!
His eyes, those new, icy-blue eyes, narrowed. They scanned the lab again, but this time, he wasn't seeing a prison. He was seeing… potential.
The humming servers weren't just for show; they represented computational power his old gaming rig could only dream of. The tools were precision instruments of creation. The schematics on the screen, while pathetic, were a foundation. Dr. Alistair Finch wasn't just a villain; he was a scientist. A genius, according to the game's flimsy lore, just one with terrible narrative direction.
A slow, cold smile stretched across his new face, unfamiliar muscles pulling at his skin. It wasn't a pleasant expression.
"The script is wrong," he said, his voice losing its panicked rasp, gaining a cold, analytical edge. He straightened up, pushing away from the workbench, and walked back to the chrome mirror. He stared at the reflection—at Dr. Alistair Finch—but he no longer saw a stranger. He saw a vessel. A tool.
"I am Leo," he told the reflection. "And I am a fan of superheroes. Of myth-making. Of epic, city-shaking confrontations between absolute good and necessary evil. This..." he gestured dismissively at the KR-0 schematic, "...is an insult to the genre."
He turned his back on the mirror, his lab coat swirling around his thin legs with a dramatic flair that felt surprisingly natural. He approached the main console, his long fingers dancing across the holographic interface with an instinctual fluency that was part of his new body's muscle memory. With a few swift commands, he selected the KR-0 schematic and dragged it into a digital trash icon. It dissolved into pixels with a satisfying fizzle.
A blank canvas. An empty stage.
His mind was already racing, concepts and designs unfolding like digital flowers. He wasn't going to follow the script. He wasn't going to be a pathetic kidnapper. If he was doomed to be the villain, he would be the greatest villain this world had ever known. But his villainy wouldn't be for petty revenge or world domination. It would be for a higher purpose. A nobler cause.
Art.
He would forge them. He would take these bland, dating-sim archetypes and sculpt them into something worthy. Into heroes.
A new project file materialized on the hologram. He labeled it: PROJECT: PROMETHEUS.
His first creation wouldn't be a weapon. It would be a gift. A catalyst.
He began designing a crystalline shard, about the size of his palm. He coded it to resonate with the fundamental forces of the universe, to act as a key, unlocking the latent potential within a human body. He assigned it elemental attributes. Fire, for the passionate and impulsive. Air, for the intellectual and detached. Earth, for the steadfast and nurturing. Water… he'd get to that. A system. A pantheon.
But a gift given freely was worthless. A hero forged in safety was a contradiction in terms. They needed a crucible. They needed a reason to fight, to bond, to become.
He split his screen. On one side, the designs for the "Manifestation Shards" continued to render. On the other, he pulled up a live surveillance feed of the city—Maple Creek, the game's idyllic, utterly boring setting. With a few commands, he located Yuki. She was walking home from school, her twin tails bouncing, completely oblivious to the cosmic rewrite happening in the narrative around her.
In the original game, his robot would jump out from an alleyway here. Predictable. Safe.
Leo's smile returned, colder and sharper than before. He began writing a new scenario. He accessed the city's infrastructure grid—another perk of being the "mad scientist"—and found a main gas line running under the street Yuki was about to cross. A minor, controlled leak. A single, stray spark from a faulty electrical box he could easily trigger.
He wouldn't send a robot to kidnap her. He would place her in the heart of a genuine, life-threatening disaster.
The love interests would be nearby, of course. The game's mechanics ensured that. They would run towards the danger, not away from it. And in that moment of extreme peril, as the world threatened to explode around them, the Manifestation Shards—which he would place strategically in their path—would activate. Their powers would erupt, not as a choice, but as a desperate, instinctual act of survival.
It was brutal. It was dangerous. People could get hurt. People could…
Leo paused, his finger hovering over the command to initiate the gas leak. A flicker of his old humanity, a ghost of the boy who'd once cried at the end of Spider-Man, surfaced. Was he really about to do this? Engineer a catastrophe that could kill innocent people?
He looked at the live feed of Yuki's smiling, carefree face. He looked at the pathetic, deleted schematic of the KR-0. He thought about a lifetime of being the joke, the footnote, the forgotten tutorial boss.
The hesitation evaporated, burned away by the sheer, terrifying clarity of his new vision. A perfect hero couldn't be born from a perfect world. They needed trauma. They needed loss. They needed a reason to put on the mask every single day.
A single, stray casualty in this initial event… wouldn't that be the ultimate motivator? A permanent, bloody reminder of the stakes? A lesson that hesitation costs lives?
The thought was chilling in its clinical precision. It wasn't born of malice, but of a deranged, fanatical devotion to the trope. It was the logic of a storyteller who saw living, breathing people as characters in his grand epic.
He was no longer Leo, the fanboy. He was The Director.
His finger came down.
> INITIATE SCENARIO: "FIRST SPARK"
> GAS LINE L-7: LEAK COMMENCING.
> MANIFESTATION SHARDS: DEPLOYED.
On the monitor, Yuki paused at the street corner, waiting for the crosswalk light to change. Unseen, a faint, sweet odor began to permeate the air. In an alley to her left, a discarded backpack—one of Leo's delivery drones—opened silently, revealing four crystalline shards that began to pulse with a soft, elemental light: crimson, azure, amber, and verdant green.
Back in the lab, The Director leaned back in his chair, steepling his fingers under his chin. His ice-blue eyes were fixed on the screen, devoid of guilt, filled only with the cold fire of anticipation.
"Let the show begin," Dr. Alistair Finch whispered into the silence. "Time to make some heroes."