My real name was Noah Wilson. I was just an anti-social 17-year-old high school kid. My dad was a Navy officer and a martial arts instructor for his unit. My mom was a police officer and detective. Since I was an only child, starting from when I was seven, my dad taught me martial arts like Krav Maga, Muay Thai, and Jiu-Jitsu.
Meanwhile, my mom taught me how to hold, clean, and shoot a pistol. Did I live a normal life? Sure, it was normal to me. Every time Dad came home from a mission, I trained. Every day, Mom taught me how to research cases and so on.
For my tenth birthday, Mom gave me a beautiful, shiny pair of handcuffs, and Dad gave me a martial arts uniform and double sticks, or nunchaku. Seriously, think about it: other kids get toys, school supplies, clothes, and even parties.
What kind of parents give a small child handcuffs and nunchaku for their birthday? Only mine. But of course, I accepted their gifts with great pride and gratitude. The reason? I knew they loved and cared for me in their own way.
Unfortunately, when I entered high school at age 15, my dad died in the line of duty, and my mom followed three months later, also dying on duty. I was completely crushed. The reason was that I truly felt alone. I couldn't socialize, and because I was never given general knowledge outside of martial arts or weapons.
I became a weird kid, and my conversations completely failed to connect with my classmates. That's why I became anti-social and spent my time training, then playing the console games I bought. My parents left enough money for my life, so I could live peacefully... alone.
Well, after I started playing games, I started making friends online, and my conversations began to connect with other people. By age 16, I had many online friends whom I had never met face-to-face.
It was more comfortable that way because I absolutely couldn't stand talking in front of people. A few of my friends introduced me to the trashy RPG game called Aetheria Records. Of course, I tried it right away and fell in love with it.
The reason was the character design was genuinely unique with incredibly detailed graphics, a vibrant and beautiful world and setting, and an engaging plot with romance, revenge, friendship, betrayal, tragedy, and so on. The combat mechanism was also really cool, with smooth and fluid graphical movements, plus the dazzling graphics of the skills and magic we cast.
I played this game every day after school until the next morning when I had to leave for school. I beat the game several times. After we finished the tutorial, which ended with the protagonist named Drake collapsing on the floor, we were given a choice to choose the route and I have been through all the routes even game over included.
The reason this tutorial was structured like this was because the so-called "tutorial" was actually the closed beta test before the game was launched, given only to a few people to try it out. The goal was only to find bugs and glitches in combat, map exploration, character dialogue, and to test all aspects of the game before release.
But what made the game trashy was that the closed beta test, which shouldn't have been there, ended up determining the route the player had to take. The annoying thing was that all three available routes led to the world's destruction even though many people said the ending is romantic because the world is destroyed.
According to my online friends, the game was great, with a winding plot and choices that determined the ending, but for me, who had beaten it every possible way by choosing various branching routes within the game, those first three choices were ultimately what determined the end of the game: the apocalypse.
Eventually, I gave up trying to find a happy ending and resigned myself to watching the world get destroyed over and over. After getting bored, I moved on to other games and forgot about it, but even so, I still played it occasionally just for fun because of the good graphics and deep characters.
One day, after returning home from school following three days without sleep—fueled only by caffeinated energy drinks—I collapsed, falling asleep right in the middle of the game I was playing. When I opened my eyes, I suddenly found myself as Drake, who grew up in a village that was then destroyed by the demon race.
After growing up, I enrolled in the academy, befriended the princess, the swordsman who became a student at the academy, and a clumsy sorceress—a former noble whose title was stripped for being a traitor, according to the story.
Of course, I knew I would be betrayed, and from the start, I avoided all three of them, but you can't break the plot. For example, I chose to drop out of the academy and live in a village, but I was ultimately asked to return to the academy. Talk about stubborn.
Or a second example: when I sat next to the princess, which was the beginning of her getting close to me, I chose to move to another spot, but the instructor ordered the princess to move next to me instead. Outrageous, right? Or a third example: during combat training and duels, I faced the swordsman.
I deliberately lost, but somehow, either I slipped that day or got hit by something the next, I still won, and he ended up sticking to me. Annoying. After trying to avoid the plot repeatedly, I finally reached the end of the tutorial where I had to choose one of the three options, and I already knew the outcome.
Honestly, I was afraid to choose because I didn't know my condition in the real world, and the pain I felt here was completely real. I truly felt everything, so I was convinced this world was real. Frankly, at that moment, I desperately wanted to choose "Game Over," hoping I could return to the real world, but if not, I would clearly die, and I didn't want to die.
Finally, because my dad always said that dying in the line of duty was an honorable thing, I closed my eyes and pressed all three options simultaneously. In other words, I chose all three at once, and whatever happened, happened. When I did that, a bright light immediately swallowed me while I was inside the power aura of the Demon King, whose name was Balzaroth.