The rusty Cosmos fan in the corner of the three-by-three-meter boarding room in Depok squeaked as if it were on its last legs. Its sound blended with the relentless buzzing of the local mosquitoes. The stuffy air mixed with the lingering smell of chicken curry instant noodles, the broth having congealed at the bottom of a cracked plastic bowl four hours ago.
In the middle of the room, which looked more like a landfill of dirty clothes and empty coffee sachets, there was only one source of light. A twenty-four-inch monitor cast a pale blue glow over the face of a twenty-two-year-old young man. The dark circles under his eyes looked like permanent tattoos from chronic sleep deprivation. His hair was a mess, his body malnourished, and his posture hunched over the keyboard like a dried shrimp.
His name was Vavian. A final-year college student whose thesis had become a fossil on his bookshelf, but whose reputation on the internet was that of a strategy god.
Vavian clicked his tongue in annoyance. His right hand aggressively scrolled the mouse wheel, going through page after page on a game distribution platform. The monitor displayed dozens of kingdom-building simulation games. His eyes narrowed cynically as he read their descriptions.
"Fucking garbage. Absolute trash. Pay-to-win bullshit," he muttered. His voice was raspy from too many cheap cigarettes and too little water. "Are modern devs just brain-dead nowadays? You call this a strategy game? Just swipe your credit card, buy a Legendary unit, and auto-win. Where the fuck is the art of actually using your brain?"
As a hardcore gamer who had dedicated thousands of hours of his life to analyzing stats, calculating hidden RNG probabilities, and exploiting system loopholes, Vavian's ego was through the roof. He had cleared every kingdom-building game on 'Nightmare' or 'Hell' difficulty. There were no challenges left. In-game AI felt like toddlers mashing buttons to him.
Just as Vavian was about to hit Alt+F4 to end his miserable night and go to sleep, his screen suddenly froze. His cursor stuck dead in the center. A second later, the monitor flickered and went pitch black. The GPU fans inside his PC abruptly roared to life, spinning at maximum speed as if the machine were being forced to process a massive, ungodly amount of data.
"The fuck? A crash? Bullshit, don't tell me my GPU just died! I still have three months of installments left on this piece of shit!" Vavian panicked, his hands frantically reaching for the power button on his PC case.
But before he could force a shutdown, a simple, minimalist gray dialog box materialized in the center of the black screen. No fancy 3D graphics. No 'X' button in the corner to close it. Just a line of static white text appearing letter by letter.
[Do you want to play the hardest kingdom-building game?]
Beneath the text, two options blinked slowly:
[YES] [NO]
Vavian paused. His panic over his supposedly fried GPU evaporated, replaced by an arrogant smirk that automatically formed on his face. "The hardest game? Yeah, right. Probably just some cheap marketing gimmick from an indie dev. Bet they just give the enemies a massive HP buff and call it a day. Boring."
Despite his trash talk, his hand went back to the mouse. His curiosity was piqued. His towering ego refused to back down from such a blatant, cheap challenge. He wanted to prove that whoever made this game was just an arrogant hack.
Click. Vavian hit [YES].
The screen instantly changed, wiping the previous text.
[Select Race:]
> Demon | Human | Elf | Beastman | Undead | Dragon-kin
Vavian leaned back in his cheap gaming chair, his eyes scanning the options like a predator selecting its prey. His analytical brain immediately dissected each choice. "Humans? Basic as fuck. Fast growth but boring. Elves? Pretentious tree-huggers, probably just camp behind barriers and spam arrows. Undead? Nice logistics since they don't eat, but their kingdom growth is always slow as hell. Dragon-kin? Way too overpowered in the early game, no real challenge for a pro."
His gaze locked onto the very first option. "Demon. In any fantasy game, the Demon race is universally hated. Every other faction is automatically hostile. Early resources are always nerfed to the ground, and your spawn point is usually in some shithole like a volcano or a toxic swamp. Now that's a fucking challenge."
He clicked Demon. The screen changed again.
[Select Difficulty:]
> Hard | Super Hard | Trash Hard
Vavian's eyebrows furrowed. "Trash Hard? What kind of fucking name is that? You think I'm some filthy casual who just installed his first game? Super Hard mode is just a speedrun category for me."
At the very bottom of the screen, there were rows of extremely tiny, dim red text. A warning text detailing absolute penalties, no-respawn rules, the absence of save points, and permanent Game Over conditions. However, Vavian was the embodiment of the arrogant gamer who skipped tutorials and never read the terms and conditions. To him, system warnings were just formalities for cowards.
Without a second of hesitation, his finger clicked [Trash Hard].
"Come here, let me show you how to break your little trash game," Vavian challenged the monitor with a condescending tone.
But there was no loading screen. No epic background music to kick off the game.
In that exact split second, Vavian's monitor exploded in a flash of absolute white light. It wasn't just bright; it was a solid, physical mass of light that felt like it was sucking the retinas right out of his skull. His consciousness was violently ripped from the top of his head. An intense, nauseating vertigo hit his stomach, as if his internal organs were being tossed into a high-speed blender and thrown off a bottomless cliff. Vavian didn't even have time to scream a single curse before total darkness swallowed him whole.
***
Cold.
That was the first sensation his brain processed. A piercing, bone-deep cold that was wet and incredibly damp. The second sensation was the smell. A pungent, suffocating stench of sulfur, dead earth, and volcanic ash that made his lungs burn.
*Where the fuck am I? What is that smell?* Vavian cursed in his mind.
He tried to open his eyes, but his eyelids felt like they were made of lead. He tried to lift his hand, just to touch his throbbing head, but his limbs didn't respond to his brain's commands properly. His muscles felt like mush, lacking the strength to even twitch a finger.
Something was wrong. Horribly wrong.
Vavian forced his mouth open, intending to scream and curse at whoever had drugged him and kidnapped him from his room.
*Who the fuck is there?! Show yourselves, you bastards!* That was the sentence he wanted to roar.
However, the sound that shattered the silence of the room was a piercing, high-pitched wail:
"Oaaakkk! Oaaakkk!"
Vavian froze instantly. His heart hammered wildly against his ribcage. He tried again.
"Oaaakk!"
*What the fuck?! What is that sound?! Why do I sound like a literal crying baby?!* he screamed internally. His panic skyrocketed. With whatever strength he had left from god knows where, he pushed past the pain and forced his eyelids open.
His vision was blurry and watery. Slowly, the world around him began to pull into focus. He wasn't looking at the cobweb-covered plywood ceiling of his boarding room. He was looking at a curved ceiling made of heavily cracked black stone, with a massive hole gaping in the center. Through that hole, gray ash drifted down from a starless, oppressive sky.
Suddenly, a mechanical *ding* echoed inside his skull. Right in front of his eyes, a translucent, pale blue interface materialized, floating in the air like a player's HUD.
[System Notification: Etherion World Initialization Complete.]
[Consciousness Successfully Transferred.]
[HIDDEN BONUS Trash Hard Difficulty: System Sight Unlocked.]
Vavian's eyes widened. His high-IQ brain, backed by tens of thousands of hours of gaming experience, immediately processed the words 'System Sight' and 'Etherion World'. This... this wasn't a kidnapping. This was an Isekai. He had literally been dragged into the very game he had just insulted!
The text on the holographic screen scrolled down, displaying his personal status.
> NAME: VAVIAN
> RACE: CAMBION (Infant Demon - Stage 0)
> LEVEL: 1
> HP: 10/10
> STATS (TRASH HARD PENALTY ACTIVE - 40% BELOW AVERAGE):
> - Strength : 22/100 (Extremely Weak, Muscles Undeveloped)
> - Endurance : 18/100 (Critical, Extremely High Risk of Premature Death)
> - Agility : 35/100 (Poor)
> - Magic : 30/100 (Below Average)
> - Aura : 45/100 (Anomaly)
> - Tactic/IQ : 88/100 (No Penalty - Retained Original World Memory)
> FACTION STATUS: HOSTILE (Automatically despised by all races in Etherion)
> ABSOLUTE WARNING: NO RESPAWN. NO SAVE POINTS. DEATH IS PERMANENT.
Vavian read the screen twice. Three times. Then, if an infant were physically capable of swearing fluently, he would have offended every god in existence.
*Endurance eighteen?! Only eighteen fucking points?! Are you shitting me?! Even a garbage-tier sweeping NPC in the worst RPG has at least thirty endurance!* Vavian raged in his mind. *And what the hell is this penalty?! Minus forty percent?! No wonder my body feels like it's going to fall apart just from opening my eyes. Goddammit, 'Trash Hard' really meant garbage-tier!*
He was trapped inside the body of an infant Demon with base stats worse than a level 1 slime. No respawn. No extra lives. If he froze to death on this stone floor, he died for real. A permanent Game Over.
Before Vavian could fully digest the absolute nightmare he had literally clicked himself into, a shadow fell over his face. A pair of hands—extremely thin, calloused, and covered in scratches—lifted his tiny body with utmost care.
Vavian looked up. Above him was the face of a woman. Her skin was deathly pale and stained with black soot. On her forehead jutted a pair of dark red, curved horns, though one of them was snapped near the tip with a jagged edge. The dark circles under her eyes were pitch black, hinting at a level of physical and mental exhaustion that defied human logic. Yet, the look in her crimson eyes as she stared down at Vavian radiated an indescribable, overwhelming affection.
"Welcome, my child..." the woman whispered. Her voice was incredibly raspy, as if her throat had been lined with sandpaper. A faint smile graced her cracked lips. "Forgive me... you had to be born in this dead land."
Vavian's System Sight immediately reacted, scanning the woman. Text hovered beside her face.
> NAME: MORRA
> RACE: DEMON
> LEVEL: 22
> CLASS: HEALER
> HP: 45/100 (Condition: Severe Malnutrition, Acute Mental Exhaustion)
> DISPOSITION TOWARD VAVIAN: BELOVED
Morra. His mother.
Vavian went silent. As someone who had lived a selfish, apathetic life in his original world, this touch full of genuine love felt alien, yet somehow... it warmed his chest. His gaming logic instantly kicked in. A level 22 Healer class should have near-full HP, at least around eight hundred points. But his mother only had forty-five points. Her malnutrition status explained everything. This woman was starving to death.
Supported by Morra's hands, Vavian slowly turned his head, ignoring the dull ache in his fragile neck. He used his vision to scan the surroundings.
They were on the ground floor of a half-ruined circular stone tower. Given the general lore of strategy games, this was definitely the kingdom's starting stronghold. In the dim corners of the room, illuminated only by a small fire pit with embers slowly turning to ash, sat several adults.
Vavian counted them. One, two, three... there were only twelve adults in total in this room. All of them possessed the physical traits of the Demon race. All of them wore ragged clothes, rusted and torn leather armor, and stared blankly at the fire as if their souls had already left their bodies.
The system provided its report once more.
> LOCATION: Kingdom of Revista (Korreth Tower Ruins, Vorreth Wasteland)
> TOTAL POPULATION: 12 Souls
> AVERAGE LEVEL: 15
> KINGDOM MORALE: 14/100 (Critical - Risk of Mass Despair)
*Only twelve people left,* Vavian thought, his eyes narrowing sharply through the gloom of the room. *Morale at fourteen points. Troop condition: starving to the brink of death. Stronghold: barely standing. Resources: absolute zero. And our spawn location is a toxic volcanic wasteland while the entire fucking continent wants us dead.*
Vavian looked back down at his own pale, tiny infant hands. The toxic gamer brain inside his head, which had been engulfed in panic and profanities just moments ago, suddenly stopped rebelling. A metaphorical 'click' echoed clearly in his mind.
Something cold, highly calculating, and utterly ruthless slowly took over. His game mode had just turned on.
This was no longer just a monitor screen he could pause when he wanted to boil some noodles. The twelve lives in this room, as well as his mother who was dying yet still trying to comfort him in her embrace... all of it was real. If he didn't use his brain right now, they would all be corpses in a matter of days. This game was intentionally designed to be a sadistic meat grinder meant to make him fail from minute one.
*Oh, so that's how we're playing this?* Vavian muttered in his heart. His tiny lips curved upwards, forming a deadly, chilling smirk that looked entirely out of place on a baby's face.
He couldn't use brute physical strength to win. Twenty-two points in strength was a joke. But he had the memories of hundreds of virtual wars, an intact IQ of 88, the instinct to read enemy patterns, and the absolute ability to see hidden weaknesses through his *System Sight*. He knew exactly how to exploit system loopholes, manipulate aggro, and twist information until even the strongest enemies begged for mercy.
Vavian closed his eyes for a second, accepting his new reality, letting the soul of an arrogant overlord wash over him.
*Fuck your penalties. Fuck the other factions. You think the Demon race is just a bunch of bugs waiting to be squashed?*
He opened his eyes again, glaring fiercely into the darkness of the Revista ruins. His gaze was freezing, completely devoid of pity, just like a tyrant general staring down at his massive chessboard.
*Tutorial mode... starts right fucking now.*
***
[Nymphaearoot the Author]: Hope you enjoy reading! If you like it, please add it to your library and let me know your favorite moments in the comments