"Hey! What's that scum doing here?"
"How can he still be in the academy after committing such vile acts?"
"So much for everyone being equal, huh?"
"Yeah. If he were a commoner, he'd have been expelled already."
"Hah. If he were a commoner, he wouldn't have even dared to pull something like that."
"You're right. But it's still unfair."
As I walked through the corridor, their voices followed me like a swarm of flies—whispers filled with disgust, scorn, and contempt.
Every step echoed louder than it should have, like the building itself wanted me gone.
And honestly?
I couldn't even blame them.
This body—Lucien Ashborne—had done enough to deserve their hatred.
I pushed open the door to the dorm room and collapsed onto the bed with a long exhale.
My thoughts drifted.
How long had it been now?
Two hours.
That's how long it's been since I arrived in this world.
Since I died.
It happened so stupidly.
I was in my room, playing Asteria Online, drinking cola while grinding for the nth time. Then—fizz, spark, pop. I spilled the can on the tangled mess of cables beside me.
The next thing I knew, there was blinding light… and pain.
When I opened my eyes again, I was here—inside this world.
Inside him.
Lucien Ashborne.
Heir to the Ashborne County.
A villain through and through.
In the game, he only existed for a few scenes—a throwaway character.
He strutted onto the stage, acted arrogant, picked a fight with the protagonist… and got crushed.
Humiliated.
A perfect punching bag for players to hate and for the protagonist to "grow stronger" by defeating.
That was it. His entire role—an experience booster with legs.
A villain so pathetic he didn't even deserve a proper death cutscene.
And now, that villain… was me.
From what I remember, at sixteen, Lucien enrolled in the Imperial Academy, supposedly to "live an ordinary school life."
Except his version of "ordinary" meant delinquency, arrogance, and violence.
He gathered a bunch of like-minded noble heirs and formed a social club—which was really just a fancy name for a gang.
They extorted weaker students, bullied commoners, and threw their weight around because of their noble blood.
He even had ties to black-market merchants and underground rackets.
Why?
Because it was fun.
He loved watching people flinch when he walked by, loved seeing their fear, their helplessness. Crushing anything that annoyed him gave him a twisted sense of satisfaction.
Then came the protagonist—a commoner with absurd talent and charisma.
He stole all the attention, won the nobles' respect, and even caught the eyes of the academy's higher-ups.
Lucien couldn't handle that.
So he targeted him.
His little circle of thugs tormented the protagonist daily—mocking his origins, vandalizing his things, insulting his dead parents.
They even planned to corner him one night for a beating.
It went about as well as you'd expect.
The protagonist and his allies crushed them.
Lucien's crimes came to light, and the academy handed down punishment.
Public humiliation, disciplinary action, and absolute ruin.
Now, everywhere I went, people whispered.
Spat.
Looked at me like I was something rotten.
And me?
I was stuck living with the consequences of someone else's idiocy.
My punishments so far?
Expelled from the main dorms
Stripped of free access to academy facilities
Forced to pay for things every other cadet gets for free
Honestly, it's a miracle they didn't kick him out entirely.
But he's a noble heir.
There are limits to how far they can punish me.
Still…
I glanced toward the clock.
Six more hours until even this temporary room is taken away.
I'll have to pack up and find somewhere else to sleep before the day ends.
I dragged a hand down my face.
Sigh… why him?
Why did I have to become the worst trash in the game?
Of all the thousands of characters in Asteria…
Why couldn't I have transmigrated as any other extra?
*****
The game Asteria Online.
Once praised as the hope of domestically produced console RPGs.
A game that captured the world by storm—rich lore, deep combat mechanics, breathtaking world-building.
And me?
I was one of those players who never missed a single day.
For two whole years, I logged in daily.
From start to finish, I'd cleared the main story dozens of times.
Every route, every ending, every character quest—I'd done it all.
And yet…
Even now, standing inside the world I loved so much, I didn't feel joy.
No excitement, no awe—just a cold, sinking dread.
"Why?" I muttered to myself, staring blankly at the morning light spilling through the stable window.
Because despite all the choices I made, all the different routes I took in this game—
it always ended the same way.
Doom.
No matter what path the player chose, the result was always the destruction of the world.
Asteria was destined to fall.
I'd seen it happen too many times to count.
So even if I wanted to fade into the background and live quietly…
How could I, knowing that the end was inevitable?
The story of Asteria Online sounded simple on the surface—like every other fantasy RPG.
The world invaded by demons.
The hero rises to defeat the Demon Lord.
The gods remain silent.
And in the end, the player fights to save humanity.
That was the overline.
But what made Asteria stand out was its depth—the way it felt alive.
Its characters weren't just archetypes; they had dreams, flaws, and motives.
Its world wasn't just a setting; it was a living tragedy.
Asteria — a dying world caught between divine neglect and infernal invasion.
It was a land of swords and magic, of kingdoms and empires, of faith and despair.
Above it lay the Celestial Realm, home of the gods.
Below, the Infernal Abyss, the realm of demons.
For centuries, these three worlds coexisted, separated by the fabric of reality.
Until the demons grew desperate.
To escape their decaying realm, they tore open space itself—distorting reality to descend upon Asteria.
And with each distortion, the very air of this world became unstable.
Rifts opened across the land, connecting to Hell.
They became Dungeons—gateways spewing out monsters, curses, and death.
At first, humanity resisted.
But when a dungeon wasn't cleared in time, it began to devour the land around it, twisting everything into an extension of itself.
This phenomenon was called Dungeonification—
a spreading corruption that turned forests into wastelands, towns into labyrinths, and people into monsters.
By the time the game's main story began, half the world had already fallen.
Cities swallowed. Kingdoms erased. Entire continents rotting away into demonic wastelands.
Only one empire remained—the Aurelian Empire, the last bastion of mankind.
The Aurelian Empire stood as humanity's final shield against annihilation.
Its soldiers fought every day to reclaim dungeons, while its nobles schemed to maintain power.
And at its heart stood the Imperial Academy—
the cradle of humanity's future heroes.
It wasn't a school in the ordinary sense.
It was a military institution, a forge where cadets were trained to become knights, mages, strategists, and exorcists—
the empire's weapons against the demonic tide.
The academy produced the elite.
The best of the best.
And among them, the game's protagonist—a commoner who rose from nothing, destined to become the world's savior.
While I…
I was Lucien Ashborne, the stepping stone meant to highlight his greatness.
The fool who mocked the wrong man.
The villain whose defeat marked the beginning of the hero's journey.
And now, somehow, I'd become him.