Have you ever read a novel where the protagonists are all villains?
Not tragic antiheroes or morally grey characters, but true villains.
The kind who killed for sport, laughed at terror, and treated the world like a sandbox filled with bones and screaming souls.
Ralf did.
The novel was titled Genome Ascension, and it was nothing short of a beautifully deranged masterpiece.
In its pages, humanity had discovered how to extract genes from animals, dinosaurs, and extinct monsters buried under millions of years of stone.
They injected those foreign codes into their own bodies, twisting themselves into hybrid beasts and walking calamities.
In the novel, cities waged war for vials of DNA, and nations slaughtered each other over fossils older than civilisation. The strongest humans were no longer human at all.
And the main characters?
They were not heroes trapped in darkness. They were the darkness.
One of them crushed skulls with his bare hands just to hear the sound of it.
While the second carved messages into the flesh of the people she killed, turning bodies into living diaries.
And the third moved so fast he turned crowds into red mist without slowing his step.
You get the gist of it.
The world called them plagues, while the story called them the protagonists.
And Ralf had devoured every chapter of this villainous novel.
He stayed awake until three in the morning with burning eyes and throbbing headache, muttering insults at the characters one moment and laughing in horrified disbelief the next.
It was addictive, chaotic, and so utterly insane that he secretly admired the author's willingness to write villains who never apologised, never softened, and never pretended to be better.
And the first victim of these main characters was:
Professor Lysander Vaunt, an irrelevant side character who died early, murdered by his own villainous students
He died so pathetically that the fandom turned him into a meme, joking about how he couldn't even survive a single arc.
Ralf had laughed at the professor's death as well. He had mocked him and called him useless.
But now he wasn't laughing anymore.
Because when he opened his eyes again after going to bed last night, the world around him wasn't the same.
He wasn't in his room. Heck, he wasn't even in the twenty-first century.
He was lying on a polished metallic platform with strange holographic screens flickering beside him, displaying unreadable genetic diagrams and heartbeat analytics.
The air smelled of biofluid.
He tried to stand, but his legs trembled, unsteady under the weight of a body that wasn't familiar.
When his vision finally cleared, he saw a reflection staring back from a transparent holo-panel across the room.
It wasn't his reflection.
It was a man in his late twenties, with tired eyes, a stiff jawline, and a white lab coat marked with the insignia of the Genome Faculty.
It was the reflection of Professor Lysander Vaunt.
The extra.
The joke.
Ralf's breath hitched as his hands ran through his whole body.
Neon-blue text flickered across the holographic interface beside him as if mocking him:
IDENTITY CONFIRMED
LYSANDER VAUNT — LEVEL 1 FACULTY
STATUS: ALIVE
Ralf's pulse thundered as the truth slammed into him with all the subtlety of a railgun blast:
He had transmigrated.
Not into a fantasy world.
Not into a magical realm.
But into a biotech dystopia, a future where people spliced dinosaur genomes into their arteries and monsters wore human faces.
And worst of all, he was inhabiting the body of the man who died before the end of the first arc.
And just as Ralf, no – Lysander was coming to terms with his new reality, a soft chime rang through his skull.
A new set of information appeared before his retina:
Class Assignment: GENOME COMBAT DIVISION — YEAR 1, SECTION V
First Session Begins: Tomorrow — 0700 Hours
Attendance Mandatory>
The words sat before Lysander's eyes, cold and merciless.
Section V.
He knew exactly what that meant.
He had read every gruesome chapter, every graphic line, every disturbing description about the students belonging to that section.
Lysander stood there for a long moment, staring at the glowing faculty notice until the letters dimmed to a low, pulsing blue.
His mind felt strangely split—half Ralf, half the man whose name he now wore—and neither half knew how to breathe properly.
He pressed a hand against the cool surface of the holo-panel, watching unfamiliar fingers tremble.
This wasn't a dream.
This wasn't a hallucination.
And this body wasn't going to wake up back on Earth.
A sharp, steadying exhale left his lungs.
He replayed the novel's earliest chapters in his mind—not as a fan this time, but as someone being dragged into its bloodstream.
He remembered the descriptions of the academy: the surgical white labs, the training arenas where failures didn't see the next sunrise.
He swallowed hard, tasting the metallic tang of recycled air.
If he kept denying it, he would die just like the original.
If he panicked, he would die even faster.
If he walked into Section V unprepared, he wouldn't even have the dignity of a second thought.
The situation in front of him wasn't fair. It wasn't logical. It wasn't survivable.
But it was real.
He lifted his head, feeling the unfamiliar weight of Lysander Vaunt's bones, the stiffness of his lab coat, the faint burn of whatever synthetic gene-enhancer the body still carried in its veins.
"This is me now," he murmured under his breath, testing the words, anchoring them into place. "Whether I like it or not."
Denial wasn't going to change anything.
If he wanted to live past the first session…
If he wanted to outlast the monsters he had once adored…
Then he had to adapt before the world chewed him apart.
Slowly, carefully, he squared his shoulders.
This was his reality now.
He turned away from the holo-panel and took his first steady step into the cold artificial light of the faculty quarters.
One step toward tomorrow. One step toward Section V.
One step into a story where there were no heroes, only villains.