"Man is nothing else but what he makes of himself. Such is the first principle of existentialism."
— Jean-Paul Sartre
***
Maybe I got the one thing every transmigrator in every story seemed to get.
The golden finger. The cheat. The broken ability that would make this nightmare survivable.
"Status," I said to the empty room.
Nothing.
"System Menu."
Nothing.
"Stats. Character Sheet. Inventory. Interface." I was getting desperate now. "Anything. Please. Come on."
Nothing. No blue screen. No floating window. No disembodied voice offering cryptic hints about my destiny. Just my own breathing and the slow realization that I hadn't been dropped into a game. There was no respawn. No save points. No overpowered skill that would let me punch my way through this world's problems.
I was just a guy in a dead man's body, and the funeral was already scheduled.
Fantastic. Really great. Ten out of ten isekai experience so far.
I grabbed the clothes the maid had left and started getting dressed. My fingers wouldn't cooperate. Had to redo most of the buttons because my hands shook so bad. The fabric felt wrong against my skin, too smooth and too expensive and too much like wearing a costume. Everything about this body felt like borrowing a car you didn't know how to drive. The limbs moved when I told them to, but there was a delay, a wrongness that made even standing in place feel exhausting.
A window on the far wall looked out over the courtyard. I walked toward it before I could talk myself out of it. Morbid curiosity, I guess. The same impulse that makes people slow down at car accidents.
Figures had gathered below. Hard to see details from this angle, but one stood apart from the rest. Tall. Confident. Golden hair that caught the morning sun like the world's most aggressive highlighter.
Leo von Valerius. The protagonist. The hero of Heirs of the Azure Orb.
The guy who was about to rearrange my face.
At least I get to meet a main character before I die. That's something. I can put it on my tombstone. "Here lies Alex. He saw a protagonist once."
The urge to laugh was building in my chest again. The bad kind of laugh. The kind that doesn't stop.
Another knock at the door. The maid didn't bother waiting this time.
"Young Master. It's time."
Of course it was.
I nodded because I didn't trust my voice. My legs felt like they belonged to someone else as I followed her out of the room. Don't trip. Don't run. Don't collapse in a heap and refuse to move. Just keep walking. One foot in front of the other.
The corridors went on forever. Portraits lined the walls, generations of Leones staring down at me with the kind of disapproval that only dead aristocrats could manage. They looked like they were judging me. Probably were, in some spiritual sense. Sorry, great-great-grandfather. Your legacy is now being operated by a guy who got here through the power of sleep deprivation and bad life choices.
If I survive this, I'm writing such a scathing review of this world's customer service.
We reached a set of double doors. Big ones. The kind of doors that existed to make whoever walked through them feel small. Light spilled through the gap as they opened, warm and golden, the kind of weather that belonged in a romantic comedy or a travel brochure.
Birds were singing somewhere. An actual nice day. Spring morning, flowers blooming, gentle breeze.
Seemed like a weird choice of backdrop for getting beaten half to death, but what did I know about narrative aesthetics?
"Young Master," the maid said at the threshold. Her voice was quiet. "Remember what I told you about dignity."
Right. I was about to get publicly destroyed in front of an audience, but I should make sure to look good while it happened. Wouldn't want to embarrass the family name more than my existence already did.
Aristocratic life. Gotta love it.
I stepped through the doors.
The courtyard smelled like cut grass and flowers. Stone pavers covered the ground, bordered by gardens that probably cost more to maintain than my college tuition. Nice place. Very scenic. Would have made a great Instagram post if Instagram existed here.
And there, in the middle of it all, stood the golden boy himself.
He looked exactly like the novel described, which somehow made everything worse. Golden hair tied back loose, sapphire eyes that practically glowed with self-righteousness, athletic build shown off by clothes that fit too well to be anything but custom made. He stood like a statue, one hand resting on the sword at his hip, head tilted at an angle that said he'd practiced this pose in a mirror.
Poster child for protagonists everywhere. I could almost hear the background music swelling.
Several other students flanked him. His entourage. His witnesses. His cheering section. I recognized them from the novel, faces I'd seen in illustrations and read about in fan discussions. Marcus Aldren, the loyal best friend type. Elena Morgenthorne, silver hair and cold expression, the designated ice queen. A few others whose names I couldn't drag up through the fog in my brain.
Leo's eyes found me as I approached.
For a second, those sapphire eyes just looked. Not angry. Not contemptuous. Something worse. He was sizing me up the way you'd look at a math problem. Figuring out the simplest solution.
Blue light shimmered around his knuckles. Mana. Just a faint glow, barely visible in the sunlight, but it was there. A reminder of what he could do. What he was about to do.
He wasn't smiling.
Of course he's not smiling. Heroes don't smile when they're about to deliver justice. That would ruin the aesthetic.