"Trash! Know your place!"
The crowd shouted in unison. It was a perfect, rhythmic chant, programmed to loop every four seconds.
Student #4 shouted too.
"Yeah! Know your place!"
His throat burned, but the scream wasn't his. It was just audio playing through his vocal cords. He didn't know why he was shouting. He didn't know who he was shouting at. He was just a meat-puppet rigged to a soundboard.
His brain was empty. Just static. Just white noise and a script running on an infinite loop.
Fifty students stood in a circle. Same uniform. Same dumb face. Same looping animation of pumping a fist in the air.
In the center, Lance Wind—the quintessential 'Trash Young Master'—was grinding his polished leather heel into a crying kid's fingers.
"A commoner thinks he can breathe my air?" Lance sneered.
"Yeah! Breathe his air!" Student #4 yelled.
"Trash!"
"Trash!"
He nodded like a broken toy. His mouth moved on a rail, totally disconnected from his will.
Then—
[ BEEP. ]
A noise screamed inside his skull.
It wasn't a sound. It was the screech of a hard drive scratching against reality. It was the feeling of a puppet string snapping in the back of his neck.
[ SYSTEM WARNING! ]
[ Critical Logic Failure... Logic processors overheating. ]
[ Rebooting Consciousness... ]
Student #4 froze.
His mouth hung open, mid-jeer, drool pooling slightly at the corner of his lip.
The guy next to him kept yelling, eyes glazed over with that terrifying, glassy NPC stare. "Go home, loser!"
Student #4 tried to force his jaw to move. It felt like trying to lift a car.
"Go h—guh?!"
[ Transferring data... 98%... 99%... ]
A voice cut the scene apart like a blade.
"Let him go."
Heads snapped. The camera angle forcibly shifted. Student #4 felt his neck muscles twitch as an invisible force dragged his gaze to the entrance.
Leo Crimson stepped forward, his face practically glowing with Main Character Lighting. Even the sun seemed to reposition itself just to highlight his jawline.
The perfect protagonist template. Red hair that defied gravity. Determined eyes that held the weight of a tragic backstory. The orchestral BGM kicked in inside everyone's head, swelling with heroic violins.
The crowd gasped on cue.
"Who dat?!"
"It's the genius!!"
"Wow, so cool!"
Student #4's mouth tried to follow the script. The auto-pilot fought for control, jerking his jaw up and down.
"So... cool..."
"So... hero... ic..."
"Go save the poor ki—URGH!!"
He bit his tongue. Hard.
The pain was sharp. Electric. Visceral. It tasted like copper and shock.
[ Model: Student_Male_04_Var2 ]
[ Lore Injection: COMPLETE ]
SNAP.
The static in his head vanished. The blurriness in his eyes snapped into terrifying 4K Ultra HD. He smelled the heat from the magic crackling in the air. He felt the cold sweat sliding down his back. He felt the cheap, itchy polyester of the academy uniform chafing his neck.
He blinked, and for the first time, the eyelids felt like his own.
He was awake.
'Where is this? Who am I?'
He looked at his hands. Pale. Generic. The hands of a nobody. No calluses, no rings, no defining scars.
He looked at the crowd. They looked like wax figures melting in the heat. Dead eyes. Synchronized cheering.
'Was I doing that? Was I a robot five seconds ago?'
He looked at the center. Lance Wind. Blonde hair. Rich. Stupid. E-Rank flames dancing on his fingers, distorting the air.
I know him, the student realized, a cold dread pooling in his stomach.
Lance Wind. The Act 1 Villain. The XP bag for the protagonist. The guy who exists solely to get his ass kicked so the hero looks cool.
He looked to the right. Leo Crimson. The Hero.
The Protagonist.
The student's blood ran cold.
He knew this scene. He knew those uniforms—the gold trim on the elite class, the grey rags on the scholarship students. He knew the clock tower in the background, permanently stuck at 12:00.
Demon Hunter Chronicles.
The RPG. A stupid, addictive game that had conquered the real world—Earth. Millions upon millions of players grinding levels, analyzing lore, and spending cash.
And he was... he was...
He was just an NPC in the Academy Arc.
No name. No goals. Just texture. Just a warm body to fill the seat so the classroom didn't look empty on 'Ultra' graphics settings.
"Oh no," he whispered, the sound barely audible over the cheering mob.
The Academy Arc was fun on a 27-inch monitor with a bag of chips. You farmed demons, romanced waifus, and skipped dialogue.
But here? In reality? It was a meat grinder.
Terrorist attacks were scheduled for Tuesdays. Dungeon breaks in the cafeteria were a monthly event. A hidden Demon King candidate was studying in Class 1-A. Tournaments where "accidents" happened daily. Demons hijacking student bodies just to give Leo a reason to unlock a new skill.
'B-but who am I? I must have a name, right? Every human has a name.'
He checked his chest. No name tag.
He frantically patted his pockets. No unique items. No letter from home. Just a lint ball and a generic student ID card.
[ Name: _______ ]
[ Rank: F ]
[ Class: (???) ]
He was nobody.
Student #4.
Cannon fodder.
The guy who dies in a cutscene just to show that the villain isn't joking. The guy whose death isn't even tragic—it's just background decoration.
'I don't even have a default name? Am I just 'Student_04'?'
"Die, peasant!" Lance screamed.
The script moved forward. Lance threw a fireball.
Real fire. Screaming, hot death. The heat wave hit Student #4's face, singeing his eyelashes. It flew at the crying kid on the ground.
Student #4 flinched. His body wanted to stand still—his code told him to watch—but his survival instinct screamed MOVE.
WHOOSH.
A blur of motion.
Leo stepped in. Slash.
The rusty iron sword cut the fireball in half. Sparks rained down like fireworks, sizzling as they hit the cobblestone. Leo stood there, hair fluttering in the after-effect wind, looking impossibly cool.
"Stop it, Lance."
The crowd gasped.
"He cut the magic!"
"Is he a genius?"
"Don't you know? That's Leo Crimson! The next SSS ranker!"
"I heard he's already in Rank D! Can you believe a first-year is D-Rank?!"
The student next to Student #4 pumped his fist, spittle flying from his mouth. "So cool!"
Student #4 clamped his mouth shut. His jaw trembled.
'Don't say it. Don't say the line.'
He swallowed the auto-generated dialogue like a pill.
Leo pointed his sword at Lance. "You fight me, or you fight no one."
Lance turned beet red. "You... you scholarship charity case!"
While the Main Characters started their monologue—a conversation that would definitely last three minutes despite them being in mortal combat—Student #4 looked around.
Everyone else was captivated. The girl to his left was trembling with admiration. The guy to his right was sweating with excitement.
They were all real now. Their faces looked unique, not copy-pasted.
But they were stuck in the plot. They were going to watch the fight. They were going to pick sides. They were going to get blasted by stray magic.
'I need to leave. Right now.'
He knew the lore. He knew the mechanics.
In about two minutes, a faculty member, Professor Ironwood, would show up and blast everyone with a 'Gale Force' spell to stop the fight.
It was a scripted event to show the power gap between students and teachers.
Anyone standing within ten meters would get tossed into a wall.
10 HP damage.
For Leo? A scratch. A minor inconvenience.
For Student #4?
He checked his internal status.
[ HP: 15 / 15 ]
10 damage was two-thirds of his life bar. It was a fractured rib. It was internal bleeding. It was a week in the infirmary—and the infirmary was run by a suspicious nurse who experimented on students with 'weird mana signatures.'
'Nope. Absolutely not.'
He took a step back.
Nobody noticed. All eyes were on the shiny Protagonist. The narrative gravity was pulling them in.
He took another step.
Then he turned.
He didn't run. Running draws aggro. Running looks suspicious. Running triggers the 'Chase' AI in aggressive mobs.
He walked. Fast. The "I really need to pee" walk. The "I left the stove on" walk.
He slipped out of the crowd. He ducked into the cool shadow of the armory building, away from the heat of the fire magic.
He leaned against the cold brick wall and slid down, clutching his chest.
His heart was hammering against his ribs like a bird trapped in a cage. He gasped for air, realizing he hadn't breathed in a full minute.
"I'm alive," he whispered, his voice cracking. It sounded foreign to his own ears. "I'm actually alive."
A blue window flickered in the corner of his eye.
[ System Error. ]
[ ID: Student #4 ]
[ Status: Awake ]
[ Anomaly found! Anomaly found! ]
[ Attempting to patch... ]
[ Patch failed! ]
[ Code Blue: ACTIVATED ]
Student #4 didn't know what the hell was happening, but he suddenly felt heavy. It wasn't just panic. It was memory.
It hit him like a download bar completing in a millisecond. Memories of a family... memories of a childhood...
[ Name assigned! ]
'Name? For me?'
Student #4... the NPC who woke up... the character created to fill a seat and cheer in the background...
He watched the words form in his mind's eye. His heart beat wildly against his chest. It was happening. It was really happening.
[ Name: Kaizen Renji Asahina ]