The match began.
As the referee's call signaled the start, his opponent came slinking closer.
'My neck's stiff.'
Ryu Tae-sin rolled his head to one side and shook the stiffness out of his body.
Perhaps it was that ease that did it; a vein rose on his opponent's forehead.
Nobody would have called it strange if the man took it as contempt.
But Ryu Tae-sin paid no mind to the anger on his opponent's face.
The bald fighter was, in the end, the challenger, and Ryu Tae-sin was the champion.
A lion seated on the throne had to carry himself with ease and dignity, always.
Ryu Tae-sin's eyes began to track his opponent.
And the bald fighter, meeting them, felt a chill run through his whole body.
'What kind of eyes are those......'
The sense of having become prey sent a weakness crawling into the backs of his knees.
It felt as though his heartbeat were slowing.
As the pumping dropped off, the signal came first from his fingertips and his toes.
His body was going sluggish.
For a fighter, quick movement is a basic virtue.
A fighter whose hands and feet are bound is worse than an amateur.
Ryu Tae-sin closed in slowly.
He was in no hurry.
He could already feel it.
'I've won.'
There was no telling what might happen inside the octagon, but Ryu Tae-sin was certain.
His opponent was already afraid.
However full of variables the octagon might be, a rabbit does not bite a lion to death.
Tap.
Ryu Tae-sin's lead foot checked his opponent's.
'Damn it!'
The man panicked a beat too late and tried to pull away, but Ryu Tae-sin's body was faster.
Pivoting on that lead foot, Ryu Tae-sin's hips snapped around.
CRACK!
Ryu Tae-sin's fist drove into the man's jaw.
A straight that had landed clean, beyond any room for doubt.
The man's body folded, and the match came to a flat, anticlimactic end.
WAAAAAAAAH!
The champion had not betrayed their expectations, and a huge cheer burst from the stands.
Ryu Tae-sin came down out of the octagon with an indifferent expression.
There was no damage to speak of. A right hand thrown with no setup at all had buried itself in the man's jaw.
It was not that his opponent had lost for want of skill.
Ryu Tae-sin was simply strong beyond spec.
40 fights, undefeated.
SFC champion in 3 weight classes, and an unbeaten fighter.
That was Ryu Tae-sin.
And so the cheering stirred nothing in him at all.
'Boring.'
He had taken up fighting because he loved the struggle, but no opponent had ever managed to raise his fighting spirit.
They were all far too weak.
Their movements were transparent to him, and no strategy they brought ever worked.
It was dull.
Ryu Tae-sin's division, at present, was middleweight.
He had climbed here step by step, starting from lightweight.
From middleweight on he had not even cut weight, taking his fights in his everyday condition.
A few kilos of body weight made no real difference to him.
He felt no urge to jump another division either.
'It would be the same anyway.'
Fighters above his weight stirred no will to win in him either.
At some point a listlessness beyond description had come over him.
"Maybe I'll retire."
The words came out before he knew it.
His many staff and cornermen startled badly at that.
"You...... what are you talking about?!"
"You take something?! Retirement, out of nowhere!"
The locker room went noisy in an instant, and Ryu Tae-sin frowned.
"It was just something I said."
The fuss died down, and the coaches and the other fighters each threw him a word of advice.
Most of it was worthless stuff, nothing but their own interests laid out at length.
'Parasites, the lot of them.'
Ryu Tae-sin knew.
They did not see him as a colleague.
A simple payday.
They were parasites leaning on the unprecedented star power of the name Ryu Tae-sin.
He had never been one to hunger after money, so he had let it go, but lately they had started reaching into his private life as well, going through his phone and his room.
It grated, but cutting them loose was more trouble than it was worth.
Tedium.
A maddening tedium was eating Ryu Tae-sin alive.
He could not summon any drive.
He had already earned all the glory and money he needed. Earning more would not raise the quality of his life.
Ignoring the coaching staff, Ryu Tae-sin picked up his phone.
There was one novel, and only one, that he had been keeping up with religiously of late.
The content was trivial, run-of-the-mill cookie-cutter fantasy, which was exactly what made it perfect for killing time without thinking.
[I'm an Outcast in Reality but a Hero in Another World?]
The title was such garbage that at first he could not bring himself to touch it.
But once he actually started reading, it was passable enough.
'The protagonist is frustrating, though.'
Ryu Tae-sin could not understand the spineless, pathetic character of the protagonist.
Even so, the protagonist kept clearing one hardship after another and growing.
And along the way, countless peerless beauties gather around him.
Pfft—
A laugh escaped him.
The story had no grounding in reality and no artistic merit either, but as a way to fill dull hours it was not half bad.
***
"Mmm......"
Ryu Tae-sin let out a groan and opened his eyes.
'Must have fallen asleep without noticing.'
Then, in the moment he went to lift himself up.
"......What?"
His body was heavy.
Not heavy from fatigue.
It was nothing at all like the weariness that comes from being tired.
The dead weight of it felt like sandbags.
The sensation was so skin-crawlingly vivid that he looked at his arm without thinking.
It was not his arm, honed like a well-whetted blade.
It was thick, fleshy, plump.
Ryu Tae-sin blinked.
'Am I dreaming?'
He looked around, and the first thing to catch his eye was the wreckage of belongings scattered everywhere.
'A shambles. And besides that...... I don't think I've been drinking, so why does it feel like my head is splitting?'
It was absurd.
He had only ever heard the phrase 'my head is splitting' in words; this was the first time he had lived it.
'And what's this lump of fat.'
Hah......
He was dumbfounded.
From first to last, nothing made sense.
Ryu Tae-sin tried, at least, to get to his feet.
But with fat caked all over him, even the simple act of standing was not easy.
CRASH!
A table and a chair went sprawling.
"......Haha."
The situation was so unreal that a hollow laugh slipped out.
A dream?
That was the most reasonable answer.
But Ryu Tae-sin felt it instinctively.
'This isn't a dream.'
What he felt was a solidity fundamentally unlike a dream.
This was not a dream.
Then what was happening to him?
The confusion found no resolution; it chased its own tail.
As Ryu Tae-sin staggered, unable to steady himself, a voice came from behind him.
"Young master, it is about time you returned."
It was cold.
A low baritone, but there were thorns in the voice.
Ryu Tae-sin's head turned.
"Young master?"
The man in front of him.
An old gentleman in an immaculate tuxedo.
An old gentleman with the look of someone who had stepped out of a film.
But something was off.
It was a face he had certainly never seen before, and yet something about it was familiar.
Then, all at once, the headache came. Along with pain like his skull splitting open, countless fragments of memory began to surface.
"......Ethan Blante? What is all this?"
The memories were scattered in every direction.
Memories like a puzzle dumped out of its box came flooding in, unsorted and indiscriminate.
It was disorienting.
The splitting headache felt ready to drop him where he stood, but Ryu Tae-sin clenched his teeth and held on to his mind.
"Ethan? Blante?"
Even in the middle of the chaos, the names felt familiar.
"The novel?"
The outcast-in-reality whatever-it-was?
"Haha."
A hollow laugh slipped out.
Right. In that case, the pieces start to fit.
Once he understood the situation, the tangled memories began to stack themselves into order.
That did not mean the headache subsided. If anything, it grew fiercer.
'I got pulled into a novel?'
And a mass-produced trainwreck of a novel at that.
Ryu Tae-sin, no, Ethan Blante now.
He had no choice but to accept the reality that had landed on him.
He had no energy to spare for the fool's game of insisting it was a dream and running from the truth.
He tried to hold on to his composure as best he could, but there was someone there to get in the way of it.
"You appear to have lost your reason again."
A look of contempt.
The face was expressionless, but there was a faint trace of feeling in the eyes.
Ethan saw it.
'Nade.'
Ethan's personal butler.
Arrogant to the bone and utterly without restraint, Ethan had heaped countless insults on Nade.
But Ethan, no, Ryu Tae-sin, who had read the novel, knew one thing.
That being a mere butler was not all Nade was.
And the old man came closer with calm, measured steps.
Nade came on, treading over the broken glasses and plates, and the air he brought with him was not light.
"This time I shall use my hands a little. It is the clan head's order, so do not hold it against me."
Nade's mouth drew into an arc as he said it, and Ethan's eyes narrowed as he watched.
'How do I play this?'
Finishing his read of the whole situation on this spot was beyond him.
At the very least he needed time to put his thoughts in order.
After a moment's deliberation, Ethan decided to go along with Nade's words quietly.
In that instant, Nade's hand reached for the back of Ethan's neck.
Ethan twisted on reflex.
He caught the outstretched hand, and his massive body loaded onto Nade's back.
All that mass disrupted Nade's center of gravity.
Ethan bent forward from there, and for a moment Nade's body floated into the air.
A near-perfect shoulder throw.
'Oh, hell.'
Ethan regretted the throw at the same moment he attempted it.
It had been a reflex.
But Nade's body, hard under his fingertips, did not feel like something this kind of technique would work on.
Whoosh—
Sure enough, Nade did not go over.
The weight went out from under him, and Ethan's head snapped up.
Nade stood in front of him, smiling pleasantly.
"I am quite surprised. This is the first time I have met a hand-to-hand art of this kind."
Nade seemed genuinely startled. But Ethan was no less startled himself.
'How did he get out of that?'
The throw had gone in properly, thanks to the old man's carelessness. Once a technique is more than 80 percent in, defending it is meaningless.
But Nade was standing there as if nothing at all had happened. By Ethan's common sense and experience, it was a phenomenon he could not account for.
"Let us end the games here and be on our way."
The contempt vanished from the old man's lined eyes.
"Fine."
Ethan raised both hands. There was nothing to be gained by resisting here.
'Unbelievable.'
It was the first time he had met one.
Someone he knew he could not beat just by looking at him.
***
When Ethan complied so readily, the one thrown by it was Nade.
The behavior ran directly against Ethan's usual vicious temper.
Because of it Nade stayed alert the whole way, worried that Ethan might bolt partway, while the man himself was not entertaining the thought at all.
'Pulled into a novel.'
An out-of-fashion premise fit for a third-rate story.
And he was living it.
'And why, of all people, this one.'
Ethan Blante.
Second son of a great sword clan renowned across the continent.
The station was good. But the names that came with it were nothing of the sort.
The utter wastrel of Blante.
The clan's disgrace.
The halfwit son of a great sword clan who feared the sword.
Even the reason for the fear was nothing out of the ordinary.
Ethan was a born coward, and he valued his own safety above all else.
That disposition is why Ethan fears the sword.
Talent and temperament so wretched it was hard to believe the blood of a great sword clan ran in him at all.
His standing inside the clan crawled along the floor to match.
But the biggest problem was something else.
'A bit-part villain.'
A device to make the original's protagonist look good.
A character with exactly that much standing, shaped for exactly that purpose.
Nowhere near a character with any dimension to him.
A stock, contrived villain, built to pattern.
'That's not happening.'
Ryu Tae-sin had no intention of carrying Ethan's character forward as written.
Because he had always been the predator, the head of the pack, the champion.
Going back to Earth never so much as surfaced in his mind.