"Another piece of shit."
I tossed the novel onto the rubbish pile, a small mountain that’s been growing steadily while I wait for the army to finish their reports.
Not much else to do in my position. The useless ants down below handle the grunt work. I just wait for results.
So I read. Escape into other worlds through fiction, kill time between campaigns.
And every single time, I was disappointed.
I slouched back in my chair, tapping a finger against the mahogany desk. Another novel. Another generic heroine. The kind with a personality like warm milk.
Fine enough on their own, I suppose. But the author had the sheer audacity to make her the final girl while filling the same world with brilliant, passionate, genuinely interesting women who just so happened to be insane.
Why settle for the bland one? A little spice never hurt anybody, right?
"Even the villainess novels are boring now."
I muttered.
"They’re not even crazy. They’re just... lukewarm spicy. A sprinkle of possessiveness wrapped in a redemption arc."
I pushed myself up and walked to the floor-to-ceiling window. Below me, a captured city sprawled under the empire’s flag, the crimson banner snapping proudly in the wind.
Another perfect campaign. We barely even broke a sweat. After the first great war, the empire’s technological growth exploded. Everything after that was cleanup duty.
Glory, fear, money. I collected them all like trinkets. Got everything a man in my position could possibly want.
Everything except what I actually wanted.
A batshit crazy woman who wanted me back.
But real life doesn’t really produce women like that. And if it did, they’re locked away in prisons or mental asylums, doped up and drained of whatever fire made them interesting in the first place.
The real world had a way of grinding down anything sharp.
"Is that really so much to ask for?"
I sighed, hands shoved in my pockets, gaze drifting up toward the sky. The same bored expression I’ve worn for years.
Then there I saw it. A distortion in the air. Something roughly plane-shaped, but wrong, like heat shimmer over asphalt, except it was bending the sky around it.
"The hell is that?"
I narrowed my eyes.
But before I could fully process the thing, before the thought even finished forming in my skull...
"Is that a nuclear warh—?"
✧ ✦ ✧
THUD!
"H-Holy shit, I think you killed him, man!"
The transition was jarring. One second I was staring death in the face. The next, I felt like my skull had been introduced to a sledgehammer.
Along with the pain came a voice, an irritating, squeaky pitch that could only belong to a teenager or a particularly panicked young adult.
"F-Fuck, how was I supposed to know this pervert was that weak?!"
"You punched him with steel knuckles, dumbass! What’d he even do?!"
"He tried groping my girlfriend! This is perfectly justified! I thought he was stronger!"
Pervert?
I had collected a lot of nicknames over the years.
Butcher. Tyrant. Monster in human skin.
Pervert, however, was definitely not one of them.
Not that I wasn’t one, admittedly. My taste in women was more than a little... specific. But I had always made damn sure to keep that particular inclination private. I might have been eccentric, but even I wouldn’t risk my career over something as mundane as public indecency.
Unless, of course, the woman in question was a villainess. Then the odds might have climbed to about ninety percent.
But I had definitely never met one before. So what the hell was this kid talking about?
"T-The hell...?"
I coughed the words out, barely managing to form them before a spike of pain shot through my skull.
"H-He’s awake! Fuck, scram before he gets a good look at us!"
The sound of feet sprinting through grass was the last thing I heard before I forced my eyes open. The first thing I saw was a forest. Beside me sat a burlap sack large enough to fit a human body.
And what did they mean by ’before I could get a good look at them?’
What the hell was going—
"A-Agh!"
My head throbbed again. But this time, the pain wasn’t from blunt-force trauma. This was something else entirely. Memories flooded my skull like a presentation running at a hundred thousand times speed.
Except I was absorbing every single frame with 100% retention.
Reyn Brimstone.
A pervert with a latent talent for sword fighting and light magic. Too lazy to actually pursue either. Currently ranked lowest in the academy’s annual examination for the third consecutive year.
A pure and utter failure of House Brimstone, a family of legends and elites that had once again produced a prodigy.
Too bad that prodigy was an absolute bastard who coasted on the bare minimum and used his family name to chase bland women rather than climb up in life.
"Is this... who I am now?"
I opened my eyes again, using the tree I had apparently crashed into to force myself upright. My head still pounded, the pain relentless.
But...
"Hehe..."
I couldn’t help it. I laughed. There were a hundred reasons I could list, more, if repetition was allowed.
But first and foremost?
Transmigration. Reincarnation. Isekai. Whatever name you wanted to slap on it. It was something not even the brightest minds of the empire could have dreamed up.
Yet here I was. And even better—
This world wasn’t unfamiliar. Not entirely at least. House Brimstone wasn’t some random noble family plucked from the ether of my scrambled memories.
No. I had heard of this place before I was ever transported here.
’Is this... the piece of shit novel I read? The one with the crazy villainesses?!’
I tried to take a step forward and immediately ate dirt, face-planting into the grass. My mind was still reeling from the fact that I’d been struck with steel knuckles by people I could only assume were significantly larger than my new body.
Because after all, what kind of setup like this let a man start at the peak of life? Definitely not any novel worth reading.
"Looks like there really is a god..."
I muttered into the dirt.
Then planted both palms against the ground and forced my head up, face streaked with grass and soil. A grin split my lips wide enough to hurt.
"I hope she’s an insane goddess as well...!"