“Charles IV, King of Bohemia and Holy Roman Emperor, had a long and successful reign.
The Empire he ruled from Prague expanded, and his subjects lived in peace and prosperity.
When the Emperor died, the whole Empire mourned.
More than seven thousand people accompanied him on his last procession.
The heir to the throne of the Holy Roman Empire was Charles’ son, Wenceslaus IV, whose father had prepared him for his whole life.
But Wenceslaus did not take after his father.
He neglected affairs of state for more frivolous pursuits.
He even failed to appear for his own coronation as Emperor, which did little to endear him to the Pope.
Wenceslaus ‘the Idle’ did not impress the Imperial nobility either.
His difficulties mounted until the nobles, exasperated by the inaction of their King, turned for help to his half-brother, King Sigismund of Hungary.
Sigismund decided on a radical solution.
He kidnapped the King to force him to abdicate, then took advantage of the ensuing chaos to strengthen his own power in Bohemia.
He invaded Bohemia with a mighty army and began plundering the territories of the King’s allies.”
That was how history was recorded.
That was how it was supposed to go.
But as always, history does not go the way people want it to.
“Where am I?”
He muttered the words aloud, his voice raspy and strange in the quiet dark.
He didn’t open his eyes right away, but his hand moved instinctively to reach for his phone or pull up his blanket.
Instead, his knuckles scraped against rough, hard wooden boards and prickly straw.
He blinked his eyes open.
There was no light from a monitor.
No familiar glow of his room.
Just a tiny, unglassed window shutter casting a sliver of moonlight across a small room built of heavy wooden logs and thick oak beams overhead.
“Where…
where the hell am I?”
As he drew in a sharp breath to steady himself, a wave of stench hit the back of his throat so hard he gagged.
It wasn’t just the smell of an old house.
It was a thick, suffocating mixture of unwashed wool, stale sweat, damp wood smoke, and the heavy, metallic stench of dried blood sticking to his tunic.
There was no fresh linen scent, no soap, no clean draft from an air conditioner—just raw, unfiltered grime that made his lungs burn.
He sat up slowly, rubbing his face.
His mind scrambled to piece together how he had gotten here.
He hadn’t gone out drinking.
He hadn’t been camping.
The last thing he remembered was sitting in his chair late at night.
He had just wrapped up playing Kingdom Come: Deliverance II, and the itch hit him to go back to where it all started.
He booted up the first Kingdom Come, determined to do a full, hyper-optimized playthrough—grinding stats in Skalitz, picking every herb, beating Kunesh, and doing every single side quest before the village fell.
And then…
the Coke.
He remembered reaching out in the dark, his hand knocking the full glass right over the top mesh of his PC tower.
There was a sharp, violent CRACK, a brilliant flash of blue light, a jolt running straight up his arm, and then total blackness.
Did my rig short-circuit?
Did I get electrocuted?
Am I in a hospital?
He looked around the wooden room again.
This doesn’t look like an ICU.
He brought his hands up to his face and froze.
In the faint moonlight, the hands looking back at him weren’t his smooth, desk-bound hands.
They were broad, rough, heavily calloused, and caked with dried dirt and dark blood under the fingernails.
A sudden, tearing headache slammed into the back of his skull, forcing a gasp out of his lungs.
He doubled over, pressing his palms hard into his temples.
Memories that weren’t his flooded in all at once—not as distant video clips, but as raw, bleeding reality.
He remembered the heat of the forge in Skalitz and the weight of his father Martin’s hammer.
He remembered laughing at the tavern, throwing dung at Deutsch’s house, and the soft warmth of Bianca’s hand by the stream.
And then came the horror.
The thunder of horse hooves.
The yellow banners of the Cumans.
The sight of his mother cut down in the dirt, his father collapsing near the forge, and the suffocating terror of running through the mud while arrows whistled past his ears.
He felt the cold rain pouring down as he rode frantically toward Talmberg, feverish, bleeding, and praying for help.
When the wave finally passed, he was lying flat on his back, gasping for air, his heart hammering violently against his chest.
He wasn’t sitting at his desk anymore.
He was sitting in a wooden cottage room inside Talmberg Castle, wearing the blood-stained clothes of a blacksmith’s son.
He was Henry.
“No, no, no…
this cannot be happening,” he whispered frantically, dragging his calloused hands through his greasy, dirt-matted hair.
“I like playing games, but I don’t want to bloody live in one!”
He pulled his knees to his chest, his breathing ragged in the cold air.
He knew history.
This was 1403—a world barely recovering from the devastation of the Black Death.
Simple things from his time that even the poorest people took for granted—clean running water, modern medicine, basic soap, electricity—didn’t exist here.
Things that an unemployed teenager in the 21st century could easily buy at a corner store were luxuries that even the highest Bohemian nobles couldn’t purchase with all the silver in Kutná Hora.
What am I supposed to do here?
Live as a dirt-poor peasant in the middle of a civil war?
His mind raced.
His mother was dead.
Martin was dead.
Skalitz was reduced to ash and corpses.
He tried to push himself upright against the wooden log wall, but a sharp, white-hot knife of pain flared through his left thigh.
He collapsed back onto the straw with a low groan, clutching his leg.
Beneath his fingers, through the stiff, blood-crusted fabric of his hose, he felt a thick roll of linen bandage tightly wrapped around a deep puncture wound—the arrow bite from his desperate ride to Talmberg.
His whole lower body throbbed in rhythm with his heartbeat.
His lips were dry and cracked, his throat felt like it was lined with sandpaper, and a dull, feverish heat radiated off his skin.
This wasn’t a game bar slowly refilling with health—his body was battered, exhausted, and genuinely on the edge of collapse.
Then a sharp realization cut through the terror.
Wait…
I know the plot.
Technically, he wasn’t just a blacksmith’s boy.
He was Sir Radzig Kobyla’s secret bastard.
In a feudal society where bloodline was everything, that was his only real lifeline.
It was the one advantage that could keep him from rotting in a field—if he could actually survive long enough to reach Rattay.
Panicking, he swung his legs off the straw bed and looked around the cramped, moonlit space.
Near the corner stood a small, rickety wooden desk.
Resting on top of it was a roll of clean linen cloth left behind by whoever had brought him into the room.
Henry blinked, staring at the desk.
He wasn’t just seeing a roll of cloth.
Floating directly above the linen, suspended in thin air in glowing, translucent text, were faint lines of information:
Bandage Condition: 100% Weight: 0.1
Henry froze, his heart hammering against his ribs.
He rubbed his eyes, expecting the floating text to disappear, but it stayed right there, perfectly crisp against the dark wood.
Am I losing my mind?
Is my brain hallucinating a HUD?
With a trembling hand, he reached out.
His fingers brushed against the rough texture of the linen bandage, but his touch didn’t affect the floating tag above it at all.
He swallowed hard, a wild, unbelievable thought taking root in his head.
He focused on the bandage and mentally commanded: Store.
Pop.
The roll of linen vanished from the desk instantly, disappearing into thin air without a sound.
Henry sucked in a sharp breath.
The shock was so violent his mouth went bone-dry.
He took a heavy gulp of saliva, his terror suddenly mixing with a surge of utter disbelief.
He let out a short, hysterical laugh into the quiet dark.
He closed his eyes, focused his mind, and spoke the word in his head:
Inventory.
A subtle, golden shimmer rippled across his vision.
When he opened his eyes, the dark wooden walls of the room blurred slightly.
Hovering right in front of him was a glowing, full-color interface—the exact, polished menu system straight out of Kingdom Come: Deliverance II.
In the center stood a detailed, full-body render of Henry wearing his blood-stained tunic.
He stared at the golden interface floating in his vision.
There were no objective markers flashing across his eyes, no quest logs detailing his next step, and no mini-map showing the layout of Talmberg.
If he wanted to find a way out of this castle, he would have to use his own eyes, ask real guards, and navigate the dirt roads himself.
But as his gaze settled on the Inventory tab—showing his current carrying capacity, the condition of his bloodied tunic, and the single linen bandage sitting in his mental storage—a cold sense of focus settled over him.
He didn’t have a game system to play the story for him, but he had a vault to hoard what he needed, and he knew every twist of the tragedy that was about to unfold.