Kisuke died thinking about something stupid.
Not about his family.
Not about friends he hadn’t seen in months.
Not about any regret large enough to deserve being the last thought of a twenty-four-year-old man.
*Damn it, I didn’t save the game.*
That was it.
A truck, a curve taken too fast, a white light that didn’t come from any screen — and the last circuit in his brain spent its final spark of electricity mourning forty minutes of lost progress on a run he wasn’t even going to post.
For one eternal second of darkness, he thought it was a joke.
Thought he’d wake up sweating in his gaming chair, neck stiff, Discord still open in the next tab.
He didn’t wake up there.
He woke up cold.
Not the programmable cold of air conditioning.
A stone cold that had been drinking warmth out of the air for generations.
The smell reached him before his vision did — melting wax, old wood, and underneath it all, a trace of incense he recognized before he could even name why.
*Sandalwood.* The exact same scent described, word for word, in the flavor-text of a game called *The Age of Heroes* — the halls of Valdoria Palace, pure ambiance, no gameplay function, there for nobody except the people who actually bothered to read.
He had read it.
He had read all of it.
Eight thousand, four hundred and seventy-two hours of all of it.
Kisuke opened his eyes.
A ceiling of gray stone.
Dark timber beams.
A window set too high to reach, letting in pale light that ached in a way Tokyo light never had.
He sat up — and the hands that rose from the straw mattress were too small, too soft, too wrong to be his own.
He lifted one to his face.
Stopped.
Stared at his own fingers like they might answer a question he hadn’t figured out how to ask yet.
The blurred reflection in a copper jug answered for them.
A boy.
Seven years old, maybe eight.
Disheveled silver hair.
Amber eyes — the exact shade of amber that some secondary codex entry in the game had described, in a footnote ninety-nine percent of players never clicked, as *the mark of elf-blooded bastards.*
That small chest started beating too fast for the calm Kisuke was trying to fake.
*I know this room.*
He knew the stain on the ceiling — right there, above the central beam — that only resolved into the outline of a continent if you lay flat in the exact center of the bed and craned your neck at a stupid angle.
An easter egg.
A joke some designer had hidden there, one he’d only found during a wasted night hunting for content for a video he never finished editing.
*The Bastard Prince’s bed.*
He stood up too fast.
The dizziness nearly dropped him.
He caught himself against the cold wall and crossed the room in short, unsteady steps, the wrong body tripping over its own intentions, until he reached the window.
He rose onto his toes.
Pressed his chin to the freezing stone sill.
Valdoria spread out below, exactly the way his memory said it would.
Gray towers.
Dark slate roofs.
Walls that looked carved from a single seamless slab of rock.
To the north, the Throne Hall raised the banner of House Vorn — a black lion on a silver field, red claws.
To the east, the market was already waking in smears of colored canvas against the gray morning.
And far off, where the city gave way to hills, the dense dark line of Whisperwood Forest.
*The game’s first dungeon.
Recommended level five to ten.
And I’m here thirty years before anyone even knows it exists.*
His legs gave out before he decided to sit.
He slid down the wall to the cold floor and stayed there, knees pulled to his chest, trying not to let the panic get loud enough to carry into the hallway.
*This isn’t possible.*
He pinched himself.
The pain came sharp, childlike, more real than any dream had the right to be.
He pinched again, harder — not to wake up this time.
To confirm.
The stone stayed cold.
The incense stayed put.
Nothing gave.
*I died on a road in Tokyo and woke up inside the game I played my whole life.*
The game he’d taken apart in spreadsheets, speedrun until he knew every shortcut cold, argued about in forums until three in the morning with people whose faces he’d never seen.
And now he was lying in the straw bed of the Bastard Prince, son of King Aldric Vorn — thirty years before the main campaign even started.
Thirty years before the Portals opened.
Something shifted in his chest that wasn’t only fear.
It was hotter than that.
More dangerous.
The same shiver as picking up a new controller, seeing the “New Game” screen, and knowing — before he’d even picked a difficulty — that this time he’d do it differently than everyone who’d ever played before him.
He got up again.
Went to the basin of cloudy water on the table.
Splashed his face.
Drank a mouthful that tasted of iron and cold — and it was real, all of it absurdly real — and looked at his own trembling reflection in the water.
Hair like moonlit threads.
Amber eyes that seemed to hold their own faint light.
And a thin, almost invisible scar cutting across his left eyebrow — the same scar mentioned in some side-quest journal almost no player ever bothered to read: *the bastard received it as a child, during the incident in the royal garden.
His mother, the elven slave Lyria, died protecting him.*
His mother had been dead a year.
The calendar on the wall confirmed the date, carved in Roman numerals: 14th Moon of the Frost Season, Year 847 of the Aethon Era.
The Portals would open in Year 877.
*Thirty years.
Exactly.*
*A thirty-year speedrun*, Kisuke thought, *to conquer an entire continent before the rest of the world becomes somebody else’s farming map.*
He knew how this story ended for the people born inside it.
Knew that when the Portals opened, the Players would come — people from another world, infinite respawns, absurd builds, treating whole kingdoms like endgame content, with no idea at all that every NPC they killed for fun had been, a second earlier, a real person.
Kings fell in days.
A single optimized mage could wipe out entire armies.
There was no happy ending reserved for anyone born on the wrong side of the screen.
But he hadn’t been born on the wrong side.
He’d already seen the whole script before the play had even begun.
All he needed was a plan.
Well — he didn’t have a plan yet.
But he would.
And he had thirty years to build it.
The rusted metal chest in the corner of the room gave way to a wooden pin and a patience no seven-year-old had any business possessing.
Inside: two worn tunics, a pair of wool trousers, boots with soles worn thin.
And, wrapped in cloth at the bottom, a kitchen dagger — short blade, plain handle, not a single enchantment on it.
*The Bastard Prince’s starting item.
System classification: Common Trash.*
He took it anyway.
Turned it in his small hands until the weight settled.
*Not much.
But every empire started somewhere smaller than this.*
He dressed quickly — everything too big, everything smelling of mildew — and went to the door.
Unlocked, just pulled shut.
He cracked it open.
A stone corridor.
Torches already lit.
Empty, for now — but not for long.
Somewhere at the end of that hall there should be a guard: Borin, a man the game classified as level twelve, loyal to the King in theory and to his own pocket in practice.
Kisuke didn’t have a single coin to bribe anyone with.
He had something better.
He had thirty years’ worth of information advantage over every living thing in that castle.
He moved on the balls of his feet, hugging the shadows between torches — quieter than a seven-year-old body had any right to be.
Nobody expected the bastard to leave his room alone.
He was invisible through neglect, not skill — and for today, that was enough.
The spiral staircase at the end of the hall split: left led to the legitimate princes’ quarters, seven floors of luxury and constant watch; right led to the servants’ rooms, the kitchens, the stables.
And if you knew exactly where to look — a detail that only existed because some designer decided to give speedrunners a way to skip a tedious stealth section — there was a hidden door under the worn rug on the third step.
He lifted the rug.
The rusted hinge sat exactly where memory said it would be.
And for the first time since waking in that cold room, he smiled.
*Damian.* He needed to get used to that name.
Damian Vorn — the name his mother had given him before she died, the name none of his half-siblings ever used except to mock.
It didn’t matter.
It was better this way, even.
Damian would be the mask this world used to look at him.
Behind it, the mind of a man who’d died on a highway calculating optimal routes to the very end would keep running.
The maintenance corridor was narrow, low, thick with cobwebs.
He walked about twenty meters and turned into a fork that —
He stopped.
*This fork doesn’t exist in the game.*
On the map he had memorized, the corridor ran straight to the kitchens, no detours.
Here, a ramp climbed off to the left that simply shouldn’t have been there.
A chill ran up his spine that had nothing to do with the corridor’s temperature.
*The world isn’t a perfect copy of the game.*
That could be the best news of the morning, or the worst.
If the world diverged, thirty years of gameplay memory were worth less than he’d calculated the second he woke up.
But if it diverged — that also meant nothing here was scripted.
That there was room for him to push things somewhere no guide had ever described, because no guide had ever existed for this version of the world.
He filed the fork away in memory and kept to the path he knew.
Priority: confirm the basics before wandering into unmapped territory.
The royal kitchen was organized chaos — smoke and copper, carcasses hanging, dozens of servants running with trays, and in the center a man built like a wardrobe, white apron stained with blood and grease.
Chef Gromm.
One of the speedrunners’ favorite jokes: a cook by trade, with a combat build hiding behind the wrong recipe.
Damian didn’t go in.
He followed the side corridor to the stables instead, where the smell of hay and manure hit him like a slap and he didn’t mind it one bit.
Outside, the sky promised rain before noon — and he vaguely remembered some side-quest journal mentioning a storm on this exact day, used as cover for an assassination whose motive he’d never fully understood.
On the distant battlements, the silhouette of a spear-carrying guard paced back and forth.
Too far to make out a face.
Close enough that Damian would bet anything that, if he asked, the man’s name would be *Borin.*
Not today.
Today he needed to go back.
Because in two hours — the sun confirmed the estimate — there would be a ceremony that almost no real-world player had ever seen up close: the Class Awakening Ceremony.
Every child of the King, legitimate or not, had a right to the test.
The game never gave the player that option.
Because the Bastard Prince was just background scenery, and background scenery doesn’t get a class.
But he wasn’t background scenery anymore.
He retraced his steps, climbed back up, shut the door behind him, and sat on the straw bed to wait.
It didn’t take long.
Heavy footsteps in the hall, armor clinking, a bored, rough voice:
“Prince Damian. Your presence is required in the Hall of Blades. Don’t make this difficult.”
The door opened.
A middle-aged guard, unshaven, eyes that made it clear he’d rather be anywhere else.
He looked at the boy with silver hair, clothes too worn, a posture too upright to match either of those things.
Damian stood up.
Not hunched, not apologizing for existing — just watching the guard with a cold calm that made the man take half a step back without quite knowing why.
“I’ll get my boots,” Damian said, and his voice came out steadier than any seven-year-old body had the right to produce.
The guard nodded, confused, and waited in the hall.
Damian laced his boots with fingers still learning to obey him.
He looked at the kitchen dagger on the table, hesitated half a second, then tucked it into his waistband, under the tunic.
Not to use.
To remember that here, even trash became a weapon if you knew where to fit it in.
The Hall of Blades was a stone circle lined with rusted weapons — swords, spears, axes, each one a leftover from some war nobody told stories about anymore.
At the center, a black marble pedestal held a crystal sphere pulsing with a faint, living light.
And around it, the princes.
Darius first — eighteen years old, hair black as jet, the posture of someone who’d never once heard the word “no.” Roderick, twelve, round-faced, small eyes already calculating some mischief.
Cassius, the most handsome and the emptiest of the three.
Then a parade of names Damian catalogued automatically, without effort — Gareth, Lucian, Theo, Silas, Maren, Elara, Iris, Vesper, Cael, Orion, Juno, Tristan —
— and then a name that made him freeze for one full instant.
*Kael.*
There was no Kael in any guide, any wiki, any of the eight-thousand-odd hours he’d sunk into this world.
A thin boy, around ten, standing too far from the rest, staring at the floor with an intensity that had nothing to do with ceremonial boredom.
Damian filed that name away the way you handle an unfamiliar blade — carefully, without taking his eyes off it.
Last, Nova, five years old, held by the hand of a nursemaid, watching everything with eyes too big to understand why the older siblings were laughing.
Seventeen legitimate children.
And him, the eighteenth — the mistake, the bastard, the basement of the family tree.
Everyone looked up when he walked in.
Darius laughed first.
Short, dry, bored.
“Well, look at that,” he said, in the tone of someone born owning the world.
“The basement prince came out to play.”
Laughter spread — some of it genuine, most of it just echoing the heir out of reflex.
Damian didn’t react.
He counted.
*Seventeen pieces on the board.
A few will become allies without knowing it.
Most will need to stop mattering before I turn twenty.*
He walked to the pedestal without hurry and without hesitation, and the hall grew quieter than any laughter should have allowed.
Archmage Veldor, blue robes, the kind of expression that carries disgust and curiosity in equal measure, looked at him like he was examining an inconvenient stain on a rug.
“Prince Damian. Place your hand on the sphere. The System will do the rest.”
Damian did.
Cold shot up his arm, through his shoulder, exploded behind his eyes like a wave of light that wasn’t quite light — symbols from no alphabet he recognized, but that he *understood* anyway, because they were the same menus he’d memorized in another life, just translated into something this world could read.
The sphere glowed.
A weak gold.
Almost timid.
Veldor frowned.
“Interesting. The affinity is… low. Nearly nonexistent.”
More laughter.
Confident this time, unrestrained.
*A bastard with no magical talent* — the joke practically wrote itself.
But Damian wasn’t looking at the sphere’s weak gold light.
He was looking at a line of text only he seemed able to see, pulsing quietly at the edge of his vision:
> [LATENT CLASS DETECTED]
> REQUIREMENTS: INT 15+ | CHA 10+ | FIELD VISION UNLOCKED
> UNIQUE CLASS: STRATEGIST
> PROJECTED TIER AT MATURITY: A — UNDER IDEAL CONDITIONS
> POTENTIAL EVOLUTION: ???
He pulled his hand back.
The light died.
And he looked — at Veldor, at Darius, at each of the seventeen siblings, one by one, slow enough for the silence to settle on its own, without needing to be asked.
“Strategist,” he said.
The word landed in the hall like a sentence only he could read.
One full second of silence.
Then the laughter came back louder than before.
Darius laughed until he had to hold his stomach.
Roderick pointed a delighted finger.
Even little Nova laughed, not knowing why, just because everyone around her was.
Veldor shook his head, almost with genuine pity.
“A shame. Strategist is a support class. No power of its own, no distinction at all. You’ll end up an advisor, perhaps, if one of your brothers ever deigns to use you.”
Damian didn’t answer.
He just smiled — a small smile that never reached his amber eyes, the kind that only exists on someone who’s just heard a joke nobody else in the room is capable of understanding.
Because Strategist at level one was, yes, useless.
That much was true, and he knew it better than Veldor ever would.
But Strategist at level one hundred became Grand Strategist.
Then Conqueror.
Then War God — the only class on the entire continent capable of buffing an entire army like it was a single person, of seeing weaknesses no one else could, of predicting a move before the enemy had even decided to make it.
And he had thirty years to get there.
Twenty-three thousand, four hundred and ninety days, if he was counting right.
He was counting right.
He turned and walked out of the Hall of Blades without looking back.
The laughter followed him down the corridors, echoing off cold stone, and he let it echo.
None of it was worth anything — none of it would mean a single thing thirty years from now, and he already knew that with a certainty none of the seventeen would ever hold about anything in their own lives.
Because while they laughed, he was already counting.
And somewhere beneath the Hall of Blades he’d just left behind — in a tunnel that appeared on no map, past a fork that shouldn’t exist — something had woken up in the exact instant the crystal sphere recognized his class.
Something that was counting the days too.
Days until the Players Arrive: 10,958