The last thing Arjun Sharma remembered was the taste of cold coffee and the blue glow of his monitor at 3:47 AM.
He'd been awake for sixty-three hours straight, trying to fix a critical bug in the payment gateway before the quarterly review. His team lead had gone home at midnight. His manager had left at six. But Arjun stayed, because that's what Arjun always did. Twenty-seven days without a break. Eighty-hour weeks. The hero of Sprint 47.
His chest had tightened. His left arm went numb. And then—
Nothing.
---
When consciousness returned, it came with the distinct sensation of expensive carpet beneath his cheek and the smell of furniture polish.
*Odd,* Arjun thought groggily. *The office doesn't have carpet this nice.*
He opened his eyes to find himself face-down on an ornate rug that probably cost more than his annual salary. Scratch that—his *former* annual salary, because he was pretty sure he'd just died.
"You're awake. Excellent. His Grace requires tea in the eastern parlor."
Arjun rolled over to find a stern woman in a black dress looming over him. She had the kind of face that suggested she'd never smiled in her life and wasn't about to start now.
"I... what?" he managed.
"Tea. Eastern parlor. His Grace has guests arriving within the hour, and you've already wasted precious time collapsed on the floor like a common drunkard." She sniffed disapprovingly. "I specifically told the Duke that hiring someone from *your* background was a mistake, but he insisted on charity cases."
Before Arjun could process this absolutely unhinged statement, the woman swept away in a rustle of starched fabric, leaving him alone on the world's most expensive carpet.
He sat up slowly, taking stock. His body felt wrong—lighter, younger, with hands that had never known keyboard calluses. He was wearing some kind of butler's uniform, complete with white gloves and a waistcoat that fit perfectly despite him having no memory of ever putting it on.
The room around him was ridiculous. Genuine oil paintings on the walls. Crystal chandeliers. Furniture that belonged in a museum. The kind of ostentatious wealth that screamed "evil noble" in every piece of media he'd ever consumed.
*Oh no.*
The realization hit him like a second heart attack.
*Oh no, oh no, oh no.*
This wasn't just any generic fantasy world. The aesthetic, the "Duke," the cruel head maid—he knew this. He'd played this. Well, his younger sister Priya had played it, and he'd watched over her shoulder during one particularly boring Diwali when their internet was down.
"Heartstrings of the Celestial Court." A trashy otome game with gorgeous art, terrible writing, and exactly one defining characteristic: every single route ended with the apocalypse.
The game had five capture targets, five romance routes, and five different flavors of total kingdom destruction. Plague route. War route. Demonic invasion route. Economic collapse route. And the fan-favorite "scorched earth because everyone betrayed everyone" route.
And if this was that game, then the Duke in question could only be—
"You there! Butler!"
Arjun turned to find a man striding down the hallway, and his stomach dropped straight through the floor.
Tall. Silver hair. Piercing violet eyes. A face so precisely handsome it looked computer-generated, because it *had* been. The black and silver aesthetic. The perpetual scowl. The aura of someone who'd murder you for serving tea at the wrong temperature.
Duke Cassian Valorian. The "Evil Duke" capture target. The man whose route ended with him literally burning the kingdom to ash because the heroine chose someone else.
"Y-yes, Your Grace?" Arjun stammered, scrambling to his feet.
The Duke looked him over with the expression of someone examining a particularly disappointing insect. "You're the new butler?"
"I... appear to be?"
"Wonderful. Another incompetent." Cassian pinched the bridge of his nose. "Mrs. Blackwood assured me you'd been trained. Can you at least manage to serve tea without spilling it on visiting dignitaries?"
Arjun's mind raced. In the game, Duke Cassian had exactly three servants who ever appeared on screen: Mrs. Blackwood the head maid, Geoffrey the ancient gardener, and...
No butler. There had never been a butler.
Which meant he wasn't even a character. He was so irrelevant he hadn't merited a sprite or a single line of dialogue. He was set dressing that the developers hadn't bothered to dress.
"I'll do my best, Your Grace," Arjun heard himself say, because what else could he say? *Actually, you're a fictional character in a terrible game, and also we're all going to die?*
"See that you do. Count Rothford is arriving shortly, and he's already looking for excuses to undermine me at court. I don't need my own staff providing ammunition." The Duke swept past him, then paused. "And fix your collar. You look like a vagrant."
As Cassian disappeared around the corner, Arjun slumped against the wall.
This was fine. This was totally fine. He'd just died from overwork, reincarnated into a doomed otome game as a character so useless he didn't even exist in the original story, and now he had to serve tea to fantasy nobles while the countdown to apocalypse ticked away in the background.
He'd handled worse. Probably. Maybe not, actually.
The sound of a bell echoed through the manor—the kind of brass hand-bell rich people used to summon servants like they were dogs.
"BUTLER! Where is that TEA?"
Arjun pushed off the wall. Right. Tea. He could make tea. He'd made approximately ten thousand cups of chai in his previous life. How different could fantasy noble tea possibly be?
(Very different, as it turned out. But that was a problem for five minutes from now.)
As he hurried toward what he hoped was the kitchen, one thought crystallized in his mind with perfect clarity:
He was going to have to save this stupid, doomed world.
Because the alternative was dying from overwork twice, and that would just be embarrassing.
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