Across the hall, half-hidden behind a fluted marble column, a lone boy sat with his tray balanced on his knees.
He was twenty, maybe twenty-one, lean in the way city rats are lean, sharp shoulders under a travel-stained cloak the color of wet ash. Dark-brown hair fell into darker eyes that never stopped moving, cataloguing, measuring, memorizing. His fingers were long and ink-stained; a cheap iron-bound journal lay open beside his plate, pages crammed with cramped handwriting and tiny, frantic doodles of the four laughing youths twenty feet away.
He stabbed a piece of sausage, watched the fat glisten as it cooled, and whispered to himself in a voice too soft for anyone else to hear.
"So the gang's finally assembled. Right on schedule."
The boy's name was Rhen Talavir, and he was not from this world.
He had died in the old one two nights ago, crushed under a collapsing shelf of light-novels while reaching for volume seventeen of a series titled *Zero Copper Saint*. He had woken up here, in the body of a nameless background extra, clutching a guild registration token and the full, terrible knowledge of what was coming.
He knew every beat.
In twenty-nine days, during their first C-rank escort quest, Kalia would be dragged into the trees by Viscount Cassian Arannis and three of his pureblood friends. They would take turns while Elaric was pinned, forced to watch, helpless and screaming until his voice gave out. Four days later, Kalia, unable to meet anyone's eyes, unable to meet her own reflection, would slip away in the night and open her wrists with Elaric's own dagger. Brenn would die a month after that, cut down shielding a village from the first wave of Elaric's revenge. Toothless would follow six months later, laughing and lying to the very end, beheaded in a back alley for "knowing too much."
And Elaric, gentle, earnest Elaric who was right now feeding Kalia a piece of honeyed pear from his own fingers, would break so completely that the world would learn a new name for terror: the Red Saint, the Orphan King, the boy who painted entire duchies with noble blood.
Rhen's cock twitched, traitorously, shamefully hard against the seam of his trousers.
He hated himself for it.
But the memory was vivid, too vivid: the way the novel had described Kalia's tears cutting clean tracks through the dirt and seed on her cheeks; the wet, animal sounds Elaric made when they forced her legs apart; the moment her eyes went dead while her body was still being used. Rhen had read that chapter three times, hand down his pants, hating every second and unable to stop.
Now she was right there, alive, laughing, licking blackberry syrup from Elaric's thumb with a teasing glint in her eye that the book would snuff out forever in less than a month.
Rhen's breath came shallow and quick. He shifted, trying to ease the ache without drawing attention, and felt the slick spot already forming in his smallclothes.
He dragged his gaze away, forced himself to chew the sausage, tasting nothing.
"I could change it," he whispered to the empty air around him. "I know the routes, the dates, the names. I could warn them. Save her. Save all of them."
His fingers tightened around the fork until the cheap tin bent.
"Or I could let it happen," he breathed, voice trembling with something too close to hunger, "and watch the most beautiful tragedy in the world play out exactly the way it was written."
He closed the journal with a soft snap, slid it into his cloak, and stood.
Twenty feet away, Elaric laughed at something Brenn said, head thrown back, throat exposed and trusting. Kalia leaned in and kissed the hollow beneath his ear, possessive and tender.
Rhen tasted iron; he had bitten his lip bloody without realizing.
He turned toward the registration desks, heart hammering against his ribs like a war drum.
One month.
Twenty-nine days until the world broke Elaric Voss and crowned him in blood and sorrow.
Rhen Talavir, the only one who knew, walked straight into the future carrying a secret sharp enough to cut fate itself in half, if he decided to use it.
Or to watch, breathless and aching, while the story he had loved and hated devoured the people in front of him alive
The breakfast hall's roar faded behind Elaric as he slipped between two marble pillars, murmuring, "Be right back, just need some air."
Kalia, Brenn, and Toothless nodded in lazy unison, mouths full, trusting.
"Be careful," they chorused, the words soft and warm with new friendship.
Elaric's smile never reached his eyes.
He moved like a ghost through side corridors, past tapestries of dragons and heroes, until he spotted the lone boy in the ash-grey cloak hurrying toward the eastern cloister—an unused arcade of cracked statues and dead fountains where no one ever went before noon.
Elaric followed.
The moment Rhen Talavir stepped into the shadowed seclusion, a fist like iron slammed into the side of his face.
The world exploded into white pain. Rhen's knees buckled; the stone floor kissed his cheek with a wet, meaty crack. Blood flooded his mouth, copper-bright and thick.
"How long have you been watching us, you piece of filth?" Elaric's voice was flat, almost gentle.
Rhen tried to answer. Another punch—harder, precise—snapped his head sideways. Cartilage crunched. His vision tunneled.
He never even managed to raise his hands.
Elaric straddled him, knees pinning Rhen's arms, and rained blows down with mechanical, horrifying calm. Each impact was a wet thud of knuckle on flesh—cheekbone shattering, nose flattening, teeth skittering across stone like spilled dice. Blood painted Elaric's fists crimson, warm and slick, dripping from his wrists in lazy rivulets that soaked into Rhen's cloak.
There was no rage in Elaric's face. Only cold, ancient certainty.
The final punch caved the front of Rhen's skull with a soft, sickening crunch. His body jerked once, heels drumming the flagstones, then went still. A thin ribbon of blood and something thicker oozed from one ear, pooling beneath the corpse's cheek like spilled ink.
Elaric stood. Breathed once, slow and steady. Wiped his knuckles on his already-ruined coat, smearing red across the patched wool like war paint.
He looked down at the ruined thing that had once been a boy and spoke to the silence.
"My name is Elaric Voss," he said, voice quiet, conversational. "And this is my second life."
He crouched, rolled the body over with one boot so lifeless eyes stared up at the vaulted ceiling.
"The first time around, I was the broken little saint. I watched them rape her while I screamed. Watched her bleed out in my arms four nights later. Watched Brenn die trying to drag me out of the fire I started. Watched Toothless laugh until a sword took his head. And every night for years I woke up tasting her blood on my tongue."
His smile was small and terrible.
"Then I died—gutted by some shining 'chosen hero' who called me monster while the crowd cheered. And when I opened my eyes again, I was twenty again, starving outside the Leaking Tankard, pockets full of holes… and a voice in my skull that wasn't there before."
He tapped his temple with a blood-slick finger.
[Multiverse Ultimate Villain System – Activated]
[Host: Elaric Voss]
[Directive: Burn the story that broke you. Write a new one in blood and fire.]
"I didn't believe it at first," he murmured, almost tenderly. "Thought I'd finally snapped. But then I started noticing people like you—readers. Possessors. Transmigrators. Little ghosts from other worlds who looked at us and saw characters. Some wanted to 'fix' the tragedy. Some just wanted to watch us suffer while they came in their trousers."
He nudged Rhen's corpse with a boot; it rolled limply, one arm flopping like a broken doll.
"You knew the exact date, the exact tree, the exact number of noble cocks she'd be forced to take while I watched. You were going to let it happen. Maybe film it with whatever twisted skill you brought from your old world. Maybe jerk off to her screams later."
Elaric's voice dropped to a lover's whisper.
"I decided the story ends differently this time."
He turned, footsteps echoing as he walked away, leaving the body cooling in its own ruin.
"Enjoy the prologue, hero," he called over his shoulder to the empty air, to the invisible readers, to the heavens that had dared make him a villain.
"This time, I'm not the one who breaks."
Blood dripped from his fingertips in slow, deliberate drops—crimson periods at the end of an old sentence.
Somewhere deep in his chest, the system chimed, soft and pleased.
[Hidden Quest Complete: Eliminate the First Voyeur]
[Reward: Memory Fragment Unlocked – Kalia Route (Revised)]
[New Title Gained: Author of Agony]
Elaric smiled, small and sharp and beautiful, and went back to his friends.
Breakfast was waiting.
So was the rest of forever.
And this time, he would be the one writing it in screams.