Alucard learned early that the world did not want him awake.
When he was a child, the hours felt tolerable. Reality still carried a softness then—a muted hum of possibility. But as years passed, the world hardened into something sharp and humiliating.
It demanded things from him he did not know how to give: ambition, confidence, resilience, presence. He failed at all of them quietly, repeatedly, until failure became the only language he spoke fluently.
So he learned to sleep.
Not the ordinary kind of sleep, but a waking slumber—a deliberate drifting inward where the noise of the world dissolved and something gentler took its place.
In his mind, there were skies untouched by pollution, kingdoms not ruled by money or cruelty, and people who saw him.
In those places, he was not weak. He was not ignored. He was not laughed at.
In those worlds, he mattered.
Reality, by contrast, treated him like a mistake that refused to erase itself.
He was twenty-two when the word loser stopped hurting and simply became factual. He lived with his parents, trapped in a small apartment that smelled of old paint and resignation. His father spoke to him only when necessary, voice clipped and tired, as if every sentence spent on Alucard was an unnecessary expense.
His mother looked at him with a careful sympathy that cut deeper than anger ever could.
"You should stop talking about those worlds," she would say gently. "People are starting to worry."
People were always worrying. Doctors, counselors, neighbors—strangers who believed they knew him after five minutes and a clipboard. They all wore the same expression: polite concern mixed with quiet dismissal.
Delusional.
Escapist.
Detached from reality.
Those were the words written about him when he wasn't allowed to hear.
They said he was sick because he spoke of reincarnation as if it were a destination, not a belief. Because he said death didn't frighten him—only continuing did. Because he talked about gods and fate and other worlds not as fantasies, but as promises that had been postponed.
Alucard did not argue with them.
Arguing required energy. Hope. A belief that being understood was still possible.
He had none of those left.
Loneliness wasn't loud. It didn't scream or beg for attention. It sat beside him in silence, heavy and patient, like a sentence waiting to be carried out. Friends faded one by one, their
messages growing shorter, their excuses thinner. Even when he had a girlfriend—someone who once claimed to love him—he never truly felt chosen.
She liked the idea of him.
She liked being needed.
She liked having someone beneath her expectations.
But she never liked him.
The accusation came suddenly, violently—like a blade pressed into his life without warning.
Sexual assault.
The words echoed in his skull long after they were spoken aloud. He remembered the way her voice trembled when she said it, how convincingly fear shaped her face. He remembered how quickly people believed her. How no one looked at him long enough to doubt.
In that moment, Alucard understood something devastatingly clear:
Truth had no weight.
Only narrative did.
Police lights flooded the street that night, red and blue bleeding into each other like a wound that wouldn't close. Neighbors peeked from behind curtains. Whispers crawled through the air faster than facts ever could.
His parents didn't scream. They didn't cry.
They just looked… defeated.
That hurt more than anything else.
When the handcuffs came out, something inside Alucard finally snapped—not loudly, not dramatically, but cleanly. A final thread severed. He did not resist. He did not plead. He simply turned and ran.
Not away from the police.
Away from the world.
His feet carried him through streets he'd walked his whole life, past places that had never once welcomed him. The city blurred, breath tearing through his chest, heart pounding not with fear but with an almost sacred clarity.
I don't belong here.
The mountain rose before him like a silent judge, its cliffs jagged and merciless beneath a moonless sky. Wind howled as he climbed, tearing at his clothes, his thoughts unraveling with every step.
At the edge, he stopped.
Below him stretched darkness—vast, endless, honest. It did not lie. It did not pretend to care. It promised only one thing: finality.
Alucard laughed softly, the sound stolen by the wind.
"So this is it," he whispered. "The door, not the end."
He did not think of his parents. He did not think of his girlfriend.
He did not think of the world that had already buried him while he was alive.
He thought of another sky.
Another body.
Another name.
"If there is a god," he murmured, stepping closer, "then listen for once."
Then he fell.
Death was not darkness.
It was weightlessness—an unbinding. The pain lasted only a fraction of a moment before dissolving into something vast and quiet.
Memories loosened their grip, stretching thin like smoke, yet his desire remained stubbornly intact.
I want another life.
Something heard him.
When Alucard opened his eyes, he was screaming.
Air burned his lungs, light stabbed through his vision, and his body—his new body—convulsed with unfamiliar strength and sensation.
Voices shouted in a language he did not recognize, rough and guttural yet strangely melodic.
He was smaller. Lighter. Stronger.
Alive.
"—a boy!" someone cried.
"By the gods, he breathes!"
"Fetch the midwife!"
The ceiling above him was wooden, not concrete. The air smelled of iron, fire, and earth. Magic—raw and unfiltered—prickled against his skin like static.
A name echoed in his mind, settling into place as if it had always been there.
Karl Olsan.
He did not cry like a normal child.
He stared.
Years passed, but the memories did not fade.
Karl grew with the knowledge of two lives coiled inside him—one weak and discarded, the other brimming with cruel possibility.
This world was not kind, but it was honest. Power mattered here. Strength shaped destiny. Fear was respected.
And Karl learned quickly.
He learned how to fight.
How to kill.
How to bend others with presence alone.
The gods of this world were real—ancient, hungry, and watching. One of them watched Karl more closely than the rest.
A god of despair. Of ruin. Of hatred born from betrayal.
It whispered to him in dreams, feeding the wound Alucard had carried across lives.
They will betray you again.
Humans do not deserve mercy.
Rule them—or erase them.
Karl listened.
He became an antihero draped in blood and legend, feared as much as he was worshipped. Cities burned in his wake. Kings knelt or died. People called him an Evil God, and for a time, he allowed it.
Not because he was evil.
But because hatred was easier than hope.
Yet even in the deepest shadow, light persisted.
Her name was Alice Vortex, a saintess born under a prophecy older than empires. Where Karl carried despair like a crown of thorns, she carried light like a wound she refused to let fester.
She did not fear him.
She saw him.
And for the first time since falling from that cliff, something inside Karl trembled—not with rage, but with the terrifying possibility of redemption.