"Life imitates Art far more than Art imitates Life."
***
The blue light coming from my monitor was the only thing keeping my shoebox of a room from becoming pitch black. I had empty energy drink cans forming a stealth course throughout the floor of my room. A more honest person would see the state I was in at 2:47 am and call it a cry for help.
Me personally? I thought it was the perfect time to be a hater and read this garbage ass novel again.
Heirs of the Azure Orb.
Chapter 347.
By this time I was getting tired of the author and his fanboys gushing about how Leo, the most cliché golden boy protagonist showed restraint in dealing with the story’s designated punching bag. A minor villain so pathetic that even I was feeling insulted by this lazy writing.
Restraint my ass, humiliating a guy infinitely weaker than you in front of the whole academy is not peak character development. Speaking of "character development" let’s talk about the villain. Kaelen Leone is a character so deplorable that even with his minor screen time, he threatens to turn a story that was a bronze medal at best into a rusted coin. How many times are we going to see him be a perverted coward who picks on the servants and commoners and cowers towards the strong?
After seeing this exact same scene thirteen times, how am I supposed to feel satisfied with Leo disciplining a strawman villain to make him look good in comparison?
If I were Kaelen, I’d have thrown myself off a cliff by now just to stop embarrassing the family name. At least then he’d have accomplished something worthwhile.
I hit enter and cracked my knuckles. Good. Productive use of my time. The comment would get buried under Leo simps within the hour, but at least I’d contributed something honest to the discourse about—
The screen went weird.
I mean, my body has been threatening to shut down for a while now, maybe I just need some sleep.
And then the pixels started twisting inward being pulled in by some black spot in the middle of my monitor screen.
Okay... maybe I’m more cooked mentally than I thought.
"What the-"
My voice died in my throat. The world folded. My comment burned white-hot on the screen, the letters searing themselves into my vision. Then nothing.
I fell through something that had no business existing.
===
Then... cool fabric.
That was the first thing my brain latched onto as consciousness dragged itself back into my skull.
Soft. Really soft. The kind of soft that my student loan balance had never allowed me to experience firsthand. A breeze drifted through, carrying the scent of flowers I didn’t recognize.
I kept my eyes shut. This was a dream. Had to be. My body had finally given up and collapsed at my desk, and now my subconscious was mixing the novel with my anxieties about my useless English degree. Made total sense. People didn’t get sucked into computer screens. That was bad fiction. I would know. I was an expert on bad fiction.
Come on, Alex. Open your eyes. You’ll see the water stain on the ceiling, smell Dave’s gym socks from next door, and everything will be terrible and normal.
I opened one eye.
The water stain was gone.
Instead, I was staring at a vaulted ceiling with hand-carved wooden beams. Tapestries hung on stone walls, showing knights fighting monsters I recognized from illustration after illustration. A massive arched window dominated one side of the room, and morning light streamed through it, making little particles of dust float around like they were showing off.
The bed beneath me could have fit three of me with room to spare. The sheets were silk.
Oh no.
A mirror stood across the room. Ornate. Gilded. The kind of thing museums put ropes around.
I didn’t want to look. Every instinct I had screamed at me to stay in this bed and pretend nothing was wrong.
But I had to know.
My legs didn’t feel like my legs at all. I would compare it to walking on stilts if I ever did that before. When I finally reached the coveted mirror, my legs almost gave out from my worst nightmare coming true.
The face in the reflection had black hair that had strands glued to the forehead from the sweat with light grey eyes staring back at be instead of the mundane brown I’ve seen in the mirrors for twenty-two years. The face was a little younger than mine and kind of looked like he could be the protagonist of a K-Drama if he ever got some meat on these bones.
Sharp cheekbones. Pale skin that had never seen honest work. A face that would have been extremely handsome if not for the hollowness in the cheeks, the shadows under the eyes, the general aura of someone rotting from the inside out.
I’d seen this face. I’d seen it getting punched by the protagonist in fan art. I’d spent an hour ripping it apart in a comments section.
No. Absolutely not. I refuse.
The universe, apparently, did not care what I refused.
A knock on the door made me jump so hard I nearly knocked the mirror over. My chest went tight with panic. Or rather, Kaelen Leone’s chest went tight with panic, because that was apparently whose body I was piloting now.
"Young Master Kaelen?" A woman’s voice. Soft. Concerned.
I didn’t answer. I couldn’t. My brain was still buffering.
Okay. Okay. Let’s think about this.
I was inside Heirs of the Azure Orb. Inside the body of the story’s most pathetic villain. A character whose entire purpose was to make the protagonist look good by comparison. A guy who got publicly humiliated, stripped of his status, and eventually killed off in such an insignificant way that the novel spent exactly three sentences on his death.
And if I remembered the timeline correctly, Leo’s "heroic restraint" demonstration was happening soon.
Ah shit, I’m going to die.