"Hey! What’s that scum doing here?"
"How can he still be in the academy after committing such vile acts?"
"So much for everyone being equal, huh?"
"Yeah. If he were a commoner, he’d have been expelled already."
"Hah. If he were a commoner, he wouldn’t have even dared to pull sothing like that."
"You’re right. But it’s still unfair."
As I walked through the corridor, their voices followed like a swarm of flies—whispers filled with disgust, scorn, and contempt.
Every step echoed louder than it should have, like the building itself wanted gone.
And honestly?
I couldn’t even bla them.
This body—Lucien Ashborne—had done enough to deserve their hatred.
I pushed open the door to the dorm room and collapsed onto the bed with a long exhale.
My thoughts drifted.
How long had it been now?
Two hours.
That’s how long it’s been since I arrived in this world.
Since I died.
It happened so stupidly.
I was in my room, playing Asteria Online, drinking cola while grinding for the nth ti. Then—fizz, spark, pop. I spilled the can on the tangled ss of cables beside .
The next thing I knew, there was blinding light... and pain.
When I opened my eyes again, I was here—inside this world.
Inside him.
Lucien Ashborne.
Heir to the Ashborne County.
A villain through and through.
In the ga, he only existed for a few scenes—a throwaway character.
He strutted onto the stage, acted arrogant, picked a fight with the protagonist... and got crushed.
Humiliated.
A perfect punching bag for players to hate and for the protagonist to "grow stronger" by defeating.
That was it. His entire role—an experience booster with legs.
A villain so pathetic he didn’t even deserve a proper death cutscene.
And now, that villain... was .
From what I rember, at sixteen, Lucien enrolled in the Imperial Academy, supposedly to "live an ordinary school life."
Except his version of "ordinary" ant delinquency, arrogance, and violence.
He gathered a bunch of like-minded noble heirs and ford a social club—which was really just a fancy na for a gang.
They extorted weaker students, bullied commoners, and threw their weight around because of their noble blood.
He even had ties to black-market rchants and underground rackets.
Why?
Because it was fun.
He loved watching people flinch when he walked by, loved seeing their fear, their helplessness. Crushing anything that annoyed him gave him a twisted sense of satisfaction.
Then ca the protagonist—a commoner with absurd talent and charisma.
He stole all the attention, won the nobles’ respect, and even caught the eyes of the academy’s higher-ups.
Lucien couldn’t handle that.
So he targeted him.
His little circle of thugs tornted the protagonist daily—mocking his origins, vandalizing his things, insulting his dead parents.
They even planned to corner him one night for a beating.
It went about as well as you’d expect.
The protagonist and his allies crushed them.
Lucien’s cris ca to light, and the academy handed down punishnt.
Public humiliation, disciplinary action, and absolute ruin.
Now, everywhere I went, people whispered.
Spat.
Looked at like I was sothing rotten.
And ?
I was stuck living with the consequences of soone else’s idiocy.
My punishnts so far?
Expelled from the main dorms
Stripped of free access to academy facilities
Forced to pay for things every other cadet gets for free
Honestly, it’s a miracle they didn’t kick him out entirely.
But he’s a noble heir.
There are limits to how far they can punish .
Still...
I glanced toward the clock.
Six more hours until even this temporary room is taken away.
I’ll have to pack up and find sowhere else to sleep before the day ends.
I dragged a hand down my face.
Sigh... why him?
Why did I have to beco the worst trash in the ga?
Of all the thousands of characters in Asteria...
Why couldn’t I have transmigrated as any other extra?
*****
The ga Asteria Online.
Once praised as the hope of dostically produced console RPGs.
A ga that captured the world by storm—rich lore, deep combat chanics, breathtaking world-building.
And ?
I was one of those players who never missed a single day.
For two whole years, I logged in daily.
From start to finish, I’d cleared the main story dozens of tis.
Every route, every ending, every character quest—I’d done it all.
And yet...
Even now, standing inside the world I loved so much, I didn’t feel joy.
No excitent, no awe—just a cold, sinking dread.
"Why?" I muttered to myself, staring blankly at the morning light spilling through the stable window.
Because despite all the choices I made, all the different routes I took in this ga—
it always ended the sa way.
Doom.
No matter what path the player chose, the result was always the destruction of the world.
Asteria was destined to fall.
I’d seen it happen too many tis to count.
So even if I wanted to fade into the background and live quietly...
How could I, knowing that the end was inevitable?
The story of Asteria Online sounded simple on the surface—like every other fantasy RPG.
The world invaded by demons.
The hero rises to defeat the Demon Lord.
The gods remain silent.
And in the end, the player fights to save humanity.
That was the overline.
But what made Asteria stand out was its depth—the way it felt alive.
Its characters weren’t just archetypes; they had dreams, flaws, and motives.
Its world wasn’t just a setting; it was a living tragedy.
Asteria — a dying world caught between divine neglect and infernal invasion.
It was a land of swords and magic, of kingdoms and empires, of faith and despair.
Above it lay the Celestial Realm, ho of the gods.
Below, the Infernal Abyss, the realm of demons.
For centuries, these three worlds coexisted, separated by the fabric of reality.
Until the demons grew desperate.
To escape their decaying realm, they tore open space itself—distorting reality to descend upon Asteria.
And with each distortion, the very air of this world beca unstable.
Rifts opened across the land, connecting to Hell.
They beca Dungeons—gateways spewing out monsters, curses, and death.
At first, humanity resisted.
But when a dungeon wasn’t cleared in ti, it began to devour the land around it, twisting everything into an extension of itself.
This phenonon was called Dungeonification—
a spreading corruption that turned forests into wastelands, towns into labyrinths, and people into monsters.
By the ti the ga’s main story began, half the world had already fallen.
Cities swallowed. Kingdoms erased. Entire continents rotting away into demonic wastelands.
Only one empire remained—the Aurelian Empire, the last bastion of mankind.
The Aurelian Empire stood as humanity’s final shield against annihilation.
Its soldiers fought every day to reclaim dungeons, while its nobles sched to maintain power.
And at its heart stood the Imperial Academy—
the cradle of humanity’s future heroes.
It wasn’t a school in the ordinary sense.
It was a military institution, a forge where cadets were trained to beco knights, mages, strategists, and exorcists—
the empire’s weapons against the demonic tide.
The academy produced the elite.
The best of the best.
And among them, the ga’s protagonist—a commoner who rose from nothing, destined to beco the world’s savior.
While I...
I was Lucien Ashborne, the stepping stone ant to highlight his greatness.
The fool who mocked the wrong man.
The villain whose defeat marked the beginning of the hero’s journey.
And now, sohow, I’d beco him.
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