Chapter 1: Slacking Off
Arthur had never imagined that slacking off at work to play Mount & Blade II would send him to another world. It was a ridiculous thought, the kind of thing that belonged in bad web novels, not in the life of a man whose greatest dream was leaving work on time. If fate ever decided to notice him, Arthur had assumed it would do so in some ordinary and unpleasant way. A sudden fever. A broken elevator. His manager remembering his name five minutes before the end of the day.
Not through a game.
Not through snow.
Not through a forest so cold it made his bones feel brittle.
Arthur had always believed himself to be a simple man. Work as little as possible. Leave when allowed. Go home. Lie down. Watch something stupid enough to numb the mind. Drink milk tea. Sleep. Repeat. It was not heroic, but heroes were usually dead, crippled, or being praised by the same people who had sent them to die. Arthur had no interest in becoming an example to others. Examples were useful only after they had stopped breathing.
He had no grand ambition. He did not dream of becoming rich enough to buy a mansion, famous enough to have strangers remember his face, or powerful enough to spend his life pretending meetings mattered. His greatest sense of achievement came from making eight hours pass while doing three hours of actual work. His greatest fear was his manager walking toward his desk with that horrible look men wore when they had ruined something and wanted another person to fix it.
That fear became real at 18:00.
The sunset came through the office windows, turning the desks and monitors gold. The light looked warm, almost merciful. It seemed to urge every worker to go home and pretend they had lives outside the building. Arthur looked at the clock in the corner of his computer. The seconds moved toward freedom with insulting slowness. His finger hovered over the punch-out button, and in his mind he was already holding a full-sugar pearl milk tea. Full sugar, because life was bitter enough without voluntarily drinking sadness.
Then his phone rang.
Arthur looked at the screen.
Manager.
For a moment, he considered letting it ring. The thought was beautiful. Brave, even. Then reality placed a hand on his shoulder and reminded him that rent existed. He answered with a tone so polite that it disgusted even him.
"Hello?"
"Arthur, emergency." The voice on the other end was hurried, but not apologetic. Men who ruined other people's evenings rarely had enough shame for that. "The client's proposal needs to be revised tonight. It has to be ready first thing tomorrow."
Arthur stared at the office window. The sunset painted the glass in gold, as if the world itself had chosen to mock him.
"Tonight?"
"Yes. I'll pay double overtime."
Arthur closed his eyes.
Double overtime.
There it was. The weakness of modern man. Not honor, not loyalty, not duty. Just a little more money and the promise of sweet drinks. His resistance died quickly, which was humiliating but practical. Pride did not pay bills. Pride did not buy milk tea.
"I understand," Arthur said.
He returned to his seat and opened the document. The proposal was not difficult. It never was. People called things urgent when they had failed to plan properly. Arthur finished the revisions in half an hour, fixed the formatting, corrected several obvious mistakes, and added a few extra pages of explanation the client had not asked for. He was lazy, not incompetent. There was a difference. A lazy capable man was still useful. A hardworking fool was a disaster with shoes.
After finishing, Arthur could have left.
He did not.
Double overtime was calculated by time, not honesty. If the company wanted to reward him for staying in a chair and pretending to suffer, who was he to reject such generosity? Going home meant lying on the sofa. Staying meant earning more money while doing almost the same thing. A total profit, if one ignored dignity.
Arthur looked around the office. Most people had already left. A few unfortunate souls remained at their desks, their faces lit by their monitors like corpses under moonlight. Arthur's gaze drifted across his desktop until it stopped on an old icon.
Mount & Blade II.
He had not touched the game in months. It sat in the corner of the screen like a forgotten oath.
Arthur double-clicked.
The familiar menu appeared, and with it came a strange comfort. He loaded his old save file, the one where he had already conquered most of Calradia. His character appeared wearing Battania elite armor, mounted on a black warhorse, with rows of infantry behind him. The banner with the wolf-head pattern moved in the wind. It looked proud, brutal, and completely meaningless.
Arthur had already won that world.
Town after town. Castle after castle. Lord after lord. All of them had fallen eventually. At first, conquest had been satisfying. Then it became routine. Then it became paperwork with screams. His armies were too strong, his lands too large, his enemies too predictable. A finished save file was like an old kingdom: impressive to look at, dead to play with.
He moved his character across the map without much interest. After a while, he guided him toward a hidden cave in the mountains near Hertogea Castle. It was an old ritual. Whenever he grew tired of a save, he went there, deleted it, and began again. A small funeral for a dead world, if one wanted to be dramatic about it. Arthur usually did not.
This time, someone was waiting.
An old man stood before the cave.
Arthur frowned.
The hermit wore coarse linen clothes. His hair and beard were white, and his body looked half-real, like a memory that had forgotten how to vanish. His cloudy eyes stared forward. Arthur had played hundreds of hours and had never seen him before. Not in vanilla. Not in any mod he remembered installing.
The old man raised one thin finger.
Pale golden text appeared in the center of the screen.
You have conquered this world. Are you willing to challenge a more difficult level?
Arthur stared at it.
"A hidden event?" he murmured.
Or a forgotten mod. That was more likely. Games were full of strange things. Men spent years building elaborate nonsense and then called it content.
Arthur leaned back in his chair. He had no particular desire to begin a difficult challenge. He had already worked enough for one day, which was a tragic sentence no man should have to speak. But he was bored, and boredom had driven men into worse wars.
He clicked Agree.
The world twisted.
At first, Arthur thought he had become dizzy. Then the office stretched and folded as if someone had grabbed reality by the edges and wrung it out. The desk, the chair, the computer screen, the lights above him, all of it bent into impossible shapes before shattering into fragments of color. His stomach turned. His head burned. His bones felt as if they had been pulled apart and put back in the wrong order.
Warmth vanished.
Cold struck him in the face.
Arthur fell into snow.
For several moments, he did not move. Snowflakes hit his cheeks, small and sharp. Wind howled through black trees. The ground swallowed his feet up to the ankles. Cold crawled through his clothes and bit into his skin, moving upward with slow cruelty. He looked around, waiting for the world to correct itself.
It did not.
"What the hell?" he whispered.
His hand went to his pocket for his phone.
There was no phone.
There was no pocket.
His hoodie, jeans, and sneakers were gone. In their place were thin clothes so useless against the cold that Arthur felt personally insulted. He stared down at himself, then at the forest, then at the snow beneath his feet.
"Am I... transmigrated?"
The question sounded stupid.
Sadly, it also sounded correct.
Arthur had read enough stories to know the pattern. Transmigration. Rebirth. Systems. Cheat abilities. Strange worlds where the protagonist should have died several times but survived because the author had become attached. He knew the tropes well enough to mock them.
Mocking became harder when he was freezing to death.
A sharp pain split through his head.
Arthur dropped to one knee, gripping his skull. It felt as if someone had taken a fistful of information and forced it behind his eyes with a hammer. His vision blurred. He clenched his teeth and tried not to scream. Screaming in an unknown forest seemed like a good way to attract something that enjoyed screams.
Then a translucent blue panel appeared before him.
It floated above the snow.
[Westeros Conquest System]
Main Quest: Unify Westeros
Limited Unit Recruitment in Progress — Battania Locked
Newbie Gift Package received. Please claim.
Arthur stared at the words.
For a long moment, he said nothing.
"Unify Westeros," he finally murmured.
He wanted to laugh. He wanted to insult the system. He wanted to find whoever had decided this was reasonable and throw them into the nearest river. He had no weapon, no food, no shelter, no allies, and no idea where he was. Naturally, his first task was to conquer a continent.
It was the sort of logic only fate, gods, or badly designed games could produce.
Arthur forced himself to breathe.
Panic would not help. Panic was useful only if screaming could build a fire. It could not. He steadied himself and opened the system interface. It was simple, almost suspiciously so. Three sections: Personal Lord, System Store, and Quests.
He clicked Personal Lord.
A list unfolded.
Lord: Arthur
Level: 0
Weapon: None
Equipment: None
Mount: None
Experience: 0/300
Prisoners: None
Items: Newbie Gift Package × 1
Treasury: 0 dinars
Troops: None
Followers: None
Arthur looked at the list.
Nothing.
A perfect row of failure.
Other transmigrators woke as princes, heirs, sorcerers, or at least rich young men with dead parents and convenient estates. Arthur had been given level zero, no equipment, no coin in hand, no troops, and snow trying to murder his feet.
"Wonderful," he muttered.
His gaze moved to the Newbie Gift Package. Complaining would not keep him warm. He opened it.
Golden light burst from the panel, sharp enough to sting his eyes. When it faded, several items appeared in the inventory: a leather shoulder strap, woodland cloth armor, forest boots, a northern hand axe, a small fan-shaped shield, a mountain hunting bow, twenty feathered arrows, a brown packhorse, an old but sturdy fur saddle, and one thousand dinars.
Arthur exhaled slowly.
"Finally. A little conscience."
With a thought, the equipment appeared on him. The leather strap settled across his shoulder. The woodland cloth armor was light, but it blocked the wind better than the useless rags he had been wearing. The boots gripped the snow and warmed his feet. The northern hand axe dropped into his palm, heavy enough to remind him that metal was honest. The shield hung on his arm, and the bow rested across his back with the arrows secured beside it.
His body stopped shaking so violently.
The horse remained in the inventory.
Arthur looked at it and frowned.
He could not ride.
In his previous life, even an electric bike had treated him as an enemy. A horse was just a larger, angrier version of that problem. He decided to leave the animal where it was. Perhaps later, if he lived long enough to embarrass himself.
Arthur looked at the forest again.
He had wanted milk tea, a sofa, and a quiet evening.
Instead, he had armor, an axe, one thousand dinars, and snow up to his ankles.
Somewhere, fate was laughing.
Arthur hoped it choked.