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"Now you see?" she shouted in a mix of annoyance and disappointment. "You can't outsmart Scrients! They're the most intelligent beings across the two realms."
    "You're right," I muttered, averting my gaze with a heavy sigh. "I made a mistake. I was too arrogant to think that a mere human like me could fool them."
    —BOOM!!
    "Heik! Wh-What was that?"
    "Hmm? I'm not sure. Maybe you should go and ask the most intelligent beings across the two realms. Oh wait, you can't. I killed them all.”
    ______
    My name is Samael Kaizer Theosbane.
    On the last day of high school, I got into a fight with a kid I used to bully.
    It was a stupid, pointless scuffle, and in the middle of it, I tripped and hit my head on a rock.
    That’s when the memories came flooding in - the memories of another life, of a different world.
    Suddenly, everything made a twisted kind of sense. I realized two things.
    First, I was in a game I used to play in my past life.
    Second, I was a villain. A villain!
    Not the cool and mysterious kind, either.
    No, my destiny was to be manipulated and die a dog's death!
    I was the worst type of cliché: an ungrateful, privileged, insufferable young master. The sort you'd find in those poorly written fantasy stories.
    The kind everyone hates — a snobby brat from a powerful noble family who thinks he owns the world just because he was born with a silver spoon lodged in his mouth.
    You know the type. The one the hero beats to a pulp to prove his worth.
    Yeah, I was that guy.
    And the hero? The hero was the kid I’d been bullying all this time. The same one I got into a fight with.
    He was the supposed savior of this damned world.
    A world teetering on the edge of destruction, beset by wars, calamities, and a grim future that only I knew.
    And at the end of it all, the final antagonist of the game, the undefeatable boss… the Spirit King, was waiting.
    But could I even make it to the end?
    Could I conquer a game where defeat was the only certainty?
    A game that was now my reality!
    “Ah, fuck it.”
    I had no idea if I could, but I sure as hell was going to try.
    Extorting extras, manipulating main characters, twisting the story to my advantage, stealing the hero’s cheat items, killing villains before they could become threats - nothing was beneath me.
    Would the main characters be affected? Who cares!
    Would the story change? Even better!
    All I cared about was me—my survival, my life, my choices.
    “I will live this life with no regrets.”
    …But as I soon discovered, fate was not easily changed.
    And the price of altering one's destiny was steep.