A Harsh Awakening to My Fate
I let out a heavy sigh.
I stepped out of the conference hall and made my way to a bench by the academy lake. I had a rough idea of the situation, but there was still a mountain of things that needed sorting out.
In this life, I needed to fully grasp my surroundings and at least sketch out a rough plan for how I’d move forward.
But how had I ended up tangled in something so ridiculous?
In my previous life, I’d been walking home when I was hit by a car and died instantly right there.
Just another old cliché I’d seen a hundred times.
Well, the memories weren’t exactly pleasant, but I hadn’t clung to them either. I’d been terminally ill in that life, and by the end my quality of living had dropped so low that walking had been a struggle. Maybe that was why I hadn’t managed to avoid the car.
Anyway, the past was gone. What mattered now was what I had to live through in this place.
As my condition worsened in my previous life, I had to cut back on everything. The hobby I picked up instead was reading web novels—something I could do without straining myself.
Looking at the names of the people I’d just encountered and the memories that had resurfaced, this world was unmistakably the one from the novel I’d read last in that previous existence.
The title had been… “I Became the Academy’s Munchkin Knight,” I was sure.
I’d enjoyed it enough to read it through twice or three times, so quite a bit of the plot still lingered in my mind.
But it wasn’t some groundbreaking story. It was just another standard fantasy academy tale set in a world where the lines between modern and medieval had blurred strangely, featuring the usual tropes of a mysterious academy with supernatural rules, monsters, magic, and other races.
The only standout feature, if you could call it that, was that the story didn’t follow the classic “conquer the imperial capital” route.
The protagonist was a young man with golden hair and clear blue eyes, a young nobleman born to a poor farmer couple. He lived an ordinary rural life until one day he discovered that his Mana Heart had awakened in a church inspection.
The bishop who recognized his talent took him under his wing, handed him a recommendation letter, and the young man entered the continent’s top academy—St. Clifford Academy.
From there he would meet several heroines and get pulled into all sorts of incidents. That was the basic outline of the novel.
Yet, despite the seemingly ordinary plot, a surprising number of readers hated it.
Its recommendation rate stayed low compared to views, and sorting by recommended only pushed it pages down the list.
Critics pointed to the protagonist’s black-and-white morality, his shameless harem-protagonist tropes, and the increasingly awkward pacing of the story.
I’d been annoyed by it too, but I’d pushed through to the latest chapters without hesitation. I’d even applied as a beta tester when I heard the game was coming out and had played it for a while.
The game itself had been decent—open-world, with continent-wide exploration and surprisingly well-realized interactions with the main characters and side figures.
It even included hidden items not present in the original novel, and players had praised it overall.
But since the novel hadn’t finished, the game was full of setting holes and bugs, and my interest faded. Once the beta ended, I deleted it and went back to reading the novel to pass the time.
And that’s when the car accident happened.
***
Once I finished sorting through the memories from my previous life, I could face the present situation with a little more cold clarity.
I walked to the lakeside and checked my reflection in the water.
What stared back was the typical southern noble look: thick black hair, dull grey eyes, and slightly tanned skin—the most striking features.
Honestly, I didn’t know my exact height, but compared to the others I seemed fairly tall.
The real problem wasn’t my face.
Just how much weight am I carrying…?
What kind of life had the old me lived before all this?
Every inch of my body was soft, nowhere without a layer of fat. At my height, even a simple blanket would have looked like something you’d drape over a troll.
In my previous life I’d never been overweight, let alone fat. The fat voice I remembered from my vocal cords and the way my armpits and groin had felt—layers of soft flesh—were still a shocking, disgusting memory.
No matter what I did now, I swore I’d get back into shape first.
The thought of spending the rest of my life buried under this pile of flesh was horrifying enough. After checking my features, I figured that if I just lost the weight, the rest of my appearance wouldn’t be terrible.
But with my current willpower, I could probably drop the pounds anytime.
The immediate problem wasn’t the fat. It was something else entirely.
Edwin Reed.
That was my name in this life.
And the bastard… was the extra villain who appeared at the very beginning of I Became the Academy’s Munchkin Knight. In the original story he existed only as a plot device to let the protagonist meet the heroine.
Because the hero had entered the academy through a recommendation instead of taking the entrance exam, he hadn’t been able to prepare properly and ended up in the lowest class, F.
Normally, a recommendation meant the academy had already vetted you, but the hero was placed in the bottom class anyway and became the target of ridicule and bullying from aristocratic students.
He didn’t mind the bullying himself, but one day he saw his own friend being dragged into the same trouble because of guilt by association.
The bully? As anyone would expect, me—Edwin Reed.
As a young child I’d lost my mother and never received proper upbringing. As the eldest son, I’d been spoiled rotten, so my personality developed a lot of flaws.
At the academy I teamed up with two other aristocratic students who had similar mindsets and started causing trouble for commoner students.
The incident that sparked everything today had happened during one such brawl.
The hero tried to stop us and the fight spilled out. Fortunately, the academy security arrived and both sides were arrested.
During the pre-hearing before the disciplinary committee, the hero met Patricia Austin—the top second-year student and Student Council Guidance Committee head—and she took an interest in his character and abilities.
She actively defended him, and her efforts paid off: he received only the lightest punishment of three days of internal service.
From then on, Patricia and the hero grew closer through various incidents until she became his heroine.
So I ended up as the device for her to fall for him…
It wasn’t exactly a pleasant realization, but it wasn’t a major problem either.
After all, it was someone else’s fate now. The real issue I needed to handle right away was something far more urgent.
***
I was still standing by the lake, lost in thought, when someone approached from behind and spoke.
“It seems you are here, Edwin.”
Who would bother me in a place like this?
And it was a woman.
If someone had called me by name, she had to be close. After searching my memory, I couldn’t think of anyone else.
A sudden uneasy feeling crawled over my whole body.
I slowly turned around and met her eyes.
She was a young woman standing there, her long brown hair reaching her waist shimmering in the sunlight. Her delicate, almond-shaped face with its perfectly arranged features made an unconscious gasp escape anyone who saw her.
Yet she looked at me with a cold, unyielding expression.
“I came here specifically to talk to you. I never imagined you’d be wasting time in a place like this.”
And I knew exactly who she was.
“There’s still plenty of time before curfew, so I’m sure you’ll spare a moment to speak with me. There’s something I need to say to you.”
“…Iris.”
The girl’s name was Iris Robinet.
My fiancée—and the first problem I had to resolve.
The heroine of the original story.