Chapter 1
Chapter 1
The Most Popular Man in a Romance Fantasy
The fantasy worlds I knew were always on the verge of destruction.
The Demon King would try to burn the world down.
A mad emperor would stain the continent crimson with blood.
A dimensional rift would open, pouring out tentacled monsters.
And then some otherworldly hero who got hit by a truck, or a transmigrator, would miraculously stop it all.
That was practically the standard formula.
But reality was different.
Even during the Cold War, when fingers hovered over nuclear launch buttons, the world didn't end.
Even after two world wars turned the Earth into a blood-soaked battlefield, humanity survived.
History was tougher than cockroaches.
And the world was far harder to destroy than people thought.
So I believed it too, without much thought.
Even if a fantasy world became reality,
there was no way the world would be destroyed that easily.
Crash! BANG!
"Throw everything out!!"
But I was completely wrong.
The world might not have ended,
but my world had been utterly destroyed.
"Y-Your Highness! Please calm yourself! These clothes were personally prepared by Her Majesty the Empress—!"
"Shut up and get them out of my sight right now!!"
After dying a meaningless death in a traffic accident,
I opened my eyes and found myself reincarnated as a prince in a fantasy world.
If other people heard that, they'd probably envy me and say I'd won the reincarnation lottery.
From an ordinary modern man who lived paycheck to paycheck, to an imperial prince.
There was no status upgrade crazier than this.
The problem, however, was very simple.
This damn world didn't have smartphones.
The day I realized that fact, I genuinely despaired.
My life of lying in bed, mindlessly scrolling through shorts and pumping dopamine into my brain, was gone.
No internet. No YouTube. No games. Not even late-night delivery app notifications.
I had heard rumors that the mages of the Magic Tower were researching magical devices capable of performing calculations for people.
Fine. Let's say that's the ancestor of computers.
But before that technology evolved into smartphones capable of running mobile games, I'd probably be lying in a coffin first.
I hadn't been born as a noble prince.
I felt like I'd been brutally exiled from civilization.
And the absence of smartphones wasn't the only thing suffocating me.
Waiting for the emperor to lift his utensils before eating?
Fine. That's etiquette. I can understand that.
But lining up five silver forks just to cut a piece of meat and even specifying the angle of each finger for holding them—isn't that going too far?
The clothes were the same.
Imperial garments decorated with gold thread and jewels looked magnificent, but in reality they were horribly heavy instruments of torture.
After arriving in this world, I came to appreciate every single day just how incredible short-sleeved T-shirts and sweatpants from my previous life had been.
Crash!
Unable to endure it anymore, I kicked apart another expensive hardwood table in front of me.
"Eek...!"
The servants lying prostrate on the floor trembled with pale faces as they gathered up the shattered furniture and discarded silk garments.
Looking down at the tops of their terrified heads, I let out a deep sigh inwardly.
'Is there no psychiatrist in this world? I desperately need medication.'
To be fair, it wasn't just because I couldn't adapt to being cut off from civilization.
The real problem was that the body I'd possessed
had never belonged to a normal person in the first place.
My name was Rouang Caesar.
The Second Prince of the vast Human Empire.
A man infamous throughout the Imperial Palace as a lunatic.
The original Rouang had survived a horrific assassination attempt during childhood.
Rumors spread everywhere that it had been orchestrated by the faction supporting the First Prince's claim to the throne, and several lower-ranking conspirators lost their heads.
But the powerful nobles hiding behind them were never caught.
Poisoned by a dreadful toxin, Rouang had coughed blood and hovered at death's door before barely surviving thanks to a holy relic brought from the Holy City.
The problem came afterward.
When he opened his eyes at the gates of hell,
he learned that the people responsible still hadn't been captured.
Even the Emperor and the First Prince couldn't do anything?
What would a child barely ten years old think when confronted with that reality?
He probably wanted to tear every suspicious bastard he saw into pieces.
What made it even worse was the Imperial Family's response.
The Emperor remained silent under the excuse of maintaining factional balance.
And the First Prince refused to abandon his followers.
The body rotting from poison had barely been stitched back together through divine blessings.
But the shattered mind was never repaired.
His rage surged like seizures.
A pathological paranoia that saw assassins in every shadow followed him with every breath.
And so the Second Prince, Rouang,
was thoroughly,
completely broken.
...Though recently, things had improved somewhat.
More precisely, it started when the foreign substance known as "me" from my previous life gradually gained greater control over this ruined body.
Standing among the sharp fragments of furniture I'd smashed apart with my bare hands, I looked down at the blood dripping from the back of my hand.
Ssss...
The torn flesh wriggled like insects before slowly reattaching itself and healing.
It was grotesque enough to make one's skin crawl.
This was the only mercy the Imperial Family had ever shown the abandoned Second Prince.
The miracle of the holy relics used to forcibly preserve a body that had been dying from poison.
His body regenerated to a level close to invincibility.
But his wounded mind still stagnated like rotten water.
Leaving the ceremonial clothes scattered across the floor as though they were vermin, I stormed out of the bedroom wearing only a thin shirt.
If I stayed trapped in that suffocating room any longer, the memories of Rouang poisoning himself and rotting away alone would start devouring my brain.
I needed something to vent this filthy, heavy feeling.
If someone had simply placed a smartphone in my hand, the solution would have been incredibly simple.
I could just lie on a bed, mindlessly scroll through shorts, or stuff my brain full of pleasure by reading addictive web novels.
But this was a medieval fantasy world filled with magic and swords.
In a place stripped of digital civilization, the most primitive and intense form of entertainment available to humans was ultimately bloody combat.
"...I request a spar."
My voice echoed low through the training grounds.
"Y-Your Highness...! But dressed like that...!"
"Does my word not sound like a command?"
The Imperial Guard knight standing before me swallowed hard.
My opponent was a monster clad in flawless plate armor.
Meanwhile, I stood there in a thin shirt, casually holding two real swords.
To anyone watching, it looked like a suicide attempt.
Dual swords look cool in fantasy novels.
But in actual swordsmanship, it's basically a declaration that you've abandoned defense.
To the knight, I probably looked like only one thing.
A madman whose head could fly off from a single mistake.
The reason I was doing this was simple.
Because they were Imperial Guard knights.
Human weapons personally acknowledged by the Emperor as among the strongest in the Empire.
And the people who caused them the most trouble in the world were members of the Imperial Family.
A prince challenging them to a spar with real swords?
Winning would be troublesome.
Injuring him would be troublesome.
Holding back too much might offend the temper of the mad prince.
In short, it was an extremely difficult form of high-level hospitality swordsmanship.
Looking at the knight's tense face, I curled my lips upward.
'Don't be scared. I'm still weak too.'
The original Rouang couldn't trust people.
So he locked himself in his room and obsessively trained his swordsmanship for the sole purpose of beheading those who wanted him dead.
As a result, killing intent had been engraved into his swordsmanship.
The problem was that he never had the courage to point it at real people.
But now things were different.
Inside this body lived the shamelessness of a modern man who had paid monthly rent.
'I'm going to squeeze every privilege I can out of this life before I run.'
The Imperial Palace wasn't a safe zone.
This body had already nearly died once after being poisoned.
So I intended to enjoy every privilege available to a prince and use every resource I could.
And this was the beginning.
Without hesitation, I kicked off the ground.
BOOM!
The tip of my sword tore through the air with an explosive metallic roar.
CLANG!!
I never intended to take it easy from the start.
If anything, I'd be more annoyed if my opponent held back.
Using the sword in my left hand to disrupt his vision, I thrust the one in my right toward his chest. Knowing it would be blocked by his shield, I still threw my full weight behind it and charged like a beast.
Against an overwhelmingly stronger opponent, momentum comes first.
CLANG! CRAAACK!
Steel collided with steel, sending sparks flying.
As expected, the Imperial Guard knight was different.
The unnatural trajectory I'd forced into existence was effortlessly redirected with a single longsword.
Strength, speed, balance.
I was outmatched in every category.
And that made it even better.
If this world had no smartphones, no shorts, and no games,
then this dance with death was the only stimulation left to drive me insane.
The knight's sword came again.
CLANG! CLACK! CLANG!
Every time I blocked, the bones in my wrists screamed.
The soles of my feet scraped against the ground, and my lungs burned as if they would burst.
Even so.
It felt fucking amazing.
For the first time, the sensation of being alive crashed through my entire body.
The knight was still holding back slightly.
He couldn't cut down a prince.
But if he relaxed too much, he might genuinely leave an opening.
That awkward middle ground irritated me.
"Hit harder."
"...Your Highness!"
"This is an order from a prince."
The moment those words fell, the knight's gaze changed.
The Imperial Guard knight who had been cautiously tiptoeing around me vanished.
In his place stood a true weapon that had killed and survived dozens of times on real battlefields.
BOOOOOM!!
The next exchange existed on an entirely different level.
Had I been half a beat slower, my wrist would have been severed.
Twisting my waist at an unnatural angle, I barely deflected the strike.
A chill ran down my spine.
And at the same time, exhilaration surged through me.
'Yeah. This is it.'
Grinding my teeth, I swung again.
The left sword created a path.
The right sword targeted a vital point.
The knight remained unmoving, like an enormous fortress wall.
The more exchanges we shared, the more obvious it became.
I wasn't strong.
I was merely someone who had desperately swung a sword in his room to avoid dying, making me slightly better than ordinary cannon fodder.
Before the true monsters at the top of this world's hierarchy, I was still little more than a baby.
Yet that fact only made my heart race faster.
Because it meant I still had a long staircase left to climb.
Swoosh!
The knight's sword swept upward from below.
The moment I blocked it, the next strike would naturally target my throat.
It was a straightforward yet inescapable sequence of death.
I barely diverted the attack by crossing my twin swords, but the recoil shattered my balance.
It's over.
The moment my brain sounded the alarm, my body moved first.
The survival instinct I'd hammered into my body through tens of thousands of swings inside that room.
Almost sliding across the floor, I twisted my body and explosively slashed upward from a blind angle.
CRAAAASH!!
The deafening impact echoed through the training grounds.
For the first time, the knight's eyes widened.
My blade had torn straight through the central guard that had seemed impossible to penetrate.
Of course, it was stopped by his armor.
In a real battle, I would have been crushed by the counterattack that followed.
Even so, the symbolic significance was enormous.
One of the Empire's strongest knights had been caught off guard by a shut-in mad prince.
I smiled.
"Now it's finally getting interesting."
After that, it turned into a complete mud fight.
The skin on my palms tore away.
My shoulder was sliced open, spraying blood.
But my body didn't follow the rules of ordinary people.
Torn wounds wriggled and reattached themselves.
Blood stopped flowing.
Flesh regenerated.
A body capable of fighting indefinitely as long as its limbs weren't severed.
It was truly a vicious passive ability.
Finally, the knight stepped back and lowered his sword.
I no longer had the strength to hold mine and let it fall.
A heavy silence settled over the training grounds.
And then—
Clap, clap, clap!
"Amazing, Your Highness!"
"Your swordsmanship was truly sharp!"
"This will be a valuable lesson for the entire knight order!"
The knights rushed forward together and bowed deeply.
It was way too much.
Wiping away sweat, I stared at the tops of their heads in disbelief.
Until yesterday, I had been a mad prince who waved swords around during violent episodes.
Today, I completed a spar according to the rules without killing anyone.
From their perspective, that alone was probably a miracle.
After all, even a neighborhood mad dog gets praised if it wags its tail instead of biting people.
I approached my sparring partner and casually said,
"That was a decent sword. Good work."
At those words, the knight's face first turned pale before flushing red with emotion.
"I-I am deeply honored, Your Highness!"
'Just how horribly did the old Rouang treat people?'
Ignoring the knights' excessive praise, I left the training grounds and walked down the corridor when an inexplicable sense of discomfort washed over me.
I was happy.
Strangely embarrassed.
And afraid.
These weren't entirely my emotions.
They were remnants left behind in Rouang's broken body, awkwardly reacting to the fact that he had received praise instead of fear.
Crossing swords with someone without killing them.
Meeting another person's gaze without murderous intent.
Those were forms of warmth the original Rouang had never experienced in his entire life.
I stopped in the middle of the corridor.
'Wait. If the original Rouang can be comforted by something this small...'
I reorganized all the information in my head.
A failed childhood assassination.
Deep emotional wounds.
Pathological paranoia.
Rage and madness.
Noble blood that falls in love far too easily.
This felt incredibly familiar.
Not fantasy as a whole.
One specific genre.
Female-oriented romance fantasy.
'I thought this was just a fantasy world. Though political assassination attempts were admittedly a little too extreme. In a real world, there shouldn't be nobles who can pull that kind of thing and get away with it.'
A wounded, broken, yet beautiful and dangerous imperial prince.
The type who becomes obsessively devoted to the heroine and finds salvation through love.
'Did all that melodramatic nonsense happen because this is a romance fantasy? Is that why Father and my brother stayed silent too?'
If I'd already seen a villainess, a saintess, or even someone with pink hair, I might have realized it much sooner.
But everyone around me had only been sword-wielding knights, trembling servants, and scheming royals.
'If this really is a romance fantasy, then Rouang is definitely...'
[The Main Obsessive Male Lead]
The problem was—
I still had no idea who the heroine was.