Is This Even Real?
Was this for real?
"This is the ending?"
Zero Chronicle.
The bishoujo mecha game I'd been playing. And I had just finished watching the final ending, every last one of them.
But now that all the foreshadowing had unraveled and the whole story laid bare, I couldn't shake this hollow feeling in my gut.
"You've been lying to me this whole time?!"
The characters I'd believed were the heroes? Turns out they were villains who had conquered the world.
The invaders I'd believed were the villains? Actually good people fighting to take back a world stolen from them by the truly evil.
And to make matters worse, those desperate, heart-wrenching flashback scenes sprinkled in every so often to deepen the emotional immersion—
They weren't the heroes' flashbacks at all. They were flashbacks from the villains' perspective.
"No wonder the backgrounds were empty during those scenes!!"
They fought so hard to reclaim the world, and in the end they were all defeated by the heroes' treacherous schemes, driving straight into a bad ending.
Not only that—the epilogue had humanity failing to properly control the world's unique energy source, wiping out mankind entirely.
And that, apparently, was the true ending.
Clatter...
The controller slipped from my hand. On the monitor I'd been staring blankly at, there was nothing left—just the single word END.
The blackened screen felt like it was reflecting my heart, burned down to ash.
"What kind of game even does this!!!"
No wonder the community was so weirdly sensitive about spoilers for this game. There was this unspoken vibe of never, ever talk about the story, so I'd deliberately avoided the ending for my own enjoyment.
They go and make an actually great game, only for it to turn out we were the bad guys the whole time?
"Wow, seriously! These devs are something else, in the worst possible way!!"
A bishoujo mecha game that completely deceived its players while still nailing the actual gameplay.
Zero Chronicle.
"So that's why the title is what it is—the true ending's foreshadowing about the world ending and starting over?!"
And annoyingly enough, the game was genuinely excellent.
Well, of course it was. It was labeled a bishoujo mecha game, but the actual content was a full-on mecha title with incredibly deep custom mech building.
On top of that, the battle system was masterfully designed, packed with endless layers to dig into.
And through it all, the controls felt great and were easy to learn.
There was just one flaw.
The balance was completely skewed toward Heavy-Frame Mechs.
"I am NEVER playing this game again!!"
That was my reaction right after the ending.
But, as I said, the mech customization and PVP systems were just too well made.
"Damn it. I've got the itch."
Before I knew it, I was quietly booting up Zero Chronicle again, building new mechs, and grinding PVP.
Bitter as it was, in this current mecha drought, when would another miracle of a title like this ever come along?
What's more, I got so deep into it that I entered tournaments and won a few of them. Enough said.
"That damn ending... if it weren't for the ending!"
No, actually—if they were going to do this, why not just start the player off on the side of the people portrayed as villains?
I wanted to stand with the good guys, not root for a bunch of evil bastards!
"Plus, hiding the heroes' atrocities behind lock and key through the entire main story and then springing it all at the end? That was just vicious."
I couldn't take it.
Unable to contain my rage, I sent an email to the developers—nothing outright profane, perhaps, but carved with exquisite, surgical sarcasm.
And then the next day, when I opened my eyes—
"Where is this? Who am I?"
An unfamiliar room. An unfamiliar me in the mirror.
I was even a woman.
I stepped out of the room, scanned the corridor, and got a read on the atmosphere.
Don't tell me... I got transmigrated?
Have I experienced a moment of intense rage recently?
YES
Did I fully unleash that rage upon the target of my fury?
YES
Was the medium of my rage a work of subculture?
YES
Did I wake up the next day in a different world?
YES
With all four boxes checked, there was only one possible development that came to mind.
Transmigration into that very work.
"Whoa. So this actually happens."
First things first, I needed to figure out who I was. On the off chance it would help, I searched the room, found a wallet, and checked inside.
Affiliated Unit: None
Occupation: Reserve Mech Pilot
Name: Christina Angelos
And beneath all of that, the name of the organization.
Dystopia.
"Wait. I transmigrated into the evil organization's side?"
I'd hoped I was wrong. I wasn't.
And there was more.
"Hold on. Christina Angelos?"
The woman I'd transmigrated into was—
None other than the hidden boss from the DLC.
And at the same time, the game's hidden heroine.
Hidden boss she may have been, but on pure stats she outclassed even the final boss—a brutally punishing character to take down.
Her backstory, if I recalled correctly, was that of a genius pilot whose talent went unrecognized—until it suddenly skyrocketed and she established herself as the strongest pilot alive.
Piloting the colossal mech known as Black Nova, she'd unleashed absolutely insane firepower, dealing shock and awe to countless players back in the day.
"So then, this place must be the Dystopia Base."
For now, I decided to look around and get my bearings.
Strangely enough, as time passed, new memories started surfacing in my head one by one—
as if my soul were downloading the memories embedded in this body.
So there I was, wandering freely down the corridors, absorbing my new memories, when—
I ran into someone.
"Ah, Christina. Got a minute?"
"Hello, Team Leader Stone. Is something the matter?"
Stone Braite.
He was the team leader of the engineers in charge of mech construction and maintenance within Dystopia.
Short in stature but packed with thick, solid muscle, with a heavy beard to boot—the man's whole look somehow screamed fantasy dwarf.
In fact, everyone around him called him "Dwarf," a nickname he absolutely despised.
At my question, Team Leader Stone stroked his beard and spoke up.
"Have you by any chance seen Dr. Selene? We've been looking for her everywhere, but no luck."
"If it's Dr. Selene, she should be in her office."
"Hahah! That's the thing—I can't find the way there!"
For the record: Team Leader Stone was hopeless with directions.
Because of that, he got lost around the base all the time.
So many members of the organization had been stopped by him asking for directions at one point or another that practically everyone was on friendly terms with the guy.
"I'll go pass along the message to her myself, then."
"Hah! I'd appreciate it! I've got to get back to the maintenance bay and finish what I was working on."
"Should I tell her to come find you there?"
"Yes, yes! Thanks!!"
"Of course."
And with that, Team Leader Stone vanished without a trace.
Somehow, the man could wander the base endlessly when looking for any other destination, yet when it came time to find the maintenance bay, he never missed. Go figure.
At this point, I half suspected he was getting lost on purpose.
"Let's see."
By now the memories had fully seeped into my mind—things I'd never lived felt as familiar as my own past.
I walked down the corridor, took the elevator, and headed for the doctor's office.
"Hm. Nobody here?"
No answer to my knock, so I opened the door and stepped inside. The room was empty.
I was about to just turn around and leave when I noticed the desk buried under a chaotic sprawl of papers, and the soft hum of a running computer in the background.
"Ah, come on. Now I'm curious."
I knew I shouldn't.
But with nobody around... a little peek couldn't hurt, right?
Dr. Selene—one of the key characters in the story, someone I'd only ever been able to see through a screen.
The most crucial figure at the heart of Dystopia's mech development, a genius when it came to mecha technology and no exaggeration to say so.
The tradeoff being that somewhere other than her research, a few screws were decidedly loose.
But above all—
She was the mastermind behind Black Nova, the mech that had tormented players without mercy.
How could a former player possibly resist snooping around her desk?
"Ohhh! No way—I might actually be able to understand all of this?!"
What lay before me was nothing less than a stack of mech development blueprints. At first I couldn't make heads or tails of them, but combined with the memories of my life before inhabiting this body, even the mind-bendingly complex details were coming into focus.
"I'm not sure of the exact timeline, but she's already started developing Black Nova."
Except the development wasn't going smoothly.
In the game's setting, the dominant doctrine had mechs built as Heavy-Frames wielding overwhelming firepower—and Black Nova was conceived as the extreme expression of that very philosophy, pushing it to its absolute limit.
The energy efficiency required, the weight management, plus a mountain of other technical problems—each one an enormous barrier, which was why the final build had taken so long to complete.
"Sure enough, there are a lot of parts that simply can't be manufactured with current-era tech."
And the energy conversion ratios were an absolute mess.
The old me had been such a hardcore lore nut that I'd dug into every last bit of the game's fine-print settings—and the devs had even released a detailed concept artbook of the parts specifically for hardcore fans like me.
All of which meant that while I couldn't build a mech with my own hands, when it came to theory for this game's mechs in particular, I knew my stuff cold.
"Honestly, instead of a stupidly huge frame like this, a Light-Frame would be way more efficient."
The game's insane degree of customization let you assemble parts with real precision, which made Light-Frame builds possible.
But the in-game balance was so wretched that everyone customized Heavy-Frames for the win rate.
Everyone except me, that is.
There was a reason Light-Frames got avoided. Your energy efficiency was fundamentally capped, so you couldn't equip high-firepower weapons, and your defenses were laughably weak.
One mistake, a few hits taken, and you'd blow apart on the spot—you were essentially a paper airplane. No wonder so few players favored them.
Worse still, the weapons a Light-Frame could carry simply couldn't land a meaningful hit on a Heavy-Frame. That was the killer.
But this wasn't a game anymore.
If someone approached the parts with a completely different line of thinking... couldn't they build a hyper-mobile mech that surpassed everyone's imagination?
"Like I always said—for mechs, speed beats raw tonnage every time."
And that's when it happened.
"That's an interesting thought."
Someone had spoken to me—me, standing there muttering at a screen.
I whipped my head up in shock, and there she was: a blonde beauty in glasses, arms crossed, looking right at me.
And of course, who else could it be?
Dr. Selene.
"Ah—Aah! Doctor! I'm so sorry! This is, um, that is—"
"Hm. You're Christina, if I recall? The reserve mech pilot who just joined us..."
"Ah, yes! That's me!"
She flashed a small smile.
"Your thoughts on my blueprints. Care to share them in detail?"
"....."
It seemed she had no intention whatsoever of letting me off easy.