Prologue — The Ultimate Concept Run
To start out with something rather abrupt: this world is crawling with perverts.
Now, "pervert" doesn't strictly mean someone who is perpetually horny or obsessed with sex. People whose specific tastes fall outside the mainstream—the kind of predilections that make polite society recoil in disgust—can also fall under that umbrella. With billions of human beings teeming on this planet, everyone is bound to have different preferences, and among them, you will inevitably find folks for whom ordinary labels like "deviant" don't even begin to do them justice.
Not that I care much about what other people are into. But compared to those fringe lunatics, I consider myself pretty darn normal.
...Probably?
"Did I screw up the build concept...? Sigh..."
Right. There is nothing quite as unseemly as some grown-ass dude blabbering about his kinks, but if I keep my mouth shut, this entire monologue becomes utterly pointless. So, excuse me while I bare my soul for a second.
Ever heard of a masochist?
As far as kinks go, I'd say it's practically mainstream. No need to get bogged down in textbook psychoanalysis; simply put, it's algolagnia—getting off on mistreatment, torment, and physical pain. To put it even more bluntly: I just enjoy suffering.
Finding pleasure in pain? You might wonder what kind of novel lunatic would think that way, but tragically, someone like me—who merely derives a thrill from physical ache—barely scratches the surface of the scene. When you look into the abyss and see the stomach-churning filth that real hardcore degenerates parade around as "preferences," I am practically a paragon of wholesome normality.
Anyway...
I'm not bringing this up just to air out my private fetishes. Think of it as a preemptive defense before I dive into the story of a certain video game.
"A masterpiece really is a masterpiece..."
Countless skills and hidden classes—well, so many players have uncovered them by now that calling them "hidden" is a bit of a stretch, but still.
There is a single-player open-world RPG called Arhen Academy. It's a long-running, wildly popular title where you create a character, choose a class, develop your build with total freedom, form parties with students from the Academy or wandering adventurers across the map, and ultimately take on the Demon King who invades to wipe out the world. A quintessential character-raising RPG.
Explaining why the game became such a massive hit would take all day, so I'll spare you the history lesson. Long story short, it offers absurd levels of player freedom, and I had already beaten the game with literally every single class available. Even after all that, I still wasn't satisfied. Searching for ways to squeeze out even more fun, I eventually hit upon the idea of roleplay builds.
Themed concept characters... don't they just sound glorious? And naturally, that concept was forged directly from the very kink that had tormented and delighted me throughout my entire life.
For my very first concept run, I designed a character who grew progressively weaker every time they took damage, forcing myself to clear the game without getting hit a single time. Sounds contradictory to what I just confessed, doesn't it? You're probably wondering: if I literally just admitted to loving pain, why didn't I play a meat-shield tank whose sole purpose is getting the crap beaten out of them?
The reason is simple. Sure, a tank helps the party, but standing there drawing aggro and eating hits with zero offensive agency is fundamentally boring. More importantly, the party AI in this game isn't exactly brilliant. The biggest headache was that even when I held aggro perfectly, my useless companions couldn't dish out proper damage.
If you ask whether it's hypocritical for a masochist to complain about that kind of suffering, well, I don't really have a defense... but please understand that the world of concept roleplaying is profound and delicate. Besides, playing a pure tank dragged out the game endlessly and killed the fun. What else was I supposed to do? Building an all-rounder brawler-tank capable of dealing damage wasn't an option either—my roleplayer pride refused to permit such an unprincipled hybrid. If I was going to do this, I needed a class that could deliver a truly exquisite, entertaining concept run.
And so, to sharpen my mechanics, I cleared the game with that glass-cannon build that penalized taking damage—a run that utterly defied my masochistic instincts. But once that was over, an empty craving lingered. Desperate for something better, I spent hours combing through the class trees and skill lists. Then, suddenly, I discovered the holy grail. An absolute, unified masterpiece.
This is it...! I can create the ultimate, most ideal character imaginable!
First off, the class. Naturally, I rolled a female character and advanced to Saint. It's a hidden class locked exclusively to female characters, which was a bit of a shame for immersion at first, but a minor price to pay for engineering my ultimate masterpiece.
You might wonder what happens to the original Saint if the player takes the hidden class. Since the divine revelation falls upon me instead, the canonical girl simply lives out her days as an ordinary nun. In other words, if the player picks any other class, the default Saint set by the game's main scenario attends the Academy as an NPC. She's a devoted, kindhearted heroine with a massive fanbase, but the developers kindly added the option for players who wanted to don the halo themselves. After all, two Saints cannot exist in a single era.
So why on earth pick a Saint? Sure, judging purely by the title "Saint," it sounds completely disqualifying. Devotedly healing others, performing selfless deeds, with no apparent suffering for oneself... or so you'd think.
On paper, it looks purely altruistic. But beneath the surface, the Saint class is an absolute masochistic jackpot. Nay, a revelation. Every single healing skill in the Saint's arsenal costs the caster's own HP. The more people you mend, the more agony racks your own flesh! A skill kit literally forged in the image of masochism itself...!
On top of that, the class possesses an absolute elemental advantage against the game's primary antagonists—demons—and it isn't like Saints lack offensive spells either, meaning solo combat is entirely viable. To crown it all, I stacked every crippling demerit trait available during character creation to hoard bonus points, dumping every single point into thematic skills and stats. The result? The greatest Saint in recorded history, and simultaneously the most sublime masochist ever conceived... A character of the concept, by the concept, and for the concept.
It was a slight pity that party members couldn't actively abuse me, but going that far would make gameplay impossible, so suffering at the hands of demons and monsters was plenty. And honestly, even without abuse from allies, imagine a Saint whose body relentlessly breaks down with every soul she heals, yet she continues driving herself to the brink in selfless, agonizing devotion. It was nothing short of divine madness.
To squeeze out even more trait points, I tacked on the demerits: Blind and Deaf. Behold, the ultimate tragic Saint was born.
In-game, the Deaf trait meant you couldn't detect enemies unless they entered your direct line of sight, and all game audio was completely muted. The Blind trait was even harsher: the minimap disappeared, all NPCs and players blurred into murky silhouettes, you couldn't locate enemies without sound cues, and your attack range suffered a massive penalty. In exchange for this living nightmare, however, the game rewarded you with an absurd bounty of bonus points.
Of course, no matter how many bonus points it yielded, on any regular class, stacking both was unplayable suicide. Anyone would wonder if the game was even beatable under those conditions. Remarkably, the hidden Saint class possessed an all-purpose passive skill called Divine Protection of Light, which granted sensory compensation that largely offset both blindness and deafness. In the optimization meta, taking those two demerits was practically mandatory if you wanted to reach the Saint's maximum power ceiling.
Flawless lore-wise, flawless performance-wise, and utterly flawless concept-wise...! I felt like a fool for not building her sooner.
"Whew..."
I felt like ascending to heaven already. I hadn't even loaded in yet, but my fingers were itching with anticipation.
Word was that playing as the Saint dynamically altered NPC reactions. Specifically, whenever I spent my HP—absorbing the exact injuries of the wounded into my own flesh—the Saint's demigod-tier vitality kept me alive through wounds that would turn an ordinary person into minced meat. Watching the surrounding NPCs lose their minds in awe and despair as this fragile girl repeatedly took on lethal trauma was supposedly absolute cinema.
I would only be healing them because the searing agony felt euphoric, yet the whole world would revere me as a selfless holy martyr? If this wasn't peak gaming, what was?!
Sure, I wasn't feeling the pain in real life, but that was the soul of roleplaying. Immersing yourself so completely that you became the character on screen—that was rule number one of concept runs. The only real downside was that Arhen Academy was strictly single-player. Unless I uploaded my playthrough logs to a forum, it remained pure self-indulgence. Then again, if I cared about showing off to strangers, I wouldn't be doing this in the first place. Beyond the concept itself, the gameplay loop just sounded outrageously fun.
"Almost ready to roll..."
Before advancing to your class, every character begins in their childhood. Well, if I wanted to sell the image of a pitiful, self-sacrificing Saint, a voluptuous, statuesque adult woman wouldn't evoke half as much pathos as a delicate, fantasy-style young girl. So instead of making her conventionally gorgeous, I leaned into an intensely cute aesthetic. Pouring every ounce of my character creation prowess into the sliders, I crafted a girl so painfully adorable she would trigger protective instincts in a bloodthirsty monster. No regrets.
This run belongs to her...!
Without a second thought, I slammed the button to begin the game.
"Huh...?"
And before I knew it, I was sitting on a cold, desolate street, having turned into a young girl.
Specifically, the exact character I had just customized.