Prologue: “I’m Not the Mastermind, Though…”
Really? Am I the mastermind?
I tilted my head back and forth, carefully scanning the face staring back at me from the mirror.
The light was too dim to see clearly, but it was enough to make out the features.
Dark brown skin.
Grayish hair, faded like the color had drained out.
Hazy eyes that sent a chill down my spine.
“This face for sure…”
I’d seen it before.
But it felt… a little off.
Younger than I remembered.
That bastard’s face had been hit hard by the years, weathered and worn.
No way in hell that psycho’s mug looked this fresh and dewy.
The disconnect hit me like a truck.
“And he was blind, too.”
According to the lore, he sensed his surroundings with superpowers or something.
But my eyes—both of them—were staring right back at me in the mirror, sharp as knives.
What the fuck was going on?
Possession? Yeah, shocking, but it happened, so deal with it.
But waking up suddenly jammed into the body of the big bad mastermind? What kind of bullshit was this?
“Hero Project… gotta be, right?”
A web novel that had some real buzz going.
Hero stories were rare, and the characters had that addictive charm, so I’d kept up with it.
But come on.
I never wished to get isekai’d into this story. Never sponsored even a single 5700-character message.
It was just one of those novels I’d binge to the latest chapter whenever I remembered, hitting recommend but skipping comments.
…No point wasting time on unanswerable crap. Better to focus on what I could figure out.
Before obsessing over the fact that I’d possessed the story’s mastermind-slash-final-boss, I needed the lay of the land.
First things first: scope out where the hell I was.
…Not that I needed to. It screamed prison cell.
I crept up to the iron bars and peered out.
This wasn’t some podunk holding cell—it looked like a full-on camp, rows of cells packed tight.
And inside them, people just… killing time in a daze.
Wearing what passed for prison jumpsuits, faces blank like their souls had checked out. Others huddled in corners, heads bowed.
Kids, adults, old folks all jammed together. The vibe wasn’t so much “den of criminals” as “guinea pig exhibit.”
You know. Lab rats.
So, yeah.
“We’re fucked…”
My possession gig was doomed from the jump.