Prologue: Should've Lived as I Pleased
Every breath I drew felt like ice shards driving into my lungs. Winter in the south had always been brutal, but today — with the entire sky dyed the color of blood — it was worse than ever.
The walls had fallen long ago. Strewn in every direction were the corpses of the Southern Barbarians who had gnawed at the Empire for two hundred years — and the Kin of the Evil God, monsters even worse than they were.
Even as my vision flickered red and I crumpled to the ground, the sheer absurdity of it left me speechless. This world was never supposed to be this kind of story. It was meant to be one of those sweet, predictable otome romance-fantasy academy games — the heroine chosen as a hero, falling in love with a roster of impressive male leads, and saving the world along the way.
I was the extra that candy-pink world had thoroughly thrown away. A border count's bastard, half my veins running the filthy blood of the Southern Barbarians' great chieftain's son — the same tribes that had painted the Empire's south in crimson.
Even the original game had labeled me a depraved rake of a bastard and classified me as a disposable extra, to be used up and tossed aside. So I clenched my teeth that much harder and crushed my true nature down. I hid the savage blood running through my body, lived as I was told, endured when they said endure, and kept my mouth shut when they said be quiet.
I took ten years to do what others managed in four, and through sheer bloody-minded effort I even forced an aura around myself. I yielded every stroke of fortune that came my way, hoping the hero's party would save the world for the rest of us.
And what I got in return was a complete, unmitigated clusterfuck. God knows where the hero's party had gone and what they'd botched, but the world had been smashed to pieces — and I'd ended up like this, fighting back-to-back with the half-kin of my blood I'd spent my whole life at odds with.
The sensation of something enormous grazing past the nape of my neck. The chill hadn't even reached my brain before the world flipped upside down. At the fading edge of my vision, a familiar torso was rolling across the ground.
That's me.
Fuck. If I'd known it would come to this, I should've just lived however the hell I wanted.
Then everything went black.