First (1)
First (1)
The room was steeped in dust and the stale ghost of alcohol.
Thick curtains smothered the windows, making it impossible to tell whether it was day or night.
The only things filling the space were the dim lamplight and the dust motes drifting through it.
Knock, knock.
A perfunctory rap knifed through the silence and into his eardrums.
Ravin didn't stir. He stayed flat on the bed.
He wrote it off as phantom noise. No one in this wretched place had any reason to come looking for him.
Though, come to think of it, maybe there was one person after all.
"Ravin! I know you're in there. Open the door."
A sharp, familiar voice.
Not a phantom.
Ravin hauled himself upright, slowly. His joints ground out a creaking dissonance.
'Why is she here?'
The door swung open, and bright corridor light spilled in alongside a gaze steeped in contempt.
The sunlight lancing into a room sealed in darkness made him squint before he could stop himself.
His sister. Levina.
Her uniform was immaculately pressed, not a wrinkle in sight. Her stark white hair was swept back in a flawless part.
Every detail of her appearance was a mirror held up to Ravin's shabby state and the misery of his reality.
Levina strode inside, pinching her nose. Her heels dug into the floorboards—floors that hadn't been cleaned in days—with fastidious, heel-raised disdain.
"Look at you. Even beasts live in cleaner dens than this."
"Just tell me what you came for."
His voice scraped out hoarse and cracked.
It had been a long time since he'd last spoken.
Instead of answering, Levina pulled a thick envelope from her coat and tossed it onto the table.
The family crest was stamped into a vivid red wax seal.
The seal alone made the contents clear enough.
"The family's final notice."
'...Final.'
The word circled inside his skull.
So this really was the end.
He had seen it coming.
The sensation of everything falling away, piece by piece, felt strange—not quite familiar, yet somehow a relief.
"We sent you to the Academy to straighten yourself out, and all we've received in return are reports of your infamy. And now this latest incident?
The family has no further reason to bear the weight of your disgrace... Father said as much."
"......."
"After this letter, you are no longer a member of this family.
He has no intention of funding your tuition any further, so the Academy will expel you soon enough. Find your own lodging.
All that money you've thrown around or stolen from the family—surely you've got plenty stashed away."
He said nothing. He stared at the envelope on the table.
He had no energy left for excuses. Explanations? He had tried that. Dozens of times. Hundreds.
The only response he ever got was disbelief and contempt.
All they believed were the lurid rumors surrounding Ravin Edelgard, the infamy and the misdeeds that had accumulated over years.
And a situation that felt preordained—as if the role of 'the original villain' was a verdict handed down in advance—was the only thing that ever came looking for me.
No one cared whether his conduct changed or not.
'I tried. I tried to claw my way out.'
I had set aside the ugly history with that shining male lead from the original story—the golden protagonist—and approached him with a smile and an offered handshake.
He returned the handshake with an awkward grimace, and every time I drew near after that, he found a reason to be elsewhere.
The rumors were too entrenched for me to feel hurt, but the disappointment was unavoidable.
Once word got around that I had moved on from women and started preying on men, I stopped approaching altogether.
I had put on a mask and sold my smile to salvage what was left of my reputation in society, trying to placate disgusting old men.
All I got in return were murmurs: 'What scheme is the Edelgard mad dog cooking up now?'
To be fair, if the roles were reversed, I would probably think the same.
A degenerate who's lived like a complete swine suddenly pretending to be decent overnight—you would figure he's either about to die or got word the family's ready to cut him loose.
I had even tried to win back Serepina—my betrothed. No, that's not the right word. She did not just hate me; loathing fits better.
I had tracked down a rare medicinal herb she had once mentioned in passing and sent it to her with a letter. She burned it all in front of my eyes.
'My entire life tangled up with yours disgusts me, Ravin.'
'You haven't changed a single thing.'
'The fact that I was once your childhood friend! That I once cared for you!
That I am engaged to you—every last bit of it is so horrifying it's driving me insane!'
Well.
So I had courted her in earnest, putting up with all that venom and throwing myself into every futile gesture I could think of. What came back was a massive fight a few days ago, and then the word 'annulment' was finally spoken.
I had been braced for it, waiting to see when it would come. It did not surprise me.
I do generally agree with the sentiment that people do not change, but—
'I tried. I thrashed and struggled to break free.'
Every effort had collapsed beneath misunderstandings, missed chances, and a mountain of misdeeds too vast for me to undo—as if the world was insisting I follow a predetermined script.
So much so that I could not begin to understand why I had been dumped into this world in the first place.
Would it have been better if I had been born Hans, some ordinary farmer in the countryside, instead of the black sheep of a distinguished house?
I was not even sure 'misunderstandings and missed chances' was the right way to put it anymore.
At some point, it had started to feel like it didn't matter how I twisted and turned—something was simply imposing a foregone conclusion on me.
[Collect the Endings!]
[Reward: Return to the Original World.]
The system message flickering before my eyes looked like mockery.
'Endings.' I had no idea what kind of endings it meant.
In this wretched game, was not the only ending waiting for me the miserable final downfall of a ruined villain?
The hope of returning. That had been the last rope my heart clung to. And now it had rotted apart before I could even grasp it.
"Do not bother showing your face from now on. You are a disgrace to the family."
Levina's voice dragged me out of the paranoid spiral—or perhaps it was not paranoia. I could not really tell anymore.
What settled on her face was revulsion, something beyond mere contempt. The look you would give filth on the roadside.
If I get cast out now... can I really go back?
If I shut my eyes and opened them again, I would give anything for it to be my cramped little studio apartment. Barely seventy square feet—fine by me.
What had I been doing all this time?
Was not the whole idea that I would reform myself and everything would resolve the moment the new, decent me showed up?
Things could refuse to work out, but there had to be a limit.
It was not as if the world was holding a damn funeral rite to wish me dead....
"Yeah. Got it. I am not supposed to show my face."
A thought surfaced.
Maybe if I died right here, that was how I would actually go back.
"So get out, Levina."
"What...?"
"You have delivered your message. I am not a member of your precious family anymore, right?
So if your business is finished, leave.
Whatever I say, none of you will hear a word of it anyway."
For a moment, I wondered why she looked so dumbfounded, but then I realized—this might very well be the first time he had ever talked back.
The more I thought about it, the more Ravin seemed like a strangely inept man.
A complete degenerate, and yet a genuine pushover who would laugh off anything his own family did to him.
Not that it mattered now.
I set the flickering system message aside. If I just died here....
My head was a tangled mess. I turned my back on my sister, still staring at me with disgust, and picked up the liquor bottle sitting on the table.
My skull felt like it was splitting.
A feeling that it would be better to just disappear.
The thought of wanting to die coiled around itself endlessly, dragging me deeper. So deep I could not even tell what I was doing anymore.
"When was it, exactly... the time someone told me if I was going to live like such a pathetic waste, I would be better off dead...."
I mumbled the words around the neck of the bottle as I drank, pointedly ignoring my sister's revolted stare.
Truth be told, I was not even sure I had the right to call her my sister. We did not share a mother.
Ever since I was a child, I had been told often enough that if I ever called her 'Noona,' she would kill me.
Of course, that is not something I experienced. It is more like an afterimage lingering in Ravin's memories.
Still, is there any other word for what she is?
"It was probably my seventeenth birthday."
Not mine—'Ravin's.' I fished the revolver he had acquired long ago out of the drawer and aimed it at my sister.
These should not be my memories, but mine and Ravin's had become so scrambled that the resentment in them felt like it was seeping into me.
"I cannot quite recall what you said on the day my mother died either."
Even when I was tipping the bottle back, she had worn an expression that suggested I was making a pathetic spectacle of myself. I savored the way that expression twisted into horror, then pressed the muzzle to my temple.
"A single day without calling someone a bastard—that would not have cost you much."
The cold bite of the metal was so vivid it briefly washed away the throbbing in my skull.
I saw Levina's lips part. She seemed to be saying something, but all I could hear was the ringing in my ears.
I could not tell if she was mid-sentence or already finished. I squeezed my eyes shut and pulled the trigger.
Ever since I had been dropped into this world, I had wanted to do exactly this, but I had been too scared. I had not wanted to see anything at all.
It was not so much a gunshot as a bursting sound, and then consciousness blurred away.
* * *
[Collect the Endings. 1/?]
[Reward: Return to the Original World.]
"Ha... Fuck. You have got to be shitting me."
I could not even summon the will to check the time.
I pulled a cheap cigarette from inside my coat, stuck it between my lips, and lit it.
No matter how much smoke I pulled in and pushed out, my head would not settle.
That was when my eye caught a letter. The scrap of kindling I had watched burn in front of me.