I spent most of my life playing dating sims and reading web novels.
I got my work done, I read web novels, I ate food, and I played dating sims. That was my life, day in, day out.
I’m sure to the outside world, it must have looked like a boring, lonely existence. But I loved my life. I was perfectly content.
I mean, sure. Every now and then I would think about the future and get a bit depressed. I was your typical loser, after all. I wasn’t married. Heck, I hadn’t had a girlfriend since the day I was born.
But I was fairly well off financially. Plus, I had the best friends a guy could ask for: dating sims and web novels. Thanks to them, I was never lonely.
…I wasn’t lonely, no. But occasionally, there were moments. Moments where I would feel incredibly empty. And, childish as it was, I would begin to envy the protagonists of those dating sims and web novels.
“Maaan. If only I could live in a world as fun as that,” I would say.
But I wasn’t greedy. I didn’t need to be the protagonist. I would be content to be his friend, or even some minor background character. Heck, I wouldn’t even have minded being a punching bag for the more important characters.
…Yeah, there were times when I had thoughts like that.
“But this…this is not cool!”
I, Kyouichirou Shimizu, stood in front of a mirror and screamed.
Of course this would happen! When I woke up and stared into the mirror, I saw the face of a villain from a game I knew very well. And he looked just as shocked as I felt.
The clear glass reflected the face of a scoundrel. His hair, made ash-gray with cheap bleach, was painfully pathetic.
None of this made any sense. Or, rather, it did make sense. But I didn’t want to believe it.
“Did I get reincarnated? Or maybe I’m just possessing this guy. But am I seriously…Kyouichirou Shimizu?!”
The answer to my question stared back at me from the mirror. No matter how I might try to convince myself otherwise, I was now this character from a familiar game.
Hoping it was all a dream, I pinched myself. It hurt.
This is real.
It was all real. I had really, actually become freaking Kyouichirou Shimizu. Talk about shocking. Talk about depressing. The more I came to terms with my situation, the more anxiety and dread seeped through my body.
“Why? Why this guy of all people…?”
It’s time for a confession. Yes, it’s true, I always wanted to be zapped inside a dating sim.
There was no use trying to hide that fact. A faint pang of yearning still throbbed deep inside me.
But I didn’t mean like this. This was bad news.
Kyouichirou Shimizu.
That was the name of a pathetic villain from the legendary dating sim RPG series Spirit Wars: Dungeon Magia. He was the poster boy for low-level bad guys. What’s worse, he was guaranteed to die no matter which route the player took. And now I was him.
✦ ✦ ✦
Spirit Wars: Dungeon Magia was one of the best-selling domestic RPG titles in years.
The Dungeon Magia series was renowned for having it all—charming characters, a vast fantasy world, a complicated battle system, and a plot full of laughter and tears. And what’s more, the RPG elements were famously difficult.
In a series like that, you could say this guy kind of stood out.
Kyouichirou Shimizu.
He was a character in the first game, Spirit Wars: Dungeon Magia (people tended to refer to this one by its full name). Kyouichirou was the first miniboss the main characters faced.
Now, some people might think that being the first miniboss to appear in an epic series would be an honor. Unfortunately, when it came to this guy, that couldn’t be farther from the truth.
The selling point of Dungeon Magia was the freedom allowed by the story’s various branching paths. And yet, only this guy—only Kyouichirou Shimizu—was guaranteed to die right at the beginning. In every. Single. Route.
The series was renowned for rewarding players for using different play styles and joining different in-game factions by revealing new aspects of each character’s personality and life. But there was only one aspect to this guy’s character: He was guaranteed to die during the intro.
Even worse, all his dialogue was stuff like “Nyeh-heh-heh! Bow down before the might of my Astral Skills, you foooooools!” and other similarly pathetic lines, all uttered with zero sense of shame.
To be clear, Dungeon Magia’s world wasn’t set in some postapocalyptic wasteland where you’d find mohawk-adorned gangs roving from town to town committing unspeakable acts. It took place in an isekai-style fantasy world full of swords and Astral Skills (essentially magic) mixed with a bit of science fiction and some school-life elements thrown in for good measure.
In a world like that, a guy like Kyouichirou who cries out “Nyeh-heh-heh!” as he attacks the main characters was clearly bad news. He stood out from the rest of the cast like a sore thumb.
But that by itself wouldn’t be such a big deal. Well, maybe it would, but most people could probably let that stuff slide.
Unfortunately, and to my horror, that was only scratching the surface of how much this guy sucked.
Kyouichirou Shimizu…was incredibly weak. Unreasonably, unbelievably weak. He was so weak that his very existence was a joke.
I guess none of this should come as a surprise. At the end of the day, the guy was only a miniboss for the tutorial. His entire boss fight was designed to teach players how to play the game, after all. It made sense his abilities were limited.
He was weak by design. The developers had made him that way. He was exactly as weak as the tutorial needed him to be. (The very next fight was genuinely challenging, mind you, which made Kyouichirou stand out even more.)
But even if you took away all that background, things still didn’t look good for this guy.
Why? The reason was simple:
This absolute loser of a miniboss had to take on a three-member party with no weapons or armor. And he only got a single turn every round, compared to the protagonists’ three.
So, imagine you’re playing the game: This miniboss with a weird speech pattern suddenly appears in front of the protagonists.
Most players probably feel a bit nervous. He’s the game’s first tough enemy, after all. What they see next is shocking but not in the way they might expect.
His attack pattern is as follows: (To be honest, the length of time between attacks varied based on character speed in the first Dungeon Magia, so it was a bit different for everyone. But it was more or less like this.)
First turn: The enemy uses an Astral Skill to make one player fall asleep (single target).
Second turn: The enemy uses an Astral Skill to lower one player’s defense (single target).
Third turn: The enemy punches one player (single target, stupidly weak).
Fourth turn: The enemy uses an Astral Skill to make one player fall asleep (single target).
…And so on, in an endless loop.
Is it clear yet?
This guy wastes two out of every three of his precious few turns inflicting status ailments (and only on one character at a time, at that!).
And after all that setup, his punches were a complete joke.
Even if he hit a character with a status ailment, using the weakest healing skill in the game once was enough to get them back to max HP. The fact that he spent two full turns setting up for an attack that was barely worth healing was genuinely incredible.
If he—I—faced a player one-on-one, I might have stood a chance. I might even have been a pretty strong miniboss. Despite the low-powered attacks, the strategy itself wasn’t terrible. Gradually weakening foes with status ailments was a solid tactic.
But reality was cruel. As if fighting one-against-three wasn’t brutal enough, one of the three protagonists was a holy woman—an absolutely broken healer character.
I only got one turn for every three player turns, and their party had three people, including the game’s strongest healer. In other words, Kyouichirou’s chances of winning were nonexistent.
And then, after getting his ass handed to him by the player’s party, the real intro boss shows up out of nowhere and devours the pathetically weak, smack-talking Kyouichirou Shimizu. RIP. Game over, Kyouichirou.
He talked some smack, got his ass kicked, was eaten, and then died.
Within the Dungeon Magia series, this ultra-pathetic fate was reserved for Kyouichirou and Kyouichirou alone. As him, the only thing I had to look forward to was dying a horrible death. What luck. What joy. Ha.
“Ha-ha… Ha-ha-ha-ha… Ngh… Sob.”
I started to cry. And I kept crying and crying. Knowing exactly how my life would end brought me no comfort, only dread and sorrow.
“This…this is too much. This is just way, way, way too muuuch!”
And so, I was suddenly thrust into my new isekai life in the worst way imaginable.