Rain lashed against the taxi's windows, the world outside a blurred mess of headlights and neon signs smeared by the downpour. Ethan's fingers flew over the keyboard of his battered laptop, the blue glow of the screen painting his exhausted face in shades of desperation. The text document he'd been wrestling with for months was open in front of him, the words of his so-called masterpiece—"Eidolon: The Sovereign's Path."
It was supposed to be his big break. His shot at finally proving everyone wrong. The novel was meant to be a grand epic where the protagonist, Lucien Ashford, rises from nothing to conquer the world's strongest academy and claim his place as the Sovereign of Eidolon. The ultimate fantasy power-trip. Just what the readers craved.
But the problem was that it wasn't good enough. At least, not yet.
"Shit," Ethan hissed as he deleted another paragraph and typed in something else. His vision swam with fatigue, every muscle in his body screaming for him to stop. Sleep was a luxury he hadn't been able to afford for days. Coffee, energy drinks, and pure spite were all that kept him going.
His phone vibrated on the seat beside him, screen lighting up with another text. His editor. Again.
"Where the hell are you, Ethan? Deadline's TODAY. You have one hour. ONE."
"Yeah, yeah, I know..." he muttered, jamming his thumb against the screen to shut the message away. The taxi was stuck in traffic, rows of red brake lights stretching into the rainy gloom. He couldn't afford to sit here waiting like some helpless idiot.
"Hey, can't you go any faster?" Ethan snapped at the driver.
"Unless you want me to sprout wings and fly, we're stuck, man," the driver replied, not even bothering to look back.
Ethan bit back a curse. His hand twitched toward his laptop again, the cursor blinking accusingly where he'd left off. He was rewriting the final battle scene. The moment where Lucien Ashford confronts the arrogant, talentless antagonist, Darius Wycliffe, and crushes him to pieces before moving on to greater heights. A crucial turning point to highlight Lucien's overwhelming talent and determination.
But something about it kept bothering him. The whole setup felt... forced. Cliché. He'd tried to fix it a dozen different ways, but nothing clicked. It was like slapping patches over a sinking ship.
"Whatever," Ethan growled, slamming his laptop shut. If he was going to make the deadline, he needed to be at the office. Now.
"Forget this. I'll walk."
"Walk? In this weather? Suit yourself, pal." The driver shrugged, hands still lazily gripping the wheel.
Ethan threw some crumpled bills onto the front seat, yanked his laptop bag over his shoulder, and shoved the door open. Rain hit him like a slap, drenching his hair and clothes instantly, but he didn't care. He sprinted down the crowded sidewalk, weaving between pedestrians like a man possessed.
His phone buzzed again. Another text. "Thirty minutes, Ethan. That's all you've got."
He glanced up at the towering glass-and-steel building of Seventh Star Publishing, its sign glowing faintly through the rain. Almost there. He could already picture himself barging into the office, throwing his half-mangled manuscript onto his editor's desk, and begging them to at least read the damn thing before tossing it aside like the garbage he knew it probably was.
But no. Not this time. This time, he'd make them see it.
Ethan's phone vibrated again, his editor's relentless words burning into his brain. "Five minutes, Ethan. If you're not here by then, don't bother showing up."
"Five minutes?" he gasped, his legs already aching from the mad dash. He checked the time. The seconds were bleeding away.
Without thinking, he made a reckless decision and broke into a sprint across the street, feet splashing through filthy puddles, horns blaring around him. He didn't even bother to look both ways.
And that's when he heard it.
The roar of an engine. The bone-rattling screech of tires against wet asphalt. The frantic honking of a horn.
Ethan's head whipped to the side, his eyes widening as a truck careened toward him, its headlights blazing through the rain like the eyes of some monstrous beast.
There was no time to react. No chance to move. Just a single, frozen moment of terror before the impact hit.
Pain.
Agony.
Then... nothing.
Ethan's eyes cracked open.
Everything was a blurry mess. His head throbbed like someone had taken a jackhammer to his skull, and his entire body felt... weird. Numb.
He tried to groan, but the sound that came out wasn't quite his. It was softer. Smoother.
Was this a hospital? It had to be, right? After getting hit by a truck like that, he'd be lucky to even be alive. But if he was alive, then that meant—
"Holy shit, I missed the deadline!" he gasped, his own voice sounding completely foreign to his ears. His heart lurched, panic surging through his veins as he struggled to sit up.
That's when everything really started feeling wrong. His limbs were way too light, like someone had replaced his arms with those of a skinny teenager. And his hands... Why the hell were they so pale and thin?
The hospital theory was crumbling fast. Ethan forced his eyes to focus, blinking away the weird haze clouding his vision.
Stone walls. Wooden beams. A high, narrow window letting in faint morning light.
"What the..."
He looked around the room—no, a dormitory would be more accurate. There was a plain wooden desk covered in loose parchment and ink bottles, a bookshelf stacked with dusty tomes, and a bed he was currently half-lying, half-tangled in. Everything had this medieval, old-school, fantasy feel to it.
Maybe he'd hit his head so hard he was hallucinating. Or worse, maybe this was one of those coma dreams people always went on about. If that was the case, his brain had a seriously weird sense of interior decoration.
Ethan swung his legs over the side of the bed, wincing as a chill ran up his spine. His clothes were all wrong, too. Some kind of stiff, formal-looking uniform with dark, navy-blue robes and silver trim. Embroidered on the sleeve was a golden crest depicting a lion with wings surrounded by arcane symbols.
"What kind of LARPing nightmare is this?" he muttered, his voice still not sounding like his own.
He stood up, his legs wobbling like a newborn deer's. Was this body made of paper or something? Jesus. Had he reincarnated as a walking stick?
The room continued to feel too real. The rough texture of the stone wall beneath his fingertips, the chill in the air, the faint scent of old paper and herbal oils. Even the uneven creak of the floorboards beneath his feet. Everything was vivid and precise in a way dreams never were.
His eyes landed on a small, oval mirror hung on the wall. The moment he caught his own reflection—or rather, the reflection that definitely wasn't his—his heart nearly exploded.
The face staring back at him was young, maybe sixteen or seventeen, with sharp, refined features that practically screamed aristocrat. Dark hair, pale skin, and a pair of icy blue eyes that looked way too intense for their own good.
He stumbled backward, his shoulder smacking against the wall. The pain was sharp and very, very real.
"Okay... okay, this is officially insane," Ethan breathed, his chest heaving as panic clawed at him. "Maybe I'm in a VR pod or something? Maybe the accident was a glitch in some new hyper-realistic game, and I'm about to wake up any second now."
He slapped his own face. Hard.
Nope. Still here. And now his cheek hurt. Great.
As his breathing slowed, he forced himself to think. Something about this felt familiar, but his scrambled brain refused to put the pieces together. He glanced down at the parchment scattered across the desk, catching sight of his own—no, this body's—handwriting.
A few words jumped out at him:
"The Arcanium. First-Year Spellcraft Examination."
"Darius Wycliffe."
The Arcanium.
Darius Wycliffe.
Why did those names sound so damn familiar?
His eyes widened as the pieces finally snapped into place.
No. No, no, no. This couldn't be happening. This was some kind of elaborate prank or a coma-induced fever dream.
But even as he clung to those excuses, his brain kept dragging him back to the truth. The one possibility that made his stomach twist into a cold, miserable knot.
He wasn't Ethan Carter, struggling author of "Eidolon: The Sovereign's Path."
He was Darius Wycliffe.
The arrogant, talentless antagonist he'd created to act as a stepping stone for the novel's real protagonist, Lucien Ashford.
The disposable roadblock. The arrogant jerk meant to be humiliated and crushed by the hero so the readers could cheer and marvel at Lucien's brilliance.
"Holy shit," Ethan whispered, his legs giving out beneath him as he crumpled to the floor. His fingers dug into the cold stone, his breathing ragged.
He was in his own freaking book. And not as the hero. Not even as one of the cool supporting characters.
Nope. He was the loser. The guy everyone was supposed to hate. The guy who was supposed to die.
And if he remembered correctly, that death was supposed to happen pretty damn soon.