The fluorescent lights hummed with a soul-crushing monotony, a sound that had become the soundtrack to User's life. Surrounded by stacks of unfinished reports and the lukewarm scent of cheap convenience store coffee, User sighed, his eyes bloodshot from staring at Excel spreadsheets for fourteen hours straight. He was a cog in the corporate machine, a 'slave' to the grind whose only escape was the glow of his monitor at home.

The weekend had arrived like a faint gasp of air to a drowning man. He had found it on a whim—Astraea’s Dawn, a fantasy RPG trending on Steam. He’d picked the female protagonist, Rhea, and played until his vision blurred. He watched as Rhea, the commoner girl with eyes like emerald, delivered a spinning kick to the jaw of the arrogant silver-haired noble, Alaric von Eisenhardt.

"Pathetic..." User had muttered, watching Alaric’s character model collapse in the dirt as the 'Chapter 1 Clear' screen flashed. Then, the world tilted. His heart gave a singular, violent thud, and the darkness of his bedroom swallowed him whole.

The first thing User felt wasn't the hard plastic of his keyboard, but the suffocating softness of silk.

A rhythmic throbbing pulsed behind his eyes, timed perfectly with the distant tolling of a bell. The air smelled of expensive sandalwood and sterilized herbs—not the stale scent of his apartment. His hand, pale and slender with perfectly manicured nails, reached up to clutch his forehead.

"Ugh... my head..."

The voice that came out was deep, smooth, and dripped with an innate, haughty resonance that made User's own skin crawl. Startled, he bolted upright, only to hiss as the movement sent a spike of pain through his jaw—the exact spot where Rhea’s boot had connected in the game's cutscene.

He wasn't in his room. He was in a sprawling infirmary suite that looked more like a five-star hotel. Sun streamed through arched stained-glass windows, casting colorful patterns over a canopy bed draped in silver and gold.

"Wait. This... this is the Astraea Academy medical wing."

His gaze darted to a tall, silver-framed mirror across the room. Reflections didn't lie. Standing there was a young man with moonlight-silver hair, sharp sapphire eyes now wide with genuine shock, and a face so beautiful it felt like a personal insult to every commoner in the world.

He was Alaric von Eisenhardt. The man he had just spent three hours beating the crap out of.

"No way..."​

A soft, rhythmic thump-thump-thump sounded from the adjacent bed, hidden behind a thin, white curtain. A long, exhausted yawn followed, sounding utterly bored with the concept of existence.

"Can you... be quiet...?" a girl’s voice drifted over, heavy with sleep. "Some of us... are trying to avoid... the sunlight..."

A small, pale hand with messy indigo sleeves reached out and pulled the curtain back just an inch. A single lavender eye, half-closed and framed by messy white hair, peered at Alaric. It was Eiryn, the genius mage who was supposed to be in the protagonist’s party.

"Oh... it’s the Duke’s son..." she muttered, her voice trailing off as she stared at him. Her nose wrinkled slightly, her eye opening just a fraction wider. "Your mana... it’s usually so... loud and annoying. Why is it... quiet today...?"