[Ren’s POV]
Okay, let me back up.
My name is Yamamoto Ren. I was a streamer. Notice I said was, not am, because where I am now, there’s no Twitch, no chat, no subscribe button, and no donation alerts. There’s a lot of shit that shouldn’t exist, though, and I’ve got a system, just like those guys in the web novels I used to read.
I transmigrated. That’s the word for it.
One second, I was sitting in my chair with a headache and a half-finished energy drink. The next, I was lying in a field with perfect hair, a sword on my hip, and a quest log telling me to SAVE THE WORLD.
I’d be lying if I said I didn’t like it.
The system is kind of broken. In the best possible way. My Luck stat is infinite. Not high, not excellent. Infinite. SSS rank. Since arriving here, I haven’t rolled a single bad outcome. My combat ability is at its peak, my looks are flawless, and people stare wherever I go.
Women stare. Men stare. Even the horses seem impressed.
It’s a lot to deal with, honestly.
[HERO SYSTEM]
Status: Yamamoto Ren
Class: Chosen Hero
Level: 14
Luck: ∞ (SSS)
Combat: Peak (Tier 3)
Charm: Flawless
Active Quest: The Dragon Kingdom (Main)
Active Quest: Win the Trust of Clara Dale (Side)
Active Quest: Investigate the Anomaly (Hidden)
See what I mean? The system does most of the work for me. I don’t have to figure out which quest to take because it tells me. I don’t have to guess who matters because it highlights them. I don’t even have to plan my build. The system handles that, too.
All I have to do is show up, look good, and be the hero.
Honestly, if my old viewers could see my stats, they’d be spamming W in the chat.
For the first two weeks, everything went exactly as expected. I started my adventure and followed the system’s guidance to Millhaven. There was a festival coming up, and apparently, I was supposed to save the townspeople during an attack, fight whatever showed up, and get celebrated for my efforts.
The quest log said WIN THE TRUST OF CLARA DALE.
Easy enough.
Save the world, get the girl. Classic RPG progression. I’d played enough games to recognise the setup. Main quest, side quest, attractive female character, heroic intervention. You could practically hear the background music starting.
And then I met him.
Joseph. No last name. No quest tag. No system highlight. Just some guy sitting in a tavern, looking like he was waiting for something.
I barely gave him a second thought. Why would I? He looked like an ordinary NPC, the kind of background character you walk past a hundred times without remembering his face.
Except he wasn’t ordinary.
And that pisses me off.
The first weird thing happened after our meeting in the tavern. He showed up and asked to speak with Clara about some bullshit involving letters. There was no quest notification, no warning, nothing. He just walked into the situation as if he had every right to be there.
Then, during the festival attack, he threw himself in harm’s way to save Clara from an attacker I hadn’t even noticed.
Let that sink in for a second.
I was the Chosen Hero. I had a system designed to guide me through the story, and some random guy with no visible stats managed to get ahead of me.
And that wasn’t even the worst part. Afterwards, the bastard got invited to the Magistrate’s residence.
The Magistrate’s residence.
Meanwhile, I was standing there wondering why my own quest had suddenly turned into a competition.
I was pissed, obviously, but at least the system had given me the ability to mask my emotions. So I smiled, played my part, and carried on. No point letting a random NPC know he’d managed to get under my skin.
I wasn’t about to give up on Clara over one setback, either. I pursued her like the quest instructed. Besides, I knew there wasn’t a woman in this place who could resist me forever. The system had made me practically perfect.
So when I asked Clara to go horse riding with me, she agreed.
We rode together. I stopped a mugging while she was there. I did the heroic things the quest seemed to expect, and Clara was warm and friendly throughout. Everything looked promising.
I figured that if I could get her to accompany me into the forest, I’d have her trust in the bag.
So I asked.
She said she’d think about it.
Think about it?
What was there to think about? I was built like a Greek god, had a flawless Charm stat, and was following the exact path the system had laid out for me.
Still, I didn’t pressure her. I waited. I had infinite luck, after all. If the answer wasn’t yes yet, it was only a matter of time.
Then, the day before our planned trip, she told me she wasn’t coming.
Just like that.
No explanation. No alternative suggestion. Nothing.
The quest didn’t update or fail. It simply sat there in my log, WIN THE TRUST OF CLARA DALE, grayed out but still active, as if the system itself had no idea what to do.
That’s not supposed to happen.
The system doesn’t get confused. It gives me a quest, I follow its instructions, and things work out. That’s the deal. That’s the whole reason I trust it.
Except this time, things hadn’t worked out.
And I had a pretty good idea why.
Joseph.
I couldn’t explain it properly, but the guy was becoming a serious problem.
He wasn’t particularly strong or fast, at least not from anything I’d seen. He had no system that I could detect, no quest marker, and no obvious reason to matter. As far as I could tell, he was a nobody.
Yet every time he showed up, things went sideways.
Clara had started paying more attention to him than to me. The festival attack had included elements my system couldn’t track. The forest was changing in ways that didn’t match anything I remembered. And through all of it, Joseph kept turning up in the middle of things, looking as though he knew something I didn’t.
If I were streaming this, chat would be losing its collective mind.
Ren, how do you not see this guy is sus?
Bro, he’s literally the villain.
Skill issue.
I could practically see the messages flying across my screen.
That was the strange thing about being here. Sometimes, I’d zone out and imagine I was back at my desk, watching chat tear apart my gameplay. I’d almost expect a donation alert or someone spamming emotes after I made a stupid decision.
But there was no chat.
No camera. No subscriber goal. No follower count climbing in the corner of my screen.
Just me.
I used to be somebody. I had viewers, a community, a chair and a desk, a microphone, and a schedule. I had a life that, for all its problems, was actually mine.
Now I had a sword, a quest log, infinite luck, and a growing list of things that shouldn’t exist.
And the only person who seemed connected to any of it was some guy with no system, no quest marker, and absolutely no respect for my protagonist privileges.
The town liked me. People were impressed by me. Clara’s father had welcomed me, and I had done everything the system expected.
But Clara didn’t choose me.
Neither did her sister.
Okay. Breathe. Think.
I’m a strategic person. I didn’t get where I was by being stupid. Back when I was streaming, I was good at reading games, spotting patterns, and figuring out the optimal path. That was what I did. I looked at the available options, worked out which one gave me the best chance of winning, and went for it.
So that was what I needed to do now.
Forget the frustration. Forget Clara for a minute. Look at the facts.
One: I transmigrated into this world as the hero. The system confirms it. The prophecies confirm it. The seer confirmed it. Whatever else might be going on, I am the protagonist.
Two: Something is wrong with the world. Events are diverging from what the system expects. The forest is changing, creatures are appearing that aren’t in any bestiary I know, and the quest log has gaps where there shouldn’t be any.
Three: Joseph is connected to the problem. He appeared in the tavern before the festival. He was on the platform during the attack. He somehow ended up with Clara’s attention, and he left Millhaven with her and her sister, heading south.
That’s a lot of coincidences for one background character.
Four: I need to find him.
Not because the system told me to. It didn’t. That was the problem. The system had barely acknowledged his existence, yet every lead I followed seemed to circle back to him.
Five: I’m getting stronger.
The cave, the power source, the level-up. Whatever happened there had pushed my combat ability further than before. I could feel the difference in my movements. My reactions were sharper, my timing was better, and my body seemed to understand things before I consciously thought about them.
Combat Peak, Tier 3.
Whatever Joseph was, he didn’t seem like a combat threat. At least, not yet.
Which meant I needed to find out what he was before this situation got any worse.
Simple plan. Leave the forest, head south, find Joseph, and figure out what the hell he knows.
Then the system chimed.
[QUEST UPDATE]
New Quest Available: Investigate the Anomaly (Hidden)
Description: Something is disrupting the narrative flow. The Hero System cannot identify the source. Travel south. Find the disruption. Resolve it.
Reward: ???
Note: This quest is not part of the main storyline. Proceed with caution.
I stared at the notification.
Not part of the main storyline.
The system was telling me this was an optional quest, a detour from the usual path. Except the description also admitted that it couldn’t identify the source of the problem.
That was like a game telling you there was a bug in the world, then asking you to fix it without telling you where the bug was.
Except this wasn’t a game I could quit.
And if the system couldn’t identify the problem, I had to consider the possibility that whatever was causing it existed outside the system’s usual rules.
My thoughts returned to Joseph.
Of course they did.
I packed up my camp, mounted my stallion, and headed south.
As I rode, I found myself thinking about Clara’s hot sister, Maren. She was another unknown variable, although a more manageable one. She was smart, politically connected, and potentially useful.
She also didn’t like me.
Which was new.
Women liked me here. That wasn’t arrogance; it was a fact supported by my stats. I had a Charm rating of Flawless. It was a passive effect, something built into the system. People were naturally drawn to me.
That was how it was supposed to work.
Except Maren looked at me the way you looked at a tool you were deciding whether to use. She assessed me, calculated my value, and seemed to have decided within the first hour of meeting me that I was useful but untrustworthy.
No amount of charm had changed her mind.
It was the first time my Charm stat had failed to get the result I expected, and I had no idea why.
Actually, that wasn’t true.
I had a suspicion.
It was the same reason Clara’s quest had grayed out. The same reason the forest was changing. The same reason the system had offered me a hidden quest it couldn’t properly explain.
Joseph.
The thought should have scared me more than it did.
It scared me a little.
I decided to keep riding while the sun was still up and the road was clear. I had no intention of sitting around waiting for the next weird thing to happen.
If this were a stream, I’d turn to the camera and say, "Chat, we’ve got a mystery."
Then chat would spam theories. I’d read a few, laugh at the stupid ones, and eventually someone would suggest the obvious answer. I’d say, "Good call," and move on to the next objective.
Easy.
Except there was no chat to help me work through the problem. No viewers to bounce theories off. No audience to reassure me that I was still playing well.
There was only me, a horse, a road heading south, and a world that had started behaving like a game with a broken engine.
I was the hero.
The system said so. The prophecies said so. The seer had said so.
And heroes didn’t just sit around waiting for the next quest marker to appear.
I nudged the stallion into a faster pace.
Another notification appeared.
[HERO SYSTEM]
Level Up: 14 → 15
Combat: Peak (Tier 3) → Peak (Tier 3, Enhanced)
New Skill Unlocked: Combat Flow State
Description: In combat, the hero enters a flow state where technique becomes automatic. Reaction time decreased by 30%. Movement becomes predictive.
I read through the notification twice.
Level fifteen. A new skill. Enhanced combat ability.
Now we were talking.
Whatever problems the world threw at me, I was still progressing. I was still getting stronger. The system was still rewarding me for moving forward.
Meanwhile, Joseph was travelling south with the Dale sisters, apparently content to let them do the talking while he stayed out of the spotlight.
Must be nice.
I continued riding, occasionally thinking about Joseph, the system, and the increasingly uncomfortable fact that I was supposed to be the hero of this world.
Heroes were supposed to win. That was how these stories worked. The hero showed up, fought the enemy, overcame the obstacle, and came out on top. The system practically guaranteed it.
Infinite Luck. Peak Combat. Flawless Charm.
The numbers didn’t lie.
Except the numbers were starting to look like they might not be enough.
And that, chat, was the part that scared me.
Still, I had to face it head-on. Heroes didn’t quit when the game got difficult. They didn’t cower just because the next level was full of enemies they hadn’t seen before.
At least, that was what I told myself as I rode south, searching for a man the system couldn’t even recognise.
Because if Joseph really was the problem, I was going to find out why.
And then I was going to deal with him.