3. Defeat Addiction (3)

"Hgh—!!"

He woke screaming, jolted by the nauseating sensation of his pierced throat being torn away.

"I… I'm alive."

The feeling of Erin's dagger punching through his neck was still vivid. The cold bite of metal sliding in. The searing, white-hot agony that followed.

"…Ugh."

Nothing was in his stomach to bring up, but the memory was so sharp he dry-heaved anyway.

Being killed and brought back to life was an experience of unrelenting horror.

Checkpoint or not, resurrection or not—the fact that he had died didn't change.

If there was any silver lining, it was that he'd apparently become something unkillable. Immortal, in the most wretched sense of the word.

"…."

But that also meant people like Erin—people who had killed him—could do it again. And again. And again.

Worse, he carried that grotesque trait that leveled up whoever killed him. Which made him not just a target, but a resource.

《 Inheriting memories and stats from the 1st playthrough.

Targets — Erin, Carmen, Maeve, Altair, Sigrún 》

Five NPCs had come back to life carrying memories of being killed by him. Five.

Erin and the rest of them were almost certainly out for blood.

He dragged a hand down his face.

He despised whatever god had dumped him into this world with a trait like that.

*…First things first. Figure out where I am.*

He shelved the rage and the revenge fantasies for later and looked around.

A soft bed. A room that was half-tidied, half-abandoned.

Books scattered unevenly across a wardrobe shelf. It looked like a personal bedroom—his, apparently.

*A dormitory…?*

He'd been told he'd resurrect at a Checkpoint after dying. That Checkpoint, it seemed, was this dormitory bed.

He exhaled slowly, relieved at least to have woken somewhere safe, and hauled himself upright.

He thought about getting a glass of water. Found a cup, filled it from the tap.

"…Gulp."

Even after wetting his parched throat, the unease wouldn't settle. He went to the bathroom and splashed water on his face.

"…."

The cold water helped. His thoughts quieted. He lifted his head and met his own eyes in the mirror.

Black eyes. Black hair.

A sharp-featured, undeniably handsome face stared back at him with a complicated expression.

The moment he saw it, he felt it.

The face of a villain. The kind of face that looked at people the way a farmer looks at livestock.

Even he—the one living inside this body—felt a chill.

*Couldn't you have been handsome in a softer way?* The sheer menace of his own reflection put him in a foul mood.

Imagining this face massacring NPCs indiscriminately during the first playthrough made him feel faintly ill.

Even if he apologized and swore it wasn't intentional, no one would believe him with a face like this.

They'd think he was mocking them. He'd earn contempt, not forgiveness.

He'd once dreamed of being a cool villain as a kid… but not like this.

He'd wanted something with depth. Not a butcher who killed at the drop of a hat.

He sighed and reached up to touch the spot on his neck where Erin had stabbed him.

There had been no hesitation in her hands when she froze his feet and drove the blade in. Not a flicker.

Of course there wasn't.

The world of Desperado Reunion was on the brink of the Melting.

She had survived that. Somehow.

And the first time she'd met him—the first-playthrough version of him—he'd killed her without reason. Of course she burned for revenge.

"…."

Even so, the fear of being killed, and the slow-rising anger underneath it, were feelings he couldn't quite name.

Erin's actions had a logic to them. Whether that logic was truly *just* was another question entirely.

Honestly, he thought the developers who designed the NPC-killing system deserved to die more than he did.

"Haah…."

The more he thought, the more vividly the deaths came back to him. He gave up and left the bathroom.

Back in the room, he sat on the edge of the bed and fidgeted with his fingers.