Prologue

 The brown-haired young man panted, ducking behind a tree as the claws swiped at his head. He’d agreed to this quest, and it wasn’t going as he’d hoped at all. Instead, he was hiding for his life, unequipped to fight it. He held a sword between shaking hands, screaming as the claws entered his throat.

He had found himself being escorted to a dock by some guy with a winged helmet and sandals, then being rowed along a river in a boat. He wasn’t super well-versed in his Greek mythology, so had a hard time placing what all this was.

All he knew was that he wanted to get out of whatever this place was. It gave him the creeps, and Niles had never been one for creepy things.

He was more invested in painting florals and landscapes, but few seemed interested in his work. The advent of generative AI sounded promising to him, and he was looking forward to trying that, but then something strange happened.

He was pulled into this dark and twisted world of horror, where that vampire lady had a blood fountain in her courtyard. When she’d offered him a quest, however, he was happy to accept it. He had found his purpose.

And so to find himself dead and in a world even darker and creeper than the other one was not entirely ideal.

He’d spent a few days looking for some way to escape, to come back into that world. What he settled upon was sneaking out when the lady of the place made her...what did she say it was? Her “court-mandated-mom-time”? Either way, he’d managed to sneak out through the portal she created to return to the above world. Snuck right into her luggage, then snuck out again as soon as humanly possible.

It turned out that the dark world he’d come to had yanked him back as soon as he got back to the human world. Again, not ideal.

But he could track down the guy responsible for his death and make him pay.

It took him a while to find him, which was when he noticed something about this human man. It turned out that he was also dragged there from the human world, and invested in the generative AI tech Niles had so wanted to try. It was then that he realized that this guy’s actions sounded a lot like what he’d wished to try for himself.

He killed this other guy (because after all, turnabout was fair play), and stole his secrets for himself. With just a flick of the wrist and zero effort, he could become better than before. More powerful.

So what if doing that killed a few acres of land? He would make them all pay for ignoring him. Ignoring his work.

Fashioning a suit of armor for himself, he started to roam the lands. The vampire would be next, he decided.

Yes, that vampire that had ripped him away from a future in the human world. He’d ruin everything for her.

And he knew that his revenge would be glorious.