SMACK.
The sound echoed through the sterile, impeccably clean dining room, a sharp crack that seemed to hang in the air long after the physical impact had registered. My head snapped to the side, the stinging heat blooming across my left cheek with familiar, terrifying speed. The metallic taste of copper flooded my mouth where my teeth had caught the inside of my lip.
I didn't reach up to touch it. I knew better than that. Moving my hands would be seen as an act of defiance, a gesture of defense that would only invite more violence. I simply stared at the polished mahogany floorboards, tracing the intricate grain of the wood with my eyes, waiting for the ringing in my ears to subside.
"Arthur," my mother's voice trembled, not with sorrow, but with a hysterical, venomous rage. "Why did you score a hundred on this exam? Tell me! Are you trying to belittle your brother?"
I slowly raised my eyes. My mother stood over me, her chest heaving, the immaculate fabric of her designer blouse slightly wrinkled from the force she had just exerted. Her eyes, usually so composed and elegant when she looked at the rest of the world, were wide and feral as they bore into mine. In her hand, she crumpled the pristine exam paper—my exam paper, the one with the bright red '100' circled at the top.
"Answer her," my father's voice rumbled from the head of the table. It wasn't loud. It was worse; it was cold, detached, and dripping with an absolute, undeniable disgust. I shifted my gaze to him. He was methodically cutting a piece of steak, not even bothering to look at me. "What a dark heart you have, Arthur. To go out of your way to make your own twin feel inadequate. It's sickening."
I didn't say a word. I couldn't. Any defense I offered would be twisted into a confession of malice. Instead, my eyes drifted slightly to the corner of the long, opulent dining table.
There he sat. My twin brother.
We shared the same face, the same eyes, the same hair. Yet, looking at him was like looking at a distorted mirror image—one bathed in warm light while I was cast in shadow. He had scored a forty-five on the same exam. His paper lay neatly beside his plate, practically ignored.
As my parents hurled their vitriol at me, his gaze met mine. He didn't look upset. He didn't look humiliated by his failing grade. He just sat there, a piece of roasted potato halfway to his mouth, and offered me a slow, coy smile. It was a smile so subtle, so perfectly hidden behind his napkin, that our parents couldn't possibly see it. It was a smile that said, 'I win again. I always win.'
This was my life. This was the inescapable, suffocating reality of my existence.
I was the eldest twin by exactly four minutes, but in the eyes of my parents, I might as well have been a parasite they had accidentally brought home from the hospital. I always wanted to be loved. I always wanted to be happy. As a child, I possessed that naive, enduring hope that if I just did things right—if I was quiet enough, helpful enough, smart enough—they would finally look at me the way they looked at him.
I was an excellent student. I pushed myself to the absolute brink, studying late into the night beneath the thin beam of a flashlight under my covers. But the truth was a twisted, sick joke: I didn't even know why I bothered getting good marks anymore.
When I brought home a perfect report card, they hit me, accusing me of showing off and trying to ruin my brother's self-esteem. When, in a desperate attempt to avoid their wrath, I purposefully tanked my grades and brought home failing marks, they hit me harder, screaming that I was a disgrace to the family name and a worthless burden.
It wasn't just academics. I remembered the annual sports festival in middle school. I had spent weeks training for the 100-meter dash. When the starting gun fired, I ran like my life depended on it, crossing the finish line first, the wind in my hair, a fleeting second of pure, unadulterated triumph in my chest. But as I stood on the podium, scanning the crowd for a proud smile from my parents, I saw only thunderous fury.
My brother had tripped in his race and scraped his knee. The moment we got home, the doors were locked, the blinds were drawn, and my father took off his belt. "How dare you celebrate while your brother is in pain? How dare you try to steal the spotlight?"
The outside world only amplified the dissonance. At the parent-teacher meetings, my teachers would beam. They would clasp my parents' hands and praise me to the heavens. "Arthur is a prodigy! He's polite, incredibly intelligent, and a joy to have in class." My parents would smile those fake, sugary smiles, thanking the teachers, playing the role of the humble, nurturing guardians. But the moment the car doors slammed shut in the parking lot, the facade would shatter. The scolding would begin before the engine even turned over. I was berated for being a sycophant, for manipulating the teachers, for making the family look bad by being "unnaturally perfect."
Meanwhile, my brother—who regularly slept through class, failed his assignments, and bullied the younger kids—never received a single shout. Even when the principal called home about his behavior, my parents would fiercely defend him, blaming the teachers, blaming the other students, or—more often than not—blaming me for supposedly setting a bad example.
At first, it was frustrating. It was a burning, agonizing injustice that tore at my insides. I cried in my closet. I prayed to a god I wasn't sure existed. I begged for an explanation, for a sliver of affection.
But as the years bled into one another, the frustration morphed into exhaustion. You can only beat a dog so many times before it stops whimpering and simply goes numb. So, somewhere around my sophomore year of high school, I just gave up.
I closed my heart. I built a fortress of ice and apathy around my mind. I stopped trying to please them. I stopped trying to explain myself. I stopped speaking unless spoken to. I became a ghost haunting my own life, isolated and utterly detached from the people who shared my blood.
The day after my high school graduation, I found my few meager belongings packed in black garbage bags sitting on the front porch. The locks had already been changed. My father opened the door just a crack, his face devoid of any emotion.
"You're eighteen. We have fulfilled our legal obligation to you. Don't come back."
He shut the door. I didn't even hear the lock click; it was already bolted.
Now, I was twenty-four.
The world hadn't gotten any kinder, but at least it was honest in its brutality. I lived in a cramped, drafty, one-room apartment on the outskirts of the city. The wallpaper was peeling, revealing the gray plaster beneath like diseased skin. The heater only worked when it felt like it, and the single window looked out onto a brick alleyway that permanently smelled of wet cardboard and stale garbage.
Life was an endless, grueling cycle. I was enrolled in a local public college, barely scraping by on meager scholarships, and I spent every other waking hour working part-time. I loaded boxes in a warehouse from midnight until dawn, my muscles screaming in protest, my hands calloused and blistered. I would sleep for three hours, go to class, study in the library, and go back to work.
I had no friends. My isolated nature, forged in the fires of my childhood, made it impossible for me to connect with anyone. When classmates tried to talk to me, I gave one-word answers. When coworkers invited me out for cheap beers, I declined. I didn't know how to be a person anymore. My heart was a boarded-up house, the windows shuttered against the world.
Yet, tonight, I finally had a moment of respite.
It was a Friday night. My shift at the warehouse had been canceled due to a massive, freak thunderstorm rolling in from the coast. The rain was lashing against my thin windowpane like a million tiny fingernails begging to be let in. Thunder rumbled so deeply it rattled the cheap mug of instant ramen sitting on my nightstand.
I lay on my narrow, sagging mattress, a thin blanket pulled up to my chest, the only source of light in the room coming from the cracked screen of my smartphone.
I was reading manga. Specifically, I was rereading Eleceed.
It was my one escape, my single indulgence in a life devoid of color. To anyone else, it was just a story about awakened individuals, superpowered fights, and fat, talking cats. But to me, it was a lifeline.
I swiped the screen, my eyes tracing the vibrant artwork. I lingered on a panel of Jiwoo Seo. Jiwoo... he was everything I wasn't allowed to be. He had been isolated, hiding his powers, terrified of the world. But instead of growing bitter, his heart remained incredibly, foolishly pure. He cared for stray cats. He fought not out of malice, but to protect. And because of that purity, he had drawn people to him. He found friends who would bleed for him. He found a family.
And then there was Kayden Break. The strongest awakened in the world, arrogant and unyielding, yet he took this sweet, naive kid under his wing. He didn't abuse him. He didn't belittle him. He nurtured him. He protected him with a ferocity that made my chest ache with a profound, hollow longing.
I stared at the screen, watching Jiwoo laugh with his friends—Subin, Jisuk, Wooin. I watched them bicker, fight alongside each other, and share meals where nobody was screaming, nobody was keeping score, and nobody was being slapped for succeeding.
A heavy, exhausted sigh escaped my lips, fogging up the cold air in the apartment.
"I wish..." I whispered, my voice sounding raspy and foreign in the silent room.
I lowered the phone, resting it on my chest, and stared up at the water-stained ceiling. Outside, the storm was escalating. The wind howled furiously, shaking the glass of my window. But inside, everything felt strangely still.
"I wish I could start again," I murmured to the empty room.
It wasn't a suicidal thought. I had survived too much to just want to end it all. It was a yearning for a reset. A desperate, burning desire to be reborn.
"I wish I could be in that world," I continued, closing my eyes. I pictured the bustling streets of South Korea, the hidden arenas of the Awakened, the quiet, warm house filled with fat cats. "A world where things make sense. Where I can fight for something real. Where I don't have to hide my strength or apologize for my existence. I just want to have friends. I just want..."
A single tear, hot and unbidden, slipped out of the corner of my eye and tracked down into my hair.
"...I just want to live a better life. I want to be happy."
CRACK.
The sound was deafening, a thousand times louder than the slap in the dining room all those years ago. It wasn't just a sound; it was a physical force.
My eyes snapped open just in time to see the world turn entirely, blindingly white.
There was no time to scream. There was no time to react. The lightning didn't just strike the building; it seemed to tear through the very fabric of reality, ripping straight down through the roof, the ceiling, and directly into the center of my small, pathetic room.
The air instantly superheated, tasting of ozone and burning copper. The force of the strike shattered my window into a million crystalline shards that hung suspended in the air for a fraction of a millisecond. My phone screen shattered. The bulb overhead exploded.
For a single, agonizing moment, I felt the electricity surge through my veins. It was a pain so absolute, so complete, that it bypassed my brain's ability to process it as suffering. It felt like every nerve ending in my body was being rewritten, burned away to ash.
I was dying. At twenty-four, unloved, forgotten, in a cheap apartment that smelled of mold and instant noodles.
By all rights, I should have been terrified. I should have been angry. I should have cursed my parents, cursed my brother, cursed the cruel, twisted fate that had dealt me such a miserable hand from the moment I took my first breath.
But as the white light consumed my vision, melting away the peeling wallpaper, the sagging bed, and the cold, damp walls of my reality... I didn't feel anger.
I felt a strange, overwhelming sense of lightness. The crushing weight that had sat on my chest since I was a child—the weight of expectations, of abuse, of the desperate, unfulfilled need to be loved—suddenly evaporated.
The pain receded, replaced by a warm, floating sensation. The roar of the thunder faded into a gentle, rhythmic hum, like the purring of a giant cat.
My physical body was gone. The apartment was gone. The life of 'Arthur, the scapegoat' was over.
As my consciousness began to slip away, drifting into the endless, blinding white void, a final thought drifted through my mind, clear and calm as a glass lake.
Man... I am happy.
...
...purr...
...
...purrrrrrr...
...
"Hey. Wake up."
The voice was gruff, irritated, and strangely close.
I didn't want to wake up. I was comfortable. For the first time in my existence, nothing hurt. It felt like I was wrapped in warm, soft sunlight.
"I said, wake up, kid. Are you dead or what? I don't have time to deal with a corpse in my alley."
Wait.
Alley?
I felt a sudden, sharp pressure against my cheek. Not a slap, but a prodding, rhythmic tapping.
A wet nose sniffed my ear.
My senses, which I thought had been burned away by the lightning, suddenly rushed back in. I smelled wet asphalt, morning dew, and... fish? The ground beneath me was hard and uneven, not like my mattress.
I forced my eyes open. The light was harsh, but it wasn't the white glare of lightning. It was the morning sun, filtering through the gap between two brick buildings.
I blinked, trying to clear the blurriness from my vision. Looming over me, blocking out the sun, was a face.
It was huge . It was incredibly, unbelievably . It is a freaking dragon had black strip a disgruntled expression, and a jagged scar over one eye.
"Took you long enough," the dragon grumbled, its mouth moving perfectly in sync with the gruff voice. "Now, get up. lets go ."
I stared at the dragon . The dragon stared back.
WHERE THE FUCK IAM I ?