The Villain’s Ledger

CHAPTER 1 — The Villain System

Time did not pass the way it used to. There was no sun here, no clock — only the slow thickening of his own limbs, the growing awareness of a second presence floating nearby in the dark.

A twin, Aarav realized. I’m not alone in here.

His brother-to-be was small, restless, and — Aarav noticed with growing irritation — had developed the singularly infuriating habit of drifting close and sucking on his toe like it was the single greatest discovery of his unborn life.

For the third time that week.Something in Aarav — something old, something that had died bitter and unfinished on a highway in his last life — snapped.

He kicked.

It wasn’t much of a kick, not yet, not with limbs this small and undeveloped. But it connected, and his brother recoiled, and somewhere in the amniotic dark, Aarav felt something click into place behind his eyes like a switch being thrown.

For a long moment, floating in the dark with a dead man’s memories and an unborn child’s body, Aarav — no, not Aarav anymore, not really — simply processed.

A system. An actual, real, glowing-blue-text system. And I’m the villain. And my brother is a protagonist.

He thought about every novel he’d ever half-read on his phone during his commute,every trope he’d rolled his eyes at. The doomed villain, always crushed under the protagonist’s rising sun. The family that loved the wrong son. The tragic, inevitable fall.

Then he thought about the ten points sitting warm and bright in the corner of his vision, and he smiled — an expression his face was not yet developed enough to properly make, but the intent was there.

Not this time.

He kicked his brother again.

His brother began, as much as an unborn child could, to cry — a distressed thrashing that sent ripples through the shared dark. Somewhere far above, muffled through flesh and fluid, Aarav heard his mother gasp and press a hand to her belly.

Sorry, Mom, he thought, without much sincerity at all. Your golden child is funding my villain arc.

He did not stop.

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