Cycle Zero : reincarnated as the Demon King, Now What?

The End and the Beginning

Ren Tanaka was twenty six years old, and for the past three years he had poured every ounce of his energy into his job at a mid sized game production company in Tokyo. He was not the flashiest employee, but he was reliable. The kind of person who stayed late without complaint, who double checked every line of code before submitting it, who believed that hard work would eventually pay off.

That morning started like any other. He left his apartment, coffee in hand, and made his way toward the train station. His phone rang halfway there. He glanced at the screen and saw her name.

“Hello, Vanessa,” he said, a small smile forming out of habit.

She didn’t return the greeting. “It’s over between us,” she said, her voice flat and final. “I don’t want anything to do with a broke man like you.”

The line went dead before he could respond.

Ren stood frozen on the sidewalk, the phone still pressed to his ear even though there was nothing left to hear. People moved around him like water around a stone. He didn’t remember the rest of the walk to the station, or the train ride, or arriving at his desk. The words kept replaying in his mind. Broke man. Like you.

He tried to work. He really did. He opened his project files, stared at lines of code that should have been familiar, and found that none of it made sense anymore. Hours passed in a haze. Colleagues spoke to him and he answered on autopilot, not really hearing himself.

By the time the director’s voice cut through the office announcing the end of the workday, Ren felt like he had aged ten years in a single afternoon. He packed his bag slowly, his movements mechanical, and left the building without saying goodbye to anyone.

The walk home passed in the same fog. He reached an intersection he had crossed a thousand times before. The light was red. He knew it was red. But his mind was still on that phone call, still turning her words over and over, and his feet carried him forward without his permission.

He heard the horn first. A long, desperate blast that seemed to come from very far away. Then he turned his head and saw the truck, far too close, its headlights impossibly bright even in daylight. There was no time to move. No time to think. Just the screech of tires and a wall of steel closing the distance in a heartbeat.

The impact never registered as pain. Just a sudden, total silence, and the strange clarity of a single thought.

Is this how I’m going to die?

I guess so.

Then nothing. No sound, no light, no sense of up or down. Just an endless, empty black.

When Ren opened his eyes again, he was no longer on the street.

He was sitting on cold stone ground, surrounded by a crowd of people he had never seen before. Their clothes looked strange, somewhere between medieval robes and ceremonial armor, and their faces were turned away from him, all fixed on something ahead. He pushed himself up, disoriented, his heart still hammering from the accident that no longer showed any mark on his body.

A man at the front of the crowd raised his arms and shouted words that echoed across the stone chamber.

“The Demon Lord Diablo has awakened!”

Ren’s blood went cold. He looked down at his own hands, then around at the unfamiliar faces, then up toward wherever that voice had come from, and a single question rose above the confusion and the fear.

Where am I? And why do I have the feeling everyone here is looking at me? He said to himself.