"Your father left you because you were useless."
"How can you be so useless?! Why didn’t you do anything I told you?"
Two towering silhouettes loomed over me, their facial outlines barely visible through writhing black fog. No faces, no names. Just twisted mouths and raised hands — always shouting, always demanding.
"What are you good for, huh? Just breathing and being a burden?"
"You should’ve never been born."
The voices echoed—layered, distorted, as if spat from every direction. My head was bowed, arms too thin, knees scraped. I stood there as a child, not understanding what I’d done wrong — only that their words always left bruises deeper than fists.
Now a classroom. Fluorescent lights buzzed overhead. My desk was surrounded.
"Why are we even in the same class as ***?"
"Dead eyes. Bet you’re cursed."
"Hey ***! Buy me lunch today."
"Yeah, and clean my shoes too, freak. That’s all you’re good for."
Their faces were distorted, mouths stretching too wide, eyes all turned toward me — full of contempt. My head was still bowed. My hands trembled atop my desk.
Then... the voices fell silent.
A woman stepped through the fog — quiet, ethereal— her face shrouded in soft white mist, her silhouette limned by faint, silver light. She stood before me, head tilted.
Her voice was soft, almost kind.
I looked up — and saw only her mouth moving.
My eyes snapped open.
I was sitting upright in my dorm bed, chest heaving. Sweat clung to my skin like frost, soaking through my collar. My fists were clenched so tight I felt the sting of my nails digging into flesh.
The room was cold. Too cold. I hadn’t opened the window.
"...That dream again," I muttered, voice hoarse. My eyes unfocused, drifting to the rim of frost hugging the sill.
The warmth of the academy’s walls couldn’t quite reach this far corner of the dorm.
Snowflakes danced beyond the glass.
Just like that dream.
The dream that never ended.
At least, that’s how it felt.
Every night, without fail, the same scene played out—the faceless figures, the echoing voices, the suffocating weight of words that carved deeper than blades. At first, it had been mixed in with my usual nightmares—cosmic terrors, Virion’s training sessions gone wrong, the occasional turtle-related disaster (don’t ask). But after a week, those faded.
I exhaled, rubbing my temples as I swung my legs over the edge of the bed. The cold floor bit into my bare feet, a grounding contrast to the lingering haze of the dream.
It wasn’t just a simple nightmare.
The emotions were too real to be fake.
The details—though fragmented—were too sharp. The way my child-self’s knees had ached from kneeling too long. The confusion of a child who didn’t understand why he was hated. The guilt that festered like rot, the self-loathing that whispered, maybe they’re right.
The way my stomach had twisted when the classroom voices hissed freak. The way my chest had caved in when that mist-shrouded woman whispered—
No. This wasn’t just some random horror show my brain had cooked up. These were memories.
But how was the question.
Erased memories resurfacing using the system’s absence? A past life bleeding through? Some parallel version of me screaming across dimensions? The possibilities were as endless as they were frustrating.
All I knew for sure was that the emotions were real. The confusion, the sorrow, the guilt—they clung to me long after waking, sticky as spider silk.
"Classic tragic backstory," I muttered, pushing off the bed and heading for the bathroom.
The mirror greeted me with a familiar face—sharp jaw, slate-gray eyes, the faintest shadows beneath them from too many sleepless nights. I splashed cold water on my skin, letting the droplets trail down my chin before meeting my own gaze again.
"Am I even a ’background character’ anymore?" I chuckled, wiping my face with a towel.
Look at this figure—a body shaped by necessity rather than vanity, each muscle earned through countless fights and beatings, each scar a lesson learned the hard way.
This face—handsome in the way of a half-remembered stranger, the kind that lingers in your periphery but never quite sticks in memory. And these eyes... eyes that hold too much weight for someone meant to be insignificant, too much quiet awareness for a background character’s role.
Hehe, narcissist, are we?
But, coupled with a mysterious System, a classic amnesia setup, a destiny tangled with main characters and hidden powers, always targeted by assassins, and now, a tragic past served up in nightly dream sequences?
I might as well be the protagonist of my own damn story.
But then again, I am sure my ’role’ wouldn’t change.
I studied my reflection with wry amusement.
Logically speaking, even in my own story, I’d still be the background character - the System had branded me as such from the beginning, and truth be told, the label fit better than I cared to admit.
Background characters were, by definition, the forgettable ones - the nameless students in academy corridors, the faceless crowds in market scenes, the interchangeable casualties in battle sequences. Their entire purpose was to fill space until the real heroes showed up.
Most background characters lived and died without ever stepping into the light.
I’d been given something rare - awareness. The System’s interference, however annoying, had granted me a perspective they never got. I could see the strings moving the ’characters’ around me.
That made me something else entirely.
Well... mostly free. If I ignored the System’s occasional forced events and Virion’s sadistic training regimens.
"But..." I splashed more cold water on my face. "Does it even matter what I call myself?"
A background character or a protagonist, it doesn’t matter.What matters is that I’m alive—breathing, moving, thinking.What matters is that I still have choices to make, steps to take, even if no one’s watching.
I reached for the towel, watching water droplets slide down my reflection’s face like tears.
A fear surfaced in my mind.
What if this is all a dream?