The Epilogue Record: The Bastard Knight's Guide to a Doomed World
On my twentieth birthday, my father, Marquis Reinhardt, handed me the ancestral sword of our lineage and told me to become the shield of the Empire. I nodded, took the heavy piece of iron, and internally cursed at the sheer weight of responsibility. I just wanted to live quietly with my family.
That same midnight, a burning sensation seared my retinas, and an invisible, ink-stained parchment materialized in the empty air before me. It wasn't a status window. It didn't calculate my strength, agility, or mana. It was a newspaper from tomorrow.
[Front Page: The Bronze District Slaughter. 42 Dead. The Imperial Knights Arrive Too Late.]
The world praises the flawless, unyielding peace of the Solis Empire. The Liberty Dawn rebels bleed in the shadows for a utopian dream of absolute equality. And I am just Ian Reinhardt, a mediocre C-grade knight freshly graduated from the academy, caught squarely in the middle of this massive, continent-spanning bullshit.
But as I turn the spectral pages of this cursed record to alter tomorrow’s tragedies, I am starting to realize a terrifying, suffocating truth.
The righteous rebels are fighting for a lie. The tyrannical Empire is hiding a horrifying secret to keep us all alive. And the human faces smiling next to me in the capital's grand halls... might not be human at all. To save my family and this rotten world, I have to play a game with the future. And I'm going to cheat.