Arc of Fire - Chapter 22: Night March

Entering Tokyo in the bubble era, in this strange era, the only familiar ones are Matsuda Seiko, Nakamori Akina, Kudo Shizuka…

- Description from novelbuddy

I thought I had seen bad endings before—but nothing prepared me for the garbage conclusion of The Hero’s Path.Years of investment, countless struggles, and for what? The protagonist failed. The villain won. Everyone else? Dead. Furious, I sent a message to the author, only to get a chilling response:[Do you think you could do better?]Before I could even blink, my phone exploded in a blinding light, and the next thing I knew—I was waking up in a completely different body.Now, I’m Merlin Everhart, a fourteen-year-old with a 12-star talent, the kind of gift only the strongest should have.But here’s the problem: I have no idea who I am supposed to be.With nothing but a system and a first-day-of-school alarm ringing in my ears, I’m thrown into the world of The Hero’s Path.Am I just another side character in a world that already ended once?…Either way, I refuse to let this story beat me too.

When he stayed at her home and one night, he took her body in a drunken stupor. From then on, he had been a constant fixture in her life. How adamant he was in forcing a marriage was how adamant she demanded for a divorce. “I’m not staying married to you! I’m not staying married to you! I’m not staying married to you!” After she repeated such an important proclamation three times, he finally tossed her the divorce paper. She thought she had finally escaped him alas… After the divorce, he still snuck into her room every night… Finally losing her patience, she yelled, “We are already divorced!” He glanced at her and set down the divorce paper before her. On it, it was written clearly: After the divorce, the car is hers, the house is hers, the company is hers, their child is hers, he… is also hers?

Rex was an ordinary salaryman, resigned to a dull life of monotony in a towering megacity. But his world shatters when he’s conscripted by Nexum Dynamics, a ruthless megacorporation, and thrust into a brutal war for a barren, alien world. The planet holds unimaginable riches, but it’s also swarming with the Krhyssari, an insectoid race that dominates the surface with their hive-mind precision and relentless aggression. Amid the carnage, Rex had an extraordinary encounter with Cleo, an ancient AI, a survivor of a long-extinct civilization. Cleo isn’t just an artificial intelligence; she’s a consciousness imbued with memories of her people’s interstellar empire and equipped with advanced bio-nanotechnology. Offering Rex a new purpose and unmatched power, she transforms his fragile human body into a hybrid of living metal and flesh, making him the ultimate weapon. But Cleo is more than a tool of war. As she journeys alongside Rex, her cold, logical algorithms evolve, shaped by his humanity. Together, they form a bond that transcends the boundaries of man and machine, discovering love in the midst of chaos. As Rex and Cleo fight for survival, they uncover a shared ambition, to rise as intergalactic overlords, uniting or conquering the galaxy.