Transmigrated into Eroge as the Simp, but I Refuse This Fate

Chapter 319: Void and voices

He crawled forward.

Not with purpose. Not with strength.

But with refusal.

Each movement was a defiance, each twitch of his fingers a whisper of war against the weight dragging him down. His arms felt like they were filled with gravel, his spine a cracked rod barely keeping shape. But he moved. Inch by inch. Breath by breath.

The voices didn’t stop.

They shifted.

“You don’t deserve this power,” one said, smooth like oil. “You don’t even understand it.”

“He’ll break again,” another echoed. “He always breaks.”

“Zerev’ta… os kel vethar…” — the tongues twisted, overlapped, then translated themselves, until he wasn’t sure what was his own memory, what was a foreign tongue, and what was invention.

A nurse’s voice, from years ago, whispered through the static: “It’s spreading faster than we thought.”

A friend, faceless now: “I stopped visiting. He made it too hard.”

Victoria: “Stop acting like it’s everyone else’s fault.”

He clenched his jaw, dragging himself forward again, his fingernails scraping stone.

’I’m not that kid anymore.’

But the doubt kept rising, thick and black like ink flooding a glass of water.

And then—

Something in his vision changed.

Not warped. Not twisted.

Just… gone.

Color leeched from the sky. The stone beneath his hands felt flat. Air, once thick with mana—even if he couldn’t taste it—now felt still. Hollow.

Light faded.

Not dimmed. Just lost.

As if the world itself was forgetting to exist.

It wasn’t darkness. It was absence.

His breath came quicker now, more ragged.

Because he wasn’t just collapsing anymore.

The world was, too.

Like a mirror cracking with no reflection behind it.

And still—the voices didn’t stop.

“You’re not enough.”

“You never were.”

“Not when it mattered.”

And worse: his own voice, faint and far.

The voices didn’t stop.

Not even when his forehead touched the stone, sweat mixing with the dust. Not even when his breath hitched into dry coughs that tasted of blood and smoke.

“Remember,” they whispered, low and layered. “Remember who you really are.”

And Damien did.

Not because he wanted to.

Because he couldn’t forget.

Not the taste of the air in that hospital room—filtered, sterile, always just a bit too cold.

Not the moment his mother looked at him, eyes rimmed with guilt, and said she’d be back in an hour. Just one hour.

She didn’t come back.

He’d waited.

And waited.

But the door never opened again for her. Not that day. Not the next. When she did finally return, her smile was too bright, her words too careful, like she thought kindness could erase the abandonment.

And his father?

The man barely looked at him after the diagnosis. Just nodded. Stiff. Professional. Like he was reviewing a failed project instead of a son with a body that had started to rot from the inside out.

Damien remembered lying there—half-alive, full of fury—while the world outside spun on without him.

And that’s what stung the most.

He deserved more.

He had earned more.

Sharp, smart, alive in a way none of those other dull-eyed kids ever were. He wasn’t the one who should’ve ended up bed-bound, reduced to watching life like a TV show he couldn’t participate in.

It was unfair.

That bitterness had fermented over time—into something thick, something acidic. A truth he never spoke aloud but wore like armor under his smirk.

He wasn’t broken.

He was robbed.

And now, that same unfairness—the same rot—was crawling up his ribs again, whispering through veins that had once been reforged by mana and now begged for another taste.

“Still that same little boy,” the voice purred. “Left behind. Unchosen. Weak.”

“No,” Damien muttered, low, hoarse.

But the memories surged.

The nurse whispering behind the curtain. “He’s not stabilizing.”

The soft beeping of machines as his muscles wasted, as the fire in him dimmed and dimmed—until rage was the only heat he had left.

“I’m not…” he tried to say.

But the words faltered.

Because back then—when no one looked him in the eye anymore, when even his teachers stopped asking if he’d return to school—he’d started to believe it.

Started to think maybe that was it.

That brilliance meant nothing if your body was a coffin.

That all the sharp thoughts, all the instinct, all the hunger in the world—didn’t matter if you were trapped.

If you couldn’t move.

If you couldn’t fight.

His vision swam again.

The plateau cracked and flickered, fading between the burning sky and that quiet, fluorescent hospital ceiling. The stone under his hand felt too smooth. Too clean.

Too much like a bedrail.

“No.”

The stone under Damien’s hand felt too smooth. Too wrong. His breath hitched again, dry and uneven, as the world slid between two realities—burning cliff and blinking lights, cracked plateau and sterile linoleum.

“No.”

It wasn’t a scream. It wasn’t even a defiance anymore.

Just a statement.

Quiet.

Flat.

Like a lie told so many times it barely meant anything.

Because maybe that was the truth. Maybe this wasn’t just a moment of weakness—maybe it was who he was.

Still that same boy. Still that hospital bed. Still—

“See…”

The word slithered in from nowhere.

From everywhere.

“I told you…”

Damien froze.

That voice—

It wasn’t one he heard often.

But it was unforgettable.

A low, wet drawl. Not full of menace. Worse. Pity. Gloating. The kind of tone someone uses when they think they’ve won just by surviving longer.

And when Damien looked up—

There he was.

Slumped in a hospital chair, half-fused to the synthetic leather by sheer inertia, was the bloated outline of a man Damien had long written off as beneath him. Pathetic. Insignificant.

Righteous_One.

Sweat-matted hair clung to a forehead that glistened with feverish oil. His shirt was stained—pale crusts of food or worse—and a long, stringy trail of mucus clung to his nostril, catching the flicker of light like a glistening sneer.

Piss had soaked through the seat beneath him. The stink hit Damien before the visual did. Sharp. Sour. Vile.

And yet, somehow, the thing was smiling.

That grotesque, smug little grin that barely fit on a face so warped by self-hatred and delusion.

“You can’t even back your words at all…” the creature wheezed, thick tongue slurring as if each syllable was a burden.

“You talked big,” it said, eyes gleaming with rancid glee. “Thought you were special. Sharp. Alive.”

It leaned forward.

“Different.”

Damien couldn’t move. Not yet. The weight pressing down on his limbs wasn’t physical—it was heavier. Internal.

“You mocked people like me,” Righteous_One hissed, spit flecking the air. “Called me weak. Called me a coward. But look at you now…”

His eyes trailed downward.

“Crawling. Begging. Vomiting mana like a child who swallowed too much candy.”

Damien tried to speak—but the words didn’t come. His jaw twitched, breath catching in his throat.

“You were just talk,” the voice mocked again. “You always were.”

And in that moment, as the image loomed closer—drenched in filth, beaming with self-satisfaction—Damien felt something snap.

Not from fear.

From revulsion.

Because that thing—that—was looking down on him.

And some primal part of Damien’s psyche, the one that had never died even through sickness and screaming, curled its lip and snarled.

’Fuck….This guy is talking to me now?’

Not like this.

Not from him.

If this was fate? If this was what the world expected him to become—

Then the world needed to be fucking corrected.

’Yeah, bloody fucking hell.’

He didn’t claw back from the brink just to be pitied by sludge.

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