Reborn as a Reluctant Demon Lord

Chapter 1 - Comic-Con

What would you do if you got to live out a childhood fantasy? If you were yanked out of your world and into one full of levels, magic, and dragons?

Would you go on grand adventures? Risk your life for levels and loot? Or would you strive to find a way back to the home that you left?

Would your answer change if you were the designated villain of the story?

These were the questions I had to face, but I am getting ahead of myself as that is not the beginning. The beginning was much more mundane and started at a comparatively normal place. Comic-Con.

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It was an ordinary day except for 2 facts:

I was getting to attend Comic-Con with a special VIP pass along with 1000 other peopleAbsolutely everything was going 100% terribly wrong

"How does this even happen?" I muttered to myself. I showed my VIP badge to one of the security people, asked for directions, and continued my complaints silently. I set my alarm on my phone to get me up an hour early, but it didn't go off. I meticulously planned my subway route and a backup, but they both ended up down for emergency maintenance. My Uber driver, which I shouldn't have even needed an Uber, got lost. The guard pointed me in the direction of the other VIPs and warned me that I was very late.

"At least I made it," I finished my grumbling, thanked the guard for the directions, and took off at a brisk jog. It would have been a run, but I had already run about 2 miles. That was about how far away my hopeless Uber driver got lost (and no, I couldn't call another one. My phone died). Anyway, my running mixed with the fact that I was not in the best shape meant I was very out of breath and coated in a thin layer of sweat.

Fortunately, I was still going to make it in time for the main event I cared about. Some company I had never heard of, TDL Industries, was unveiling something that they were calling the "next generation of virtual reality RPGs." I thought it was a bit strange that they were deciding to reveal that at Comic-Con instead of one of the gaming conventions, and I also thought it was weird that they were only showing it to the VIPs. However, I didn't give it much thought since I was just too excited to see it.

The fact of the matter is that if you looked into TDL, you wouldn't find a record of it anywhere. If you looked at the master schedule for Comic-Con events, you wouldn't find one for the showing I was going to. And finally, the exclusive VIP passes themselves didn't even exist two weeks ago.

Not that I had a way of knowing any of that then.

As I finally made it to the auditorium's double doors, I nearly ran into another guy who was coming from the opposite direction. He was about the same height as me, at 5'10, and had messy light brown hair. The fact that he had large bags under his eyes and was also panting and glistening with sweat meant that he had quite the morning too. I opened one of the doors, then after pausing for a second gestured "After you."

He nodded, said thanks, and then went through. I went in right after him to find a completely packed auditorium. We located what seemed to be the last two seats available in the back right corner, so we headed over to them. After we both gracelessly flopped into the seats, we finally introduced ourselves.

"I'm Jake," he said while offering his hand.

"Titus. Nice to meet you." I took his hand and gave it a shake. "Rough morning?" I asked.

"Yep."

"What happened?"

"Well, my phone was on the fritz, and for some reason, my alarm would go off every 15 minutes no matter what. Eventually, I just sent Garrett a text asking him to give me a wake-up call when he got up and silenced the alarms on my phone. Unfortunately, it seems like he didn't get my message." Jake paused for a second at that and pulled out his phone. "Speaking of Garrett, I better let him know I made it here safely. We were planning on meeting up." He tapped out a quick message and then continued, "Where was I? Right! Woke up late, and then subway issues resulted in me having to run to get here on time."