When I finally reached the village, I stopped and took a look around. The place was badly run down. It looked like it had been through war after war, the buildings scarred by old battles. Panting slightly from my frantic sprint to escape the other heroes, I slowly walked toward the entrance.
The moment I stepped past the perimeter, a group of guards rushed forward, instantly surrounding me with their weapons drawn and pointed straight at my chest.
Before I could even explain myself, the crowd parted. A woman in her early twenties with long black hair walked forward. She carried herself with the strict poise of a commander. She wore polished armor, but it was visibly thin and beaten up—likely a result of the village's short supply of resources.
She stepped closer, her sharp eyes scanning me from head to toe.
???: "You look like you're running away from something.”
Her voice was surprisingly calm, yet completely unyielding as she rested her hand on her weapon.
Claire De La Roche: "My name is Claire De La Roche, Commander of this village's defense and tactical force. You are under arrest—primarily for interrogation. Don't make this difficult.”
Before I could even let out a confused, "Ehh?" they had already slapped heavy iron handcuffs onto my wrists and begun dragging me toward the village dungeon.
Claire led the way, escorting me straight into a bleak interrogation room where she forced me onto a stone bench across from her.
She leaned back, her sharp eyes scanning my unusual outfit. Since I was wearing standard modern clothes, she had clearly never seen anything like it. Then she stared at the strange, transparent frames resting in front of my eyes—also known as my glasses. Combined with my completely messy, curly hair, I looked less like an otherworldly traveler and more like a total vagrant by this world's standards. Well, they weren't exactly wrong; as of right now, I was technically homeless with absolutely nowhere to go.
Surprisingly, Claire didn't ask about my bizarre fashion sense. Instead, she leaned forward, getting straight to the point.
"So," she murmured, narrowing her eyes at me. "Where exactly do you come from?"
Her glare was icy. What I didn't know yet was that every single nation in this world harbored a deep, violent hatred for one another following the aftermath of the First War. To her, any stranger was a potential enemy spy.
I swallowed hard under her intense gaze. The pressure in the room was so thick I felt like one wrong word would turn me into a permanent victim of Truck-kun.
"Umm..." I stammered, sweating bullets. "From... the forest?”
Claire didn't blink. Her expression went completely deadpan. "From the forest? Do you take me for a fool, outsider?"
She opened her mouth, likely to order my execution or throw me into a darker pit, but the universe decided to save me.
BOOM!
The entire stone dungeon violently shuddered. Dust, mortar, and sharp rock debris rained down from the ceiling as a terrifying, primordial screech echoed from the streets above. It sounded like a mixture of a roaring furnace and a hissing reptile.
"Report!" Claire barked, her royal composure instantly shifting into battle-ready discipline as a panicked, bleeding guard threw open the heavy wooden door.
"Commander! A Giant Flame Salamander has breached the northern barricade!" the guard gasped, clutching a broken arm. "It’s breathing hellfire across the residential district! The vanguard is getting completely wiped out!"
Claire didn't waste a single breath. She drew her broadsword with a brilliant, ringing SCHWING! "Evacuate the lower levels. All remaining units, form a defensive perimeter at the fountain square!" she ordered, sprinting past my cell without a backward glance.
Unfortunately for me, the salamander was a fast mover.
A massive, scaly tail encrusted with glowing magma slammed directly through the dungeon's outer foundation wall. The impact blew the iron bars of my cell inward, shattering them into twisted scrap metal and sending me flying into the dirt.
I scrambled out of the settling dust, coughing and gagging. "Magic! Come on, infinite mana battery, do your thing! Explosions!!!!!!!!!!" I panicked, thrusting my hands forward in desperate anime poses.
Nothing. Zip. The infinite mana inside me was completely locked up, frozen by pure adrenaline and a lack of proper activation parameters.
When the giant lizard stuck its massive, smoking snout through the collapsed wall, its yellow reptilian eyes locking onto me, my survival instincts took the wheel. I turned right around and sprinted out of the crumbling building, running for my absolute life.
I burst into the burning village square, and the scene was pure apocalypse. Thatch roofs were ablaze, and in the center of the chaos, Claire De Valois was fighting like a true legendary commander. She was dodging streams of liquid fire and parrying the salamander’s razor-sharp claws with her broadsword.
But the beast was simply too massive for a single warrior with worn-out equipment.
With a cruel, heavy swipe of its tail, the salamander shattered Claire's iron shield, sending her crashing hard into the stone basin of a dried-up fountain.
I stopped dead in my tracks. My brain told me to keep booking it toward the woods, but my eyes locked onto her weapon. Claire was bleeding from her temple, her breath ragged, but she was still using her heavy silver broadsword as a crutch, desperately trying to force her trembling legs to stand and protect her people.
‘I want that,’ a sudden, unhinged thought crossed my mind.
The moment that desperate thought took hold, the roaring flames and the screaming villagers faded into background static. My vision zoomed in on the weapon in her hand. Suddenly, I wasn't just looking at a piece of sharp metal—I was looking at a living blueprint.
-The carbon-to-iron density ratio...
-The center of gravity is located exactly three inches above the crossguard...
-The specific micro-scratches on the hilt worn down by ten years of elite knight training…
My infinite mana battery finally responded to the blueprint, surging into my right palm like a tidal wave of electricity. Glowing, neon-blue pixelated data streams began spinning rapidly around my hand, and a solid, brilliant replica of Claire's broadsword—made entirely out of dense, humming mana—started materializing out of thin air.
"Holy crap, it's actually working!" I yelled, a massive grin breaking across my face.
But because I was staring at the glowing, magical sword instead of looking at the ground, my foot caught the edge of a shattered cobblestone.
"WHOA—"
THUD!
I tripped over my own feet, faceplanting spectacularly into a puddle of mud. As I fell, the newly formed mana sword slipped from my grip, spinning gracefully through the smoke-filled air before plunging vertically into the dirt with a loud SHING! The glowing blue blade vibrated in the ground right in front of me, perfectly waiting to be claimed.
I groaned, shaking the mud off my nose, and scrambled forward to grab the hilt.
The instant my fingers wrapped around the mana sword, a jolt of pure digital energy shocked my entire nervous system. My eyes wide, columns of glowing green code and digital text started scrolling across my vision at light speed, overlaying the real world like a sci-fi heads-up display.
[OBJECT REPLICATION: SUCCESSFUL]
[EXTRACTING USAGE HISTORY FROM SOURCE TARGET: CLAIRE DE La Roche]
[DOWNLOADING: DE La Roche ROYAL SWORDSMANSHIP... 25%... 70%... 100%]
[INSTALLING MUSCLE MEMORY PARAMETERS]
=================================
✨ NEW ABILITIES UNLOCKED ✨
=================================
• [Copy/Paste] — (Innate Ability)
• [Mana Materialization] — (Innate Ability)
• [Flash Step] — (Copied from Target: Claire)
• [Strength Enhancement] — (Copied from Target: Claire)
• [Endurance Enhancement] — (Copied from Target: Claire)
=================================
My right arm twitched violently as my muscles forcefully memorized a decade of elite knight training in a single second. I didn't know standard physics, but my brain had just successfully copied and pasted her entire combat identity directly into my arms.
I stood up, effortlessly spinning the heavy, glowing mana sword with flawless, master-level precision. I looked at the giant salamander, a confident, slightly unhinged grin spreading across my face.
"Alright, lizard," I muttered, the downloaded code still pulsing in my eyes. "Let's see if this copy-paste job actually works.”
With the newly downloaded stats coursing through my veins, I moved. I activated Flash Step, blurring across the courtyard with an incredible, explosive speed that honestly surprised even me. My glowing mana blade became a blur of blue light as I began slicing through the lesser lizards with effortless precision.
Meanwhile, Claire lay wounded on the shattered cobblestones, exhausted from fighting off multiple monsters at once. She looked up at the approaching reptiles with tired, heavy eyes. A tragic, soft smile touched her lips as she closed her eyes, accepting her fate.
‘I did my best... for our country,’ she thought, waiting for the final blow.
BOOM!
A shockwave of blue mana rippled through the air. I suddenly materialized directly in front of her, effortlessly blocking a massive lizard claw with my glowing sword. I glanced back over my shoulder, tossing her a cocky, protagonist-tier smirk.
"Well," I said, my voice echoing with downloaded authority. "As long as I am here, nobody is dying today. Except for these overgrown geckos."
Claire snapped her eyes open. She looked up from the dirt, her breath catching in her throat.
There I stood, defiantly blocking the monster. A majestic, flowing cape billowed dramatically behind me in the wind. The afternoon sunlight broke through the smoke clouds, hitting my silhouette so perfectly that it created a literal halo around my body. To her, in that exact moment, I didn't look like a homeless vagrant anymore.
To her, I looked absolutely divine. A true, legendary savior king.
To me? I was completely suffering.
The blazing sunlight was reflecting off my glasses at a terrible angle, making it almost impossible to see where the hell the lizards were actually attacking from. And as for the "majestic cape"? It wasn't a cape. While I was sprinting away from the prison earlier, I had accidentally blindsided a villager's backyard and gotten violently hit by a low-hanging laundry line.
A heavy, wet floral-patterned blanket had wrapped itself securely around my neck, and because I was in a panicked sprint, I couldn't stop to take it off.
So now, I was forced to fight a horde of giant monsters while wearing a stolen bed sheet, completely blinded by the sun, desperately swinging a pirated mana sword by pure muscle memory.
The smaller lizards scattered in terror, leaving only the massive Giant Flame Salamander. It roared, its maw glowing with a massive buildup of hellfire.
"He's going to get blasted!" Claire cried out from the ground, trying to reach for me. "Your Majesty, dodge!"
‘I would dodge if I could see!’ I screamed internally. ‘Also, wait—did she just call me Your Majesty?!’ The sun was hitting my glasses so hard I was literally staring into a wall of pure white light. I couldn't see the salamander, I couldn't see the fire, I couldn't see anything.
But my downloaded muscle memory didn't care about my identity crisis or my lack of eyesight.
As the salamander unleashed a torrent of blazing hellfire, my body moved entirely on its own. [Flash Step] activated automatically. My feet blurred, dodging the superheated flames by a fraction of an inch as the lavender-scented laundry blanket snapped dramatically in the wind behind me.
[Strength Enhancement] pulsed through my arms, locking my grip onto the hilt. Guided purely by the downloaded instincts of the De La Roche Royal style, I lunged forward blindly into the white light and swung the mana sword downward with everything I had.
SLAM!!
The glowing blue blade split the air, striking the giant salamander directly between its thick, armored scales. A shockwave of pure mana exploded outward, instantly extinguishing the remaining flames and splitting the massive monster's skull in a single, flawless strike.
The giant beast shuddered, let out a final smoke-filled gasp, and crashed heavily into the mud. Completely defeated.
I landed squarely on top of the monster's head, completely frozen in a perfect, rigid post-battle pose, my sword held out majestically to the side.
To Claire, I looked like a stoic, infallible god of war, standing victoriously over the slain beast without even breaking a sweat.
In reality, I was just completely paralyzed with fear because I knew that if I took even a single step in any direction, I would definitely trip over the lizard's tail, lose my glasses in the mud, and ruin the best reputation upgrade I’ve ever had in my entire life.
[END OF THE CHAPTER!
Sovereign Roulette Fun Fact #1:
Why Aung Chin Phyo got his [Copy/Paste] ability: > Before getting transported to this world, he was an IT Engineer and Coder. In the programming world, copying and pasting stack-overflow code is basically second nature—it was pure muscle memory for his brain. So when the fantasy system digitized his soul, it gave him the ultimate developer shortcut as a magical skill!]
