Heart: I wanted to be a hero. I ended up being something else entirely.

Tsumiya Higeri spent 23 years consuming stories about heroes and never becoming one. He worked, slept, ate, watched anime and played video games in a small apartment in Japan, with a university degree he never used and dreams that never stopped being dreams. One ordinary night, he was attacked in an alley over something as mundane as an anime figure, and in the moment before death, something pulled him into another world.

Not because he was chosen. Not because he had some grand destiny written in the stars. But because in the instant before death, he wanted to live with more desperation than he had ever wanted anything in his life.

He arrives with no magic, no level system, no legendary weapon. Only two abilities he barely understands — one that keeps him alive when he should be dead, and another that for three seconds makes him conceptually invulnerable to anything, at the cost of stopping his own heart and leaving him unable to move. An emergency card he'd rather not use, because the pain that follows reminds him that he is not the invincible hero he imagined himself to be.

What he truly has is a head full of anime tropes that keep convincing him he's the protagonist of a story that doesn't follow his rules, a borrowed sword, and the naive determination of someone who never learned when to give up.

But here's the real question:

When the fantasy finally breaks — what's left of the man underneath?