Their bodies were piled, each one balanced on another like a mountain.
The same people who begged for my downfall, and the same people I satisfied, blindly, page by page.
How many are there now? I must have lost count. Should be more than 150,000. Maybe 500,000.
I never thought there'd be that many, and it took such a long time, yet I doubt I finished off all of them.
Did I kill the bastard who continued it? I still can't tell. I don't know who he is or what he looks like.
And his blood is not in sight. Neither was there blood in this place at all.
Just calm.
Below me, a glass-like body of water, reflecting the sky above me. Beautiful, soft, and too warm that it made me feel like I was being mocked.
Why put me and the people I killed in a place like this?
And on my right… the Journal.
Plain, with a cover made of a material that felt like cotton. There were three characters on top too:
「読裁者」
Reader. Judge. System.
I think I wrote my name on it, not the first. I forgot that one.
Han, and the title I was given.
Maybe that name was taken from me. Maybe I gave it away. Either way, I deserve the forgetting.
A quiet punishment for how willingly I failed, multiple times.
And yet here I am.
Looking at the mountain of bodies before me,
I heave a sigh. They only wanted a story. They only wanted to feel something.
They tell themselves:
"It's fiction. It's fine."
"It's just a game."
"He was written to suffer anyway."
If someone, probably asked me why people did what they did…
Why they stole things that never belonged to them. Why they killed. Tortured. Lied.
Why they loved like it meant something eternal, only to let it rot days later.
Why they destroyed each other, calling it justice, survival, or wrapping it in words like "revenge" and "righteousness."
It all came down to one thing.
Satisfaction.
Every act, whether soaked in kindness or cruelty, fed some kind of hunger.
The need to feel something. Power, love, assurance, relief, peace, hatred, or maybe just a moment of silence.
But when satisfaction wasn't enough?
They turned to entertainment.
Grief became a spectacle, pain was something to watch.
And the death and agony of others? They consumed it and still slept peacefully afterward.
They create monsters to feel heroic.
And when the monsters bleed too realistically, they downvote the pain and call it poor pacing.
They like watching good people break, as long as someone else cleans up the ending, and the protagonist is happy and OP.
And I didn't get to understand that completely until I met him...
The bastard that I had written to rise above others. Not the protagonist... I never write books starring protagonists or good guys.
Who says an antagonist or villain can't be the protagonist or the "good guy"?
He was a good guy before he turned into someone everyone hated, right?
That bastard was incompetent and let his hatred for the author... me... get in the way of what I wrote him for.
It's obvious, killing the Protagonist. The same protagonist everyone loved, thus the name "The Last Villain Stands."
But then what my readers, and you who read this, fail to understand is that I never specified that it was one villain.
"The Last Villain Falls" was also the same. There's more than one, but Jaren remained the main.
He had everything: motive, depth, a tragic past crafted with care. I gave him pain, but I also gave him tools. I gave him people who could have loved him, even after everything. I gave him room to breathe, to change.
But no. I still can't explain it, but he broke character and decided to hate me.
However, his incompetence made me take his place.
He was my best. He had flaws, sure. He wasn't perfect.
His incompetence… his weak hands… and let's not forget that lingering sympathy for the people who wronged him.
And there there's his brother Han, my imperfect perfection.
The kid with hatred thicker than blood that if he actually hated me, I wouldn't survive a day after crossing paths with him.
Why? Because I took everything he grew up with, unlike Jaren who never knew his family.
That made me take the title from him.
How funny.
Han was never meant to be the main character.
But I guess second place gets the final draft.
I could even remember when Han once stared back at me in the mirror and said.
"Not everyone is like Jaren, he had his reasons, and I still love my brother, he should be returning soon, but till than...."
"....just know, we took the title because Jaren was always innocent and never deserved to be the Villain, all he wanted was a family and a good life."
"....but the Protagonist and his side characters took that from him, and us too....I guess the same goes for you too Zhrak."
"A side character in your world took your chances of being happy, right?"
"That's why we have to kill them all "