Chapter 1: can this game be cleared

In the dimly lit room, the screen's glow cast eerie shadows across the young man's face, accentuating the dark circle beneath his eyes as he sat hunched over his controller. His expression oscillated between determination and disbelief, a wry smile playing on his lips.

"Finally, I reached the 100 floors," he murmured, a glimmer of pride flickering in his eyes. But as the game unfolded before him, his confidence wavered, replaced by a growing sense of disbelief.

"How can she be the last boss?!" he exclaimed, his voice tinged with disbelief as he navigated through the battleground. Yet, despite his best efforts, a relentless barrage of attacks pummeled his party, leaving them decimated in seconds.

The realization hit him like a sledgehammer. The party he had painstakingly built and nurtured, investing countless hours into their development, was wiped out in a second. "How can this be? Is this boss even beatable?" he muttered in frustration, his hands trembling as he set down the controller in defeat.

Desperate for answers, he turned to the gaming forum for help. And then, he stumbled upon the answer that shattered his perception of the game entirely.

"You need to romance the last boss to beat it," he read aloud, the words hanging heavy in the air. It wasn't just a role-playing game; it was a dating sim intertwined with dungeon-crawling elements—a fusion.

"I feel like all my effort leveling my party was for nothing," he lamented, his shoulders slumping in resignation. "What did I expect? It's a dating sim."

Exhaustion washed over him like a tidal wave, his eyelids heavy with weariness. "I'm tired," he sighed, pushing himself away from the screen. "I should take a shower and sleep."

And with that, he rose from his seat.

The pain surged through my body like a raging fire, jolting me awake from what felt like an eternity of unconsciousness. As my eyes fluttered open, I realized that the ceiling above me was not the familiar sight of my bedroom. Instead, it was a weathered, ancient-looking ceiling, adorned with cracks and patches of peeling paint. Confusion washed over me like a wave as I struggled to make sense of my surroundings.

"Where... where am I?" I murmured to myself, my voice barely more than a whisper in the eerie silence of the room. The air felt heavy.

Taking in my surroundings, I noticed the room itself was old. The furniture was sparse. It was then that a sharp pang of pain shot through my head, accompanied by a rush of memories flooding back to me.

I whispered aloud, the name feeling both familiar and foreign on my lips. It was a name that belonged to me, yet it felt disconnected somehow as if it belonged to someone else entirely.

It took me a moment to gather my thoughts, to sift through the fragments of memories that danced at the edge of my consciousness. How had I ended up here, in this strange place, when just moments before I had been living what I thought was my normal life? The memories seemed to blur together.

waking up in a world that I knew was not my own, a world where I was destined to play the role of a mere NPC, a background character. in this unfamiliar room, with memories that seemed to belong to someone else entirely? The questions swirled around in my mind. How could this be possible? What had happened to me? And, perhaps most importantly, what did it all mean? As I struggled to make sense of my newfound reality, one thing became clear. "I got reincarnated in the dating sim I was playing" As he stood in the unfamiliar room, the pain from his awakening subsided, replaced by a newfound sense of determination. "I'm going to survive this game."