“Brothers, today’s Hell Has Invaded campaign walkthrough is officially wrapped up!”

“Now, let me tell you about the absolute latest meta in Hextech Brawl!”

“What ‘by-the-book Jayce’? What ‘Emperor Ryze’? That’s all ancient history!”

“You gotta play Ten Thousand Swords Jinx!”

“Astral Body? Even a dog wouldn’t pick that!”

“Your streamer bro’s absolute favorite is playing ten tanks stacking Heartsteel together. I can stack that shit all afternoon!”

“What do you mean, ‘The streamer is addicted to big-titty anime gacha games’?”

“That’s just to put food on the table! It wasn’t easy landing a sponsorship deal!”

“Your streamer bro is still the purest League player out there!”

“I used to be a pro player, alright? I was the substitute’s substitute for TheShy!”

“Your streamer bro had a championship dream too! Spent a lifetime trying to beat the LCK but never managed it!”

“Back in the day, I used to solo-kill Chovy with one hand!”

“Playing gacha games now is just me being forced by life, brothers!”

“But honestly, the character art in Hell Has Invaded is genuinely stunning!”

“Let me recommend it to you all one more time!”

“Don’t leave, brothers!”

“Your streamer bro will literally kowtow to you right now!”

He seemed to see himself, pathetically trying to please the viewers, banging his forehead hard against the monitor.

Then, the monitor started smoking.

Sparking with electricity.

“Test Subject No. 665, injected with the Proto-Christ Matrix.”

“Reaction time: one hour, eight minutes, and fifteen seconds. Mutation node recorded.”

“Push the failure into the incinerator.”

A cold voice echoed in his ears.

‘Where… where am I?’

“Test Subject No. 666, Hextech Horus. From the Undercity. Hmm?”

“No other background info. Such a simple identity?”

“Whatever, they’re all the same.”

“Injecting Proto-Christ Matrix.”

“Record the reaction time.”

Hextech Horus…

That name sounded incredibly familiar.

A surge of icy liquid was pumped into his body, jolting his dormant consciousness back to life.

Squeezing out every ounce of his strength, he forced his heavy eyelids open.

What met his eyes was a piercing, glaring, incandescent light, not his familiar ceiling at home.

Was he kidnapped?

Struggling, he rolled his eyes to scan his surroundings.

This was a laboratory.

Glass flasks, pipettes, and distillation tanks cluttered the metal tabletops.

The walls were dark and stained. The air was thick with a pungent, nauseating stench of disinfectant, blood, and chemical reagents.

As for himself, he was tightly strapped to a freezing surgical table, his limbs secured by leather belts, completely unable to move.

‘Holy shit, it’s over!’

‘Is this some kind of organ-harvesting camp?’

“Hextech Horus.”

Someone was calling his name.

He slowly turned his head to look beside him.

A brown-haired young man in a white lab coat stood by the operating table. He had handsome features, but his eyes were as cold as ice.

In his hand, he held a syringe that had already been emptied.

“Test Subject 666’s resistance to the new anesthetic is significantly higher than that of an average human,” the brown-haired young man said.

“The subject woke up five minutes early.”

He was speaking English. Horus had never even passed his basic college English exams, yet he understood every word perfectly.

“Who… am I?” His brain was a chaotic mess, his voice raspy.

“It seems the new anesthetic has affected his nerves, causing a degree of mental confusion,” the brown-haired young man said with a frown.

He turned to instruct two middle-aged men, also dressed in white lab coats, standing nearby:

“Adjust the dosage next time. Don’t let this kind of anomaly mess with the experimental variables.”

The two middle-aged coats nodded. “Understood, Lord Frankenstein.”

‘Lord Frankenstein?’

Combined with this ancient, blood-soaked laboratory, the realization struck Hextech like a sudden thunderclap.

“You are Frankenstein?” he muttered.

Lord Frankenstein replied, “I am Willis Frankenstein.”

“You don’t remember me?”

“Record this: Test Subject No. 666’s memory has been affected by the Proto-Christ Matrix.”

“Where is this?” Hextech asked, his eyes widening.

“This is Great Britain,” Frankenstein answered patiently.

“Which city?” Hextech continued, his hands already starting to tremble.

“Manchester,” Frankenstein said calmly, his gaze fixed on him as if evaluating a mere object.

“The year… is it 1911?” Despair thoroughly filled his voice.

“It seems your memory is starting to return.” Frankenstein nodded slightly.

“Today is April 16th, 1911. Easter Sunday.”

Hextech’s pupils slowly unfocused as his thoughts raced faster and faster.

Starting as a test subject.

Frankenstein.

Manchester, 1911.

He knew this setup all too well.

“I’ve transmigrated…” he mumbled to himself.

“The neurological impact of the new anesthetic is temporary, with a recovery period of about five minutes,” Frankenstein noted before looking back at Hextech.

“Do you still remember your identity?”

‘My identity…’

Hextech’s thoughts tangled together in complete chaos.

“I was minding my own business at home, and suddenly I’m here,” he muttered.

“You injected me with the Proto-Christ Matrix…”

“You bastard, you’ve completely ruined me,” Hextech said, his panic and anger flaring up the more he spoke.

“If it weren’t for a lack of options later in the game, I would absolutely slaughter you.”

“Let me go!”

“The demons are coming!”

“Let me go right now!!”

Frankenstein coldly logged the data: “Add to the records.”

“The five-minute recovery window is insufficient. The subject’s emotional state is unstable.”

“Exhibiting symptoms of delusional raving.”

An assistant asked, “My Lord, is the experiment a success? Test Subject No. 666 shows no signs of mutation.”

“Your observational skills are worse than a paramecium’s!” Frankenstein snapped, casting a frigid glare at him.

“Mutations almost always begin after the five-minute mark. Pay closer attention to the logs!”

“Administer a sedative to No. 666 and secure him with restraint straps.”

“I am going to handle the other failures first.”

Hextech turned his stiff neck toward the corner of the laboratory.

A grotesque, massive corpse covered in tumors lay on an adjacent table. Its chest was still faintly rising and falling; it was clearly still alive.

But it wouldn’t be for long.

Soon, it would be wheeled into the incinerator and reduced to ashes.

“Let me go!!”

“I’m not a test subject!!”

Hextech struggled violently, but with his arms and legs bound, the two assistants used additional heavy leather straps to pin his entire torso to the operating table.

“Give it up. These are steel-reinforced cowhide restraint straps,” an assistant said, patting him on the shoulder.

“Not even a bull could break free from these.”

“Don’t lose hope. Maybe your experiment will actually succeed.”

“Just wait patiently.”

Right after, a cold needle stabbed brutally into his arm.

As the sedative pumped into his veins, an overwhelming wave of exhaustion and numbness instantly washed over him. Hextech’s body went limp, draining him of all remaining strength.

Yet, the sedative also managed to quiet his racing mind.

By now, he was certain he had transmigrated.

He hadn’t ended up in just any world, but rather the exact universe of the third-rate roguelike card mobile game he sponsored on his stream.

Hell Has Invaded!

And “Hextech Horus” was the exact name he had carelessly given his main character!

‘I’m utterly screwed.’ That was his very first thought.

‘I need to escape!’

That was his immediate second thought.

It wasn’t because Hextech held any deep attachment to his original world.

After all, his parents had divorced early on. His grandmother raised him until she passed away when he was sixteen. He didn’t even finish his junior college education before drifting into society. Fortunately, competitive gaming was booming at the time, and he possessed a certain degree of talent in League of Legends.

 

He managed to scrape his way into the pro scene, becoming a benchwarmer’s benchwarmer for TheShy. Though his professional career was entirely unremarkable, he at least leveraged the “pro player” title to transition into streaming.

In those early years, things actually went quite well. He caught the wave of the streaming boom and made a few million yuan.

However, making money too easily only made spending it too reckless. He ended up signing an unfair, predatory contract with his streaming platform, violating its terms, and never received a massive chunk of his earnings. Instead, he plunged heavily into debt. As the golden era of streaming faded, his viewer numbers plummeted.

In the end, he was left barely scraping by on third-rate sponsorships.

Even though Hell Has Invaded was a gacha anime game—an entirely different lane from his usual content—Hextech still treasured the opportunity. He put real effort into his streams to create entertaining content, but his audience simply didn’t buy it.

They unfollowed him in droves.

Finally, he had apparently kowtowed so hard that he smashed into his monitor and got electrocuted into this transmigration.

Given his lonely, broke, and heavily indebted reality back home, he would have woken up laughing if he had transmigrated into a standard MMO or an adult dating sim.

But of all things, it had to be Hell Has Invaded.

Hell Has Invaded was a total cesspool of a world, haphazardly stitched together by third-rate writers who shamelessly ripped off several major intellectual properties.

It took elements from Arknights, Warhammer, Trench Crusade, Dead Space, and more.

The core theme of this world was dark, edgy, grim, and utterly apocalyptic.

Ever since the Gates of Hell burst open in Jerusalem back in the year 1096, the human world has been facing relentless demonic corruption.

By 1911, the demons had already fought their way to the borders of the Holy Roman Empire.

Human civilization hung by a thread.

In the game, fires raged everywhere, demons roamed freely, cults ran rampant, evil gods invaded, and the world was ending.

To make matters worse, there were even sci-fi nightmares like alien insectoid hives thrown into the mix.

In the early game, the protagonist led a premium strike force to suppress various incursions from hell, evil gods, aliens, and space bugs.

The late game got even more absurd. Cities fell one after another, with casualties numbering in the millions every single time. It was a literal living hell on earth—absolutely not a world meant for a transmigrator to survive in.

Granted, almost no gacha game background is actually peaceful; otherwise, there wouldn’t be a need for so many overpowered characters. When Hextech played the game normally, he just treated the lore as background noise and never took the setting seriously.

The fatal issue was that when he made walkthrough videos for the game, he mostly just stared at the character art to admire the massive assets and fair legs.

As for the actual plot, he skipped it whenever possible.

He only remembered a few major historical events. His understanding of the lore couldn’t even compare to that of a casual lore enthusiast.

Furthermore, this was a gacha game, not an MMORPG.

An MMO transmigrator could rely on their future knowledge to snatch opportunities, exploit bugs, farm reputation, and hoard divine artifacts or hidden classes.

But the protagonist of a gacha game was practically a glorified mobile camera. He dragged his feet through the entire plot, remaining utterly useless from start to finish, relying entirely on the powerful gacha characters he rolled to clear stages and fight his battles.

Even with knowledge of the plot, he couldn’t get stronger ahead of time.

The protagonist didn’t actually participate in any combat, and character progression relied entirely on rolling duplicate copies, upgrading star levels, and equipping signature weapons. There wasn’t even a traditional leveling mechanism for the main character.

On top of that, crucial characters wouldn’t even show up until their specific plot points were triggered.

The scene taking place right now was the opening cinematic of the game.

The protagonist had just undergone modifications by the mad scientist Frankenstein, having been injected with the Proto-Christ Matrix, which carried a 50% mortality rate and a 49% mutation rate.

Even if this body possessed protagonist plot armor and successfully survived the backlash, the Gates of Hell would tear open tonight at midnight.

Manchester would instantly become a living nightmare.

Seven days later, out of Manchester’s population of nearly one million people, only a dozen or so survivors would remain.

A literal one-in-a-million survival rate!

How the hell was he supposed to survive!

‘Give me a cheat system already!’ Hextech couldn’t help but roar frantically in his mind.

The very next second, a pale blue light screen suddenly flared to life before his eyes.

Had his golden finger actually arrived?

Hextech squinted to get a closer look at the text, and his jaw dropped. What on earth was this?!

‘Hextech Brawl?!’