Transmigrated into Eroge as the Simp, but I Refuse This Fate

The classroom smelled like sterilized chalk and recycled air—comfortably boring. Rows of lightglass screens floated before students, scrolling notes automatically unless you locked them. Damien's was locked.

He wasn't slouched. Not today.

Fourth week in, and for the first time since term started, he was sitting upright. Elbows off the desk. Shoulders squared. Back straight. A few heads turned, surprised. A few others whispered. He ignored all of them.

Because right now?

Right now, he was trying to understand.

Teacher droned at the front, tapping through equations on the holo-board with a long, bony finger. His voice was the kind that made normal people drowsy—calm, methodical, precise. A sleeping pill wrapped in a lecture coat.

But not for Damien.

Not today.

"Momentum," Marell intoned, "is the product of mass and velocity. It is a vector quantity. Which means it has magnitude—yes—but more importantly… it has direction."

The words stuck in Damien's head like pins.

Mass. Velocity. Direction.

Right. Obvious on paper.

But in his head?

It clicked differently.

He had mass. Even now, he could still feel the remnants of the weight he'd been cutting—weeks of sweat, of heat surging under skin, of his own flesh burning itself down to make room for something leaner, faster.

And velocity?

That was starting to form too.

Each workout. Each sprint until his lungs clawed against his ribs. Each meal weighed, each hour spent under Elysia's eye—measured in pain, sure. But it was movement. Real, brutal forward motion.

Now the system was responding. His muscles compressed. His senses sharpened. Even his mind, dulled by three weeks of hunger and fatigue, was waking up again.

He wasn't just changing.

He was accelerating.

"So if momentum is mass times velocity," the professor continued, "then increasing either—while keeping direction constant—results in a greater force."

Damien's gaze sharpened.

That was it, wasn't it?

It wasn't just about size or speed alone. It was how you moved. Where you aimed.

What direction you chose.

'Hmph.'

His fingers drummed against the edge of the desk, quiet but restless. Not bored—engaged. Calculating.

He'd spent the last three weeks cutting weight, carving fat, swallowing bitterness and red tonic until his guts felt like fire. And now, finally, he could sit in this chair without feeling like it might collapse under him.

But that came at a price.

He was behind.

Three weeks of skipping lessons. Three weeks of zoning out during lectures, mind focused on reps and dosage instead of formulas and theory.

And now?

He had to catch up.

Damien's gaze stayed pinned to the holo-board, but his mind drifted—not away from the lesson, but deeper into it. Sharper.

A thread tugged at the back of his thoughts.

Isabelle.

That little moment between them, not even a week ago. Her eyes had been cold—measured—but not cruel. And her voice? Sharp, like a ruler snapping against a desk. She had crossed her arms and said it with full clarity:

"If you're serious, then prove it. Top twenty-five by midterm. Otherwise, stop wasting my time."

At the time, he'd smirked. Cocky. Confident. Almost lazy.

Now?

Now the weight of it clicked. Not heavy. Not oppressive.

But very, very real.

Top twenty-five.

In a school built for aristocrats, Awakened, political projects, and primed intellects.

Old Damien were sitting somewhere near the bottom.

'Not me.'

He could feel it. That sharpness that had once come so easily. From before. Before the surgeries. Before the endless hospital rooms. Before the mirror started reflecting something weak.

Back on Earth, he never got to attend the 12th year. His body had failed long before his mind did.

Yet, just like how it was in chemistry class—

The same applied here.

Damien closed his eyes for half a second, letting Marell's voice drift around him like background noise. He wasn't zoning out. He was syncing.

And when he opened them again—

He remembered.

Not the formulas. Not in full. Not yet.

But the feeling.

The structure.

The logic.

Force equals mass times acceleration. Newton's Third Law. Free body diagrams. Conservation laws. Kinematics. Pressure. Fluids. Thermodynamics.

Physics had been one of his best subjects. Not because he loved it, but because it made sense.

And now, here it was again. Dressed in a shinier interface, a slightly more advanced curriculum, some added fluff about mana fields and augmented vectors—but at its core?

Still physics.

Still the same truth:

If you push something, it pushes back.

If you want to change your motion, you need a force.

And if you want to crush someone in your way?

You just needed more momentum than they could handle.

'That came out violent for no reason.'

He will mock himself.

'If you want to blast those damn corpos, then you only need a bomb.'

His lips twitched—just slightly.

"…and in collisions," Professor Marell continued, "momentum is always conserved, though kinetic energy may not be. This is the basis for understanding impulse, shock absorption, and more advanced impact mechanics."

Damien's pen moved across the digital pad, but he barely looked at it. His ears were open. His mind was awake. Not in panic.

He was locked in.

*****

The double-period ended with a soft chime and the flicker of the holo-board fading to black. The faint sound of chairs shifting, screens powering down, and muted conversations filled the room like a slow, rising tide.

Damien leaned back in his chair and exhaled, long and low. His spine gave a soft crack. He stretched his arms overhead with a lazy yawn, his jaw popping halfway through.

"Damn…" he muttered, rubbing at his temple. "I really forgot how hard it is to maintain your focus during class…"

He blinked once. Then again. His eyes felt like they'd been sandblasted.

"…Fucking ADHD hits all the time."

It wasn't like he hadn't been paying attention. He had. More than anyone else in the room, probably. But staying locked in for that long? Tracking every diagram, every derivative, every throwaway tangent Marell felt like drifting into?

It was a grind.

A different kind of exhaustion from training. Less sweat, more static.

His brain felt like it had just run a marathon inside a blender.

Still, he looked down at the notes. Clean. Detailed. Annotated with just enough of his own shorthand to make sense later. The old habits were kicking back in, even if his body kept trying to check out every ten minutes.

'I need to rework my study cycle. Not just pushups and potion chugging. If I'm gonna pull top twenty-five, I've got to train this too.'

He glanced around. Most of the students were already standing. Some chatting, some yawning, a few throwing glances his way—nothing direct, just the usual secondhand surprise.

Damien Elford. Awake. Taking notes. Not asleep. Not hungover. Not gone.

He smirked faintly at that.

"Scary, isn't it? The lazy bastard shows signs of life."

The smirk lingered, but only for a moment. As the buzz of chatter swelled around him, Damien's mind was already pivoting. Lecture's over.

He thought briefly of heading to the library—somewhere quiet, somewhere out of the way.

But then his eyes dropped back to the notes. Or more precisely—

The gaps between them.

Three weeks of missed content. Three weeks of lessons he'd either slept through or outright skipped.

He'd caught the momentum topic today, but the curriculum had clearly been moving at pace. This class wasn't crawling. It was sprinting.

The thought came uninvited, quiet but persistent.

'Should I ask Class Rep?'

Damien leaned back in his seat, watching the flicker of his screen fade to idle. He wasn't pretending to be calm—he was calm. Calculating.

Three weeks of lectures lost. Three weeks of groundwork, diagrams, foundations. He couldn't brute-force his way through gaps that wide—not when the coursework was sprinting ahead.

And the worst part?

He had no one to ask.

Moren, Kaine, Ezra—his old circle of indulgent mediocrity? Not a single brain among them worth raiding. They were deadweight. Worse than useless. Just echoes of a version of him that didn't exist anymore.

So. That left no one.

'But no.'