Dungeon Defense

A nameless loser of a gamer sinks tens of thousands of hours, in a cluttered rented room, into a single game — the notoriously brutal Dungeon Attack. On his seventeenth playthrough he finally crushes the final boss, the strongest Demon Lord Bael, and savors his victory. Then he wakes up in the body of an NPC — the weakest, the seventy-first of seventy-two Demon Lords, Dantalion. He has a rotting dungeon, a single golem bodyguard, and stats barely sufficient for an inglorious death at the hands of the first party of adventurers to come along.

But he has what no one else in this world does: memory of the game. He knows the ranks of every Demon Lord and the fates of future heroines, reads the status window hovering over people's heads with their secret thoughts, and sees the affinity gauge tracking how they feel about him. He has no strength — only cold calculation, shameless lies, a honed Acting skill, and a willingness to cross any line. Dantalion begins to climb: he buys the military genius Laura de Farnese out of slavery, gains the half-succubus chancellor Lapis, surrounds himself with devoted monsters and humans, and step by step turns the despised seventy-first rank into a power everyone must reckon with.

His manipulations pit the human nations and the Demon Lords themselves against one another in a great war of mutual attrition, while he rules from the shadows behind borrowed titles and puppet emperors. But the price mounts with every victory: the corpses of allies, tortured enemies, and at last the idealist succubus Paimon, whose "I love you" he will never be able to forget. This is the story of how the weakest rises through cunning and betrayal — and of what it costs the soul to walk a road where one wins by never once looking away.