Beep. Beep. Beep. Beep. Beep…

There is a certain ‘face’ that comes with being an author, and I believe that most people who’ve never tried writing will have little to no idea what I’m talking about, even if they delude themselves into thinking they understand. There are various names used to refer to this topic, but one that might resonate with you is ‘reader expectations’. While the denotative meaning by itself is relevant, I would like to expound on it a bit.

The denotative meaning is ‘to write a sentence or exhibit a tone that is appropriate for the intended audience.’

Beep. Beep. Beep. Beep. Beep…

Let’s unpack that a little bit.

When a person begins their journey to become an author, they inevitably encounter this piece of advice: ‘Write to a specific audience.’

This advice is simultaneously incredibly useful and painfully restrictive.

What does it mean to ‘write to a specific audience’?

Readers have been trained over the centuries to expect certain elements in their favorite genres. While these expectations certainly develop over time, they are often slow to move. As a writer, I have two paths forward—I can write what I want, readers be damned, or I can write what the readers want, my joy and happiness be damned. Some ridiculously lucky subset of authors happen to find readers who enjoy what they want to write, but for the rest of us, we have to languish as failed artists or cave to the whims of a gluttonous market that cannot be pleased, only satiated.

Many authors lie through their teeth and claim they are okay with selling out. Those who make six or seven figures have the easiest time living under this delusion since money is an effective way to dilute boredom. At this stage, these writers are no different from office workers—corporate slaves pawning off their souls and dreams to the market at a discount in pursuit of extra zeroes on their paycheck. These are the writers who have accepted reality. They understand that dreams are something that only the chosen, lucky few are allowed to pursue.

I am the other type of writer. Despite my desperate need for financial stability, I wrote what I wanted, readers be damned. My story was my magnum opus, the characters, my symphony, the narration, the conductor. Everything was in place. I was one of the fools who believed that my masterpiece had value because of the love, sweat, and tears I poured into it.

Beep. Beep. Beep. Beep. Beep…

But almost nobody showed up to enjoy the show. ClojureGod69 was my only subscriber, and he only stayed for a single month of the five years I spent writing.

When authors fail to meet reader expectations, the readers can be terrible critics. These were some of the comments I had on the early chapters of my 1st and 2nd drafts:

FantomRake - 4 years ago

This **** story is so predictable. Im done with this story

LinuxMasterRace - 3 years ago

This is by far and without question the most boring story ive seen in years. There’s literally no conflict, just endless positivity, cooperation, and weak writing and it makes me sick

EchoLight - 3 years ago

Why is the MC in these stories always a ***** beta male?

GigaChaddeus - 3 years ago

@EchoLight

Lmao projecting much? My bro Chaddeus is a true sigma. If he snags one of these stupid girls I’m dropping the story.

IamStand - 3 years ago

I’m pretty sure I read this story already on Wattpad.

Half the critiques I received were complaints about the lack of good romance in my story when I never even gave it the romance tag.

Since this is my experience, I can confidently say this:

Screw ‘reader expectations’. Readers have no idea what the hell they want. If you listen to the average reader talk for ten minutes about a story, they’ll ramble on and on about some nonsense like how ‘cool’ or ‘romantic’ or ‘funny’ it was, but if you ask them why they never have a meaningful answer. ‘Reader expectations’ is more of a social science, not unlike psychology. And, like psychology, the internet is rife with people who think they understand ‘reader expectations’, but almost nobody has any idea what they are talking about. There is no comprehensive solution that works 100% of the time. As an engineer, I have to ask the obvious question:

What am I supposed to do with that?

When we write, we pour our hearts into our characters and story. In a sense, it could be said that writing is one of the most vulnerable forms of artistic expression there is. We turn our souls into words and put them on display for the world to see, and anonymous internet pricks have the audacity to waltz in and say whatever flippant words they want without trying to understand anything.

Beep. Beep. Beep. Beep. Beep…

I’ll say it again. There is a certain ‘face’ that comes with being an author. That ‘face’ is made of stone. It has to be made of stone to weather the storm of criticism, but sometimes the stormy winds are just a little too sharp for just a little too long.

I am not claiming that readers should support bad authors and endorse harmful or negative behaviors, but I am saying that readers don’t understand how destructive their words can be. There’s an old saying that goes ‘sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me.’ Since writers turn their souls into words, readers are given the powerful ability to turn their own words into sticks and stones, and souls don't have bones to absorb the damage.

My stone face cracked a long time ago. The venomous comments I received in the later years were so destructive and painful that I’m not ready to share them yet. That venom seeped into the cracks and poisoned my mind. I know I’m an awful person, but I can’t help but care.

I care so much that my only reprieve is to retreat.

Beep. Beep. Beep. Beep. Beep…

This is the reason why I normally sleep in until 11:00am. This is not an excuse to be lazy, I assure you. I am deeply hurt on a spiritual level and it makes me unable to function in normal society. Sleep is my precious reprieve. This isn’t an excuse…

Beep. Beep. Beep. Beep. Beep…

An excuse…

Beep. Beep. Beep. Beep. Beep…

If not for that stupid alarm clock…!

Beep. Beep. Beep. Beep. Beep…

With a groan, I blearily rolled over and lifted my eyelids just enough to catch a glimpse of the current time on my phone.

7:25am.

Ugh…

I was isekai’d into my own web novel, so why wasn’t I free from this curse? What sane person wakes up this early on a Saturday?

Since I had to meet with Thaddeus at 8:00, I smacked the button on my phone to turn off the alarm. Rolling out of bed with an aching groan—my body was sore from all the exercise I’d been doing—I stumbled into the bathroom to take a shower.

“Stupid Editor and your stupid prejudice against gag workout routines…”

It took me all of ten minutes to get ready, give or take twenty seconds. Before I left, I made sure to stand in front of the mirror and tweak my face until the dead look in my eyes was a little more presentable. Once I was satisfied with the refreshing smile reflected back at me, I snagged Thaddeus’ recently washed bathrobe and draped it over my arm before leaving my dorm room.

With plenty of time to spare, I made my way over to the meeting place on the basement floor of the west wing. Though I hadn’t yet visited the area before, it wasn’t all that difficult to wander around the basement floor until I found the meeting place.

The corridors of both the east and the west wings were relatively uniform other than the varied contents of the classrooms and labs. The walls were made of white-coated concrete that gave off a chilly ambiance, despite the salty humidity omnipresent on an artificial island.

It only took me a few minutes to spot Thaddeus standing next to a pair of vending machines sequestered in an alcove. As expected, he wore his character-defining flannel button-up over a white t-shirt and stylish jeans. With his muscular frame, tall height, and handsome features, he was drawing a lot of attention from the handful of cadets walking by.

He noticed me as I approached and raised a hand in greeting. I tossed him his bathrobe which he caught effortlessly.

“I machine-washed it on a cold cycle,” I said. “Thanks for letting me borrow it.”

“Anytime,” Thaddeus said while flashing his pearl-white teeth. He rapped on the vending machine glass with a fist and asked, “You eaten yet?”

“Nah, didn’t have time.”

He scanned his ID card and said, “Grab whatever you want. We’ll eat and talk while we walk.”

I checked the contents of the vending machine before settling on the timeless American breakfast—powdered donuts. Snatching a bottle of cola from the other machine, my perfectly balanced and nutritional college student meal was complete.

While I started munching on my food, Thaddeus stored away his bathrobe. Then he gestured toward the hallway and said, “After you.”

This book's true home is on another platform. Check it out there for the real experience.

We started moving down the hallway. I kept my pace half a step behind his so that I could effortlessly follow his lead since I knew where we were going but I didn’t quite know where it was.

“As long as we keep our tones down, we can talk relatively freely while we’re walking,” Thaddeus said. “This place is mostly empty on the weekends, and while the cameras might pick it up, they’ll only check the footage if we give them a reason to.”

I looked up at his words and noticed the small black devices connected to the ceiling periodically. There were a couple on the walls around the corners of the hallways as well.

“Alright. If it’s safe to talk, then where are we going?”

“First, let’s talk about what we’re doing,” he replied while quickly scanning through the windows of a nearby lab area. “Prince August has reason to believe that students affiliated with the Eastern Empire managed to poach some monsters and somehow smuggle them into Horizon Academy. Our job is to determine if this group exists and, if it does, figure out how they did it and put a stop to the entire operation.”

There was an obvious question that I could follow up with, though I already knew the answer to it. I decided to ask it anyway since it might seem strange if I didn’t ask.

“Why not report it to the school and have them take care of it?”

“I asked the prince that question myself. He said, ‘We finally obtained peace; we cannot let those eastern barbarians end it here.’”

“Hmm…”

Well, it was an answer that I understood because I created Prince August.

“I suppose that makes sense. So did we meet here because they’re in the east wing?”

We turned a corner and descended a set of stairs to the second basement level.

“I don’t know,” he admitted sheepishly. “When I thought about where they might be, there were only two places that came to mind: the east and west wings.”

“Lemme guess. Is it because your phone doesn’t get a signal down here?”

He glanced at me with a hint of surprise. “Dang, dude, that’s right. How’d you know that?”

I resisted the urge to sigh while adjusting my glasses. “Your reasoning is flawed.”

It wasn’t entirely his fault, since he just followed the script I wrote…

“An operation of that scale would need fast, efficient, and clear communication. We’re on Horizon, an artificial island protected by military forces from three powerful countries. Do you seriously think they could hide just by somehow sneaking into the basement of a building that has thick concrete walls filled with rebar?”

‘Take this criticism and grow, my creation…!’ I silently willed.

“That’s… okay, that’s a good point,” he admitted. “If that’s the case, then where do you think they are?”

And here was the real reason I pointed out his error. I not only knew where the poachers were actually hiding the monsters, but I also knew that Thaddeus was supposed to encounter the magic bomber plotline while investigating the east wing. While that plotline should be gone since I killed the Magic Bomber, the Editor might have…

The entire building momentarily shook like it was caught in an earthquake.

“What the…?!” I exclaimed as I stumbled, barely catching myself on the wall.

“That came from… above us?” Thaddeus muttered while staring at the ceiling with a pensive expression. He turned around and motioned for me to follow. “Let’s check it out.”

‘What the heck is going on?’ I wondered as we booked it up the stairs to the main level. When we arrived at the lobby area of the west wing, we saw a massive hole in the front wall; the glass doors were melted while the concrete edges still glowed cherry red. Several dozen cadets collapsed here and there, some of them covered in terrible cuts and burns. It wasn’t clear if any of them were dead, but that wasn’t my concern. Hundreds of papers spat out of the vents and filled the lobby, the ones that touched the molten walls immediately catching fire.

“This event…” I muttered. Snatching one of the papers out of the air, I read it and inwardly groaned. Grabbing a few more, I confirmed that every paper had the same message:

I know who you are.

‘Why is she here?’ This event wasn’t supposed to happen until after Thaddeus killed the Magic Bomber. It took her a while to figure out that he did it, and then she started harassing him like this.

‘It’s too early…’

Agent-007 was a mid-tier KSP operative. The current Thaddeus might be able to deal with her if he had support from other members of the main cast, but even that was questionable.

“What happened here?” Thaddeus asked a nearby cadet.

‘Isn’t that Vera?’

It was the cyborg girl from Intro to Magic Power. Her habit had a few tears and burn marks, but it was mostly intact.

“I don’t know,” she replied. “I felt a touch of machine resonance that triggered a surge of energy, and then the wall exploded.”

“Machine resonance…” Thaddeus repeated. “The stat used by cyborgs?”

“That is how outsiders view it,” Vera answered in a monotone. “It is more than a stat; it is a right. It is the will of the Machine Father made manifest through worthy vessels.”

“Right…” he said, unconvinced. “So the takeaway is that a cyborg did this.”

Her digital eye flickered for a moment and a bit of life made its way back into her voice as she replied, “Probably. None but those who pursue Assimilation are allowed the right to resonate.”

He glanced at me. “You think this unknown cyborg is related to what we were talking about?”

“Maybe? I doubt it, though. These pieces of paper all have the same note on them, right? ‘I know who you are.’ I think this is targeted at someone specific.”

As we were speaking, dozens of faculty, guards, and other personnel were flooding the scene. Those with healing-related abilities were treating the wounded while others were securing the area.

“I might be the target,” Vera said. “I’m somewhat of an outcast in my country due to my religion.”

I blinked. “...religion?”

‘A religious cyborg? Could she be…?’

“Yes, religion. I am an anomaly.”

When I first saw the note, I was sure that I was the target since I killed the Magic Bomber, but if Vera was the Apostle of the Brightest Star…!

“Just to clarify, what do you worship other than the Machine Father?” I asked.

Her mechanical eye flickered at the same time that she closed her human eye. Clasping her hands together as if to pray, she recited her answer in a reverent tone:

“The Second Father. The Second Creator. The Light That Shines Upon All Things And Never Dims.”

‘The Second Father…?’

There were some names in there that I’d never heard before, but the ‘Light That Shines Upon All Things’ probably referenced the Brightest Star.

A shudder ran through me as I realized I’d found yet another major player from the later parts of the story.

Two soldiers in American Navy uniforms approached us. One of them asked, “Are any of you injured?”

“We’re all good,” Thaddeus reported.

“Some teachers will be here to escort you to a safe place soon.”

With that, the soldiers moved on to the next group of observers.

“We should put our job on hold ‘til after we get free from this,” I mentioned to Thaddeus.

“Yeah, probably,” he agreed. “Let’s meet up after we get free of questioning. It goes without saying, but…”

“I know, I know. This might sound hard to believe, but I know how to hold my tongue when I need to.”

***

It took several hours before the faculty and guards let us go. They had all sorts of questions about what we were doing in the west wing on a Saturday, if we saw anything suspicious, whether we felt a need to talk to a therapist they brought in just in case, and so on.

Honestly, by the end of it, I was more bothered by the fact that I quickly ran out of powdered donuts and cola, and they didn’t give me free lunch for my inconvenience, those scumbags.

Once we were free, Thaddeus and I reconvened at the cafeteria. The massive room was an offshoot of the central building connecting the east and west wings. Since this building was built when Horizon was remodeled into an academy, it had more color and personality. The entire north-facing wall was made of glass panels, letting in plenty of sunlight. The floors were carpeted and the walls were made of layered concrete blocks. Benches and tables filled with students were scattered everywhere.

The cafeteria was part of the central building, but it was separated by a hallway with sets of double doors on both ends. The designated eating area had hundreds of circular and rectangular tables, many of them occupied by students. Some had laptops out and were typing away at some assignment while sipping their coffees, while others were animatedly chatting with friends over pizza, chicken, pasta, burgers, or whatever other foods were on the menu for today.

There were five different lines, each one to a restaurant that specialized in its own foods:

Tiberi’s Pizza and Pasta.

Thanco’s Burgers and Fries.

A Taste of Orient.

The Rotating Kitchen.

Starbucks.

If a person wanted more specialized foods, like vegan cuisine or accommodations for dietary restrictions, there was a second food court connected to this one through another set of double doors, but I had no intention of spending any time over there whatsoever, so it might as well not exist as far as I’m concerned.

Thaddeus and I agreed on a table and separated to get our chosen foods. I nabbed myself a pepperoni pizza and a cola from Tiberi’s while he got some tacos and enchiladas from the Rotating Kitchen. We arrived at our table within a few minutes of each other and began to tear into our food while we continued our discussion from earlier. The loud noise created by hundreds of talking cadets was a powerful mask for our conversation.

“So, before we were interrupted, you were saying something?”

“Oh, right,” I said with a nod. “You asked where I thought they might be hiding. If I were them, I would work with a demon to hide the monsters in an extradimensional space. Humans don’t have the technology to consistently detect pocket dimensions, so it would be easy enough to smuggle them in. Then the students could hide in plain sight and bring the monsters out whenever they want.”

This was the correct answer, or it should be. The problem was that Lilith was the one who provided the students with pocket dimensions in the original story. She did it as part of a plan to incite conflict between the Eastern and Western Empires, but demons were supposed to be our allies now.

“That’s…” Thaddeus bit his lip. “I never thought of that. If that’s possible, then isn’t it a huge security risk?”

“It is,” I agreed. “Monsters don’t approach Horizon, but people can bring them here. If several dangerous monsters—say perhaps, dragons—were released in the middle of the city, a lot of people would die.”

His face went pale. “This is a problem.”

I waved his concern away. “It’s only a problem if we don’t catch them. Besides, we don’t have proof that my idea is right. We should ask a demon if it’s possible.”

Thaddeus slowly nodded in agreement. “That’s true. I know a few people that I can ask, but if your theory is right then we need to escalate this. We can’t handle it ourselves.”

“Nah, we got this. The prince wanted you to keep this quiet for now, right? I’m sure he has his reasons. You ask your people. I have a person I can ask. We’ll compare notes and come up with a plan.”

“Alright. If this gets too big for us, then we’re calling in the big guns. We can’t let civilians die for our egos.”

“Of course.”

“I don’t think this is something we’ll be able to take care of in only a day. We have the gnome dungeon on Monday and lots of homework to do, so let’s meet up next Saturday and compare notes.”

With our next steps decided, we finished our food and separated to accomplish our specific tasks. I trained my body and my mana and then ran over everything I knew about the gnome dungeon, practicing dozens of simulations in my head until I was satisfied.

Once that was done, I chilled in my room reading web novels on my phone for the rest of the day. It was important to take a break and let my body heal before diving into the dungeon. As such, Sunday was pretty relaxed. I chipped away at my homework while otherwise lazing around and letting myself get plenty of rest.

And before I knew it, it was Monday.

It was time to enter my first dungeon.