Man, the whole premise IS the twist, right? It starts feeling like a standard regression revenge story—dude gets murdered, wakes up years earlier, decides to take out the elite 'players' who ruined his life. But about a third in, you realize his entire understanding of the world is wrong. The 'Academy' isn't some prestigious school; it's a factory for producing sacrificial lambs for a system that's already ended. The guy he thinks is his final target, the top Player? That's his own future self, or a version of him from a different loop. He's been hunting ghosts of his own making. The real enemy is the narrative itself, the 'story' that forced him into this cycle. Blew my mind when I connected the dots from those weird, off-hand comments the side characters kept making about déjà vu.
Honestly, I saw parts of it coming—the time loop stuff got hinted at pretty hard with the recurring motifs of broken watches and repeating corridors. But the specific reveal that he was essentially building his own prison by eliminating every possible rival, thereby ensuring only he could become the final boss? That stuck with me. Makes the second read-through totally different, every arrogant monologue from the MC just reads as desperate self-deception.