I was Reincarnated as the Scum Older Brother of the Protagonist in a Romance Battle Game, But I don’t want to Die, so I’ll do my Best

Reincarnated as the Protagonist’s Trashy Older Brother!? I Don’t Want to Die, So I’ll Keep My Distance from the Main Heroine

When I woke up, I was in an unfamiliar bed, surrounded by furniture I didn’t recognize—someone else’s room, not mine. As I look around the room, I realized I had become someone else entirely.

That’s right—this was the world of Demon Capital Tokyo 1999, a school romance battle game.

My name is Nanjou Joji, an engineer at a mid-tier software development company in Tokyo. This company, now run by its second-generation president, was on a steady decline. Our main work consisted of subcontracts and debugging for larger firms, and we were currently suffering from a severe labor shortage.

The number of projects brought in by sales far exceeded the number of engineers available to handle them. We were drowning in endless overtime, physically and mentally exhausted. And under the guise of “work-style reform,” our overtime was forcibly capped at 44 hours.

This wasn’t just a black company—it was a super-black company.

I wanted to quit, but I couldn’t forget the company’s golden days, when I worked alongside the former president and the team to create games—back when the work was fulfilling.

Back when we were developing our debut title, Demon Capital Tokyo 1999.

And now, here I was, reincarnated into that very game. As someone who loved it, I should have been overjoyed, but instead, I felt utterly miserable.

Because I was reborn as Kitano Joji?!

Kitano Joji was the older brother of the protagonist, Kitano Takashi—a mob villain and a scumbag. Worse, early in the game, he gets his engagement to the main heroine, Miyashita Aru, broken off. Enraged, he challenges Takashi to a duel, only to get utterly crushed as part of the combat tutorial. Then he’s kicked out of the house, left to wander the streets, and ultimately dies.

A disposable villain whose sole purpose is to make players sneer, “Serves you right!”

But I have no intention of dying. I’ll put everything into the “effort” that the original Joji never made and defy the death flags forced upon me.

The key to changing Joji’s fate lies with the sub-heroine—“Ariel on the Rooftop,” aka Amamiya Mashiro. To survive, I’ll forge a bond with this rumored celestial beauty, known as the school’s “living goddess” with her meteor-like eyes.

At first, my interactions with Mashiro were purely to save my own life, but as we spent time together, something inside Joji began to change… and so did his ambitions.

Meanwhile, the protagonist, Takashi, grows restless as the brother he thought was a worthless scumbag starts gathering people around him and building trust.

The fates of a mob villain and the protagonist intertwine in unexpected ways…