Chapter 1: The Selfish Princess Awakens

Chapter 1:
The Selfish Princess Awakens

WHEN MY LIFE flashed before my eyes, I found it remarkably…normal. That isn’t to say it was all smooth sailing, but compared to most, it was pretty darn ordinary.

After getting accepted to a junior college in my senior year of high school, my only real dilemma was how I’d enjoy my break to the fullest. I skipped right along through life, daydreaming about replaying my favorite otome series from the beginning. I was humming to myself, fantasizing about all the routes and romances, when I stepped out onto the crosswalk just as a car barreled through the intersection.

That was how life as I knew it ended.

“Your Highness! Can you hear me?!”

“Princess Pride!”

Servants frantically called my name. I cradled my head and sank to the floor as the world faded to darkness around me.

“Someone call the doctor! We must tell the queen and prince consort what’s happened!”

“The princess is hurt!”

My name was Pride Royal Ivy. I was the eight-year-old daughter of the queen—the firstborn princess of my country. At least, that’s who I was here in the world of Our Ray of Light, the otome game I’d planned on replaying. But why did I have to end up as Pride, of all people? She wasn’t just evil and devious. She was the final boss!

I awoke in a plush bed. I forced my eyes open, staring at the ceiling as maids flitted by, rushing in and out of the lavish room, arguing over details that my reeling mind couldn’t quite grasp.

I only have ten years left… I can’t believe I’m going to die at the same age in two different lives.

My head spun, trying to sort the memories of my past life from the reality before me. Incredible as it sounded, I’d really woken up in a video game world. I knew the protagonists, the background characters, even the setting itself. I recognized every detail.

And I knew I wouldn’t live long.

As Pride, I would destroy the kingdom in ten years’ time and terrorize this world as its final boss. Destiny decreed that I scar the hearts of the love interests—and pay for my crimes with my life.

Indeed, this was the world of Our Ray of Light. It was a longer series than most, and from what I could tell, I was in the very first game. People of all ages enjoyed “ORL,” as we called it. I got hooked on the anime version of the third game, and that infatuation grew until I played through every single installment, from oldest to newest. Whenever they released a new one, I jumped right on it. I was obsessed.

“Pride!”

My father flung the door open with a bang, charging right past the flustered guards.

“Father…”

The prince consort scowled—or, at least, he seemed to. Everyone else mistook his wrinkled forehead and serious expression for sternness, but I knew just how kind he was beneath the surface. Sure, he could be strict, but he loved his daughter with all his heart. He shooed the maids and guards out of the room to speak with me privately.

“Are you all right?” he asked me.

“Yes. My head started to hurt all of a sudden…”

“The doctor says your life isn’t in any danger, but Rosa was worried about you too.”

As queen, Rosa Royal Ivy, my mother, was the highest authority in the kingdom. Needless to say, she outranked Father in that regard. It was no surprise she was too busy to come see me herself even under these circumstances. While Father always told me she would visit me if she could, I now knew the true reason for her absence.

“Father.”

“What is it?” he said, watching me anxiously.

“I have a little sister who will soon turn six, don’t I?”

He blinked, taken aback, which only confirmed what I already knew. If this really was the world of my otome game, then I had a younger sister—Tiara Royal Ivy, the protagonist of this whole story.

“How do you know that?” Father said.

It was the first time I’d ever seen such shock on my father’s face. Something about my question threw him off, but I’d only just regained my memories, so I wasn’t sure what.

Wait, this all seems familiar somehow…

“Could it be?” he said. “Do you share the same precognition as your mother? Is that what made you collapse?”

Father stared down at me, his gaze never wavering, and gently brushed my hair off my brow. I’d inherited my father’s crimson locks, but my mother’s soft waves.

“Yes,” he mused. “My congratulations, Pride. This proves you are the true heir to the throne.”

Father beamed at me, tears forming in his eyes. I, meanwhile, tried not to cry for a wholly different reason. With a few simple words, I’d royally messed up. Now, all I could do was try not to scream as the gravity of the whole situation sank in.

That’s right! I was thinking of Pride’s childhood in the game!

You see, with that one simple line about my sister, I’d just marched beat for beat toward my own doom.

Our Ray of Light was set in the sprawling kingdom of “Freesia,” a mysterious land and the only place in the world where humans were born with special powers. Naturally, that included my precognition. While one out of every couple hundred people would inherit some kind of power, precognition was the rarest. It belonged solely to those in line for the Freesian throne and existed only among members of the royal family, especially women, manifesting once every few decades. Many viewed precognition as a divine message anointing our next ruler. In the game, Pride fainted when she was eight years old. When she awoke, she mentioned a younger sister who had been kept secret from her. She said all this to her father on the very day he planned to reveal the secret himself. It was the moment her precognition awakened and she earned the title of the future queen of Freesia.

But that’s exactly what just happened to me!

When the love interests talked about this scene, they called it “The moment that would lead to unimaginable tragedy for our kingdom.”

Even as dread sank cold into my gut, my father’s face lit up with joy. But I knew things were playing out exactly the same way as they had in the game. Guilty as it made me feel, I needed a way to make this seem like anything but precognition. However, when I opened my mouth, no words escaped.

Father noticed my confused expression, but he apparently took it for exhaustion. “Get some rest for now, Pride,” he said. “I know you’re still confused, so we’ll talk about your sister Tiara some other time.”

He offered a smile before he rose and left, surely on his way to tell Mother of this momentous development. The instant he exited, the guards and maids swept back in.

“My sister…” I muttered. I turned to the window, staring out at the gardens below as though I could escape that way. “But…I already know everything about her.”

For example, I knew my younger sister, Tiara Royal Ivy, inherited our parents’ compassion and grace. My mother carried herself with poise and wisdom, while my kindhearted father served as her assistant. Frail, delicate little Tiara was the protagonist of this game, a sweet princess who had to be kept a secret to protect her from kidnapping and assassination attempts.

Tiara… Even her name was cute, unlike “Pride,” a rough, overbearing name suited for the villain of the story. I teared up just thinking about her, but that was wrong, so very wrong. My little heart simply couldn’t take the waves of emotion, and soon I was desperately sniffling, trying to keep the snot and tears inside me. I would become the wicked final boss—and Tiara would become the heroine.

During every single route in the game, Pride died at the hands of the main characters. Even the “bad” endings simply had Tiara or a love interest take Pride’s place. No matter how I looked at it, I was doomed. Moreover, I deserved it. Tiara and her love interests were good, honest people. I wouldn’t dare cheat my way to a bad ending with my past-life memories. By the end, Pride was so completely evil, she deserved nothing better than death. As much as I loved the game, I certainly wasn’t a fan of Pride when I played ORL in real life. Fans of the love interests especially hated Pride, and some of that hatred seeped into me now.

I lashed out at the table beside my bed, frustrated to find myself in the body of someone I detested. A maid jerked at the sound of the kick and the table rattling.

“Oh… I’m sorry,” I said.

Shoot! It’s things like this that’ll add up to make me the wicked queen…

The wide-eyed maid simply straightened out the table. “There’s no need to apologize,” she said stiffly, shooting me nervous glances out of the side of her eyes.

Well, no surprise there. Pride—or, I suppose, I—didn’t hold back at all with the maids. I’d fired many and even threatened some with death if they displeased me. Of course, Father intercepted all my attempts to punish them. The normal Pride would have sent the table flying across the room and screamed at the maids to fix it at once, but I couldn’t act out like that, not while retaining my memories of my previous life. I didn’t want to be like that Pride. I couldn’t be like that Pride. In the game, Pride used precognition to torment the love interests and allow tragedies to unfold, but I wanted to take a different course. If only I knew more than just the existence of my sister. If only I knew about my father’s—

“Ah!”

I leapt out of bed with a gasp. The maids all spun toward me. Even the guards outside the door rushed into my room. A flurry of voices asked me what was wrong, but I brushed them all aside.

“Where’s Father?!” I said.

“His Royal Highness just left to inform Her Majesty of today’s events,” a maid informed me.

This is bad! At this rate, he’ll…

“Stop him right now!” I ordered. “He can’t get on that carriage!”

“But Her Majesty is here at the residence, so I don’t believe he’ll need to take a carriage.”

It was no use. The maid, stuck here at my bedside, didn’t realize the queen’s plans might have changed.

I rushed to the window, sticking my head out to view the sprawling garden below. A single carriage sat parked before the house. My father approached it alone, preparing to go see my mother. Contrary to the maid’s assertion, Mother was back at the main castle attending to urgent business, and that was precisely where Father planned to go.

No! He can’t take that carriage!

“Father!” I screamed.

He froze, but then he simply waved up at me.

No, I’m not saying goodbye!

I’d intended to warn him, but he carried on, blissfully unaware. I couldn’t just go on yelling for him not to board the carriage. He’d think I was a kid throwing a tantrum.

In that case…

I placed my foot on the windowsill and leaned out past the frame. Father’s pleasant smile melted into raw fear. My room, the room of a firstborn princess, easily rose higher than an average house. A fall would be fatal.

“Your Highness?!” the maid behind me blurted. “Stop that at on—”

“Stay back!” I said. “It’ll be your head if you stop me!”

I lifted myself up to stand on the windowsill. If I lost my footing, I’d plummet to the ground. The wind gusted against me, sending my long hair streaming behind me. I could hardly breathe aside from panicked sips of air.

“Get down from there, Pride!” Father shouted far below, his face twisted with terror.

Well, I definitely got his attention. Thank goodness.

I steadied myself by clutching the posts and forced down a deep breath.

“Father!” I yelled down to him. “You can’t board that carriage! It has a broken wheel, and you’ll get into an accident before you can speak to Mother!”

Even from a distance, I could see him blinking in confusion. For the second time today, I’d shocked him with one of my pronouncements.

I hardly got the words out before one of the guards grabbed me and yanked me back into the room. But back outside, my father’s voice rose as he demanded someone inspect the carriage’s wheels.

Crisis averted. Now I can relax a little.

This time, at least, I thwarted the events of the game. In ORL, Pride’s father boarded the carriage to rush to the queen and inform her of Pride’s newly awakened precognition. But the carriage collapsed, gravely injuring him. He survived only long enough to tell the queen of Pride’s gift with his dying breaths. Somehow, Pride never foresaw her father’s accident. Not in the game, at least. Here, where I knew the whole story, I could save him. It was truly a blessing.

The guard loosened his grip when he realized I wasn’t resisting. I turned, relieved, but yelped when I saw a maid curled up on the floor in tears. Everyone else stood frozen around her, their faces pale and bloodless. Only that one guard seemed capable of speaking.

“Are you hurt, Your Highness?” he asked me.

Before I could answer, an older maid stepped in front of the one crying on the ground. She fell to her knees at my feet.

“P-please, Your Highness, forgive her. She has nowhere else to go, so I beg of you, please show her mercy.” She trembled as she apologized over and over before me.

Whoops. Might’ve overdone it there.

I should have known better than to throw around threats, even in the heat of the moment. The maid apparently believed I really would have her executed for trying to stop me in the window. I was the crown princess, after all. Everyone around me was at the mercy of my whims. Once again, Pride’s selfish whims, my selfish whims, had caused so much pain.

“I’m…”

I wanted to apologize, but the more I thought about it, the more my head spun. Even the guard who’d pulled me away from the window must have been bracing for some sort of punishment, yet he’d reached out to protect the precious daughter of the queen anyway.

“I’m…I’m sorry,” I said.

Perhaps the emotions were just too much for an eight-year-old’s body. Something reached into my chest and squeezed all the air out of my lungs. I burst into tears before I could stop myself. The guard and maids all looked on in bewilderment as I sobbed before them, babbling out tear-thickened apologies.

From the eighteen years of experience I’d gained in my past life, I knew just how much fear power could instill in others and just how much grief could come from having that power used against you. More than anything, I wanted to engrave these facts into my mind for the ten remaining years of my life, so that I would never forget or abuse this authority I’d woken up into.

After all, I was the crown princess of this kingdom.

Father eventually came back up to my room. He consoled me while I cried until I calmed enough to speak, and he made me swear never to do anything so reckless again. Though he did confess that the attendants found one cracked wheel and one defective one when they inspected the carriage.

“I owe you my life. Thank you, Pride,” he said, wrapping me in his arms.

Almost as quickly as I’d managed to stop crying, the tears flowed again.

Later that day, when Mother returned to the castle, Father recounted the day’s events to her. I became the official heir to the throne at that point, and the news of my awakened powers spread to the people of the kingdom. When Father tried to ask my guards and maids what exactly happened, I placed myself between him and the servants.

“It was all my fault,” I said. “These people were only looking out for me, so if anyone deserves punishment, it’s me.” But Father just smiled and shook his head, and I realized he’d never intended to punish anyone in the first place.

That night, Father stayed by my side until I fell asleep. He hadn’t done that for me in ages. He spoke softly and soothingly, telling me about my younger sister Tiara like it was a bedtime story. He said he’d planned to tell me about her that very day before I blurted it out myself. I would get to meet her in one month on her birthday, but until then I wouldn’t see her or Mother much. It turned out the queen had to spend a lot of time looking after sickly little Tiara on top of all her other duties.

He stroked my hair, so like his and my mother’s, as he described Tiara more. “You and Tiara are both our precious daughters. Nothing could ever change that,” he said, his gaze brimming with affection.

I had to wonder if the Pride in the game would turn into a corrupted, evil queen if her father had gotten to live and say such lovely things to her all the time. It was still possible, of course, but maybe his kindness would have changed the course of events for her.

Father warned that the pace of my studies would pick up now that I was officially recognized as the heir to the throne. He rattled off a list of subjects—governing, local history, etiquette, procedures—and my eyelids grew heavy as lead. I drifted off to the sound of his voice, the deep rumble of his soothing tone as he debated adopting a little brother to serve as my assistant now.

Wait… A brother?!

***

“I won’t forgive you… I’ll never forgive you! I’m going to kill you!”

A boy was crying, his tearful eyes ablaze with pure hatred. He stared straight ahead at a girl who cackled right back at him, a girl too young to soften her laugh to be more ladylike. She clutched her sides as she laughed down at the boy.

“Ah ha ha! How foolish can you be? You could never kill me. After all…”

I knew both of these people. No, it was more than that…

That girl was me.

Pride Royal Ivy. She…or rather, I was the girl who irreparably scarred the hearts of all the game’s love interests. My younger sister, Tiara, would sweep in to heal their wounds. After I received my punishment at the end of the game, Tiara would take my seat as the queen and set the kingdom back on the path to harmony alongside her love interest.

I remembered this scene from the game. From what I could recall, it was the memory of one of the love interests.

“Why did you trick me?!” the boy said. “I-I just… I wanted to see her, that’s all…”

The boy gritted his teeth, tears tracking down his cheeks while I pointed at him and howled with laughter. That laugh was too big, too cruel, too evil to fit inside one little girl, yet there I was. Meanwhile, the boy kept calling out for someone.

“I missed her. I missed her so much,” the boy said.

“Ah ha ha ha! Oh, that’s right. You’d better keep this a secret,” I said. “Not that anyone would listen to a dirty former commoner like you.”

I kept up my laughter, and the boy howled until his voice went hoarse. Over and over again, he cried out that he would kill me.

His name was…Stale. Stale Royal Ivy—Pride’s adopted younger brother-in-law.

Someone… Someone save him.

He hadn’t done anything wrong, but I couldn’t do anything for him. After all, I was the one who hurt him.

The one who could help him, the one who was his only salvation from the life he lived at the castle, was his adopted younger sister-in-law.

“Tiara…”

I opened my eyes with a gasp. Just a dream. But I recognized the events from the game.

The moment I awoke, my maids launched into my morning routine, starting with grooming. I glared back into my own dark eyes in the mirror, watching one of the women comb through my hair. Those eyes were so much like Father’s, just like the bright red of my hair, even if the waves came from Mother. Father beamed with pride to have a daughter who’d inherited so much of him, but I couldn’t help thinking the combination of purple eyes and bright red hair made me look like a witch—or a final boss. I struggled not to wince at the reflection of the wicked enemy of ORL staring right back at me. No one wanted to look at such a thing early in the morning.

In the game, Pride took the throne quickly thanks to her newly awakened precognition, seizing the opportunity after her father died in the accident and her mother followed after him from grief. Still, she was spiteful about her mother’s disproportionate attention toward her younger sister. Thus, Pride sent Tiara away to live in a distant castle, creating a life of luxury for herself as she ruled over the country with an iron fist. The surrounding countries grew increasingly worried as Pride turned into a dictator.

But all of that wouldn’t happen for ten more years, on the day of Tiara’s sixteenth birthday. In the meantime, Tiara met her many love interests, healed the trauma they carried in their hearts, and stood up to Pride, deepening the rift between them. Eventually, Tiara’s own powers of precognition emerged, bestowing upon her the same divine mark of leadership.

“Princess Pride… Your Highness?”

“Huh?”

The maid’s voice finally dragged me back to the present. It was the same woman who’d been so overcome with terror that she’d cried on the floor the other day. Now, she gently set my hair down, having finished brushing it. Remarkably, she didn’t seem to hate me for the incident. If anything, she’d become kinder, more tender as she chuckled and told me my hair was all combed through.

How did I never notice until now? I have such a wonderful maid working for me. She’s very… Wait…

I cocked my head in confusion. Now that I thought about it, I hardly knew anything about this woman.

“What’s your name?” I asked.

The maid raised her eyebrows before she could compose herself and smiled sweetly. “Lotte.”

I made a point of asking the names of other servants as I made my way through the castle that morning. The older maid who’d defended Lotte was Mary. The guard who’d pulled me out of the window was Jack. I committed these three names to memory—Lotte, Mary, and Jack. Such a simple thing, yet it was like opening the curtains and letting the sun shine into this dreary castle. This was the first time anyone apart from Father had added vibrance to my world.

I spent much of the day that way. It wasn’t long before I noticed the staff looking at me a little differently. I was still the firstborn princess, of course, and the official heir to the throne, but that wasn’t the only change. Rumors swirled about how I’d saved my father from that carriage ride.

“That spoiled little princess finally learned how to behave?”

“The bratty princess must’ve been possessed by a goddess.”

Some people seemed to believe that developing precognition was the reason my personality changed so drastically. I bit my tongue and let them believe whatever they liked, even though I wanted nothing more than to tell them they were all wrong. I wasn’t possessed by a goddess or anything like that—I’d simply regained the memories of my past life. Certainly, in the game, precognition did little to improve Pride’s sinister personality. If anything, she became more vile. But now, I appeared to them much more competent to rule the kingdom in the future.

By afternoon, I couldn’t remember that morning’s dream anymore, even though something about it seemed so important. The more I thought about it, the more I realized the names of the love interests weren’t coming to me either. I knew there were five total in the series, including certain hidden characters. Also, I could still recall the plot of the game from replaying it over and over to get all the endings. However, I didn’t remember many details about the love interests themselves. My favorite was the third game in the series, which I’d replayed now and again, but I only ever fully cleared the first and second games. Once each at that. How could I forget games I’d played so obsessively in life? Even on the day I died, I’d been daydreaming about replaying the series all over again from the first game.

It’s fine. I’m sure I’ll remember the details when I meet everyone, since my life follows the same plot as the game.

Except that all depended on this life being the same as the plot of the game and, well, I’d already gone and changed that. The mere fact that both my parents were alive proved deviation was possible.

Can I actually change the story of the game?!

It was a little late for me to make that realization, but it struck me like a slap to the face. What else could I change? How much could I change?

I didn’t have much time to think it over. At dinner the next day, Father said my adopted brother-in-law, one of the game’s love interests, would be arriving at the castle in two weeks.