COARV Chapter 1

Prologue

Seria had been sleeping unusually often lately.

It was a different way of moving through the world than she had a year ago. Last year's Seria had been society's most notorious villainess, chasing down every banquet and ball there was, hoarding no time for sleep in favor of raising hell. She had rank and standing enough—no one was there to stop her.

But that was long behind her now—she'd turned over a new leaf.

Every noble worth knowing knew Seria had gone and reformed—that absolute wretch. She had changed, slowly, within the narrow margin everyone could just barely accept. How exactly that lunatic had gone so quiet remained a mystery even now.

In any case, Seria sat on the lavish terrace, nodding off.

"It's the cold you've caught, my lady. They say this winter's cold makes people sleep like this."

The one speaking to Seria in a gentle voice was a priestess dispatched from the Temple. She had come purely on account of Seria's cold, all the way out to this distant territory. The priestess looked down over the terrace's edge with warm, satisfied eyes.

Below stood a woman with hair black as pitch.

"That the Saint should descend from the heavens themselves. Truly, a blessing from the heavens. Of course, Lady Seria too has received the blessing of God, so a mere cold will pass quickly enough. You'll always be in good health."

The priestess's well-wishing was mild. Her face was full of joy.

The Saint, then.

Seria followed the priestess's gaze out past the terrace.

Deep chestnut hair, ivory skin—there stood the Saint, Lina.

Yes, she was the Saint, all right. In the "original novel" Seria had read, the female lead had been called the Saint.

This was a world inside a novel, and only a few days ago, exactly as the original had written it, the female lead had dropped clean out of the sky.

"Oh, is that not Lady Seria's fiancé?"

The priestess was right. Beside Lina stood a handsome man, his dark blond hair catching the eye even from this distance.

Kallis strode toward Lina with long steps, and Lina, recognizing him, greeted him with a bright smile. Her smile was visible even from this terrace, some distance away. Lina was wearing a dress that bared her shoulders, and just then a chilly wind picked up.

Kallis hesitated a moment, then took off his own coat and wrapped it around her. Watching, Seria's mood turned faintly strange.

'That son of a bitch?'

He was Seria's fiancé. Barely a week left before their wedding.

Should she go down there and grab a fistful of his hair? If I did—would I survive it?

"Spending all day on the terrace with a patient, is it."

At the voice, Seria and the priestess turned back reflexively. Seria rose from her seat at once. The priestess bowed her head in a hurry.

"Your Highness, Grand Duke Lesche Berke."

Eyes red as if soaked in blood turned on the priestess. What sat in that cool gaze was thick with irritation.

"Lady Seria—if you stay out on this terrace long enough for your cold to worsen, will your meddling fiancé not throw a fit and drag in the High Priest himself this time?"

This man was not, in the slightest, worried about Seria's health. He simply found it tiresome that his territory might end up hosting a High Priest on top of an ordinary priestess.

"My apologies, Your Highness."

Lesche Berke. He stared at Seria, flat and unblinking, for a moment, then looked away. He spoke to the priestess.

"Take the Saint back to the Grand Temple, and soon."

"As I mentioned, the Saint wishes to remain here a while longer, for her recovery—Your Highness!"

The Grand Duke turned and walked off, unhurried, heavy-footed, without a backward glance—and the priestess scrambled after him. But Seria paid it little mind.

'The male lead. Of course.'

Cold as he seemed now, he'd eventually turn into someone who looked at the female lead like she hung the moon.

The male lead's fate. How the original story ended, that's all.

Seria—no, the woman transported into Seria—thought exactly that.

I suppose I should start by saying I used to be an ordinary graduate student.

Yes, I know. A graduate student—no one calls that ordinary. Fine.

Anyway, one day I opened my eyes to find I'd possessed a character from a novel I used to read. I won't bother going into how I died, or how I supposedly came to terms with it, or any of that. Dragging up something I'd only just managed to forget does nothing but tire me out.

What matters is the person I possessed: Seria Stern.

Seria Stern was, without a doubt, the biggest villainess in the original novel.

Ask a hundred people in the Empire's high society to name the worst villainess, and a hundred and thirty of them would name her—a villainess with a face of flawless beauty and a temperament nothing like it, cold, and possessed of the sheer nerve to pour champagne on someone's head, "adjusted appropriately for rank," whenever they displeased her.

Of course, all that malice had an inferiority complex sitting underneath it as its foundation.

Seria was, by birth, a daughter of the prestigious western Marquess Keliden family—except, of all things, her birth mother had been some low, disreputable actress. A rank somewhere between commoner and outcast, was it?

Well. They said her beauty had been exceptional, even so. And thanks to that, Seria too, having inherited her mother's blood, was a stunning beauty with glossy green hair and eyes blue as ice.

But the Marquess of Keliden already had two sons. Both born of his true wife, both of unimpeachable blood.

Only Seria's birth mother had been a nobody actress.

Because of it, Seria never fit in at home either, and raised hell every chance she got. Her hobby: extravagance. Her specialty: waste. Her relationship with her family: catastrophic.

But the day Seria turned fifteen, everything changed.

It came out that Seria carried the power of a god. And what came of that? Seria took the title the Temple handed down—'Stern'—and flaunted it as her own surname, daring anyone to object, left the Marquess Keliden household, went up to the capital, and enjoyed a life of lavish delinquency.

But around a year ago, Seria changed.

That was when I possessed her body. At first I tore my hair out over why, of all people, it had to be her.

And with good reason—this novel was strange in only a handful of specific ways; everything else about its characters and relationships followed the genre's clichés with religious devotion.

The premise: an interdimensional traveler, the female lead "Lina," falls into another world and is showered in love by the male lead and the sub-male-leads. And of course, it dutifully followed the cliché of a happy ending too.

But wherever there's light, there's shadow. Naturally, there was a villainess too, fated to die miserably.

That villainess was me. Seria Stern. My life was set to end with Kallis's blade cutting my throat clean in half….

I wanted to live. I'd already died young once in my last life; I had no interest in doing it again in this one. It wasn't as if I had a fetish for villainy. I gave up my past misdeeds easily enough. Of course, it looks like it'll still be a good while before my reputation, having bottomed out completely, climbs its way back up….

While I was struggling through all this, falling in love with my current fiancé was pure accident.

Kallis Haneton.

The beautiful golden-haired sub-male-lead of this novel—and—as of a month ago—the man I'd become engaged to.

'The wedding's next week, already.'

Kallis was beautiful, but he'd spent all this time hiding the pain of one arm slowly rotting away beneath his sleeve. The one who healed it in the original was the female lead, Lina, and naturally, Kallis develops feelings for the woman who healed his arm. That fondness just as naturally blooms into love.

But every sub-male-lead's ending is the same, isn't it? Kallis was devoted to Lina—so devoted that he personally disposes of the villainess Seria who torments her. But in the end, since Lina never chooses him, he dies alone and forlorn.

Honestly, once I became Seria, Kallis terrified me.

Just thinking about how vivid that scene had been in the original was enough to raise every hair on my body—Kallis's blade splitting Seria's throat clean open. And on top of that, the actual reason his arm rotted in the first place traces back to Seria herself, which only fed his hatred of her further.

I sought Kallis out to survive, and groveled and begged until he let me heal his arm myself. I'd read the original too, of course, so I already knew exactly how Lina had healed it.

I'd gone and earned the goodwill of the very man who once killed me most cruelly—

I never expected him to confess love to me.

I did wonder, honestly—wasn't he bound to fall for whoever healed that arm, no matter who it was... But even so, I found myself growing steadily fonder of Kallis, who pursued me so headlong.

The female lead was going to fall for the male lead anyway. Wasn't it better for everyone if the sub-male-lead found happiness with a reformed villainess instead of suffering himself into suicide?

Yes. I really did think it was the perfect fix for the original.

I thought so—until—

"Seria Stern!"

I looked up, dazed, at the man shaking my body. He wasn't Kallis Haneton, my fiancé. On the floor, a veil crumpled in his fist rolled loose. He called out to me, teeth gritted, me in my wedding dress, drenched in blood.

Some of my blood had gotten onto his beautiful silver hair too.

"Get a hold of yourself. Don't die. Don't you dare die on me, goddammit!"

…How did it come to this.