The girl’s sigh echoed through the dark room.

She wouldn’t stop, so I faked a smile and told her, “Don’t worry. There’s nothing to be scared of,” and her crying quieted slightly.

I was trying my best to be gentle with her, so as not to frighten her.

I wasn’t doing it out of kindness, and I definitely hadn’t suddenly started feeling pity for this kidnapped girl. I just thought that her crying would make my job more difficult.

My job: bringing this very valuable girl to her buyer without damaging her.

I was only a disposable pawn. I didn’t know any of the details, but I was still going to be paid handsomely.

Now that the girl was almost done crying, I heard her stomach growl.

“I’ll go buy you something to eat,” I said, then asked one of my partners to look after her as I went outside. My fake smile vanished instantly.

The salty breeze from the harbor hit my expressionless face.

I reached the road, which was bustling with people. The people here were always calm and peaceful, possibly because of the warm southern climate. In general, the people in this country were obliviously sheltered.

In the kingdom of Sorcié, the largest in the region, slavery and human trafficking were forbidden, and the rights of the citizens were carefully protected. Even commoners received education, and most people were literate. It was a wealthy, peaceful country.

Seeing the happy faces of the people walking by made me wonder about something… If I were born here, maybe I wouldn’t have needed to resort to crime to make a living.

But wondering about that was useless.

I hadn’t been born in Sorcié. I was born and raised in the slums of a poor country, and I was an orphan who couldn’t even read properly.

I shook the thoughts out of my head, put on my usual fake smile, and went to a shop to buy something to eat.

★★★★★★

“Oh, everything looks so different here!”

I, Katarina Claes, looked out of the carriage’s window and couldn’t help but express my surprise at the change in scenery.

Larna Smith, my superior and fellow passenger, explained why: “This city is located south of the capital, so the plants around us are completely different.”

I took a better look, and sure enough, the greenery looked much more tropical than what I was used to. We hadn’t traveled that far, so a change this radical was surprising. I thought that, maybe, this was because this world belonged to an otome game.

I have a secret I’ve never shared with anyone: I have memories of my previous life. When I was still eight years old, I’d fallen down and hit my head and remembered that I used to be an otaku high school student from a country called Japan.

I died because of an unfortunate accident and was reborn as the daughter of a duke. I soon realized that I was now living in the world of Fortune Lover, the otome game that I was playing in my previous life right before dying! And if that weren’t enough, I was playing the part of Katarina Claes, the villainess who was destined for doom no matter what she did.

I was obviously shocked when I found that out. I had seven years before I’d have to enroll in the Academy of Magic, where the events of the game would take place. I spent that time preparing countermeasures for all the ways in which my doom could happen, and my efforts were repaid. I successfully avoided all of the Catastrophic Bad Ends that the game had in store for me, finally earning peace. Or so I thought…

I became friends with the game’s protagonist, Maria, and after graduating, we started working together at the Magical Ministry, one of the kingdom’s most important organizations. But once there, I found out that the Ministry was actually the setting for Fortune Lover II, the game’s sequel!

And, according to the game’s story, Katarina Claes, after being exiled during the events of the first game, was back in the kingdom for more evil antics which all resulted in her doom.

After all that effort to escape doom, here was a fresh new batch of bad ends! I needed to do something! But unfortunately, I’d never played FL2, the sequel, in my previous life. All the hints I had about it came from a mysterious note I found and from some dreams which I sometimes had, where a friend from my past life was playing it. Armed with nothing but that, I was currently looking for ways to avoid my impending doom.

Maybe because the game’s influence was forcing me to follow its script, I happened to get my hands on Dark Magic, an evil and forbidden type of magic whose very existence was kept secret. Specifically, I found a Dark Familiar and something known as the Dark Covenant. So, between thinking of the bad ends and my work at the Ministry, I was very busy.

Right now I was headed towards Ocean Harbor, the port in southern Sorcié which was used to trade with Ethenell, and this was also part of my job.

A young, magic-wielding noble lady disappeared not too long ago.

While the Ministry was looking for her, I (accidentally) found that she had probably been kidnapped and was going to be used for human trafficking.

We also found out that, in all likelihood, a Dark Magic user from Sorcié was involved in the kidnapping.

Larna, the head of my department at the Ministry, chose three people to accompany her on this mission based on their ability to fight Dark Magic: me and my colleague Sora, since we wielded that same type of magic, and Maria, who wielded Light Magic. The four of us were now close to Ocean Harbor, the town where human trafficking was likely taking place.

A few days had already passed since that young lady was kidnapped, and we therefore had no time to lose. As soon as the International Assembly was over, we had to rush here for our new mission.

Despite the tight schedule, however, my friends had found the time to come to see me off.

“Katarina, remember to keep away from things which do not concern you. Stay clear of danger,” Jeord said, furrowing his brow.

Keith, with a similar expression, said, “Big sister, don’t follow strangers, even if they promise to give you snacks.”

“…I’m an adult, you know? I’m eighteen years old,” I replied, slightly offended at being treated like a child, but then my friend Mary joined in, staring deep into my eyes.

“That’s what makes it all the more dangerous! Take these, they could come in handy. This will turn any assailant temporarily blind, and this one will paralyze—”

“What? Where’d you even find those things? Quit it, anyway. Giving someone as clumsy as her things like those would make it all even more dangerous,” Alan said, stopping Mary as she was getting a series of little bottles out of her bag.

To be honest, I agreed with him. Hearing the way she spoke about their contents, I was scared to think of what would happen if I accidentally broke one of them.

“Lady Katarina, should you be bored during the ride…” Sophia said with a smile as she handed me a series of books which were probably romance novels. I appreciated the thought, but those were probably too many for me to ever finish reading.

“Sophia, Katarina isn’t going there to play. She’ll be working and will have no time to read those things. Bring them back home,” her brother Nicol said. I actually wanted to borrow a couple…

I couldn’t bring myself to contradict someone as strict and serious about work as Nicol, so I gave up.

I eventually left the capital with some snacks to eat along the way and a lot of warnings not to do anything dangerous and to be very careful.

“We’re going to leave soon,” Sora announced through the carriage’s window.

“Please take care of Katarina,” Jeord addressed him with a dark smile, “and make sure that nothing weird happens.”

Sora was slightly taken aback, but he silently nodded.

Everyone was seeing me off as if I were going to a far away country, but I wasn’t even leaving Sorcié at all…

I was now excited at the southern scenery around me. The greenery was different, with palm trees and luscious flowers I’d never seen before, and the people were different as well. They were tan, unlike the pale people that lived in the capital.

It was just like one of the islands in southern Japan from my previous life… or at least I assumed it was, since I’d never visited them.

“We’re almost there,” Larna said while I was still busy excitedly taking in the scenery around me.

“You all know about your identities, right?” she then asked.

“Yes,” all the three of us replied.

She was talking about the fake identities that we were supposed to take on during the mission.

Unlike the time when that village had asked the Ministry to help them with their tanuki infestation, this was an undercover operation, just like Sora and Maria’s mission at the Castle during the Assembly.

If people found out about our ranks or about the fact that we worked for the Ministry, they would probably feel wary of us, and looking for information would become much more difficult.

Therefore, as long as I was here, I was no longer a Ministry employee or the daughter of a duke. I was supposed to be just a normal girl.

There was a restaurant in the area which had secret connections with the Magical Ministry. We would pretend to be relatives of the owners who had come there from the countryside to help with work. We would then use that cover story to snoop around without raising suspicion.

However, when Larna prepared our cover stories, mine was a bit different. The higher-ups at the Ministry insisted that, as the daughter of a duke, I couldn’t be asked to do the lowly job of a commoner, and so I could pretend to be a slightly higher-ranking tourist, just lazily goofing around while my friends worked. I refused, and asked to help Sora and Maria.

I was doing my fair share of manual labor back at the Ministry, and, in my previous life, I worked part time at a restaurant to finance my otaku hobbies, so I was positive that I’d have no problem.

First and foremost, though, I couldn’t stand doing nothing while my colleagues were working and collecting information.

In the end, it was decided that Maria and I would work at the restaurant while Sora would help load ships during the day and act as a sort of bouncer during the night.

Larna, who was a master of disguise, who would change her looks to investigate here and there, but she didn’t tell us any of the details.

“Here we are,” Larna said, and we hopped off of the carriage.

There was a slight breeze coming towards us.

“It smells salty!” I said, happy to experience that smell for the first time in this life.

“That’s because we’re so close to the sea,” Larna explained.

“The sea?!” I said, overjoyed.

“Lady Katarina, have you never been to the sea?”

“No, never.”

In my previous life I’d go to the beach to swim every summer, but since being reborn as Katarina Claes, I’d never even seen the ocean. The word itself was enough to get me excited.

“If that’s the case, you should go and take a look at it if you find some free time,” Larna kindly said. I definitely wanted to do that.

“I have also never seen it, so, if you go, I would like to come along,” Maria said, so we promised to go together.

I was looking forward to discovering what the sea looked like in this world.

Leaving the carriage, we walked through a street smelling like salt and full of people, until we finally reached a building with a red roof and a simple sign on it that read “Harbor Restaurant.”

While it didn’t look particularly old, it obviously wasn’t very new either.

A sign on the door showed that it wasn’t open yet, but Larna casually walked inside, making the shopkeeper bell ring.

Inside we found a few dozen tables, each with two or three seats, and, just to the right of the entrance, what looked like a counter.

Just like the building itself, its contents were neither ancient nor brand new, but the whole place was very clean.

“We’re here!” Larna said as soon as she entered, addressing someone inside.

“Oh, already?” a voice from behind the counter replied.

It belonged to a woman probably in her late twenties, who was crouching behind the counter, doing something, and stood up when she heard Larna.

“It’s been so long, Larna. I haven’t had much time since you contacted me, so I’m not done with the preparations yet. Sorry.”

The woman, whose words indicated that she obviously knew Larna, had brown eyes and hair of the same color, long enough to reach her waist and tied in a messy ponytail.

She wasn’t extraordinarily beautiful or anything, but she had an attractive something about her.

“Don’t worry, it’s my bad for calling you all of a sudden. We’ll take up the preparations from here,” Larna said before introducing us to the woman.

“From right to left, these are Katarina Claes, Maria Campbell, and Sora Smith,” she said.

Introducing people with nothing but their names — no titles — was weird, but this woman must have been used to how weird Larna usually was, since she didn’t bat an eye.

“I see,” she said. “I already read about all of you in the files that were sent to me. However, as long as you are here, we’ll all be on a first-name basis. I’m Regina, by the way. I know this is very sudden, but time is of the essence, so I’ll show you your rooms.”

We followed her to a hallway opposite to the entrance. It was darker than the hall, but just as clean.

Regina opened one of several doors.

“This, the next room, and the one at the end of the hallway are the employees’ rooms. They all look the same, and, since they haven’t been used in a while, they could be a bit dusty.”

She showed us a simple room with a bed, a wardrobe, a desk, and a chair. It only had the bare essentials, but the sunlight coming in from the window made it look like a pleasant, comfortable place to stay in.

“Lady Katarina, Maria, Sora. Clean these rooms and then move into them, one for each,” Larna ordered after checking inside the door.

“What about you, Miss Larna?” I asked, wondering where she was going to stay if we used up all three of the rooms.

“Don’t worry, I won’t be staying in this building. And don’t call me Miss while we’re here.”

“Y-Yes…”

She was going to investigate in disguise, so she wasn’t going to stay with us.

“Regina, I won’t be able to stop by so often, so please take care of these three.”

“Even after going up in rank, you’re still as freewheeling as always,” Regina said, putting a hand to her cheek and sighing. She looked toward the rest of us. “It can’t be easy working with her as your boss, huh? Anyway, as long as you stay here, I’ll take care of all of you, so just tell me if anything happens,” she then added, showing us a voluptuous smile. I nodded, but I found myself blushing.

Larna, however, had raised an eyebrow.

“I want you to take care of them, but don’t teach them anything weird, all right?” she said.

“What do you mean weird!?” Regina replied, pouting.

“I mean things like how to charm men, which I know is one of your fortes. These two girls, in particular, are young and naive, so try not to tease them too much.”

“I would never! And I don’t try to charm men. They just come to me of their own accord.”

“Don’t think I’d forget how many men you were keeping around yourself and how much trouble that caused at your last workplace.”

“If we’re talking about that, shouldn’t we also mention how much trouble you caused me by thinking of nothing but your research on magic, without ever stopping to consider the consequences of what you were doing?”

By the quick remarks that they were exchanging, one could see that Larna and Regina were very close to each other.

“Excuse me, how do you two know each other?” I finally asked, unable to contain my curiosity.

“We worked together at the Ministry,” both of them replied in perfect unison.

“Regina is a bit older than me, but we started working at the same time and were assigned to the same department,” Larna explained.

“So you used to work at the Ministry?”

I knew that our organization had some connection to this restaurant, but we didn’t know that a Ministry employee was working here, and finding this out surprised all three of us.

Seeing our reaction, Regina put her hand to her cheek and sighed once again.

“Why are you always so half-hearted, Larna? You haven’t even explained the details to your subordinates? Be more diligent!” she said, and then looked back at us.

“Most Ministry employees are open about their work, but there are some, like me, who hide their position and pretend to be common citizens. We do that to collect information and report it to the higher ups, or even solve small problems on our own. In other words, we do all of this undercover,” she said.

I knew that Larna had been on some undercover missions, and that Maria and Sora had recently done the same at the Castle, but I didn’t know that there were people who were always undercover!

“Regina looks… like that, but she’s actually strong both with her arms and with magic. You can rely on her,” Larna said.

“What do you mean like that? I really don’t want to hear that coming from the Ministry’s problem child…” Regina replied, pouting again.

“Problem child? That’d be you.”

“No way. You were the problem child.”

Most likely, both of them were the problem child.

In any case, the Ministry was hiding more secrets than I thought.

I used to think that Ministry employees were like government officials in Japan, but now they looked more like an intelligence agency. I really didn’t understand the scope of this organization, despite being an employee myself. There was so much I didn’t know.

Now that we reached Ocean Harbor, we went from answering one Ministry problem child to another.

I didn’t know how glad I should feel about that.

We started by deciding who would stay in which room, but, since we were two women and one man, Sora would stay in the room at the end of the hallway, and Maria and I only had to choose which one of the two adjacent rooms to use, and then we all cleaned them.

Just as Regina had told us, the rooms were a bit dusty, and looked like they hadn’t been used in a while. We opened the windows and swept the floors.

Since there was only the bare minimum furniture, cleaning took very little time, and soon we were ready to put our belongings into our wardrobes.

Anne, my maid, used to do everything for me, but while working at the Ministry, I had experienced doing a variety of menial tasks, and now I could easily take care of this kind of thing.

However, according to Anne, I was “too careless about personal appearance,” and she even asked Maria to look after me in that regard. She obviously didn’t trust my skills yet, but I personally thought that I’d improved a little bit since my past life. Now, for example, I fixed my hair before leaving the house.

I thought of that while taking things out of my luggage and stuffing them inside the wardrobe.

I put in my clothes and other daily necessities, and my bag had remained almost empty, except for a book.

I didn’t take Sophia’s romance novels with me, did I? I thought but, taking a better look, I realized that it was actually the Dark Covenant.

Oh, that’s right. I’d been told to always keep it with me, so I’d put it in my bag before going to the Castle for the Assembly.

I often forgot about the covenant, mainly because reading it was so difficult that I wanted to think about it as little as I could.

When I looked at this book, by far the most villainesque thing I owned, I remembered about the Catastrophic Bad Ends that were waiting for me.

I avoided doom throughout my time at the Academy, but, after I started working at the Ministry, I realized that I wasn’t quite done yet. However, even after a while, I hadn’t noticed any particular event that looked like it could lead me to a bad end.

It was also possible that I just hadn’t noticed—after all, I hadn’t played FL2, so I wasn’t very familiar with its script.

Despite everything, I had accidentally found a lot of Dark Magic-related items that were probably used by the villainess in the game. Furthermore, because of my job, I spent a lot of time with Maria, meaning that maybe I was inadvertently interfering with her romantic events.

I had to be really careful about that, since, from what I knew, doom for Katarina in FL2 was related to interfering with the love between Maria and the three new love interests: Cyrus, Dewey, and Sora.

As for Cyrus, Maria’s gynophobic superior, I’d actually helped him get closer to her, and I was always rooting for Dewey, the child prodigy, so I didn’t think I’d have any problems with those two…

But then there was Sora, who worked in the same department as me.

We spent a lot of time together, but I could never tell what he was really thinking under that aloof expression of his.

I decided that, if I found some free time during this mission, I’d ask him again what he thought of Maria.

I put the Dark Covenant in the wardrobe with my other belongings and, since I was finished, I went to see how Maria was doing.

“I’m done!” I said, and I noticed that she was still putting her clothes away. Unlike me, who just threw them in haphazardly, she was neatly folding each one of them.

“That was fast, Lady Katarina,” she said, before quickly realizing what she’d done and covering her mouth with her hands.

“You can’t call me Lady while we’re here, remember?” I answered with a grin.

“…Miss Katarina,” she said while blushing.

I wouldn’t have minded being called just Katarina, without even the Miss. Actually, I would have preferred that, considering that Larna had also told me not to use it with her. However Maria refused to do that, saying that she could never disrespect me like that.

I thought that in this world, where rank was so important, that gap was too large to bridge, but I still hoped that one day we could just call each other by name like two friends.

“Ah, I ended up bringing Alexander’s towel…” Maria muttered to herself as she continued putting her things away.

“You mean that teddy bear?” I asked, and her expression got slightly darker.

“Yes. He was supposed to come with us, so I had also packed his things.”

“A shame, really,” I said.

Alexander was a magical tool, an uncool teddy bear with a cool name that Larna had created, and it was supposed to come with us on this mission. It was very attached to Maria and followed her everywhere.

Its main function was finding people, and it had helped us find Keith in the past, which is why we thought it could be helpful this time too. We tried to borrow something from the kidnapped young lady to activate it, but we then found out about a major problem… Alexander was actually looking for people by detecting traces of their magic, so it didn’t work properly with people who only had weak magic powers.

Keith, Maria, and the other test subjects we had used when experimenting with Alexander all had very strong magic powers, so we only recently found out that it couldn’t help us in finding the not-so-powerful young lady.

This also meant that it probably couldn’t find not-so-powerful me.

We were obviously all disappointed, but the most disappointed person (bear?) was Alexander, who thought it could save the day.

To be honest, I didn’t really like Alexander (because it teased me all the time), but seeing how depressed it looked back then made me feel for it.

After all, Alexander had to stay in the capital.

“I think it’d want us to do our best,” I told Maria, in an attempt to cheer her up, since she was Alexander’s… owner, in a sense.

After Maria was done with her luggage as well, we walked out into the hallway, where we found Sora. He’d already finished with his room and was waiting for us.

“Now that we’re all done, we should go back to the restaurant. Regina said she’ll tell us what we’re supposed to do next,” he said, and so we all went back to the hall that we’d seen earlier.

We found Regina behind the counter, and Larna sitting in front of it.

“You’re done? Sit here, then. I’ll make you something to drink,” Regina said, inviting us to the seats near Larna’s.

As we sat down, I thought that the atmosphere was too relaxing to think that we were going to actually work.

“There you go,” Larna said after pointing at the glasses on the counter in front of us. They were full of an orange liquid and decorated with a slice of some kind of citrus on the rim.

It’s a tropical drink! I thought, a bit excited, as I took a sip.

“…Hmfg!”

I did my best not to spit it out.

Wh-What is this?! It looked like orange juice, but it tasted sour, bitter, and spicy… In a word, it tasted disgusting.

I considered that maybe it just didn’t match my palate, but I looked at Maria and Sora and, sure enough, their faces had turned blue with disgust too.

The person behind the drinks, however, didn’t seem to notice.

“So, how does it taste? Did you like it?” Regina asked.

Having no idea how to reply, the three of us silently looked at each other.

“Have you seen their faces?” Larna asked coolly. “Do you think that’s a face that people make when they drink something they like? You still couldn’t throw together something half palatable to save your life, it seems.”

Now that I looked at it, I noticed that the glass in front of Larna only contained water. She probably knew that Regina’s drinks were terrible.

I stared at my superior as if to blame her for not telling me before I drank that, and my thoughts reached her.

“I just thought that making you taste it for yourself was the easiest way to do it. And these drinks are no exception. Everything that Regina makes is awful. Food, beverages, you name it. Her sense of taste is awful too, so she doesn’t even understand just how bad the things she makes are,” Larna explained with a shrug.

Regina then took a sip of the drink she had made for us before asking, “Is it really that bad?” thus proving Larna’s point.

“If so… who is cooking at the restaurant?” asked Maria, who had finally recovered from the attack on her taste buds.

I was actually wondering the same thing, since I’d seen no one else but Regina in the restaurant.

I seriously hoped that she wasn’t serving customers things that tasted like that drink.

“There’s people who help me with that. I mostly manage the restaurant by myself, but they come around to give me a hand.”

“So you have employees,” said Maria. “Do they also work at the Ministry?”

“No, but they know what’s going on. I’ve performed background checks on them, and they’re trustworthy. They’re an old couple living near here.”

“Is it only that old couple?” I asked Regina, surprised.

“Yes. So what?” she replied.

We were all surprised by this reaction. The restaurant was quite big and it had a lot of seats. How could three people, two of them elderly at that, be enough to manage it?

I explained my doubts to Regina, who then casually replied.

“Oh, that’s not a problem. This place is never full. Even during lunch time, the most we ever get is maybe ten people at once.”

“And is that enough to keep the restaurant going?” Maria questioned, her eyes wide with curiosity.

“No way,” Regina simply replied.

Huh? We all looked at her in confusion.

“This place exists to gather useful information for the Ministry, so they give me enough money to keep the place running. Getting a few customers is more than enough!”

“So this restaurant does not make enough of a profit to cover expenses?” responded an even more confused Maria. Her eyes looked grimmer than usual.

“Exactly. We just buy food and beverages and resell them as is, after all.”

“You are not cooking the food you serve?” Maria attempted to clarify. She was surprisingly forward with her questions today.

“Yes. That couple told me that cooking would be too taxing for them, and that they couldn’t cook anything worth selling anyway. I’d cook the food myself, but my dishes aren’t very popular,” Regina explained as she cocked her head to one side.

If the drink she had served us was anything to go by, I could see why that was.

“So, long story short, this restaurant just sells the same food and drinks you could buy everywhere and isn’t even popular at all, right?” Larna mercilessly summarized the conversation so far.

“Hm, yes, I guess that’s about it,” Regina replied without looking very concerned.

“But wouldn’t it be weird to get two new employees, Katarina and Maria, if the restaurant is doing so badly?” Larna asked, raising an eyebrow.

Indeed, that did sound a bit unnatural.

“No need to worry about that. This restaurant still hasn’t closed despite drawing in so few customers, right? So everyone around here thinks that I have a rich lover who gives me money to keep the place afloat and that I only do this as a pastime. People will simply assume that the two new girls are just other lovers of the same guy,” Regina said with a smile as she slightly moved her head to one side.

That elegant, womanly smile definitely made her look like a rich guy’s lover.

“…I see. Fine then,” Larna said, still looking somewhat unconvinced. Personally, being thought of as someone’s new lover was anything but fine…

“There’s not much to do around here, so you just need to stand there and kill time!” Regina said while looking at Maria and me.

I was ready to give my best as a waitress, so I was actually disappointed.

“If we have the time… may we try to cook something?” Maria asked.

As always, she was such a diligent girl that she couldn’t forgive the idea of just standing there doing nothing.

“You can cook?” Regina asked.

“Maria’s a wonderful cook! Especially when it comes to baking, she’s even better than your average patissier!” I replied before Maria had a chance to respond.

“N-No, that is not true…”

“It is true! The things you cook are delicious!”

Maria was being humble, but, as the daughter of a duke, I’d eaten my fair share of delicious cuisine. I knew a good cook when I saw one. Every time she made something for me, it was always delicious.

She was beautiful, cute, kind, and even good at cooking… I wished I could marry her.

“Really?” Regina answered with a grin. “In that case, come to the kitchen with me.”

Fearing for Maria’s life, Sora and I followed her and Regina.