Why did she lose favorability points just for greeting him good morning?

  Under the heavy glare he was pinning her with, Mira stammered, “W-what do you mean, Your Highness?”

  Another flash of red light.

  No, no, this didn’t make any sense. Why in the world would she lose points for that very innocent question?

  He took a step towards her, aggression practically radiating off him, and she instinctively took one back.

  “Um …”

  In light of the quick deduction of favorability points for the last two times she’d spoken, she was afraid to say anything else.

  Instead, she waited for him to talk.

  Eventually, her back came in contact with the wall after a few more cycles of him walking towards her and her walking backwards in turn.

  Seeing this incensed guy scowling at her like she’d murdered his entire household standing just three feet away from her, Mira gulped.

  “Um,” she tried again.

  “Is that all you have to say?” he demanded. “Drop the act, Blythe. I know you’re up to something.”

  “Um … Your Highness, I …”

  A flash of red light.

  She froze. The key words were ‘Your Highness’. But if she wasn’t supposed to call him that, how was she supposed to address him?

  Then her memories of the game hit her like a truck. Scenes with Blythe in the game were typically bullying scenes, where Magnus was conveniently absent so that she could do whatever she wanted. But on the very rare occasions that Blythe and Magnus were on the same screen, she didn’t call him Your Highness. She called him Magnus.

  Of course.

  Of course Blythe would relish being able to call him by his first name, banking on the privilege she had as his fiancée.

  In her panic, Mira had forgotten to take that into consideration before greeting him.

  It had to be extremely out of character for Blythe to address him the same way other people would in order for Magnus to get so mad about it. Was this why he thought she was up to something?

  “I’m not up to anything,” she said.

  No point deductions. That was good.

  He scoffed, smiling grimly at her. “So then why are you wearing this?”

  At a loss for words, Mira gaped at him then looked down at her outfit. It was a modest, classy piece. She didn’t see anything wrong with it.

  She frowned, trying to figure out the answer he was fishing for. “It’s a dress?”

  “Is this your way of telling me you want to play truant today? Where’s your school uniform?”

  Oh.

  Mira could’ve screamed in her frustration. All he had to do was tell her to wear her school uniform. Why go through all this fuss just for an attire faux pas? Now that she thought about it, he was wearing the same uniform she’d grown accustomed to seeing in the game. Her brain just hadn’t registered it due to the deep animosity he’d greeted her with distracting her from everything else.

  It finally clicked for her—it was obviously a school day, and she was expected to attend classes in Novalbus Royal Academy. Her attire had given him the impression that she was planning to skip school. By all appearances, it seemed that Magnus was sick of Blythe’s nonsense, which explained his reaction to her mere presence.

  Mira let out a weak laugh, trying not to seem too rattled. In what little scenarios she’d seen of them together in the game, Blythe had never appeared afraid of Magnus until the time came for her execution.

  “Silly me! I totally forgot,” she said, trying to put on the playful behavior she’d seen in Blythe during the times she interacted with Magnus. “Sorry. I’ll go wear my uniform now.”

  “You forgot this was a school day,” Magnus repeated stonily. “Really.”

  “Really,” she insisted, stepping obliquely away from the wall to keep a distance from him. “I’ll go now. Please, um …”

  She racked her brain for the next words to say.

  Wait here? Go now?

  What was he doing here, anyway? Shouldn’t he be staying as far away from Blythe as much as possible, given his blatant dislike of her?

  Mira didn’t need to see the favorability points to know how much he detested her; he was already screaming it with his body language.

  If you spot this narrative on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

  “I’m coming with you,” he said coldly, as if he could predict her next words. “I’ll wait outside your room for you.”

  “What?” She managed another fake laugh. “You don’t have to—besides, wouldn’t that be kind of inappropriate?”

  If he had waited for her arrival at the drawing room instead of right outside her bedroom despite his obvious impatience towards Blythe, it stood to reason that he had done so for the sake of the appearance of propriety.

  Red light.

  This was bad. This was really, seriously bad—did the favorability points mean anything beyond arbitrary values in a table? At the rate that they were dropping, Mira feared she would trigger some event that would prove either fatal or devastating for herself. As much as she wanted to believe that this was all a fantastical dream that her sleeping brain was cooking up, all the signs pointed to this being her current reality.

  Why did she lose points for that, anyway?

  Magnus’ smile didn’t reach his eyes.

  “Inappropriate? You didn’t seem to think it was inappropriate all those times you pulled me directly into your room to have tea. Are you trying to hide something?”

  Mira cringed at the thought of Blythe dragging Magnus into her room with that giant portrait of them she had up on her wall. She couldn’t imagine putting a blown-up photo of her crush and her on her wall and then inviting him into her room.

  The original Blythe wouldn’t have turned down the opportunity to have Magnus as close to her as possible. That explained the points she’d lost.

  She kept a cautious smile on her face. “I’m really not hiding anything. I just … uh, never mind. Well, then, I’ll be headed back to my room. Feel free to follow.”

  Pretending not to see the way he cocked his head to side in suspicion at her response, Mira turned her back to him and nodded at Suzy. Her sharp stare seemed to get through to Suzy—her handmaid bowed before leading the way before Blythe in the direction of her bedroom, just as she had on their way here.

  At least it seemed like she had a smart servant who could read social cues by her side.

  The three of them walked in silence, with Mira trying not to fidget or do anything to give away how nervous she was while Magnus strode confidently beside her. If she even looked at her surroundings wrong, he might detect that she wasn’t familiar with where they were. That fear tugged insistently at her brain, refusing to relinquish its hold.

  The quiet between them held up for all of one minute before Magnus said, “Are you really not up to anything today? Like cooking up a plot to trouble Miss Willoughby again?”

  She immediately regretted glancing back at him. His stare was so piercing it felt like he could tell she wasn’t Blythe at all.

  Who are you? she thought at him.

  Purple light.

  That was straightforward. Unfortunately, it didn’t provide any information she didn’t already know.

  “No, I promise. I’m not going to bother Daisy at all.” She paused to think of an excuse. “I had an intense dream and woke up thinking that we didn’t have school today.”

  The reply seemed to appease him slightly, because his sharp features smoothed over, but another frown set in shortly after.

  Mira wanted to pull at her hair. If he didn’t want to leave, why couldn’t this guy have at least waited in the drawing room for her or something?

  “Since when did you start calling her Daisy?”

  The urge to pull her hair intensified.

  Mira was so used to thinking of the heroine of Waiting for Fireflies as ‘Daisy’ that she’d forgotten Blythe had always called Daisy solely by her last name.

  The students in Novalbus Royal Academy were encouraged to call each other by their first names—without any honorific titles attached—within the school walls as a sign of equality among all the students regardless of their ranks within the nobility. Magnus was the only one exempt from this convention, being that he was the crown prince of the kingdom and most people felt uncomfortable calling him by his first name.

  On the other hand, the original Blythe had despised Daisy so much that she’d refused to call her by her first name even while they were on campus.

  “Um … I thought I should try to get over myself,” she said, affecting another fake laugh. “I guess I finally realized how unbecoming it was of me to so openly express my dislike of a fellow student.”

  Making up an excuse for why she would start calling Daisy by her first name from now on made more sense than continuing to refer to her as ‘Willoughby’ and risking frequent slip-ups.

  The furrow in his brow grew even deeper, but there were thankfully no further flashes of red light to indicate more lost favorability points. Mira wondered what it would take to gain them back.

  “It was,” he agreed, but his eyes were wary. “I never understood why you had such an issue with her to begin with.”

  In the game, Blythe had hidden the worst of her harassment towards Daisy from Magnus, afraid of showing him her insecure and jealous side. However, it was still abundantly clear that she had something against Daisy by the way her friends always picked on her and did petty things like hide her PE clothes, all without Blythe having to lift a finger.

  It was revealed later on in his own route that Magnus could tell that even if there was no hard evidence Blythe was the grand orchestrator of these humiliating events, she at least condoned the perpetrator’s actions. It was why the game began with Magnus already estranged from his fiancée.

  As the game progressed, Blythe’s covert schemes designed to demotivate Daisy at school gradually escalated into outright harassment with the help of her friends.

  Mira avoided eye contact. “I was being childish, but I don’t want to be like that anymore. I want to be someone my parents can be proud of.”

  It was the best excuse she could think up on the fly.

  Green light flashed across her vision.

  Mira’s eyes bulged.

  First, that was an important discovery: she could gain favorability points.

  Second, wasn’t that a little stingy? She'd finally said something right, and the points she'd gotten were still lower than any of the points she'd lost for unknowingly saying something wrong.

  After a short hum, Magnus said, "Well, if that's true, I'm glad to hear that."

  She gave him a tight smile.

  Upon entering her bedroom and hearing Suzy shut the door behind her, Mira let out a tiny sigh of relief.

  "Suzy, bring me my uniform and the things I need for school," she said, sitting down on the armchair at the study desk.

  Suzy bowed and then promptly disappeared into the walk-in closet.

  This dream, if it was one, had gone on for long enough. This time around, Mira pinched the underside of her right arm. Pain spiked into the muscle where she'd mercilessly gripped, and she sucked in a breath.

  Had she really been transmigrated into Blythe Ridge's body just like the main characters of all those isekai stories she’d been reading?

  But how? Had she died in her sleep somehow? How had she died?

  The questions swirled around in her mind like a whirlpool.

  She had been kidding about wanting to awake as the villainess in one of her otome games!

  Sure, she’d often fantasized about what it would be like to wake up as a side character like in the isekai web novels only to turn the original story on its head and be able to predict everyone’s reactions as she did so. And maybe she’d thought about it one too many times before bed, dreading going to school the next day and having to face the reality of being invisible to everyone, but that didn’t mean she was ready to be put in a reality entirely different from her own.

  Her train of thought was interrupted by the sound of the walk-in closet doors opening.

  Suzy, carrying a set of her school uniform in her arms, approached her.

  Mira suppressed a sigh as she stood and went to Suzy, bracing herself to be changed out of her clothes by a total stranger for the second time that day.

  Was she just supposed to live as Blythe from now on?

  At least it would be easy to evade death. All she had to do was leave Daisy alone. That was simple enough, as all the web novels she’d read had made abundantly clear.