Chapter 1:
A Reason to Fight
TEN YEARS PASSED in the blink of an eye after I regained my memories. I spent my days fuming that such a lighthearted otome game was actually a world full of wickedness, and it had become my reality.
Well, it wasn’t like I could stay angry all the time. Though it was another world, it still had its own daily rhythm.
We were indeed nobles, but we were poor countryside stock. We often toiled in the fields ourselves, and naturally, I helped out. Manual labor toned my body over the years. My face grew more masculine as well, and it once again resembled the one I’d had in my previous life.
At fifteen, with black hair and black eyes, I was no stud, but I wasn’t an ugly gremlin either. Sadly, this was an otome game world. Dreamy guys swarmed the place, and I was just one of the masses. A background character. A mob.
My older brother Nicks had moved to the continent—the main area of the kingdom—to enroll in the academy and live in the dormitory. As soon as he left the cramped storage shed we shared, the sixth youngest of the family (the fourth son), Colin, took his place.
Currently I was in my room reading a letter Nicks sent me. We were close like that (or at least, I thought we were close). Looking for a bride is tough, he noted.
In this world, a man who couldn’t get married by the time he graduated the academy was considered deeply flawed. Still single by the age of twenty? You were second-rate goods. Society came down especially hard on the sons of noble families. Commoners might be given a pass, but noblemen who didn’t marry young were treated like pariahs. As I read his letter, I prayed Nicks would find a wife quickly. For men, this world was ridiculously harsh.
If you couldn’t get married, it affected employment, like your prospects for promotion. This held true even among the nobles. Second and third sons and onward had to leave the house and strike out on their own. They were merely spares, anyway, in case the heir failed to continue the family name. And once the heir inherited the family titles and produced a male child of their own, those spares became useless.
When that happened, our jobs were already predetermined: we either entered the military or became government officials. There were some exceptions, such as men who became doctors or something else that would benefit the country and the people in it. All other forms of employment were treated with disdain.
The men who couldn’t marry were forever no better than a servant class. They had no hope of climbing a career ladder and would never be given any significant responsibility. Society didn’t trust those who couldn’t marry. Therefore, marriage was critical for men, especially those of rank.
“This world truly is despicable,” I muttered as I read Nicks’s letter.
Conflict defined our era—wars, squabbles, air pirates, monsters—and the death rate for knights and other men in the military was high. Noble houses like mine produced so many children because a lot of them inevitably died during war. And yet, while fighting was a man’s job—all while holding down a paying job, come on!—women held all the authority. Men put their lives on the line and died in combat but were still garbage in the eyes of society. It was twisted and warped.
I hoped there was a reason for it. If this world only allowed women to get away with all this crap because of some developer’s offhand decision to make the game’s society matriarchal, I’d cry.
Why did I have to reincarnate here? There wasn’t a day I didn’t wonder that.
Wait, no, there were some days. A lot, actually. I was so busy that I often forgot to begrudge my situation. After all, it had been ten years since I regained the memories of my previous life. You get used to things.
Inside our little storage shed, my younger brother Colin sprawled out on his bed, sleeping soundly. He had such an innocent face. From the game’s standpoint, he and I were nothing more than useless background characters. If we even got names, they would be Character A, Character B…
I’d never even heard of Bartfort House in the game.
“So I’m a background character.” I sighed. “I guess it does kinda fit me.”
I didn’t want to accept it, but part of me did anyway. It wasn’t like I held any grand aspirations or wanted to move up in the world or do anything worthy of note. If I was just a background character, then a background character I would be.
More importantly, I would be enrolling in the academy next year. One of the few perks of this world for men (and trust me, there were very few) was that all nobles could join the academy. I was a little apprehensive about the idea of the game’s story becoming real life for me, but I was grateful for the opportunity to study so I could advance in the paths available to me. With so few opportunities to leave your family’s territory, this was a precious chance. If you didn’t leave, you were likely to be forced into an engagement with some thirty- or forty-year-old has-been. No laughing matter.
“When you think about that, enrolling in the academy sounds pretty great.”
I watched my little brother sleep, relieved I’d be escaping soon.