That’s right, my past life. I still possessed memories of my past life, before I was reborn as Katarina Claes, daughter of a duke. Or rather, I recalled them one day.
This happened one day when I was eight years old, when I accompanied my father on a visit to the palace. As he was showing me the garden, I tripped and hit my head. At that moment, my memories of my former life suddenly came rushing back into my mind. I recalled that I was once an ordinary high school girl, an otaku, living in a country called Japan in a world that was different from this one.
Perhaps because of the sudden recovery of my memories, I developed a high fever and was bedridden for some time. I was yanked back in time by recollections of life as an ordinary high school girl, undergoing a drastic character transformation as a result and turning over a new leaf. However, as I was getting used to my new life, I suddenly realized something shocking: The world I currently lived in was the setting of an otome game I had been playing just before I died in my past life—a game called Fortune Lover!
It was certainly a surprise to find myself reborn in the world of an otome game, but that in and of itself was not such a big problem. However...it so happened that I had been cast in the role of Fortune Lover’s villainess, who was destined to torment the game’s protagonist before meeting her own doom! If the protagonist achieved a Happy End, Katarina would be exiled from the kingdom, but in the case of a Bad End, she would face death. Either way, Katarina Claes was a person who was invariably marked for doom.
If I didn’t do anything to stop said doom, I was headed for an untimely death, just like in my previous life. Having realized this, I started to work tirelessly to evade my impending doom. I began plowing a field to grow vegetables, trained to fight with a sword, practiced making toy snakes, somehow made friends with the game’s romanceable characters and rival characters alike, and went back to plowing the field some more. With all my efforts, I was able to overcome the doom I was meant to have met during my time at the Academy of Magic.
In spring of this year, I graduated from the academy none the worse for wear, and found employment at the Magical Ministry together with my good friend Maria, the game’s protagonist. It was the first full-time job I’d ever had, including in my past life. Unfortunately, after I’d motivated myself to do the best job that I could, I had only a fleeting moment to focus on work before learning that the sequel to Fortune Lover, Fortune Lover II: Love at the Magical Ministry, was about to begin!
Not only that, but Katarina Claes, who was supposed to have been dealt with—by being exiled from the kingdom—was set to return as the villainess! And the Bad Ends in this game would receive an upgrade—this time she would face imprisonment or death!
No way was I going to put up with a Bad End now, not after having managed to overcome doom at the academy! I racked my brains to find a way to overcome doom in this game’s story as well, but regardless of my intentions, I ended up obtaining items that placed me squarely in the role of a villainess—chief among these were my Dark Familiar and Dark Covenant.
Still, thanks to the mysterious dreams I was lucky enough to have now and then, and my own superb powers of deduction, I had managed to discover that there were only six months left in the storyline of the second game. I resolved to spend each day doing everything in my power to make it through these six months.
“Lady Katarina... You’re all ready to go.”
“Ah! Thanks, Anne.”
Whoops, I was totally lost in thought.
Right, today’s a new day! Time to give it my all at work!
To shake the memory of the nostalgic, wistful dream I’d had that morning from my mind, I psyched myself up for the day ahead.
A little more than six months had passed since I joined the Magical Ministry and found myself assigned to the department that was rumored to be the last place you’d want to end up—the Magical Tool Laboratory—since it was apparently filled with weirdos. In that time, I had more or less grown used to my work in the department and my somewhat peculiar senior colleagues.
Because the workers in the Magical Tool Laboratory were quite capable, the Ministry had a tendency to give them all sorts of miscellaneous tasks. There was even a lot of physical labor involved, so considering that I found myself getting sleepy whenever I had to sit at a desk and read documents, perhaps it suited me well.
However, following my discovery of a suspicious tome known as the Dark Covenant, I had been forced to spend my afternoons working on deciphering its contents. I had to look up all the characters I couldn’t read (from an ancient script) in a dictionary as I read the covenant. This work also made me really sleepy.
More recently, I had even started training in Dark Magic, in order to apply what I was learning from the Dark Covenant. This new project occupied my mornings. That I was now unable to perform my regular duties for the Magical Tool Laboratory—duties I had gone to such great pains to learn from my mentors—made me feel quite sad.
That wasn’t all. In order to train me in Dark Magic, I’d had to ask Raphael to teach me. Some called him the “real head of the department” since he often had to assume the duties of Larna, its official head, whenever she got too obsessed with her own pet projects and ditched work. I felt guilty about adding to Raphael’s workload when he was already so busy.
I wanted to learn all I could about Dark Magic as quickly as possible, so that I could stop being a burden on him. Afterward, I’d still have the Dark Covenant to tackle, but I could do that on my own, relieving him of his teaching duty.
“You did a good job of absorbing that,” Raphael—the “true head” of my department and my instructor in Dark Magic—said with a smile. But I got the feeling that he was actually a bit frustrated.
Just as Raphael said, I’d managed to absorb my own Dark Magic today, as I did every day. I’d gotten really good at absorbing it. I’d learned to do it very quickly, in one smooth motion. But I hadn’t made progress in any other areas.
I still couldn’t generate a cloud of darkness any bigger than a tangerine, and all my training in reshaping the darkness had yielded only hazy results, with no further progress as the days rolled by. I felt extremely guilty.
“Maybe... Maybe I don’t have any talent when it comes to Dark Magic,” I murmured. Of course, my attempts at Earth Magic were just as pitiful, so I got the feeling that actually I had no talent for magic at all.
“That just isn’t so. Haven’t you already improved so much when it comes to absorbing darkness?” Raphael asked, seeing how dejected I looked.
My teacher is really too kind.
“Thank you so much. But I really can’t do anything except absorb it...”