Chapter 1: A Happy-Bad World
BEFORE me, a sea of flames engulfed the royal capital. The palace, the academy, the church—even the nobles’ mansions had burned down. At this rate, the fire would spread, and the innocent people in the city outskirts would suffer, too. That was the one thing I wanted to avoid at all costs.
My beloved gazed out at the wreckage, his navy-blue hair glowing faintly in the firelight. Our love was forbidden but ardent nonetheless. I called out to him, and he turned to look at me, his eyes shining proudly in the darkness. Behind him, a flaming pillar shot up into the sky like the ascent of a dragon. To me, it was beautiful. But it was my sinfulness that created this scarlet inferno.
He reached out to me.
“Now nothing will ever come between us.”
He was mad with grief and only I could save him. Only I could save this city.
I leaped into his arms…and plunged my double-bladed ceremonial dagger, imbued with the power of the Holy Maiden, deep into his chest.
“Even you betray me?”
As his smile twisted in pain, I wrapped my arms around him.
“No…I’m coming with you.”
The other end of the gilded dagger pierced my skin, my blood mingling with his as threads of light enveloped us like a cocoon.
“If this world forbids our love, then let us awaken at the dawn of the new millennium.”
“Is this…the magic of the Holy Maiden…?”
“Yes. With this, we’ll sleep for a thousand years.”
“Together…”
There inside the holy cocoon, the two of us drifted to sleep in each other’s arms.
—After the aristocracy was wiped out, the world regained its former prosperity, and the two lovers were worshipped as the Gods of Flame.
Then, after a thousand years passed, they awoke there on that very hill, gazed into each other’s eyes, and smiled…
~Fin~
✦ ✦ ✦
…YOU’RE joking, right?! How is THAT a happy ending?!
Iris bolted upright in bed, sweat dripping down her back as she shivered. She’d just had the most tragically beautiful dream—excessively dramatic, yet, for some strange reason, it didn’t strike her as unrealistic. For a moment, she wasn’t sure where the dream ended and reality began. Wrapping her arms around her trembling body, she felt the warmth of her own skin and realized, at last, that she was free from the nightmare.
You call that “dramatic violence?” I call it DOMESTIC violence!
Bad joke, I know, but I wasn’t the one who marketed the game as “cutting-edge dramatic violence” right on the back of the box!
As Iris regained her composure, she slowly looked around. A giant four-poster bed…plush bedding embroidered with lace…a silk nightgown that rustled against her skin with the slightest motion… Wait a minute…
Her heart thumped in her chest. This was Iris’s room—she knew that very well—and yet something about it felt wrong. As she jumped out of bed, she heard the tinkle of a bell just under her chin. Startled, she reached up and clutched at her neck. There, she found soft velvet and the cold metal of a little charm. She didn’t even need to look at it to know it was an iris—the family crest as well as her namesake.
A chill ran down her spine. Why was she still wearing this thing? Iris hurried over to the mirror. With every step, her bell jingled obnoxiously.
Then Iris saw her reflection and froze.
Standing there was a thirteen-year-old girl with a beautiful face reminiscent of an ice sculpture. Thick, glossy hair hung in a loose ponytail all the way to her waist, in a shade of mint green that wouldn’t look out of place in a video game, the tips curled into loose ringlets. Beneath her pencil-thin eyebrows, a pair of upturned eyes stared back at her—the color of jade, though they’d lost their shine.
Wait… Hold on… Isn’t that Iris?!
Iris stared, dumbfounded. Standing there in the mirror was none other than Iris du Chevalier from an otome game called HanaKoro: When the Pale Petals Fall.
Hastily, she yanked up the sleeve on her left arm. Hideous pitted scars ran from the back of her hand up to her elbow—the result of a virus known as soilpox.
Soilpox had been a raging epidemic throughout the land. Not only did it have a high mortality rate, but those who managed to survive it were scarred permanently. Iris had contracted it at the end of last summer, and although she had fortunately recovered, she was now left with extremely visible scars on her arm. As a result, she had chosen to hole up in her room for months. Now it was nearly spring, and she still hadn’t set one foot outside the house.
Iris’s parents didn’t hold it against her, however. After all, soilpox survivors faced harsh social stigma, and as the daughter of an aristocratic family, appearances were everything. Her position in fashionable society was now tenuous at best. Flawless beauty was a must for someone seeking to preserve—or even improve—her status through marriage.
But although soilpox was contagious, it didn’t spread easily, and only a handful of people contracted it at any one time. As a result, it was considered “God’s punishment.” Likewise, soilpox scars were seen as a sinner’s mark; thus, everyone kept them covered.
There’s no doubt about it—I’m looking at Iris, the villainess from HanaKoro. I remember reading that she had grown up feeling inferior due to her soilpox scars. And the dream I’d just had was one of the game’s endings! It was so sublime, it brought back memories of her past life!
In Iris’s previous life, she was a twenty-eight-year-old gamer otaku—just your average laid-back adult woman. “Laid-back? More like apathetic!” her friends used to say, but that’s beside the point.
She first fell in love with the character “Iris” when she played HanaKoro, an otome game set at a prestigious academy in a magical Western fantasy world where the Holy Maiden’s mana was on the verge of running out. The protagonist’s goal: to be chosen as the next Holy Maiden. And with the help of a few eligible bachelors, she could make it happen.
Although it was set in some faux-European country, it was still a Japanese-made game, and as such, all the familiar aspects of Japanese culture were present and accounted for. There was no ongoing war, and while the story featured royalty, there was no overly strict etiquette. Thus, the low-born protagonist was free to go on casual dates with all the aristocrat boys.
But HanaKoro: When the Pale Petals Fall was no ordinary otome game. Sure, it had all the stock romance options: the prince, the knight, and the mage. But what truly set HanaKoro apart was its “happy-bad” endings. No matter which love interest the protagonist ended up with, the outcome was always bittersweet—at some point, their love for each other turned dark. Hence “happy-bad.”
Oh, and if the player failed to end up with their chosen suitor over the course of his route, the protagonist would inevitably be stabbed to death in the resulting bad ending. No friendship endings, either. If you earned an equal amount of affection points with all the love interests, you’d be rewarded with a “harem bad ending” that featured the protagonist getting stabbed by all of them at the same time. So yeah, the options were either happy-bad or just plain bad. No butterflies and sparkles here, Iris thought to herself wearily.
But because the art was so exquisite, the game acquired a massive cult following among hardcore otome gamers who preferred dark stories. Naturally, in her past life, Iris had been one of them. The endings were so tragically, horrifically beautiful, as was the villainess every time the protagonist outwitted her. The controlling yandere prince; the sadistic, verbally abusive knight; the psychotic, dangerous mage—she ate it up. She was tired of the same cliché happy endings where the good guys always won.
Her dream had been her mentally replaying the Thousand-Year Slumber—the “true route” players reached after completing all the others. It took a lot of effort to unlock it, so she remembered it well. She also remembered screaming, “What part of this is happy?!” as the credits rolled. But to be clear, she had no real complaints about the game. At the time, she enjoyed the story quite a lot; she could remember arguing online about how the happy-bad endings were actually more romantic because “the ultimate true love is never rewarded.”
So yeah, Iris liked happy-bad endings…as long as they were fictional. She enjoyed shedding a sympathetic tear for fictional characters whose fictional lives were worse than hers.
So why the hell would I want to experience it in real life?!
She tugged on one of her mint green ringlets. Likewise, the Iris in the mirror tugged on one of her mint green ringlets. When she let go, it bounced back like a spring.
I have been reincarnated as Iris du Chevalier, and HanaKoro’s dramatic violence is now my reality.