The banquet hall glowed beneath the crystal chandelier, golden light spilling over polished marble floors and gowns thick with embroidery. Small knots of nobles traded gossip in low voices while champagne glasses met with a steady stream of clear, delicate chimes.
At the center of that glittering scene stood a girl in pale blue silk, as poised as a swan in full display.
Her name was Princess Mirielle Peony.
Her long blond hair slipped over her shoulders like silk, and her back remained perfectly straight in a way that somehow looked natural instead of forced. Every small gesture had a quiet elegance. The color of her gown matched her eyes, and under the lamplight those eyes resembled pieces of the sea set into her face, beautiful and deep and distant in a way that made people hesitate to even look directly at her.
In front of her, a boy knelt on the cold marble, wearing a ceremonial suit that belonged to another era. The cuffs were frayed, the fabric had that tired shine that came from too much use, and the cut had fallen out of fashion ten years ago.
That boy was Wensley Fauce.
His knees pressed into the stone, and his fingers wrapped around the stem of a blue rose he had spent far too long choosing. The flower trembled together with his hand. He had practiced this confession in his head for ten full years. Now, with every eye in the hall drifting toward him, his throat suddenly refused to shape the words he had rehearsed again and again.
The stillness between them stretched until it felt almost physical.
Mirielle's flawless face barely changed, yet the air near her seemed to grow colder.
Her clear blue gaze settled on him, moving over his rigid shoulders, his stiff neck, his expression frozen somewhere between hope and terror, and the way his hand clenched the rose so tightly that the stem had started to bend.
"Wensley," she said at last.
Her voice remained soft and even. There was no anger in it, and no hint of comfort. That calm tone made what followed land even harder.
"Your confession only makes your love appear cheap and careless. It shows disrespect to the person you say you love, and it shows disrespect to yourself. If you truly wish to love someone, you should begin by respecting your own feelings. Or perhaps first learn what love actually is."
She did not raise her voice. She did not sneer or mock.
Yet she left no space for objections, no small opening where he could push in one last desperate plea.
After she spoke, Princess Mirielle turned away. She reached for the hand of the silver haired girl beside her, the one whose red wine Wensley had splashed when he stumbled forward in his panic, and the two of them walked off together without even a moment of hesitation.
As they passed him, the silver haired girl tilted her head. At an angle only Wensley could see, the corners of her lips curved in a small smile that was satisfied and quietly mocking.
Then the two figures were gone into the crowd as if the scene had already ended.
Wensley stared at Mirielle's retreating back, and it felt as if ten years of affection and fantasy were evaporating right in front of him. The courage he had scraped together a little at a time over an entire decade shattered in a single instant.
A heavy, suffocating darkness crept in at the edges of his vision.
His chest burned as though someone had shoved a fist of heated iron straight into his ribs. He staggered two steps back. Above him, the chandelier stretched into a blur of pale lines, and the music and laughter in the hall sounded like they were drifting in from another building far away.
The sounds around him dulled.
His vision wavered.
The noble youths nearby did not let the moment slip past.
"Tsk. That useless brat actually dared to confess to Her Highness Mirielle?"
"Does he really still not understand where he stands?"
"Toads are common enough, but a toad that dreams of eating swan meat is rare. When you find one, you ought to treasure it, because it will only humiliate itself once."
"Did someone bring in a circus troupe? I see the clown, but I do not see any clever animals yet."
"If His Majesty had not given his family an honorary title for the goddess's sake, that boy would be no better than a beggar on the pavement."
"He has nothing at home, they say his house is bare, and he still refuses to wake up. Instead of guarding the last scrap of dignity he has left, he stretches his hand toward the princess. Truly ridiculous."
"This fake descendant of the goddess dares confess to Her Highness Mirielle? He should stand in front of a mirror and take a good look at himself first."
The jeers piled up one after another like rubbish thrown into the same heap.
Wensley's thoughts spun without quite forming words. The insults reached his ears, but they felt muffled, as if he were underwater listening to voices from above the surface. He drifted among those sounds like a corpse that had not yet realized it was dead, his body still standing while his mind slipped away.
Someone quietly stretched out a foot.
He never saw who it belonged to.
His toe caught. He pitched forward. His body crashed against the floor in full view of everyone.
The blue rose slipped from his fingers, arcing through the air before landing at the edge of the crowd. Shining shoes stepped on it one after the other without even a pause.
Laughter burst out and spread through the hall like a string of firecrackers being lit in quick succession. No one reached down to help him up. No one asked who had tripped him. To them, he was a small piece of entertainment tossed into an evening that might otherwise have been boring.
The sound of their amusement rolled over him like incoming waves of icy water.
As the crowd shifted and moved, the blue rose he had spent half an hour debating over in the flower shop was slowly ground into a smear of torn petals and crushed leaves.
Whether it was from the blow to his head or the weight of everything that had happened in that short span of time, Wensley's vision suddenly went completely dark.
He lost consciousness on the banquet floor.
At the same instant his mind went black, something unusual stirred.
Memories surged through him, memories that did not belong to this world and yet still felt like his own. They poured into his skull with the force of a river tearing through a broken dam.
Citrus Crown?
A yuri game?
Villain cannon fodder?
A sword through the heart?
Wensley Fauce?
…What is all of this?
A sharp, stabbing pain drilled through his head.
"Ah…!"
...
When Wensley opened his eyes again, he was no longer on the cold banquet floor. He lay on a soft bed, his shirt clinging to him with cold sweat. His breath came in short, rough pulls, and the gentle light of the crystal chandelier overhead seemed far too bright, almost irritating.
His heart thudded against his ribs.
He pushed himself up bit by bit, every movement pulling at the ache in his skull, then turned his head toward the full length mirror standing beside the bed.
A thin, sickly looking boy stared back.
The boy's skin was pale with a faint sallow tone, and freckles dotted the bridge of his nose and his cheeks. Moon blue hair framed a face that would not be called ugly, but looked worn down and underfed.
He matched the image from those new memories exactly.
"…Wensley Fauce," he whispered, his throat dry. "Princess Mirielle Peony…"
The names felt strange and familiar at the same time when he said them aloud.
The fragments in his mind began to settle into place.
If he remembered correctly, in his previous life he had gone out for something trivial, run into a truck, been hit, and died.
There were really only two ways to explain his situation now. Either he had transmigrated into this world, or he had just awakened the memories of his past life.
And the world around him now was not an ordinary world.
It was a game.
A yuri game called Citrus Crown.
The title screen surfaced in his memory, along with character art and splash illustrations of the heroines. He remembered sitting in front of a monitor playing through route after route.
In that life, he had been the player.
Now, he was inside.
The good news was simple enough. The person he had become was not some nameless background student with two lines of dialogue. In Citrus Crown, Wensley Fauce was a major supporting character who pushed the story forward at several key moments.
The bad news followed immediately. That important role belonged to the villainous cannon fodder.
He was not the protagonist.
He was not the love interest.
He was the punching bag.
In the game, Wensley was known as the problem child of the Kingdom of Carmella, a person whom nobles, commoners, and visitors from other lands all agreed was awful. He showed up again and again as the kind of character players loved to hate.
He was the jealous childhood friend.
He was the arrogant noble scoundrel.
He was the obstacle that pushed the heroines closer together whenever he tried to stir up trouble between them.
He drove the plot forward, yes, but he did it as a walking disaster.
Later in the story, after this exact banquet, he would sink into darkness and accept tainted magic. From that point on, he harassed the chosen heroines in different ways and became the training dummy they took turns beating.
The list of people who pounded him into the ground included the reborn Phoenix Overlord, the gifted Dragon Princess, the Golden Elf Queen, the Great Fox Demon King, and his former fiancée, the empire's eldest princess, Princess Mirielle, whose engagement with him was already hanging by a thread.
Each of them was a towering figure on their own.
Yet the game gathered all of them together, apparently for the sole purpose of letting them take turns beating up a villain with no real talent and a collection of crooked methods.
What kind of difficulty setting was that supposed to be?
He could only draw one conclusion. The original Wensley had been born unlucky.
If this had been a normal romance game, even a villainous side character might possibly drag out a small redemption route. But Citrus Crown was not that kind of story. It was a pure yuri game crafted to focus entirely on romances between girls.
A man who tried to compete for affection in that kind of world was starting from the wrong side of the genre.
By the time the developers had drawn their first character sheet, Wensley's fate was already set. He was there to be beaten down again and again by the heroine, until finally he died.
He remembered the game's special illustration for that moment too.
Wensley Fauce, the villain, kneeling in a spreading pool of his own blood, a sword driven straight through his chest. His vision blurred, yet he could still make out Mirielle and the female lead standing before him, two beautiful girls locked in an embrace, kissing while the world around them celebrated.
They even went on to play those little alphabet games about who was on top and who was on the bottom, and they did it right there in front of his fading eyes, as if they wanted to emphasize who held the power in their relationship.
Who was the real villain in that scene, honestly?
So I am just part of the spectacle for your happy ending too, is that it?
Even so, to be precise, the female lead had never truly "stolen" Wensley's girlfriend.
You need mutual affection before you can say that someone cheated.
Just as Mirielle had said earlier, she had never once felt romantic interest toward Wensley, despite knowing him since childhood. It had always been a one sided fantasy on his part. How could he claim betrayal when there had never been a promise between them in the first place?
At most, he had been like a dog that adored the moon from a distance, tail wagging while the moon never once looked down. His feelings were not seen, and not wanted. He did not even qualify as the wronged man in someone else's drama.
Thinking through everything the original Wensley had done, the current Wensley found he could honestly understand why Mirielle had thrown his flowers away without a single pause at the banquet.
In the original scenario, Wensley possessed a harsh possessive streak. He treated Mirielle as if she were part of his private property. He watched her every move with the anxious intensity of a guard dog. Any girl who drew close to her immediately drew his hostility, and his attempts at interference were crude and embarrassing.
He held a noble title, yet his behavior resembled that of a noisy performer at the edge of a street. He insulted other nobles in public, shouted at anyone who spoke to Mirielle, and flaunted his possessiveness as if it were proof of deep love rather than a sign of serious problems.
To make matters worse, his family had fallen from power long ago. He was the only one left, living in a half empty house and keeping up the appearance of noble dignity by sheer stubbornness.
The girl he adored, on the other hand, was Princess Mirielle Peony, praised as the brightest jewel in Carmella's crown.
Mirielle was the king's only child and the sole heir to the throne. Even if you ignored the details of her character, her position alone meant that suitors lined up in waves, both inside the kingdom and beyond its borders.
In that situation, what else could someone like Wensley be, with his twisted personality and poor circumstances, except trouble?
He would appear at Mirielle's tea parties without an invitation, slam his hand on the table, and declare in front of everyone that she belonged to him. He would glare at the young nobles she tried to befriend and accuse them of scheming.
Even picturing the scene made his scalp prickle now.
Then there were the gifts. Wensley had always given Mirielle things chosen entirely based on his own taste, never stopping to consider whether she liked them, whether she needed them, or even whether they suited her at all. He had believed that he was showing his love. In reality, he was only proving Mirielle's quiet judgment that he was too self centered to truly see anyone else, and that he needed to learn what love meant before talking about it.
When he looked at the whole picture, Mirielle had actually shown more patience than most people would have.
Her affection for Wensley had dropped below zero long ago, yet she still remembered the childhood they had shared. If he imagined himself in her position, he suspected he would have cut ties with that version of himself much earlier.
In the original story, Mirielle endured because of their shared past. She suffered through his behavior, cleaned up mess after mess behind him, and still hesitated to fully sever their connection.