Prologue: What the Hell Is This?
I stared into the mirror and found my hands trembling before I even realized it. A mutter slipped out under my breath — nothing particularly polite.
"What the fuck is this."
The voice that rang through the room was high and clear, almost musical. It would have been pleasant to listen to, if not for the thick, vulgar curse that came pouring out of it — the kind of language that voice had no business producing.
Anyone overhearing would have been thoroughly unsettled. Not that I had much choice in the matter. I hadn't seen this coming either.
Someone was looking back at me from the mirror.
Lustrous golden hair tumbling down to the shoulders. Sharp eyes set in a face that looked downright intimidating. When I leaned forward, the faint swell of a chest came into view, and even sitting down, that tall frame nearly reached the top of the glass.
In a word, she was a cold, striking beauty. The problem was that the beauty in question was me.
"This is... the villainess Eriana..."
Part of me wanted to put a fist straight through the mirror. I held back. It wouldn't be my hand that suffered — that glass would shatter into a thousand pieces on impact.
"What the hell is even going on here?!"
I shouted at the top of my lungs. It didn't help.
A voice soft and silky enough to completely contradict the face it belonged to. A figure developed to an almost violent degree, paired with that towering height. Every last one of them was a signature trait of the villainess noblewoman from the game I'd been playing.
Witch Craft — an otome game. A raising sim, and an alchemy crafting game on top of that.
They'd started courting a male audience lately, which was probably why a character like this had shown up. Her figure was so absurdly over-the-top that it had pulled in a whole wave of attention all on its own.
To me, though, it was just a trash game I couldn't stand.
Everyone daydreams about falling into a game world and meeting the characters. Nobody actually expects it to happen. And when the character in question isn't even the protagonist — when she's the villainess standing in direct opposition to the heroine — well, that goes without saying.
On top of everything, this girl was impossible to miss. Every other character had a cute, gentle look about them. Meanwhile she came packing sharp features, a towering frame, and a body that refused to be ignored...
"I turn into a villainess noblewoman out of nowhere — what kind of nonsense is this..."
Honestly, no ordinary person could just accept a situation like this. One moment you're fine, the next you've got a heavy chest hanging off you and a waist cinched down to nothing. Your voice goes soft and feminine, and your strength is... wait. My strength is ridiculously high?
I swallowed hard and rested a hand on the vanity in front of me. Then I gave it a proper lift — and it came up like it weighed nothing. No sense of strain at all. Just a clean, effortless whoosh, and it was off the floor.
I set it back down and let go. The vanity sat there as if nothing had happened.
That was genuinely terrifying. A vanity with a full-length mirror attached is not light furniture.
"Incredible... just how strong am I?"
Curious, I walked over to the wardrobe, wrapped both arms around it, and hoisted. It rose as smoothly as if it had been waiting for the invitation.
Okay. The strength really was absurd. Borderline frightening.
A wardrobe packed full of clothes, and I'd just flicked it into the air like it was nothing.
At the very least, I wouldn't be getting pushed around anytime soon. If anything, I'd be the one doing the pushing.
After that little display of power, I stepped back in front of the mirror and looked myself over. The long, lean height. The frankly ridiculous figure. Sure, I'd suddenly become a woman — but this was the kind of body you'd want to get your hands on at least once.
Almost without thinking, I rested a hand on my chest. I gave it a little squeeze, kneading gently, and the sensation was... strange.
Like I was touching someone else's body, not my own.
"Mmm... not bad, actually..."
Something about it felt weird. My hands just kept going of their own accord. I knew perfectly well how bizarre the whole situation was, but I couldn't stop myself.
Well — until yesterday, I'd been a man.
"Haa... so what am I supposed to do now?"
I had no idea where to even start. In the game, they piled on all sorts of tragic backstory to make her a pitiable character — but from where I was standing, having become her, none of that background meant a damn thing to me.
Everyone else was off having their soft, fluttery little romances while she alone got stuck playing the villain. It must have been exhausting. And she probably never expected to draw this much attention in the first place.
Let's be honest — when everyone else is flat as a board and you're the only one built like a goddess, people are going to stare. Most of that attention was meme-tier, sure, but being noticed still beat fading into the background.
"But if I end up in her shoes... I honestly have no idea what I'm supposed to do."
Follow the original story? That didn't sit right. This girl was such a textbook villainess noblewoman it almost hurt.
By design, she could barely use magic at all — and yet she'd been born into a famous mage family, which meant she ate discrimination for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.
So on the surface she went around with her little ohohoho laugh, tormenting the protagonist. In reality, her family gave her less than nothing, and she'd been left completely isolated. Even so, she couldn't let go of her jealousy, so she took it out on the heroine instead.
I looked around the room. It was narrower than I'd expected.
One wardrobe, with only a handful of clothes inside. A bed with a single blanket tossed on it — probably the same one she used year-round, all four seasons.
Noblewoman in name only. She was dirt poor. Of course she was — zero talent for magic will do that to you in a family like hers.
"Hah... what a joke."
And yet the real problem was that monstrous strength of hers. Bluntly put, if she'd been born into a knight family or a warrior bloodline, she would have been a legend.
You could see it plain as day on the stat screen. In a world where the maximum Strength stat capped at 25, and most people hovered somewhere between 10 and 14, she alone was sitting at 20.
By the end of the game, she'd clawed her way all the way to 25.
I'd just lifted a wardrobe like it was a cardboard box, hadn't I? Swing a sword with power like that and any half-baked mage would have their skull caved in on the spot.
I let out a long breath and drifted over to glance outside.
A thoroughly ordinary medieval cityscape stretched below. Medieval might have been a stretch, actually. Right beneath the window sat a bakery, and a warm, comforting smell drifted up toward the glass. Across the way, buildings linked together into a single continuous street.
Down below, a woman was selling what looked like vegetables of some kind.
She happened to glance up, so I gave her a little wave. Her eyes went round as saucers and she just sat there staring.
Why was she looking at me like that?
I tilted my head, watched her a moment longer, then quietly shut the window.
"Whew... so what am I supposed to do from here?"
I'd become a villainess noblewoman out of nowhere. Was there anything useful I could even do? In the story, all her energy went into getting in the protagonist's way. She never fully fell to darkness or anything, though.
She just harassed the heroine and threw up obstacles. Nobody actually died because of her. In the end she collapsed completely, spat out her resentment, and gave up.
All that interference became the charges against her, and she was banished to the outskirts. What happened after that, nobody knows. Maybe she ate well and lived comfortably out there. Maybe she didn't last long and slowly wasted away.
Eriana's ending was left deliberately open and ambiguous while everyone else got their happy endings... and the fans were not thrilled about it. Let's be real — among a cast of bland, cookie-cutter characters, she was the one lively presence, the one who actually did things, even if those things were mostly getting in everyone's way.
And even that was just jealousy. She never truly hurt anyone. That final scene where she screamed herself hoarse asking why she could never beat them — that one left a real impression.
"Hmm... the outskirts might not actually be so bad."
They called it the outskirts, but it was basically the countryside. Eriana's punishment was simply that she couldn't enter the city — and given her total lack of magical talent, she'd never amounted to much anyway.
Getting banished to the countryside would probably have been the happier outcome for her. I wasn't any different. I'd been dropped into this body with zero knowledge of magic and nothing going for me except raw physical power. If anything, I was worse off.
"Maybe... becoming the villainess and getting driven out to the countryside is actually the better deal."
They'd still call her family, after all. Exile that barred her from the city was one thing — they weren't about to throw her out to die. You don't just leave a noble daughter to starve. Blood ties make for stronger chains than people give them credit for. Abandoning her to waste away of hunger simply wouldn't be tolerated.
Which meant that for someone like me — who couldn't cast so much as a spark of magic — the easiest path to a comfortable life was getting myself banished to the outskirts.
It was almost funny. To kick back and live easy, I had to become the villainess who tormented the heroine.
But it wasn't a bad plan.
"Huuuh... so where do I even start?"
I clapped my hands together and made up my mind, and somehow that alone made things feel a little better. I cracked a smile, and the anxiety that had been churning in my chest just moments ago eased, if only a fraction.
I stretched my arms over my head and leaned out the window. The spring breeze rolling in felt almost sweet.
I'd gone from a man to a woman in the blink of an eye. Was this really going to be okay?