The Bennet Princess Safety Manual

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When my imprisonment in Bastille Prison was finalized, I couldn't help but feel a strange sense of irony.

And for good reason — Bastille Prison sat right near the place where I'd first transmigrated into this game.

Yeon Bennet: adopted by Duke Bennet at a young age, and from that moment on, a walking disaster who did nothing but torment everyone around her. In the end, the Duke made a hard decision to correct her ways. He left only a handful of servants and guards behind in an empty manor and locked her away there.

And that manor was the place where I first opened my eyes in this world.

Now, where the burned-out estate once stood, only carefully tended graves remained, sitting alone in the quiet. I picked some of the white wildflowers blooming nearby and laid them one by one before each headstone.

"It's been too long, hasn't it? Sorry. I've been a little busy myself."

The servants and knights I'd grown close to after coming to this world — the day the monsters slaughtered them and the manor burned. The Duke had rescued me, the sole survivor, told me the truth, and struck a deal. One of the prices I'd demanded was that he keep their graves maintained.

Well. Looks like the Duke kept his promise after all.

In front of Annie's grave — the one I'd been closest to — a thick book with a bizarre title sat preserved under a conservation enchantment. She'd insisted it had to be passed down to her successor, and she'd spent what little salary she had on that preservation magic, treating the thing like a treasure. Thanks to that, even through the fire, we'd managed to salvage one of her belongings and place it here.

I closed my eyes quietly and began to remember the day I transmigrated into Yeon Bennet — the same day I first met Annie.

When I opened my eyes, I was lying in an unfamiliar room.

Strange patterns on the ceiling, the soft feel of the bed, and a faint fragrance filling the air — all of it put me on edge.

"Ugh... my head..."

I clutched my splitting forehead and tried to sit up, only to feel something off. My body was light. My movements were smooth. A mirror beside the bed caught my eye, and I approached it slowly.

In the glass stood not me, but a beautiful young girl who looked about the age of a high school freshman. Jet-black hair spilled over her shoulders, and large, clear eyes sparkled with confusion. I lifted a hand and touched my face. The girl in the mirror did the same. Soft, slender fingers brushed against my cheek, and the reality of it all finally hit me.

Slap.

I struck my own cheek with a hand smaller than I was used to, trying to snap myself out of it.

"Hngh—!"

The mild pain cleared my head — and at the same time, a bizarre sensation flooded my entire body, enough to wring a strange little sound out of me without meaning to. But that wasn't important right now. I steadied my somewhat-awakened mind and tried to recall what had happened the night before, just before I'd fallen asleep.

Last night, I was definitely...

Tales of Etheraisha — TOE. The game I'd been completely obsessed with lately.

It was a title where you took various characters as protagonists and completed each of their individual storylines. As the player, you chose a main character and had to save the world of Tera from the evil gods. The structure itself was a fairly standard RPG, but the high-quality storytelling had earned it a massive following.

The problem? After three full years of so-called "early access," they still hadn't updated the final chapter. Players had absolutely roasted them for it, and a lot of people had quit — but I had a reason I couldn't stop playing.

"Ohhh! There it is!!!"

A gacha effect so dazzling it put the usual ones to shame. I'd finally pulled a legendary skin through a brutal 0.3% drop rate. I'd be living on instant noodles until my next paycheck in two weeks, but I didn't care.

I'd lost my parents to a Gate as a kid and spent twenty years living alone. No family like everyone else had — just a lifelong solo existence. And then one game character had found her way into my life: Rina, a playable character in TOE and a candidate Saintess.

"It's okay! I'll protect you, no matter what."

"Holy crap..."

The moment I switched to the character select screen and equipped the skin on her, the gasp came out on its own. This was genuinely next-level. Pink straight hair, that same cute face as always — but none of that was the point right now.

It was summer. And Rina's brand-new legendary skin was a swimsuit.

A dark fantasy world about stopping evil gods, and they put a swimsuit on a saintess candidate? So what? Any gamer who frets over a minor lore inconsistency on a swimsuit skin has no right to call themselves a gamer. And of course, if it's a female character's swimsuit skin, a bikini is the law of the land. Those massive assets that even her default academy uniform could barely contain were now on full, shameless display.

I'd dumped half my paycheck into the skin gacha, and I had zero regrets. I was proud of it, actually. I was deeply grateful to the TOE developers for creating something this absurdly incredible — but still.

I've got things I need to do, don't I?

This was the world where my favorite character lived and breathed, and I prided myself on loving this game more than anyone. So what I was about to do was nothing more than a pure, affectionate expression of that love.

"Absolutely no redemption."

Unlike my pure, kind-to-everyone favorite character Rina, there was Yeon Bennet — the number-one contributor to making every story route miserable by tormenting the people around her and trolling the plot. The character I hated most of all.

Fortunately, no matter which route you chose, Yeon Bennet was always judged and met a wretched end by Act Three. At least, until now.

A month ago, the developers had announced she was being added as a playable character, and the TOE community had gone absolutely nuclear for a while. The fire had cooled a bit since the announcement, but still.

The studio had turned villain characters into protagonists before. Shining a light on a villain's circumstances could backfire and create backlash if done poorly — but with enough narrative coherence, it could set people on fire with excitement. And as much as I hated to admit it, the reason TOE's story got such praise was exactly this kind of redemption writing. Honestly... they wrote it well. Well enough to completely flip the community's opinion on a character they'd spent all day tearing apart.

Which was precisely why I couldn't accept it. They'd clearly prepared some killer story for her. I was never going to sit still and watch praise rain down on the girl who'd spent every day tormenting my favorite character and everyone else. I had to keep throwing wood on the fire and show the developers the will of the player base.

One hundred twenty-one posts. About time people start noticing.

I hit the logout button and logged into my thirty-first throwaway account.

Just this one more, then I'm going to sleep.

No wonder her face looked familiar.

All I'd done yesterday was exercise my legitimate right as a customer across thirty-one accounts in the community forums... and now here I was. Yeon Bennet. The villainess of House Bennet. In the bleak, exhausting world of TOE — a setting where you constantly had to hold back the followers of evil gods and waves of monsters — I had transmigrated into the worst villain who'd tormented my favorite character.

Knock knock knock.

"My lady, it's time to wake up."

Right after the sudden knock, a maid with brown hair and a pretty face opened the door and stepped into the room.

"Aaaah!"

The moment she saw me, the maid went pale, cried out, and dropped to her knees.

"I'm so sorry! I didn't realize you were already awake!"

What? I hadn't even done anything...

"...It's fine. Just get up."

I helped her to her feet for now.

"Y-yes! Will you be washing up? I'll attend you for your bath."

She was still fidgeting, watching me nervously. I had no idea why she was so panicked, but I figured it would only invite unnecessary misunderstandings, so I decided to send her out first.

"I'm fine. Just wait outside for now."

At that, she went even paler — and this time she threw herself fully to the floor, practically burying her head in the ground.

"I'm sorry! Please, spare me just this once!"

...What?

What the hell is going on here?

I was stunned.

Just what kind of monster was this crazy girl on a daily basis?!

After somehow calming the sobbing girl and sending her out of the room, I quietly started sorting through my current situation.

First — if this really was the world of TOE, there was something I needed to test.

"Appraise."

I placed my hand on a white cloth sitting on top of the drawer and called out, and a translucent window appeared before my eyes.

Ohhh! It works!

Ah... that was information I really did not need to know.

One of the things people praised about TOE was how it wove game mechanics into the world's lore so players could accept them without feeling disconnected. The Akashic Records held every record of existence in the world. And the System Administration Bureau edited that information and delivered it to people in various forms through the System. Providing basic item information ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠like this was one of those System functions.

I forced myself to ignore the mortifying item window and checked the next function.

"Status."

A translucent screen appeared before my eyes.

"Of course."

The status window was another System function — something that served as a kind of ID card for the people of this world.

Just the bare essentials — useful only for identity verification. Exactly like the status windows I'd seen in the game.

Wow. She was strutting around the story with a level this pathetic?

Among every character I'd ever played, this was the lowest starting level. At least they'd given her Level 2, the minimum for academy admission... but if she'd been some minor provincial noble instead of a duke's daughter, this was the kind of level where you'd get quietly eliminated without anyone noticing.

But then...

Ugh...

"Haaah..."

I'd really wanted to grit my teeth and ignore it, but my eyes were drawn there no matter what.

"What the hell is this perverted ability?"

How was the ability name Masochist?

After confirming that the System worked in this world exactly as it did in the game, I immediately turned my attention to Yeon's unique ability.

A unique ability. An innate power that could exist in only one person. The types varied wildly and the performance was all over the place depending on the individual, but characters who possessed one were almost always among the strong. In other words, Yeon — who'd been known as nothing more than an incompetent third-rate villainess — actually had some decent talent.

No one in the game had ever known she had a unique ability, which meant she'd been hiding it... Yeah. With a name like that, keeping your mouth shut until death was the only sane option.

Alright. Let's check exactly what this ability does.

A pretty straightforward ability. True to the name Masochist — she got stronger through pain.

That bizarre sensation when I'd slapped my cheek right after transmigrating to clear my head... I'd been too disoriented to pay attention at the time, but was that the unique ability activating?

With a power like this, Yeon's behavior in the game actually gained a certain amount of narrative coherence. If she got stronger by being cursed out by everyone around her, true to the word "masochist"... then maybe she'd been acting that way on purpose just to use the ability???

Hmm... thinking about it that way just makes her seem even more like garbage.

Annie, dedicated maid to the Bennet princess, sat in her room with a thick book open in front of her, trembling.

The book was so heavy you had to wonder if her slender arms could even lift it: the Bennet Princess Safety Manual. Dozens of maids had been beaten half to death over the pettiest of pretexts and driven out of the household by Lady Yeon Bennet. This safety manual had been written in their blood.

It detailed, down to the last entry, how to respond to the princess's incomprehensible acts of tyranny — things no ordinary person could understand. By memorizing this massive tome cover to cover, Annie had become the woman who lasted the longest as Yeon's personal maid, a record for the history books.

But now she could feel it in her bones: even that legendary streak was about to end.

She'd followed Rule 53 exactly — no answer came, so she'd entered the room as usual to wake her lady. And that complacency had produced the worst possible result. The princess had already gotten up on her own.

Annie's trembling eyes found the final rule, printed in especially thick, emphatic lettering among the manual's countless entries.

The first time she'd read it, she'd snorted and moved on, thinking a day like that would never come. And now it had.

Until now, Annie had diligently followed every rule in the manual — but this time, she simply could not bring herself to obey. After her father died, she needed money for her sick mother's medicine and living expenses ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠for the two younger siblings under her care. Tears pricked at her eyes. She'd managed to hold on this long — was she really going to die like this?

Ding-ding.

In that moment, the bell summoning a maid thundered in her ears. Annie squeezed her eyes shut. She had to endure this. Her family needed her to survive. She steeled herself, stepped outside, and made her way to the princess's room.

Knock knock.

"Come in."

When she entered, her mistress looked slightly different from usual. The girl who always wore nothing but a frightening, venomous expression was gazing at her with a face milder than Annie had ever seen. The manual had never said she was capable of making a face like that. This was not good. The next rule in the manual was probably going to be written in Annie's own blood.

Then the princess opened her mouth.

"I... I think I've been far too harsh with all of you. I'm sorry. I really want to apologize."

What...?

Annie's mind froze at the impossible situation. Her head spun — and then she crumpled straight to the floor.