Rosa Chesterfield was not in her realm. Well, in a way, she had never been in her realm, which was a reason why she knew exactly what was going to happen—and it wasn’t going to be pretty.

“So you’re that woman’s daughter,” intoned a lady, lavishly decorated with heavy jewels. Rosa estimated the weight such jewels would accumulate into if they were the real deals and came to the conclusion that this lady was much stronger than she looked.

The lady sat leaning back on the velvet couch in the Chesterfield estate drawing room, her nose held high and her arm at such a weird angle that it made her seem both excessively haughty and made Rosa’s fingers itch for a protractor.

“…horrible,” he lady was saying. She leveled an icy look on Rosa. “Your clothes—”

But too bad for her, Rosa was having fun trying to assign a temperature to the madam’s eyes, to find out just how cold that look would be. Hmm… Colder than the common winter day here, so…

“Your mother was poison,” the lady said, her voice shaking in quiet anger. Rosa bristled, disappointed. How could she have allowed herself to forget the exact rate of conversion from Celsius to Fahrenheit? She had gotten weak.

“Understand?” the lady snapped. She was full-on glaring now, and Rosa lowered the temperature she’d assigned by fifty degrees. Celsius.

“Answer me,” she hissed, which was straightforward enough. Rosa nodded dutifully. But what was her name again?

Just as Rosa opened her mouth to ask, the door opened with a bang. The Duke walked in, his large belly diverting Rosa’s attention immediately.

“You must be Rosa,” he bellowed, much too loudly even for a big room like this one. Rosa idly wondered how she would be able to roughly calculate the amount of decibels he was emitting per second, though she would need proper measuring tools for that. He peered at her from over his belly. “You got into the first-year, of course.”

She nodded. Did she have to clarify that it was the higher division first-year, or did he already know?

“Good,” he boomed. He nodded towards the lady, who had assumed a most demure pose from the moment the door had opened. “Then let us leave, Duchess.”

“Of course, my dear husband.” She cast another narrowed glance (the lowest temperature so far! Rosa noted with a sense of awe) towards her, the girl wearing a brown and patched up dress covered by an apron, very out of place with the rich colors that surrounded her. The Duchess harrumphed and took her husband’s arm to sashay right out of the room.

Ugh, Rosa thought. She’d probably have to stand and see them off, huh? She reluctantly stood up and did a half-hearted dip that could maybe pass for a curtsy at their backs, so fast that a maid who’d happened to blink at the same time actually missed it. The moment the door closed, she flopped back down on the couch, because when had been the last time she’d sat on a comfy couch like this one?! Not for sixteen years, at least.

Huh, she thought. That wasn't as bad as what the game had made it to look.

“My lady,” the butler said as he approached her. “We have your school uniform ready for you.”

Rosa stopped running her fingers down the velvet surface of the couch and raised her head to watch a maid in the back step up towards her. The maid was holding five packages in her hands.

“We had them tailored specifically for you, using the measurements you so kindly sent us last week,” the butler said. “Your insight is amazing; I hope it was not too big of a hassle.”

“Oh, that was no problem,” Rosa said distractedly, reaching for the packages. “I only thought I could get away with it.”

The figure of Rosa Chesterfield had been said to wear ill-fitting clothes her first year, which differentiated her from other students and had made her shameful of her commoner origins. But after considering the range of possibilities that the change in detail might bring to the predestined future, the current Rosa had reached a conclusion that there was a 1-to-86 ratio that wearing well-fitting clothes would actually change any results significantly. She would probably be shamed anyways, which would be enough to arouse compassion—if, that was, compassion was needed.

For yes, obviously, the current Rosa Chesterfield was not the original Rosa Chesterfield. She was a reincarnator (duh), who knew quite well what she was doing through the Powers of Math. And presently, this Rosa Chesterfield was very devoted to get the best ending possible, which hadn’t existed in the original game world of <Love Academy! – Love Love Catcher 3>. That was right! This Rosa Chesterfield was going to achieve the impossible.

She was going to get an ending without a single death involved.

“My lady?” the butler repeated, leaning forward.

Rosa straightened instantly. “Yes?”

The old man paused. “I asked whether you would like some refreshments.”

“Oh. Do you have any pastries or sweets by any chance?”

“Yes, m’lady.”

“Then please. And could you get me six more—no wait, seven more of each type you bring me and put them in a basket? I’d like to bring them with me.”

“Of course, m’lady.”

Rosa nodded and smiled sweetly, which brought smiles to the servants’ faces as well, though they didn't really know why. What they also didn’t know—they weren’t immune to the Heroine Buff like a certain childhood friend was, after all—was that her smile was nothing sweet at all, and rather devious and chilling.

Perfect, the girl was actually thinking. I have ammo.

---

“Rosa!” I yelled, barging into her home like it was mine. “You in?”

“Yeah, give me up to five minutes!” she called from the second floor somewhere.

“Okay! I’ll be in the kitchen!” And so I headed to the kitchen… which was nothing more, to be honest, than a strip of counter carved out for cabinet space on one side of the living room.

Ruth, the smallest one (she was six), popped in from the back door. “Filian!” she squealed.

“Ruth! How’s my favorite little piggy doing?” I picked her up and spun her around as she giggled and squealed some more. (I called her piggy because, first, she always wore pink, and two, she squealed like a thousand times a day.)

When I set her back down on the ground, she dashed out to the backyard again. “Roly! Poly! Filly is here!”

“Filly?”

“Filian’s here!”

“Oh no you don’t!”

With a thunder of footsteps, the whole set of siblings dashed in. Except for Ryan, of course, who at fourteen years old was “too old for childish running” like this.

The first to reach me was Rebecca, the ten-year-old, child number 3. She pushed her dark red hair away from her face and grinned at me. “Filian!” she crowed, “guess what Big Sis brought!”

“What?” I asked, crouching down.

“Cookies!” she hooted. Then she started dancing around right on the spot before the eight-year-old twins, Rhea and Renna, shoved her out of the way. “Ow!”

Rhea and Renna were not identical—one had her dad’s darker brown hair, and the other more of her mother’s red hair—but everyone called her Roly and Poly anyways, for reasons nobody remembered anymore. Knowing these folks, though, the only reason they would ever need was the fact that they were twins.

“You shoved me out of the way, Poly! You’re not allowed to do that”

“Yeah, well, you hogged Filly by yourself!”

“Yeah, Becca, that wasn’t fair!”

Oh, and probably also because once you go against them, they almost merge into one, like a roly poly.

As soon as they got Becca out of their way, they turned to me with shining eyes. “Filly, guess what! I lost my tooth the other day!”

“Me too!” They both grinned widely to show me their front teeth.

Poly elbowed Roly to the side. “Roly punched it out of me, you know,” she whispered loudly.

“Hey! That’s not true!”

“You know that’s true, stop lying!” Poly made a face. “You said you didn’t want to help and—”

“Well, you started it!”

“No I didn’t!”

“Yes you did!”

“Stop!” I said, in my Firstborn Voice^TM. “You want me to knock both of you together until all your teeth fall out?”

They pushed at each other one last time and gave each other stink-eyes, but otherwise they smiled at me. “Whew! Sorry, Filly,” said Roly. “Won’t do that again.”

“Liar,” Poly muttered.

“Hey!”

I yanked the two apart. “No more!”

Roly grinned at me sheepishly. “Aww, that wasn’t fighting.”

“Yeah, that wasn’t fighting.”

I rolled my eyes. “I’d rather the two of you not fight even more, then. Oh hi, Ryan,” I said, nodding at the boy who was standing at the doorway, hands behind his back and shoulders squared.

“Filian,” he said, in what was probably his most regal voice. “Glad to see you.”

“His voice cracked,” Becca whispered to Roly. Poly giggled, and Ryan’s ears turned a little pink.

“Still training to become a soldier?” I asked, pushing the three girls (who, like a domino, knocked against each other so hard that they giggled even more).

He dipped his head in a nod. “Of course.”

Ruth peeked at me from behind him. “Ryan got beat up last week,” she said in her piping voice. “He tried fighting the old man next door, and—”

“Yeah,” Becca laughed, “he was on his back real fast, like in three seconds!”

“No, it was two seconds!”

“No, it was one!”

They all laughed so hard that Ryan turned literally red, almost as red as his hair, and he kept saying “Stop laughing!” but then his voice would crack and turn everyone’s insides out even more.

This was the scene Rosa came into when she clomped down the stairs. She met my eyes, and I chuckled at the dead expression on her face. She rolled her eyes at me, and I shrugged.

Then she grinned, too, and mouthed ‘Watch this’ to me. I raised an eyebrow.

“Attention!” she yelled, and she whipped something out from her pocket so quickly I didn’t see what it was. “If anyone wants a piece of this cookie, you will stand at attention and not make a single sound!”

Almost immediately, everyone (even Ryan) clapped their feet together and straightened, as stiff as a board.

“I’m cutting it into five pieces, and if you dare fight each other over it, I will take it all away and eat all of it!” Rosa continued, glaring at the small crowd, hand still in the air. “Understand?”

They all let out a short, staccato yell, and Rosa nodded, satisfied. She clomped down towards the kitchen counter and brought out a knife, cut it into six pieces, and passed around one piece to each sibling in order of age: Ryan, Rebecca, Roly, Poly, and Ruth at the last.

“Okay, now go play outside until dinner,” she ordered, and they filed out obediently.

The back door closed behind them, and Rosa turned to me triumphantly.

“Where’d you get the cookie?”

“From the Duke’s. It’s my weapon now,” she grinned. “Here, you want the last piece?”

“Is that even a question?” I shot back. I took the tiny piece from her and popped it in my mouth. Man, it would be worth it to become a stuffy noble if it meant I got to eat this every single day. “I’d be as fat as Mr. Rowlandson’s cow if I was a noble,” I said after I swallowed.

Rosa nodded seriously. “I’m in serious danger of that once I go to the Academy. But what’re you here for?”

I immediately narrowed my eyes, leading her to the sitting mats on the ground. “You didn’t hear the news yet, huh?”

“What news?”

I lowered my voice and leaned in. “The news,” I whispered urgently, “about the treason.”