Someone tried to shove Bertia down the stairs, but our “villainess” is luckily fine thanks to her contracted spirit. The downside, however, is that she remains undeterred. She keeps trying to spin this off as a crucial and necessary development in the otome storyline. But as we’ve said before, this is not a game. What if Kuro is too slow to react next time? Cecil needs to stop being so hands-off and take control of the situation, lest his fiancée end up in a coma. I still want Cecil to set Bertia straight, and truly convince his fiancée to just let him love her. But for now — always for now — he’ll take matters into his own hands without looping her in. Instead, he assembles the entire Avengers into his revenge scheme.

Heronia is now claiming that Bertia bullies her. My first thought is you need evidence! You can’t just say whatever you want willy-nilly! You need evidence to back up your allegations! Then it zoomed in, so I saw that stupid bird. It’s probably using its dumb charm magic or whatever to sway people to her side. Sure enough, we’ll later find out that this is the case… sorta. So far, Heronia’s charm seems to only work on the boys at the academy. Bertia has gone ahead and even protected the capture targets, so Heronia doesn’t even have the important boys on her side.

Guess we’re doing stories for the capture targets already. But there’s a good reason for this! To avoid Heronia falling for anyone but the prince, Bertia needs to eliminate Cecil’s competition. In other words, she needs to start playing matchmaker. The funniest part, however, is that she’s the biggest reason why Heronia and Cecil won’t get together. On the other hand, what will Cecil do? Apparently, she’s been trying to fix him up with the heroine for a year now. Surely, he must be tired of this by now. He clearly has no desire to even get to know Heronia. I would personally like to see him take a stronger stance. I would like to see him make it very, very clear to Bertia that he will not entertain the thought of getting to know Heronia. Yeah, yeah, it might be amusing to watch Bertia screw around and fail. But I’m a “cut to the chase” kinda guy, so I want to see the prince be more active than passive.

We finally meet the capture targets, and there’s always a shota. Always, always, always. It’s kinda disgusting if you ask me. If you go too far down his route, the game should just automatically dial the police and give them your name and address. In any case, everyone is busy talking about Bertia. Normally, they should be obsessed with the heroine, right? I also don’t think you should be openly yapping about the prince’s fiancée like this. But we have to remember that Cecil is mostly amused by Bertia for now. He hasn’t quite fallen in love with her just yet.

It’s funny how this show is scratching my new game plus itch far more than the series that actually has the words “new game plus” in its title. I only wish Bertia was a little less clueless. In fact, she might be a touch too clueless. Y’see, she’s too brain-rotted by cheap, cliche otome games, so she continues to see her life as a “scenario.” Everything, she thinks, is dictated by said scenario. For example, saving her mother’s life has led to the woman bearing a second child, which doesn’t happen in the original story. This has the unintended consequence of her father not turning evil, which is necessary for the the scenario to play out as it should. Bertia fears that Cecil won’t have his happy ending as a result. So what does the girl do? She tries her best to corrupt her own father. She even gives him a book with pretty pictures and everything — a literal how-to on the finer points of being evil. By the way, how did she manage to print something like that in this universe? Are there people passionate about graphic design in our fantasy setting? But I digress. This part is a little odd to me, though. Bertia was so deathly afraid of her mother dying, but she’s just fine with her father becoming an evil doer who might get punished harshly, i.e. executed? I dunno, man…