Fragments came to her.
Not memories—movies, flashing in disordered bursts, like some deranged montage stitched together by a drunk god.
A world obsessed with power.
A world stuck in the early medieval age not because it couldn't progress, but because nobody fucking cared to. A world where people measured their strength the way insecure men measured their dick sizes—loudly, constantly, and with catastrophic consequences.
Why invent plumbing when you can cultivate harder?
Why invent toothbrushes when rotten teeth don't matter if you can punch a mountain in half?
Why read books when you can kill your neighbor, steal his land, and call it destiny?
They killed. They pillaged. They carved kingdoms out of blood and arrogance, fought over land and resources, grew stronger just to kill more—until enough people got tired of their bullshit and banded together to kill them. Then the kingdom fractured, the survivors fought each other, and the cycle started all over again.
An endless loop of violence and stupidity.
A mad world.
A pointless world.
And somehow—of course—she was now stuck in it.
Congratulations, Jack thought dimly.
Welcome to the dumbest million-dollar challenge ever conceived.
She didn't know how long she drifted like that.
Coming back wasn't like waking up.
It was more like dragging herself toward consciousness on her elbows—slow, humiliating, and somehow painful even before the pain fully arrived.
She floated in warmth. Bed. Cloud. Coffin. Who cared.
Her body refused to listen. Every inch of her felt sore and numb, the kind of deep, echoing ache you got after a wreck or a blackout you didn't deserve. The front and back of her skull throbbed like someone had used her head as a drum.
Her eyes wouldn't open.
She could only hear.
Two voices nearby—female—low and whispering, like they were standing beside a corpse and hadn't decided yet whether it was worth saving.
One voice was bright.
Too bright.
The sort of sweetness that set the teeth on edge—like a girl laughing too freely at the wrong moment.
"Sister Angela… you truly are a fool," the younger voice said, a nervous little giggle tucked into the words. "Why should it matter to you whether she lives or dies? Look about us—this place is finished. Camelot is lost, plain as day. If we remain, we'll be taken by those black brutes soon enough."
A pause.
"And truly—she was a fool herself to go up upon the wall without so much as a blade. We ought to leave her and save ourselves while we still may."
Fool.
Jack's mind caught on the word like a hook.
The other voice cut in at once—low, precise, and edged with unmistakable anger.
"Enough, Mira."
Silence fell hard.
Then the elder voice drew a measured breath, steadying herself as one long practiced in composure.
"Mira," she said firmly. "Mind your tongue. I will not have such words spoken again."
Another pause.
"Whatever is to befall us… Princess Aleria is dear to us. And should we be taken into servitude, then I shall endure it with her, without hesitation."
Aleria.
The name hit wrong.
Her thoughts wobbled.
Aleria… Camelot… friend…?
She tried to swallow.
Her throat felt like sandpaper.
Then a scent reached her—clean, warm, unmistakably human. Not perfume. Not cheap spray. Something like a woman's skin after soap and sunlight.
It hit her hard enough that her stomach tightened.
And despite everything—despite the body, the blood, the impossible situation—her instincts did what they always did.
They woke up before her morals.
Okay, her half-dazed mind muttered.
Either this is heaven… or this is the most targeted hallucination in history.
She forced her eyelids open.
Light stabbed in.
Shapes swam.
Then the world snapped into focus—and Aleria went very, very still.
She wasn't in her apartment.
She wasn't in a hospital.
She was still in this insane medieval world—just relocated.
She lay in a massive bed, the kind built for royalty and ego. High stone walls rose around her, carved pillars reaching toward a ceiling meant to impress gods. Heavy blue banners hung beside double doors, each emblazoned with a white dragon coiled in silent vigilance.
Polished wood furniture gleamed softly. Thick drapes swallowed the light. The air smelled faintly of sandalwood and old wax—the kind of scent rich people paid for so they could feel like their ancestors mattered.
No monitors.
No LED glow.
No cheap carpet.
No California sun through dirty blinds.
Just stone. Wealth. History.
And then it hit her.
The crushing, stomach-dropping certainty that this wasn't a dream.
She hadn't woken up back to reality—no dirty apartment, no sirens, no cheap laminate floor—but she had clearly arrived somewhere else. Somewhere absurd. Somewhere theatrical. Somewhere that smelled suspiciously like a game show designed by a sociopath with a million-dollar prize dangling at the end.
And, apparently, she'd arrived as a woman.
Aleria turned her head a fraction of an inch, slow and careful, like moving too fast might cause the entire scene to glitch out and collapse into static.
It didn't.
Two figures stood near the bedside, mid-argument.
One was farther away: a petite blonde maid in a fitted servant's dress, light golden hair pulled back into a practical ponytail. Her arms were crossed tight over a modest chest, lips twisted into a pout sharp enough to cut glass. She looked like someone who'd been ordered to babysit a dying animal and had taken the assignment as a personal insult.
Mira, Aleria's mind supplied helpfully.
Tiny. Cute. Psychotic.
Then her gaze slid closer.
A second maid sat at the bedside—taller, fuller, visibly tense as she leaned forward, whisper-hissing at the smaller girl to shut up already.
And Aleria's brain promptly blue-screened.
Blonde hair—long, thick—tied back with a purple ribbon. Skin pale as fresh snow. Her maid's outfit was looser than Mira's, less restrictive, draping instead of clinging, elegant in a way that screamed discipline rather than modesty.
And yet—
When she leaned closer, the fabric shifted.
And Aleria's eyes did what eyes do when they belong to a crude idiot with a pulse and no internal censor.
Deep cleavage. Soft, full curves pressed together without apology. The kind of breasts that looked less like anatomy and more like a crime scene. The faintest hint of pink at the peaks where the fabric thinned, teasing just enough to make it worse.
Her hormones snapped to attention and saluted.
Heat crawled up her neck. Her stomach flipped. And something else happened—something unfamiliar, wrong, unmistakable.
Not hardening.
Wet.
Aleria sucked in a sharp breath.
"Oh no."
She yanked her gaze away like it had been caught stealing, heart pounding, and looked down at herself.
The blanket covered her—mostly.
The sleeping gown did not.
The neckline dipped low, scandalously so, and with every shallow breath she took, she could see it: her own chest rising and falling beneath thin white fabric. Small, soft mounds. Modest compared to the other two, sure—but undeniably there. Cute, even. Little peaks poking against the cloth like they were waving hello.
Her brain connected the dots.
Slowly.
Horrifically.
Oh.
Right.
I can't get hard if I'm a girl.
I just… get wet.
The realization detonated in her skull.
Shame hit like a truck.
She shook her head violently, face burning, and then the sound tore out of her before she could stop it—a high, shrill, undignified squeak, halfway between a scream and a dying chipmunk.
"Nooooo! I don't wanna be a girl!"
Both maids startled hard, lunging toward the bed.
"Thank God—you're awake?" the bustier one whispered.
Aleria tried to respond like a sane human being.
What came out sounded like a corpse with opinions.
"I… uh… what's going on?" she rasped.
The woman—Angela, her brain whispered—lifted her hand and pressed the back of her fingers to Aleria's forehead. Cool. Gentle. Real in a way that made Aleria's stomach twist.
"That's good," Angela murmured, relief flickering across her face. "Your temperature is normal."
She smiled like someone who'd been holding her breath for hours and had finally dared to exhale.
"Aleria," she said softly—and there it was again, that name tightening like a collar around her throat. "How do you feel? Does your head hurt? Doctor Evan said you must rest—please don't try to sit up."
Aleria's eyes flicked over Angela's face again, quick and searching—looking for seams, pixels, anything fake.
There was nothing.
Her touch was real. Her breath was warm. Her concern wasn't scripted.
And that meant something worse.
It meant she was real too.
Angela swallowed, voice dropping as if she were handling something delicate.
"Aleria, have you forgotten? You went to the wall. You led the defenders." Her eyes shone, wet and earnest. "A despicable enemy struck you with a dark hammer. By the War God… people said they saw your skull crushed, yet here you are—no scar, no wound. Beautiful and whole as ever. Only a small bump remains from the fall, and even that is fading. Doctor Evan says as long as no fever comes, you will recover."
She squeezed Aleria's hand, grounding, anchoring.
"You were brave."
Aleria's thoughts tripped over each other.
Crushed skull.
Fall from the wall.
Princess body.
Did I hijack a corpse?
Am I… wearing someone who should be dead?
She blinked slowly, desperately, like blinking might wipe the madness clean.
"Me?" she croaked. "Aleria… I'm the Princess?"
Angela brightened too fast.
Not the normal relief of someone seeing their mistress wake up—but the way adults smiled when a child finally said a recognizable word.
"Yes," she said, voice trembling with something that wasn't just happiness. "Our young Princess. Our brave little Princess of Camelot. Your presence on the wall raised everyone's courage—our soldiers repelled another assault because they saw you."
Aleria stared at her.
Something about the tone crawled under her skin.
It wasn't how a maid spoke to a ruling noble.
It was how a caretaker spoke to someone fragile. Someone… slow. Someone everyone quietly agreed not to correct too harshly.
Mira couldn't stop herself.
"She's not brave," the blonde maid said flatly, rolling her eyes so hard Aleria almost heard the joints complain. "And she's clearly lost her memory or something. If Lord Basil hadn't insisted, Her Highness would never have gone up there in the first place. I saw her when they tried to put armor on—she was shaking so badly she nearly wet herself."
Angela hissed a warning, but Mira was already committed.
"And yes, she did boost morale," Mira continued, shrugging. "Because watching the Princess get her head smashed in by the enemy was so shocking it made everyone furious. Then when she woke up again—apparently fine—and promptly fell off the wall in the first seconds after regaining consciousness, it was so stupid and unbelievable that the soldiers forgot they were afraid and just… fought."
She sighed, rubbing her temple.
"Confusion is a powerful motivator."
Angela turned on her with a glare sharp enough to draw blood, and the two maids immediately devolved into a heated whisper-argument—sisters by blood, apparently—debating whether the Princess had suffered brain damage, temporary shock, or whether she'd simply always been this way and people were only now admitting it.
Aleria turned her eyes toward Mira.
The girl's face was small and pretty, but her expression held that precise, honed cruelty reserved for people you were forced to serve. The look you gave a boss's useless daughter when you'd never be allowed to say what you really meant out loud.
Aleria didn't even try to argue.
Her brain was still buffering.
Somewhere in the wreckage of her thoughts, a stupid cat meme popped up uninvited.
Meow, it supplied helpfully.
She almost laughed.
God, she would've been unstoppable as a cat-girl streamer back in Los Angeles. Millionaire. Sponsored. Tax write-offs. So unfair.
Then panic surged up her throat.
This wasn't a stream.
This wasn't content.
And this "game show" wasn't going to win itself.
She tried to sit up.
Pain detonated behind her eyes and along her ribs like someone had jammed a hot poker straight through her skull.
She collapsed back into the bed with a sharp gasp, staring at the ceiling as her pulse thundered. Okay. Real pain. Real consequences. Falling off walls was still very uncool, even in fantasy worlds. At least it hadn't been game over.
Angela sat rigid at her bedside, fingers clenched in the blanket so tightly her knuckles went white—as if sheer grip strength might hold reality together.
Aleria saw it then, plain as day.
Poor Aleria.
That was the thought written all over her face.
And then—
A voice slid into the bedchamber from beyond the doors, loud and oily, smiling in a way that meant it absolutely was not smiling at all.
"Aleria! I heard you were hurt, my beautiful little Princess. I rushed over the moment I heard."
The double doors didn't open politely.
They swung wide with the confidence of someone who believed they owned the space.
Angela stiffened instantly.
Mira lifted her chin like a cat spotting a dog it despised.
Aleria turned her head.
And a round lump of humanity rolled into the room.
Short. Wide. Glossy with sweat. Wrapped in clothes that were expensive in the way a rich idiot's clothes were expensive—too shiny, too loud, too desperate to announce wealth. Puffy red face. Thick lips. Chestnut hair slicked near the scalp like oil refused to leave him.
Everything about him screamed comfort and entitlement. A man who had never walked anywhere if he could force someone else to carry him.
Gergel, Aleria's half-borrowed memories supplied.
And somehow the name fit perfectly—for a man shaped like a spoiled ham with delusions of importance.
Gergel smiled.
Not kindly.
Not warmly.
He smiled like he expected applause just for existing.
And the room felt smaller the moment he did.