Wensley took that fragile goodwill and smashed it.
The turning point of the story was exactly this banquet.
After his confession was rejected in public and the crowd laughed, he became the object of pity and contempt. The young man who had starved for love finally broke. He fell into despair, reached for forbidden magic as if it were the only rope dangling over a cliff, and headed straight toward ruin.
If the world hated him so much, then he decided he would pay it back with more hatred.
His parents had died early. No one had taught him how to behave. No one had guided him toward any sort of maturity. He only knew that the world treated him worse than a stray dog, and that even the smallest people with a little position tried to step on him just to prove they were above someone.
So why should he care if that kind of world burned?
Wensley slowly raised his hand and touched his own neck, feeling the dampness on his skin.
His palm came away clammy with cold sweat.
"This is like pressing the accelerator all the way down while driving straight toward a cliff," he muttered. "No brakes, no wheel, just one long road until the crash."
He closed his eyes and drew in a long breath. When he opened them again, his gaze was a little clearer.
"…Is it too late to take my foot off the pedal?"
The more he thought about it, the stranger the whole thing felt.
When he had played Citrus Crown, he had barely paid attention to Wensley as a character. To that past version of himself, Wensley had been nothing more than an annoying villain whose only purpose was to make the girls' relationship look sweeter by comparison.
Now that he was inside Wensley's body, carrying Wensley's memories and the weight of his emotions, the cracks in that view became obvious.
Before this banquet, what exactly had Wensley done?
Yes, he had been obsessive and rude and selfish.
Yes, he had embarrassed Mirielle in front of others and managed to offend half of the noble circle.
But if you looked at his actions one by one, there was nothing that deserved absolute condemnation from an entire kingdom. He wanted to be a villain, but he did not have the power to truly become one.
Yet his bad reputation had spread through Carmella and even spilled over into neighboring lands. People described him with a whole string of labels. Greedy. Lustful. Cowardly in front of the strong and cruel to the weak. Despicable. Shameless. Deceitful.
If you actually asked any of them, "What specific thing did he do to earn all those names?" the answers would turn vague.
It felt like the world had already decided that this man was trash and then slowly filled in the details afterward.
He was a convenient punching bag.
He was a character written so that everyone could dislike him without having to think too hard about whether he truly deserved it, which made it easier to cheer when the heroines stepped on him.
After all, players had not come to Citrus Crown to worry about a villain's past. They came for sweet yuri romance. Someone like Wensley existed mostly to make them feel disgusted and then satisfied when the game finally allowed them to hit him.
But now that Wensley stood where that character had stood and remembered all the lonely pieces of his life, he could not help asking himself a simple question.
Before he fell into darkness, before he grabbed hold of forbidden magic like a drowning person grabbing a knife, had he truly done anything that matched the level of hatred thrown at him?
A sentence he had once read floated up from his memories.
The lucky ones spend their entire lives being healed by their childhood.
The unlucky ones spend their entire lives trying to heal their childhood.
Wensley was obviously the second kind.
He had lost his parents early.
He had grown up under the scorn of the capital.
He had no relatives and no real friends.
Everyone kept their distance. Nobles looked down on him. Talented mages who had risen from humble families scoffed at him for having noble blood with no magical talent. Even ordinary townspeople preferred to cross the street when they saw him coming.
The only person who still spoke to him and occasionally offered a bit of help was Princess Mirielle.
However, Mirielle was the only heir of Carmella and the future queen. Her days were already overflowing with responsibilities.
At home, she assisted her father with government affairs and studied advanced magic.
At school, she carried out her duties as student council president while staying at the top of her class.
How much energy could she have had left to handle a childhood friend who never tried to understand her situation and only clung to her with unreasonable demands?
In the original story, after the banquet, Wensley believed that even Mirielle had abandoned him. He felt that the last person who could possibly stand at his side had turned away. So he chose to abandon the world first. He went to extremes because, to him, there was no other way to fight back.
He had been childish, foolish, and wrong.
He had also been desperate.
"No one taught him how to live," Wensley thought, studying the boy in the mirror. "So he ended up teaching himself how to die instead."
He looked at his reflection, at the thin shoulders and the freckles and the tired eyes.
He was the villain of a yuri game.
He was cannon fodder.
He was meant to die with a sword through his heart while he watched the two girls kissing in front of him.
Wensley's hands curled into fists at his sides.
"If this world decided I was trash before I even had a chance to do anything, then fine," he said under his breath. "But this time, I am the one inside this so called trash, and I am not going to lie here and wait for the fire."
His chest still hurt from Mirielle's rejection. The humiliation in the banquet hall still burned like a fresh wound.
Yet somewhere inside that pain, another feeling had appeared.
A thin, stubborn line of resistance.
The original Wensley had thought, "What difference would it make to me if such a world were destroyed?"
The present Wensley looked into his own eyes in the mirror, and his gaze grew steady.
"More importantly," he whispered, "what will happen if I refuse to follow the script?"