Bound
The formation Vincent claimed to have learned from me was one I had picked up in my life before my previous life, back when I served in the military.
After fleeing from my mother and Ma Cheonseong, I had been taken in by a great general and his wife while crossing a bridge.
When the Son of Heaven decreed that the general march forth to hold the borderlands, I set out for the frontier myself — to repay the couple who had raised me like a son, and to earn the strength to live on my own two feet.
Driving back the warlike nomadic tribes that invaded the border — that was my work there.
It was an unbroken succession of bloody battles, blood washing away blood. Not the romantic, chivalrous duels of life and death I had dreamed of as a child, but the life of a beast — killing others to survive, surviving to kill. There was no better teacher than the battlefield, as they say.
There was frankly no one left alive who could pass the art of internal energy cultivation down to me. In the end, all I had left was the mantra of the heart cultivation method that Ma Cheonseong had drilled into me. By some means he had carved it into my memory so deeply that it never faded, so I grew stronger the only way I could — repeating the training he had commanded of me and tempering it through real combat.
Perhaps the fact that he had been my teacher was the very reason I survived so long on a battlefield where a single instant's mistake meant death.
By the time I had grown used to a life of watching the people I laughed and traded banter with every day die off, then cutting down the throats of the tribesmen who killed them yesterday — that was when I met him.
The black sheep of the Jegal family.
He was a madman who staked his very life on strategy and formations. A man out of his right mind, who had come seeking the battlefield of his own will, claiming he would follow in his ancestors' footsteps by mastering the arts of war to their utmost limit.
Though I suppose I was a madman too, walking into that hell on earth to repay the debt of being fed and healed.
At first I thought he'd die within days and didn't spare him a glance. But they call it the shaky-bridge effect, don't they? After crossing life and death beside the very man I'd expected to perish on the first day of the campaign, marching through battlefield after battlefield, familiarity bloomed between us quite naturally.
He must have felt indebted to me for saving his life again and again, because he taught me the formations of his ancestors that he had restored, and designs of his own devising besides. The Jegal family was a martial house versed in many weapons, he said, and looking at my swordwork and blade technique — built from raw combat alone — he trimmed away the excess for me.
Thinking back now, I'd say he was one of the very few people I could have called a friend.
I wonder if he's doing well?
If he had been there with me, could I have ignored that formation and simply run? The day I left the battlefield, he told me his research there was finished and that he would return to his family house. We parted at the crossroads, and I never saw him again — but if I ever find a way to learn what became of my mother after my death, it wouldn't hurt to look into how he's faring as well.
So the formation Vincent claims to have learned from me is the very one that Jegal fool taught me. Its effect is simple enough: it dulls the perception of anyone who enters it, making them wander in circles within until they can never pass through.
In my case, it seems the oath's prohibition activated the moment my heart turned toward escaping him, dragging me back before him every single time.
In other words, like a squirrel on a wheel, I spun round and round the same ground — and came back on my own two feet to stand right in front of him, waiting there all along.
When the front door opened and the forest came into view, I should have realized there was no way he'd leave it so carelessly passable if escape were truly possible. But my heart was in a panic, and I threw my body forward before thinking.
Vincent had calculated even the possibility of my attempt, and laid his formation through the woods encircling the clearing around the house. It's a fair bet it blocks entry from outside as well as exit from within. No one will come looking from beyond those trees, ever again.
Perhaps I just lost the first and last move I had for slipping free of Vincent's grasp.
I seem to have blacked out for a moment. Where am I? Looking around, I find myself in that bedroom — the one where I first woke in this house. My body, which had run its lightness technique without rest for so long, was apparently still too weak to shake off the exhaustion.
So I've come back after all.
Vincent appears to have carried me, unconscious, from his arms into the bedroom and then left. When I came to, I was laid out on the carpet. Both wrists bound in white silk cords, the white garment he'd given me stripped away, wearing nothing but those sheer, revealing string garments.
If I had just a little more of that special energy left, could I have escaped him? No — probably not. Now that he's confirmed I have nothing left, he would only have told me the truth. Even my information puts me at a disadvantage going in.
When exactly did he plan all of this, and put it into motion? He never had the wherewithal for something like this. When he traveled at my side, he was nothing but a good, earnest boy.... Was it after he became the Hero? During the journey to slay the Demon King, was he planning this the whole time?
I don't know. I don't know when he began preparing for this — no, when he began harboring these feelings for me at all.
I was at a loss. This wasn't a matter of some desire he couldn't master, or some other emotion he'd mistaken for love. He had truly intended to propose to me. This time my escape cut things short, but he will keep courting me, again and again, from here on.
I need to find a way. A way to dissolve this relationship gently, and return to what we once were — master and disciple.
The door opens, and Vincent steps into the bedroom.
"Adela, how are you feeling?"
"Untie this...."
I held out to him wrists bound in white silk, and asked.
"That, I can't do."
He refused flatly, then handed me a cup of water. Was he worried about all the sweat I'd lost?
"Drink first, Adela."
"If you're going to worry about me, you could stop doing the things you do to me...."
The moment I drained the cup, he took it back from me — and pulled the other end of the silk cord binding my wrists.
"Wait — Vincent?"
Pulling the cord's opposite end, which was looped over the ceiling beam, he hauled me up from where I had been sitting. Like a calf dragged to slaughter, I was yanked into the air, and only barely — on the very tips of my toes — managed to keep my wrists from bearing my full weight.
"Why are you doing this?!"
Vincent watched me dangle from the beam, straining to touch the floor, and smiled with satisfaction. At the sight of that smile, I flailed in alarm and shouted back.
"Vincent! Stop it, untie this!!"
I'd been hauled up to the very edge of what I could bear, and every struggle only redoubled the agony in my wrists. And in that state, I endured Vincent's hands roaming and provoking my body, here and there — stroking down my side with a tickling touch, then licking a trail up my spine.
"Kyaa! Wh-what are you doing?!"
"Adela, you make such a girlish scream when I do this."
Ashamed of the moans spilling from my own mouth, my face flushed red — and watching that, Vincent shifted his attention to my armpits. He pressed his nose into them and inhaled. At that perverted display, I struggled desperately to break free of this situation, but it only added more weight crushing down on my wrists.
"What are you, a pervert...?! Don't sniff me! Hyaat?! D-don't lick either!!"
He wrapped his arms around my waist as I writhed to escape his torment, and inhaled my armpit once more.
"It tickles! I told you to stop!!"
As I twisted my body this way and that in misery, Vincent only grew more enthusiastic in his teasing.
"Adela, I don't think you understand the position you're in yet. You're being punished by me, you know? So don't go making demands."
"Punished?! There's no such thing! You dragged me here by force — huk! — and you're calling my escape a crime?! What kind of punishment is... worth anything?!!"
Vincent lifted his face from my armpit, and this time bit down on my earlobe as he went on.
"If you hate it that much, then all you have to do is accept my proposal, Adela."
With both hands, Vincent tormented my nipples where they showed through the sheer fabric of my top. And it wasn't only his hands tormenting me from behind. The underwear that couldn't hope to cover my pale, plump cheeks only helped him rub his swollen, fruit-hard length against me all the more easily. The sensation of him grinding across the cleft of my rear wrenched a moan out of me.
"I won't... do that. Huk! Ah, aah!! Don't bite my eaar! Go find some, other giirl!!"
The hands teasing me through my top slipped beneath the fabric before I knew it, feeling my breasts bare and raw. Having already been brought to climax by my chest alone more times than I could count at his hands, my body flinched and reacted the moment he gripped them. The mouth that had been chewing softly on my earlobe pressed kisses down my nape, leaving his mark — claiming me as his own.
"Don't lick, hyaaah! Why do you only pick the things — aahng! — I tell you not to do! Untie this!"
I twisted my body trying to work the bonds loose, but every motion only made my wrists hurt worse. The hand at my breasts slid gradually lower. With both palms cupping my pubic mound and pulling me back against him, Vincent's thickness forced the cleft of my rear apart — and revealed the lust crest, already beginning to drip its honey, drop by drop.