I Picked Up the Princess 1
Caric was a reincarnator.
He was also a northern barbarian.
His life was simple.
"UUUULBARAAAAA!"
Charging into battle while screaming the name of his ancestral god.
"Surrounded? Excellent! Now every swing is guaranteed to hit an enemy."
Spreading positive thinking wherever he went.
"The payment doesn't match what we agreed. I counted, and it's thirty-seven silver, not forty."
"Eh? Heh heh heh! Looks like I made a little slip. My bad."
"A slip? No. A merchant miscounting money is a serious matter. Fortunately, I know the cure."
"Now, hold on—"
"This will sting."
"GAAAAAAH!"
"Sting!"
Establishing proper commerce culture in the civilized world.
Truly fulfilling days.
Of course, Caric hadn't been this smooth from the very beginning.
After all, in his previous life, he'd been a delicate INFP man.
Though even then he'd stood 190 centimeters tall and pulled a 600-kilogram total at the gym.
But deep down, he'd possessed a soft, pure soul.
Problem was, this world had no place for a shy barbarian to survive.
This place is definitely dark fantasy.
It was just that freaking barbaric and medieval.
Drink one bad cup of booze and you'd wake up missing a kidney.
Countless times he'd risked his life hunting monsters only to nearly get stiffed on the reward.
And above all, you had to watch out for pretty women.
A plain human honeypot was the least of your worries.
Catch a succubus, and you'd be found the next morning as a dried-out husk.
And it wasn't even like you got to do it once for real before dying.
You'd just come down with a cursed dream-sickness.
Found face-down in a snowbank, wheezing hah, hah — this is what I live for — and then dead.
He really, really didn't want to die like that.
Demons prowling in broad daylight. Monsters, cultists, even corrupt lords. If this isn't dark fantasy, what is it?
It was simply no place for a man to live.
Even the perpetually snow-covered land was starting to wear on him.
Well, word had it things got somewhat better if you headed south.
Something about a colossal stone wall — the Great Wall, or whatever it was called.
Cross it, they said, and there was an Empire on the other side.
A place that supposedly had everything.
What a load of ridiculous rumors.
The way people told it, that place had air conditioning, macarons, and even trains.
They said the locals threw parties over nothing, every single day.
Piled food up in mountains and didn't even eat it, supposedly.
Sure they do. Keep walking and you'll find the end of the world, why don't you.
Things were probably a bit better there.
But even so, how different could it really be?
The ignorance and snake-heartedness of dark-fantasy medieval folk were bottomless.
Great Walls, Empires, parties — bah.
Time spent daydreaming about that nonsense was better spent moving his body.
Especially for a soft, pure INFP man like himself.
A fragile mind demanded a powerful body to house it.
"Oh, look at that. A quest, right on schedule."
A corpse lay collapsed in the snow.
One glance told him it hadn't been dead long.
Going by the weapons and gear, the man's profession was human hunter.
The tracks showed footprints leading off into the forest.
Looked like a pack of them, hunting somebody down.
"Lucky me."
He'd gut these bastards' pockets and buy himself a nice expensive dinner.
Saving whoever was about to be caught would put him in a good mood, too.
Shall we exercise a wholesome influence on civilized society again today?
Caric took a light step forward.
His thighs swelled massively, then drove powerfully against the ground.
BOOM!
With a thunderous crack, Caric's colossal frame launched toward the forest like a cannonball.
He crossed the snowfield as if he were flying.
The wind slapping his face felt refreshing.
Just a few strides and he'd entered the forest.
Caric let out a pleased, murderous aura.
"UUUULBARAAAAAA!"
The monstrous howl rolled thunderously through the woods.
It was, in a way, an idiotic move.
He'd thrown away the advantage of ambush just to announce exactly where he was.
But Caric was secretly proud of his own delicacy.
It's like a police siren.
This little ritual of his was fairly well known by now.
From his battle cry alone, the enemy would know who was coming.
Then they'd hesitate, even for a moment.
And the victim's odds of survival would go up.
That's me all right.
What other barbarian in existence cared this much for his fellow man!
Caric kept his route simple, too.
Straight ahead, shortest distance, no exceptions!
He didn't rein in his speed in the slightest.
Dense branches blocking the path?
CRACK!
He shouldered straight through them.
Fallen logs and monsters alike got no special treatment.
Grrrr! Woof!
A fairly large wolf-type monster blocked the way, apparently displeased that its territory had been invaded.
Caric couldn't have cared less.
"GEET! OUUUT! OF! THE! WAY!"
A full-speed body slam!
SPLOOSH!
The monster's body burst apart, pathetically easy.
Like popping a balloon. Simple as that.
Caric ended up drenched in blood.
But he didn't slow down one bit.
He simply carved his way through the forest, exhilarated, pressing onward.
A din like some massive construction project shook the woods.
CRASH!
Splintering one last ancient tree that stood in his path clean in half,
Caric finally arrived at the scene of the incident.
Without even realizing it, he was grinning, teeth bared.
"C-Caric? It's really Caric!"
There stood a gathering of the familiar residents of this dark-fantasy world.
Rotted or broken teeth, scars everywhere, eyes that crawled with malice.
The nooses, shackles, and nets in their hands looked thoroughly ominous.
But the men stood dumbstruck, as if their souls had left them at the sight of Caric dropping out of the sky.
The one at the front looked especially rattled.
Understandable, perhaps, seeing as he was the one wearing a face full of wood splinters and Caric's spit.
"C-Caric!"
"Caric? You don't use casual speech with Car—"
Caric readjusted his grip on his axe.
Time to demonstrate what happens to people who get cheeky with a stranger.
But then one of them scrambled forward in a panic.
"L-Lord Caric! A pleasure to meet you for the first time, sir!"
A one-eyed man with a savage face.
Yet his tone was desperately, frantically polite.
Caric smiled crookedly.
"Well-mannered, for a human hunter. I'll make your death a little less painful."
"Wha—? No, no, my lord! Sp-Spare us! We're not bad people!"
"Oh?"
"We're wanted criminals! No! Wait! Not that! The opposite! We're wanted-criminal, er, HUNTERS!"
The man rushed on, desperate.
"We were chasing a criminal just now! Sh-She came over the Wall!"
"The Wall?"
So that thing actually existed?
What, exactly, had the man taken from Caric's reaction?
The one-eyed man gestured behind him.
The human hunters shuffled aside to make a path.
Truthfully, the gesture was pointless.
Caric stood a full head taller than any of them anyway.
In any case, Caric finally turned his gaze in that direction.
And he froze.
"...What."
What met his eyes was something he had never expected.
A woman of unreal beauty stood there.
The kind whose cascading silver hair suited her so impossibly well it was almost unfair.
Ruby-red eyes like a rabbit's.
Tears brimming and welling in them.
A beauty that stirred the protective instinct and a strange sadistic urge all at once.
As he watched the woman slump into the snow, her legs apparently giving out beneath her, Caric thought:
So this is what a high-rank succubus would look like.
But he sensed no demonic energy from her whatsoever.
Which meant she was a pure human.
Her face was one thing — fine. But what was with the outfit?
This woman, being hunted through a snowfield, was wearing a dress.
A lavish one, with bare shoulders and a cinched waist, no less.
"What is that?"
Caric was utterly dumbfounded.
"An imperial noblewoman, my lord. A very wicked bitch who committed a crime and ran."
The one-eyed man said it while glancing at Caric warily.
"Her face is, er, ordinary enough. But look at her clothes! Do you have any idea what those jewels are worth?"
"Ordinary?"
What kind of nonsense was this now?
But the one-eyed man seemed to have taken Caric's objection entirely the wrong way.
"Ordinary, isn't she? Well — a bit below your standards, Lord Caric, of course. She's scared half out of her wits, so she's not much to look at right now! Ahahaha!"
He spoke as if the woman were some ugly duckling.
It was trashing so extreme it was starting to feel suspicious.
Yet the reactions around them stayed indifferent to the man's words.
Aside from being cowed by Caric's sheer presence,
none of them seemed to disagree with the one-eyed man at all.
To these men's eyes, the woman genuinely looked like she had an ordinary face.
What is going on here.
Caric frowned.
Something about this situation was deeply wrong.
There was no mistaking what kind of lowlifes these men were.
Human hunters, the lot of them.
He'd clearly spotted jewelry strung with pierced human ears, hastily hidden away.
The problem was the woman.
Out of nowhere, a woman bristling with wrongness comes over the Wall.
And everyone around him insists she's ordinary-looking.
Something strange was afoot.
This world's standards of beauty weren't meaningfully different from his past life's.
There was no way a face from an entirely different genre could be called ordinary.
Wait. Genre?
Come to think of it, there really had been a genre like that.
The genre where someone drags out a peerless beauty and insists she's plain.
Dramas were the classic offender.
And every so often, romance fantasy did it too.
Romance fantasy, huh.
Thinking that, something suddenly clicked in his mind.
Caric walked toward the woman.
The human hunters exchanged nervous glances and parted to let him through.
Up close, her expression looked like she might faint at any second.
She struggled to push herself upright, failed, and collapsed right back down into the snow.
White-faced, she bit down hard on her lip.
"D-Don't come any closer! If you do, I'll — I'll shoot!"
The words were spat out with what courage she could muster.
But for a threat, her voice shook far too violently.
Her shoulders were hunched high around her ears.
Shoot?
Come to think of it, a magic circle was floating around her.
And that, too, was a deeply strange sight.
He'd never seen such an elaborate magical system before.
Though for all that, it flickered like it was about to wink out at any moment.
Caric stopped at a reasonable distance.
"You. What's your name?"
He looked down at her as he asked.
"My — my name?"
The woman's eyes went wide for an instant, then her face crumpled like she was about to sob.
"Why ask my name now? Where was this consideration when you were — when you were herding people around like cattle...!"
She had apparently taken him for mocking her.
Some leader of the human hunters, arrived late to join the chase, most likely.
"You're going to catch me and sell me off or k-kill me anyway, so why...!"
Maybe saying it out loud had cracked something open.
The venom she'd been squeezing out of herself with such effort thinned away.
And the tears she'd held back for so long finally began to fall, drop by drop.
"I'm not one of the human hunters."
Caric lowered himself down to her level.
"I'll ask again. What's your name? It matters to me."
The woman wiped her tears with the edge of her sleeve.
Then she lifted her head as if to lay a curse on him, opened her mouth — and stopped.
Because of Caric's eyes.
They were quiet.
He wasn't angry. He wasn't threatening her.
And yet those still, sunken eyes carried something that crushed whoever met them.
Eep.
The woman sucked in a startled breath, and her tears stopped as if they'd never been.
"Annette."
Frozen stiff, she answered before she could stop herself.
"Annette de Belgarde."
"I see."
Faintly — but unmistakably — he remembered that name.
Caric let out a slightly hollow laugh.
And here I thought I'd been born into a dark-fantasy world.
It was romance fantasy.