I Picked Up the Lady
A scream tore through the depths of the forest.
Sharp and desperate—someone was in danger. Judging by the voice, a kid of maybe fifteen or sixteen.
I stopped where I stood and deliberated for a good long while.
...Sorry, but I'm a fugitive right now. If I went poking into someone else's business and the tribe's goons caught wind of it, my life would pull into its terminal station on the spot.
I might get the barbarian-style public execution, or the barbarian-style death sentence proper.
Public execution = flayed alive, one strip of skin at a time. Death sentence = carved into a hundred pieces, starting from the legs.
Just imagining it made my whole body shudder. At the very least, I refused to meet an end that gruesome.
Then, out of nowhere, a memory from five years ago flashed through my mind.
"Teacher! Do you not have a home, Teacher?!"
"What's that supposed to mean, out of nowhere?"
"You're always at school, Teacher!"
"Hey! I have a home too, you know!"
To be precise, it was a monthly rental, but still.
At my light bark, the kids went eek! and scattered in every direction, shrieking.
And now, the reason that long-forgotten memory had come back to life was painfully clear.
"Kyaaaaah!!! Please...!!! Somebody save me!!!"
"...Ugh, damn it all."
The joyful shrieks of children from the past overlapped with the desperate scream ringing out in the present.
The scene was gruesome. Three-odd bandits, bloody blades in hand, had surrounded a carriage and were threatening a girl.
All around, the men who must have been her guards lay sprawled where they'd fallen, already lifeless.
"Quit your screaming!"
"Heh heh heh... quite the premium goods, this one."
The girl wept, trembling with terror. One of the bandits crept toward her with a lecherous air.
"Heheheh... we'll wreck you nice and thorough, then sell you off at the slave market...!"
"That's a violation of the Child and Youth Protection Act."
"?!"
As I stepped out of the darkness, the bandits' vulgar laughter died mid-breath. My massive frame, standing well over two meters, cast an overwhelming shadow across the carriage, and the air around it froze solid in an instant.
"What the—this barbarian bastard? Where'd this mutt crawl out from!"
Casually ignoring the shouting, I slung my greatsword across my shoulder.
"Before we get into child protection law, your sentence structure is already a disaster. That crude vocabulary—'premium goods,' 'wreck you nice and thorough'—is a problem too. Hard evidence that your intelligence sits somewhere below elementary school."
"Huh? What's this bastard babbling about? Oi! Kill the big one first!"
All three bandits screamed and charged at once.
I exhaled a sigh and moved. No battle cry, no wasted recoil—nothing but the indifferent, efficient line of a man boarding the evening subway home.
Shnk—!
I snatched the wrist of the first bandit mid-charge, before his blade could even complete its arc.
Crack!
"Gyaaagh! My hand! My hand!!!"
"First. That delivery of yours is far too long-winded. Strip away the modifiers and keep only the core."
Using his grotesquely bent wrist as a brace, I drove the pommel of my greatsword into the face of the second bandit charging in from the side.
Crunch—!!
The sound went beyond a shattered nose bridge; his entire face caved inward with a wet, bursting collapse. He slammed into the ground without so much as a scream and convulsed there.
"Second. Short sentences are always clearer than compound ones. Don't swing five times—end it in one. I have no intention of holding remedial lessons for trash like you."
"H-hiik...! A m-monster! A barbarian monster!"
Having watched two of his men turn into lumps of meat in a matter of seconds, the bandit leader staggered backward. Mindful not to spill blood, I closed the distance. My voice was calm—and that, if anything, must have made it sound all the more grotesque.
"Now, today's class ends here. I'll summarize the key points in three lines, so listen up."
I folded down three fingers, one by one, staring straight into his eyes.
"One. You chose the wrong opponent."
"Two. My mood at the moment is very poor."
"Three. Therefore, every last one of you dies here."
"S-spare me...!"
Whump—!!
The greatsword fell in a vertical arc before his plea could even finish. The crude blade he held up snapped like a sugar confection, and a beat later his skull burst apart in a single stroke.
Shhhk—
By the time I drew the greatsword back, blood and gore had spattered in every direction and the scene was a wreck. Indifferently, I flicked the droplets from my leather clothes, then turned my head toward the girl still shaking where she stood.
As politely as I could manage—like a parent-teacher conference from my past life—I offered a gentle nod.
"My, my. Are you hurt anywhere?"
Perfect grammar, impeccable manners. But behind me lay lumps of meat that, until moments ago, had been called human beings.
Instead of an answer, the girl drew in a breath, gazing up at me with eyes a churn of terror and awe.
"You... you're..."
Seventeen or eighteen, perhaps. Crimson hair glimmering under the moonlight, cherry-bright lips, dark liner framing her eyes.
...Fuck.
This girl was the Lady of House Leonhardt. Roselyne Leonhardt—the heroine who graced the cover of The Lady Is Consumed by Loneliness.
She was HERE, at this point in the timeline?! I screamed inwardly. Of all the people in this novel, I had just saved with my own two hands the one person I absolutely could not afford to get entangled with.
The reason was simple.
The Lady Is Consumed by Loneliness, Chapter 2.
"Your Grace! Lady Roselyne has been found in the barbarian encampment!"
"March at once!"
And so the war between the Leonhardt army and the barbarians begins. The badly outnumbered barbarians charge straight into the duchy's lands, only to be slaughtered to the last man by the protagonist, Ruines. The original owner of my body, too, gets cleaved in two with a single stroke somewhere along the way. The great barbarian coalition is annihilated within a week—that was the shape of the story.
"Is this plotline for real?"
I remembered muttering exactly that.
So, going by the circumstances, it must have played out like this.
1. Three months before Chapter 2 of the original, Roselyne Leonhardt was kidnapped by bandits.
2. The bandits, having confirmed her identity, took fright and fled.
3. They dumped her in barbarian territory under the pretense of a "gift" and vanished without a trace.
One more line from the original novel surfaced in my memory—something Roselyne had said while gazing up at Ruines.
"I... I've already been defi—"
Fuck, that is way too dangerous!!! Thoughts of Child and Youth Protection Act violations came rushing back. This was genuinely dangerous. I could not get entangled any further. In every sense of the word.
"You... are you a barbarian?"
"Not a barbarian. Just an ordinary civilian with a good physique."
"...Then isn't that tattoo on your right arm the 'Engraving'? The traditional marking of the barbarians?"
Engraving...?
What even is that... Barbarians had stopped being mentioned after Chapter 2 of the original—of course I wouldn't know the fine-print lore...
"Your right arm... that mark..."
Before I knew it, I was looking down at my own right arm. A strange pattern was etched across it, large and unmistakable. When I'd first fallen into this world, I'd assumed it was just some tattoo the local punks got to look intimidating.
No wonder every single one of them, regardless of gender, was inked with the exact same thing.
In any case, helping this girl any further was tantamount to suicide. I had run away to live, only to come face-to-face with the very cause of my death—there was no contradiction in the world greater than this.
To lay it out simply:
Premise: Roselyne.
[Return to the encampment with her = sliced into a hundred pieces. Death.]
[Return her to the ducal house = suspicion, torture, or death.]
[Pretend I saw nothing and walk away = survival, provided I run well.]
Conclusion:
"Now that the situation has been resolved, I'll take my leave. It's late, so I'd recommend keeping to the main roads. Good night."
"W-wait, just a moment!"
Instead of answering, I quickened my pace—the unhindered, efficient footwork of a man clocking out for the day. Please, whatever you do, don't block my path... I prayed.
Tug!
...Fuck.
I stopped and looked down to find Roselyne, face drained white, desperately clutching the hem of my leather coat with bloodless fingers. Her eyes brimmed with tears; she looked so frail and desperate she might collapse on the spot.
"Please... please don't abandon me and go... Sir Knight..."
Sir Knight, she says.
For a man who turns people into lumps of meat, the title of knight wasn't merely undeserved—it was closer to a wrong answer. It was a remark that put her intelligence in considerable doubt, but the fingers gripping my hem carried a strength I could not ignore.
I could have shaken her off and walked away. But the teardrops spilling down her cheeks ultimately pinned my feet in place.
"Ugh... I've gone and gotten myself well and truly snagged..."
Instead of pushing her away, I let out a deep sigh and gave the bandit corpse sprawled at my feet a light kick. Rooting through its filthy leather pouch turned up a crudely rolled bundle of bandages.
"All right, hands off—have a seat here."
I carefully peeled Roselyne's fingers away and sat her down beside the carriage wheel.
"Grabbing hold of a stranger's clothes without a second thought is a serious deficiency in social awareness. If I'd been some worse sort of man instead of me, you might have had something terrible done to you right then and there."
My rough hands closed around her slender ankle. She must have twisted it while running from the bandits—it had swollen up ugly.
"Agh, ow...!"
"Quiet. No more screaming—it's unnecessary now. Crying won't solve anything. The situation is concluded; we're in post-incident cleanup. Kick up any more fuss here and you're advertising a free meal to every starving beast in these woods. Understood?"
I delivered the lecture in a cold, dry tone—a chronic occupational hazard of being a former teacher.
But the gaze of the girl before me—Roselyne Leonhardt—began to shift in a strange way. In eyes that had brimmed with pure terror, an unfamiliar warmth was quietly settling.
"Sir Knight... your name, if I may...?"
"I told you, I'm not a knight. Your question fails at its premise. And what would you do with my name anyway? Planning to enter it into your wrong-answer notebook?"
I tied off the final knot firmly and rose to my feet, readjusting the greatsword on my shoulder and brushing the dust from my clothes.
All right... now what?
Just then, beast-like snarls rumbled out of the darkness of the forest.
"The next Great Chieftain is mine!!!"
"Doberan's got it right!!! It's mine!!!"
It was the barbarian pursuit party that had been hunting me. As hulking frames over two meters tall shoved through the underbrush, Roselyne's face turned ash-gray in an instant. The goons looked back and forth between the fallen bandits, the carriage, and Roselyne, drooling with naked greed.
"Why the hell would it be yours!!! It's mine!!!"
"Mine!!!"
"Duuuuel!!!!!"
Paying my existence no mind whatsoever, they set about grabbing each other by the collars and swinging axes, each loudly asserting ownership. Their intelligence wasn't merely low—it had regressed.
Pressing a hand to my aching brow, I thought: ...I had briefly forgotten the splendid intellectual caliber of our dear cousins next door.
Then the largest of the pursuit party—Doberan—fixed me with a bloodshot glare.
"Aiden!!! Traitor!!! You sheltered a lowlander!!! You healed one!!!"
The hulks came barreling at me, enormous axes whirling.
"DIE!!!!!!!"