Don't Hold Me Back, My Lady
'Now.'
Moonlight settled one more time over the scratch I'd marked on the wall.
Half past four in the morning—the hour when the pulse of the ducal mansion, that vast living organism, slowed to its very slowest.
"About thirty minutes since Roselyne's visit, so the timing should be about right."
The night knights, pickled in end-of-shift exhaustion, rubbed at their eyelids, while the servants still floundered in the swamp of deep sleep.
'Fuck, that metaphor was way too metaphorical. Gotta rein it in.'
I rose slowly.
Clank.
Right at the moment the sentries' vision went hazy, the mana-suppression restraint gripping my wrists let out a faint metallic rasp.
A chill that ached down to the bone came creeping up through me, but discomfort of this degree was merely a line item already factored into the bill.
'If not tonight, I never get out.'
I punched numbers into the calculator inside my head.
'Escape fast, then run for a distant foreign land.'
Honestly, I had no idea where a person even went to reach a distant foreign land.
'Just keep running down one road long enough, and I'll get there eventually.'
And then there was Roselyne Leonhardt.
Watching that lady's eyes grow darker with every passing dawn had cold sweat sliding down my spine.
It wasn't gratitude. Nor was it admiration.
It was the look of a starving beast that has found its only prey—or the desperate obsession of a drowning woman grasping for even a rotten rope.
Any later, and it would truly be over.
I was one step away from having my entire life shoved into the great swamp known as this novel's main scenario.
You run while running is still possible, or you die.
Because the first law of an extra's survival is to never get entangled with the protagonist.
Click.
I slid a slender wire into the gap in the restraint I'd scouted out beforehand.
Who knew the lockpicking I'd picked up as a hobby in my past life would shine here of all places.
"Waaah!!! Teacher!!!! My locker's locked!!!!"
"Step aside."
I pulled a MacGyver knife from my pocket and coaxed it around the keyhole.
Click.
With a crisp little sound, the locker door swung open.
"See? Your teacher's pretty amazing, huh?"
The kids' reactions were not what I'd expected.
"Teacher's a THIEF!!!!!!!"
"Teacher goes around opening any door he wants!!!!!!"
"How does that even follow?"
Truly, a person must keep learning to survive.
Ssslk.
I snatched the heavy hunk of iron out of the air a hair before it struck the floor.
The sensation of liberated mana washed over my whole body.
The explosive strength unique to a Barbarian came surging wild through my veins.
Three routes. The most certain was the northwest corridor along the outer wall.
Bending the bars of the confinement cell was no work at all.
The sound of iron curling like taffy lay low over the silent underground storeroom.
I slipped into the corridor, soundless as a cat. —quoth the two-meter slab of meat.
The two knights holding the corridor were already dozing against the wall, exactly on my schedule.
Chopping their throats with just enough force to drop them unconscious took less than three seconds.
No scream escaped—not so much as a proper breath.
The stairs, the west corridor, and the hidden passage leading out to the garden.
My preparation had been perfect.
"Not exactly perfect, though."
Soldiers dropped along the way alone: thirty.
Servants on night patrol and maids drifting through the mansion included, roughly fifty in all.
'I didn't kill any of them. Believe it or not, I am a man with the brain and common sense of a thousand years in the future...'
Barbarian bastards being the exception.
Ah, and bad people too.
Because if I don't kill, I'm the one who dies.
When the cold dawn air touched my skin, I was all but certain I'd made it.
The black silhouette of forest beyond the wall seemed to promise freedom.
And then.
"...Are you leaving?"
My heart dropped straight through the floor.
Beneath the wall, from between tree shadows steeped in deep dark, a white figure walked out like a ghost.
It was Roselyne Leonhardt.
No ornate gown, no maids in tow—only a thin dress with a single cloak thrown over it.
The insteps of her bare feet on the cold grass were soaked with night dew, gone white.
"Roselyne?"
"Without a word... you were truly going to leave without a single word."
Her voice was calm.
Only her voice.
That calmness was, if anything, the chilling part.
She looked like someone who had foreseen everything—or like a person standing amid the wreckage of a world already collapsed.
"Hey, what are you doing out here at this hour..."
"I was anxious. I couldn't sleep, so I went to check whether you were still there... and the room was empty."
Roselyne stepped closer.
Her eyes glinted strangely even in the dark, where not a single lantern burned.
"I thought you'd at least give me one word. At the very least some parting jab—'don't bother waiting, I'm not coming back.'"
"...I was going to leave. I was a prisoner from the start, and this was never a place for me."
Struggling to keep my voice level, I turned my eyes toward the wall.
Vault past her right now, and it would be over.
All I needed was to vanish into the forest before she could scream.
Roselyne's next words hooked my ankles.
"Are you leaving me behind, all alone?"
Her voice trembled, faintly. This was no lovesick confession.
The terror of being abandoned.
Faced with the fact that her one and only refuge was about to evaporate and leave her, Roselyne wore the expression of a child whose soul had shattered.
"I thought it was all right for me to be here. I liked what you taught me, so I thought yesterday would be like today, and today like tomorrow..."
"Roselyne, you and I were a relationship with an obvious ending from the very start. A duke's daughter and a barbarian prisoner. Doesn't the whole arrangement strike you as wrong?"
I cut in, cold and clinical.
Ignoring the tears brimming at the corners of her eyes, I put out my coldest voice.
"You clocking perfect attendance at my room every single dawn—that's a bit much for a thank-you, don't you think? You know it, too. The rumors are already crawling through the mansion. When the knights seal their mouths as you pass, it isn't respect. It's because they think you've lost your mind."
"What's wrong about it?! You saved me, and without you I can't even breathe!"
Roselyne's slender shoulders shook in fine tremors.
"The more you're tangled up with me, the worse it gets. I am not your refuge. The moment I walk out of this castle, I'm nothing but a savage they treat like a monster. Cling to me all you like, and all I'll ever be is a trash bin gnawing away at your reputation. If you understand, go back inside. The end."
I brushed past her, knocking her shoulder with mine. Offhand and dry.
But the feel of her frail fingers trembling as they caught my collar came shooting up my forearm like a bolt of lightning.
"...It's for my sake, isn't it."
At Roselyne's low murmur, I stopped.
"What?"
She lifted her head.
In those tear-soaked eyes, the hollowness of a moment ago had burned away, and a strange conviction blazed in its place.
"The reason you're leaving... it was because of me all along. You're braving this danger and running to protect me—to protect my honor...!"
'She's reading it THAT way?'
Nonplused, I looked back at her.
But Roselyne's face was already no different from a martyr's beholding a self-sacrificing hero.
"No—don't get it twisted. I'm leaving to keep myself alive. Whether you care or not, I'm going my own way!"
"That's a lie. You always say that, but you watched my breathing and mended my speech habits. So I wouldn't fall apart, so I could stand up on my own..."
Roselyne seized the hem of my clothes tighter.
"I know that using you as my refuge is a burden to you. But Sir Knight—if you leave, I won't have the courage to face those cold stares again. So please... just stay by my side."
"Let go of that. Any later and the jailers wake up."
I wrenched my hand away, rough.
She latched on again.
"Don't go... please..."
"LET GO, GODDAMMIT!!!!!!"
She grabbed the hem of my trousers even as she dropped to her knees on the cold ground.
"Don't go... please!!!!!!!"
Her scream tore the stillness of dawn wide open.
That was the moment.
Far off, the red glow of torches wavered, and the footfalls of dozens of men came rushing toward us.
"Over there! The savage is threatening the Lady!"
"Save the Lady! Surround them, now!"
With the Knight Commander's bellow, cold spearpoints closed around us in layer upon layer.
The knights had apparently mistaken my escape attempt for an abduction.
"FUCK!!!!"
Escape routes and shift schedules meant nothing anymore.
Then Roselyne planted herself in front of me.
Body shaking, she spread her arms wide and wrapped them around me.
"No! Sir Knight wasn't trying to harm me! I... I only stumbled, trying to come outside on my own!"
The lie was flimsy past all belief.
"My Lady, you're being deceived! This brute threatened you and dragged you out here..."
But her eyes alone flashed sharp enough to overpower the Knight Commander.
"I said no! I came because I wanted to! He did not drag me out here!"
She held her ground, taking the killing intent aimed at me with her whole body.
In the end, I was bound again.
"Fuck."
On my knees, the mana-suppression restraints clamped down on my wrists once more.
The knights began dragging me off.
Roselyne, sunk to the ground, stared holes through me as I receded into the distance.
Her gaze was far deeper than before, twisted far more dangerously.
The surveillance, I could breach.
The mansion's layout was no problem either.
The real problem was that lady.
That woman who bound my ankles in the name of protecting me—who read even my escape attempt as protection meant for herself.
She had now defined me as something more than a mere rescuer: her one and only confidant, a man willing to play the villain for her sake.
'Why is the plot going like this?'
My mouth went bone-dry.
The stairs descending to the underground dungeon were far deeper and darker than before.