[Episode 0]
It was late at night, a sudden visit. His handsome face was a mess from the rain.
“I can’t accept this.”
A droplet fell from the ends of his hair and lightly grazed my cheek. As if seeking my permission, he hesitated a moment, then followed my retreating footsteps into the room.
“It’s not something that requires your acceptance.”
Small puddles gathered in the wake of his footsteps. Water welled up and sloshed in his reddened eyes, too. Steadying my voice that threatened to sink because of that, I looked straight into those eyes.
“…Is there no way I can change your mind?”
“There isn’t.”
Ha. As if bewildered by the firm answer, he roughly pushed back his rain-soaked hair. Beneath his exposed forehead, contorted eyes were visible.
I averted my gaze from him. If I kept looking at those eyes, my already firm resolve would soften and follow him.
*I can’t let that happen.*
When I avoided his gaze, he stepped into the dormitory with hurried strides. Whether from the rain or from anger, those footsteps were straight despite his trembling voice.
“Even if I never… never see you again. Is it such a great greed to simply wish that you live happily somewhere?”
“Don’t act like a child. No matter what you say, my decision remains the same. I’ve explained enough why it has to be this way. If you still don’t understand… I don’t care. Because from the very beginning, in that choice, you…”
Damn it. My throat was clogged, and my voice wouldn’t come out properly.
“Weren’t considered.”
He froze at those words and remained silent for a long while. The sound of rain continued ceaselessly, and only after some time did he finally spit out his words.
“Irresponsible.”
“…What?”
His reddened eyes were full of resentment.
*This is bad.*
At this rate, I might really end up wanting to be caught. As I unconsciously tried to take a step back, he urgently grabbed my hand.
“Then you shouldn’t have forced your way into my life as you pleased.”
I looked at the hand he had grabbed and slowly pulled it free. But I couldn’t step back. Those eyes looked so painfully sorrowful that I felt suffocated, and the falling tears truly stole my breath away, so I couldn’t distance myself from him any further.
“If you were going to disappear like that, you shouldn’t have made me want to keep living because of you.”
Without hiding his cracking voice, he crumpled and buried his forehead against my shoulder. My gradually soaking shoulder was warm with the moisture’s heat. Unable to comfort him, unable to stroke his trembling back. Feeling the warmth leaning against my shoulder, I thought:
*Where did it all go wrong?*
Slightly below the median, yet always settled within the range called “ordinary” in the spectrum of life—my life began to collapse when I slipped on the company stairs.
It felt like I was smashed to pieces.
Sprawled on the cold floor, I quietly assessed my condition.
I think I really was smashed to pieces.
Well, if I fell down the stairs like that, of course at least one part would have been shattered….
Feeling pain so severe I couldn’t even groan, I felt my consciousness fading away.
Someone’s scream echoing from afar also gradually died down, just like my consciousness.
* * *
At the scratching sound of a pen writing something, I opened my eyes slightly and saw an old foreign man scribbling beside me. Even thinking with a global mindset, that foreigner who wasn’t even wearing a gown didn’t seem like an emergency room doctor.
*Crazy company…. Did they drag me to the infirmary instead of calling 119?*
Did our company even have foreign employees? As I thought such things and slowly tried to raise myself, the elderly foreigner who seemed to be an employee, noticing that I had awakened, soon hardened his expression.
“Miss Dietrich, are you… alright?”
Dietrich… Mi…ss…?
An unbelievable, cringeworthy form of address flowed fluently from the foreign stranger’s mouth. Yet strangely, the name wasn’t unfamiliar.
Unable to understand the current situation, I looked around and saw middle-aged foreigners who appeared to be a couple standing with pale faces, watching me.
*Foreigners… Did buyers discover me?*
As I tried to hurriedly get out of bed, excruciating pain surged through my left leg again.
“Dietrich, you must be careful! Your leg is….”
Unable to finish her words, the middle-aged lady gasped. From her reaction, I realized that something unbelievable had happened to me.
No way… *that* Dietrich?
There was a novel that had recently become a small joy in my life. It was a decent academy romance novel that gave me subtle vicarious satisfaction, as I had never felt joy in school life from my school days until university graduation.
While reading it with such a light heart, there was a character who became an obstacle to enjoying the campus life in the novel while emptying my mind.
The name was Dietrich. Precisely the villain in the novel I had possessed.
In the early part of the novel, calling Dietrich a villain was somewhat ambiguous. Because without directly harming the protagonist, Roxanne, he merely circled around her from one step behind.
He was slightly irritating and gloomy, but an ambiguous character that one couldn’t quite pin down. However, from the middle to latter half of the novel, continuous misfortunes piled upon Dietrich, eventually leading him to board the express train to villainy and run rampant.
One day, claiming that she “had stolen everything from him,” Dietrich sneaked into Roxanne’s dormitory to harm her, but was barely stopped by a member of the Ducal family. In the end, the maid who helped Dietrich enter the protagonist’s dormitory committed suicide by poison, and Dietrich jumped off the Academy, bringing the role of Dietrich in the novel to a close.
After finishing Part 1, where the novel that started refreshingly as a romance fantasy ended as an academy tragedy, I couldn’t steady my heart that had gone completely cold and eventually abandoned the novel.
Rather than the mere fact that someone died in the novel being sad, the process depicted throughout the novel of Dietrich’s path to choosing to jump was too heartrending to simply dismiss as the downfall of a villain.
Registered as the lost daughter of the Ducal family through the orphanage director’s scheming, Dietrich experienced subtle discrimination due to an appearance completely unlike the people of the Ducal family. Then the true Ducal lady, Roxanne, appeared, after which Dietrich was miserably banished. Even after barely entering the Academy, he spent his days unable to fit in with anyone.
And at the mere age of eighteen, he died jumping off a building, alone.
*No, did he really do something so wrong that he deserved to die like this?*
At the utterly unacceptable development, I repeatedly scrolled up and down. It felt like too excessive a fate to die like this.
Nevertheless, the characters in the novel seemed quite satisfied with Dietrich’s death.
Upon learning of Dietrich’s death, Roxanne reminisced that the nightmare circling her seemed to have finally ended. However, she still sobbed that on rainy days, she could hear the sound of Dietrich limping closer on the leg injured in an accident. Even in death, he was remembered as a gloomy and unpleasant figure.
However, feeling pity for a character in the novel didn’t mean I wanted to live Dietrich’s life.
So—long black hair, blue-gray eyes, circling the protagonist with a gloomy expression and a limp, cast out to a remote baron’s territory for deceiving the Ducal family that ruled the Thromple Empire, with no money, no title, nothing—I had absolutely no desire to possess that Dietrich.
So in short… I’m fucked.