I moved through the narrow path, keeping my steps as light as I could manage, my heart beating hard in my chest. A few minutes later I burst out into the open and immediately stopped dead.
No.
No no no no no.
I stepped back into the shadows instinctively, and as my eyes adjusted to what was in front of me, panic started crawling through my chest fast.
There was absolutely no way I was getting through that.
The entire courtyard was crawling with soldiers, spread across the perimeter in tight formation, armed to the teeth and sweeping their eyes over every inch of the area like statues that had just learned how to breathe. How they hadn't thought to check the back of the mansion was completely beyond me, but that wasn't the point right now.
This was a problem. A massive, catastrophic problem.
I couldn't get spotted trying to slip away. If I got caught, it was over, I'd be locked inside this mansion until the academy arc started, and if that happened then I was as good as dead, because I already knew exactly how that played out.
Amael, the character whose body I now occupied, was known in the game as the Agent of Bad Endings, but there was a way he could die long before he ever got the chance to earn that title. I'd found it myself, back when I was still just a player, a hidden trigger buried inside the entrance examinations on the very first day of the academy arc, a loophole that almost nobody knew about.
And it worked. I'd used it.
But killing Amael early came with a cost I hadn't anticipated, because that one decision set off a chain reaction I never saw coming. Christina, one of the main heroines of the game and honestly one of my favorites, ended up becoming the Ultimate Villain of the second act instead.
I still remembered the shock of it. The sheer disbelief sitting in my chest as I watched the story spiral into something I'd never expected.
I'd thought I was being clever. I thought I'd broken the game wide open and earned myself a clean slate. But no, all I'd actually done was hand the protagonist a different nightmare to deal with, one that was significantly worse than anything Amael's minor villainy would've caused. The probability of the protagonist stumbling down that same route was slim, sure, but with the kind of luck I'd been carrying around lately, he'd probably trigger it without even trying, and then sweet, lovable Christina would become a nightmare all over again.
Right after I died, of course.
"Tsk."
I clicked my tongue and narrowed my eyes, scanning the area carefully. The soldiers were everywhere, covering the perimeter, the corners, every possible angle, with no visible gaps and no obvious way through.
Then a different thought hit me, and my stomach dropped.
The guards posted outside my room.
If they decided to check on me and realized I wasn't there, the whole mansion could already be on high alert right now, and I wouldn't even know it yet.
"Just kill me already," I muttered, and my knees hit the ground before I even realized I'd stopped standing.
I couldn't catch a single break. I was stuck on both sides with no good options, because even waiting for the security to ease up after the party carried real risk if the guards back at my room had already sounded the alarm.
"Alright, what do I do," I said to myself, though it wasn't really a question because I didn't have an answer. My head was completely empty. I wasn't some overpowered protagonist with plot armor and abilities that bent the rules of reality. I was a helpless villain sitting on a countdown timer with no idea when it hit zero.
Why couldn't I have reincarnated as the protagonist? At least then I'd have had a fighting chance.
I took a slow breath and let it out.
"Alright. Let's do this."
A plan was starting to come together in my head, and it wasn't a good one. It could go wrong in about a dozen different ways and get me killed before I even understood what had happened, but at this point I didn't see another option.
What was the worst that could happen?
I winced the second the thought crossed my mind.
I really shouldn't have said that.