The Dialectic of Master and Slave - Chapter 243

Volumes 1-4 + Side Stories of DMS are available uncensored on ko-fi! ※ This work contains depictions of coercive relationships, explicit language, and other graphic content. Reader discretion is advised.

Anxiety clawed at him. He had to find the answer quickly, had to reassure her—

—or she might hurt herself.

That fork she’d been using for dessert could plunge into her throat. The shattered edge of a plate might slit her wrists. The corner of the chair’s backrest could—

“Why are you stopping me? Don’t interfere.”

The memory of Jaha’s face—worn-out like a tattered doll, pleading with him—sent a chill through his core. Once through that hell had been enough.

His heart plummeted, then surged back up in violent throbs. He squeezed his eyes shut, then open, trying to steady himself. When he spoke again, it was with forced calm.

“If it’ll help, I’ll have restraints brought to bind my hands. Would that make you feel safe?”

Logically, it should work. Before he’d reached out, there’d been no issue. But this was a shallow, linear solution—one that missed the truth: Jaha wasn’t afraid of his actions, but of him, his very existence. Unfortunately, he didn’t realize that.

“…That won’t be necessary.” Jaha’s voice was steadier now. “Just stay where you are. Don’t come closer. Speak from there.”

So she doesn’t need me restrained?

A flicker of hope sparked in his chest as he studied her. She wasn’t trembling—but only because he’d stayed behind the invisible line she’d drawn. Cross it, and she’d panic again.

The clarity of her rejection was staggering, like all the blood in his body had drained to his feet.

What do I do?

He couldn’t just let her go, yet he had no idea how to fix this. For the first time, he felt like a broken tool, useless in his own hands.

“If you have nothing else to say, I’ll leave now.”

Jaha’s declaration sent his mind reeling.

I can’t let her walk away.

Acting on reflex, he grabbed her wrist—not to force or intimidate, but with the desperation of a drowning man clinging to driftwood. To Jaha, though, the distinction didn’t matter.

She screamed, wrenching away so violently her chair clattered to the floor.

“Jaha, I didn’t mean—!” he stammered, but it was too late.

“I—I told you not to touch me.”

The contact exploded the trauma that Jaha had been suppressing under extreme stress and terror. The pain she had forced down to keep from breaking, to survive, seeped out like blood from a split skull.

“I told you not to be fooled. I said you’d regret it.”

The girl who had once shed bloody tears—the past Yoo Jaha who had lived through a vanished world—spoke to the present Jaha. Her voice was impossible to decipher, whether mocking or pitying. Perhaps it was both.

“You promised not to touch me, so how could you—right away—!”

Jaha glared at him with bloodshot eyes.

The reason she had tried to leave quietly, to end things like this, wasn’t because she was some saint or because she loved this man madly.

It was because Jaha herself was a Jenga tower on the verge of collapse. A fragile structure barely holding its form, one that would crumble at the slightest touch—so she had wanted to avoid any shock.

If she faced this nightmare of a reality head-on, she wouldn’t be able to stay sane. That’s why she had tried to brush it off and move on.

“Why couldn’t you keep even one promise? Why? Why! Am I that much of a joke? Then again, you probably don’t even see me as human!”

Frozen by the razor-sharp intensity of Jaha’s fury, he missed his chance to explain. By the time he managed to move his stiffened tongue, Jaha was already unleashing her rage again.

“I don’t get it at all. What do you even want? If time was reversed and everything was undone, we should’ve just lived our lives without crossing paths. So why did you approach me again? Some new game? Am I just a toy for you to play with, clueless as I am?”

Tears fell like rain from her eyes, brimming with resentment.

The way she struggled to appear as threatening as possible wasn’t intimidating—it was unbearably pitiful, heartbreakingly tragic, and it left him suffocating, his chest torn apart.

That’s not it.

It’s not like that….

“You’re not even human. After what you did to me before, and now that that nightmare of a time has been undone, you show up in front of me again to mess with me? Even for someone shameless and cruel, there’s a limit—how can you have the audacity?!”

He wanted to wipe away her tears, but he knew she would recoil if he reached out. So instead, he quietly clenched his fingers, which twitched as if trying to flee.