Since descending into this world, Subaru had died many times, through countless deaths.
For the vast majority of living things, life is a one-shot deal—and considering that, Subaru, who had already earned his tenth attempt at the challenge, was something of a veteran when it came to death.
And through that repeated, involuntary familiarity with dying, Subaru alone had developed a sharpened sensitivity that only he could feel.
—A nerve honed to clearly sniff out the unmistakable approach of "death" right before his eyes.
"You sure have a habit of doing whatever you please, all of you."
That voice, carrying a bone-deep pressure, poured down from the sky to the earth below.
When Subaru looked up, he saw icicles hanging from the sky like a canopy, their sharp tips pointing downward—and presiding over them was a tiny, tiny shadow.
Only by squinting, only by focusing deliberately, did he make out that it was a cat-like creature with grey fur.
Except it held its upper body upright as if walking on two legs, stretched its short little arms as far as they would go and folded them, flicked an abnormally long tail, and bore a pink nose—a truly rare existence.
Facing a being that wielded human speech, Petelgeuse and the
It was the first time he had ever seen the spirit—Pack—so openly display his rage. And from the aftershock of that rage alone, he could feel the world dying.
"...Pack."
The floating spirit—Pack's—surrounding air turned white with mist, and the nearby forest began to crack and transform with the sound of shattering. The trees dyed their green to white, their leaves, branches, and trunks frosting over with ice as mana was sapped away, leaving them withered and lifeless.
The same effect began to spread across the ground. First the vegetation died, then the soil, and then that creeping hand of frost reached toward Subaru and the Witch Cult standing upon that earth.
His skin stung, a burning pain searing across his entire body. A growing sense of weakness welled up from deep inside, breathing became an ordeal, and his consciousness began to blur and drift.
Mana drain—a phenomenon Subaru knew intimately. The debilitation caused by the forcible extraction of mana by a spirit. What had once been performed only on Subaru was now being executed by an enraged Pack on a global scale.
In truth, Subaru's vision—strained against his groans—saw Petelgeuse with cold sweat beading on his forehead, stumbling backward, while the kneeling cultists gasped for air like fish desperate for oxygen.
Pack looked down upon them, twitched his adorable little nose with a "hmph," and spoke: "The Witch Cult. —Four hundred years, and you haven't changed a bit. In every age, you always do the thing that makes me most sad."
Moving his dark eyes, Pack's gaze locked onto a single point in the forest.
Following his line of sight, Subaru could see that it was the only space in the area still untouched by Pack's mana drain.
Surrounded by frost and decay, there was one spot where green still remained—a clearing where
"Ah, poor little Lia. ...You died without understanding anything at all, didn't you."
A sudden, barely concealed note of grief crept into a voice that had been kept deliberately flat.
Pack gazed at Emilia with a lonely, sorrowful expression, then slowly turned his eyes to the surviving people scattered on the ground before him: "The crime of taking my daughter's life is severe. Do not expect a single one of you to leave here alive."
"A spirit—what right does a spirit have to—what right what right what right—right—right—right to speak!? A half-devil who failed the trial is nothing but filth! It is your 'sloth' that should be blamed for failing to protect that wretch! Ah! Ah! Ahhhh! My—brain—is—shaking—shaaaaakkkkeee!!!"
Facing down Pack's terrifying pronouncement, Petelgeuse threw his hands toward the sky, spittle flying from his mouth. His maddened, bloodshot eyes rolled wildly and asymmetrically as his killing intent swelled.
Knowing full well the enemy spirit's power was formidable, Petelgeuse chose to resist. This was not a choice born of courage—because for what he held dear, the relative balance of power was utterly meaningless.
For— "All phenomena, all events that can occur, are recorded in the Gospel! The
—Die loving. Perish loving.
For Petelgeuse, his faith in the Witch was nothing other than the act of answering her love, and he believed with unshakable conviction that demonstrating his love through action was the absolute truth of the world.
All acts of love toward the Witch took absolute priority, and whoever interfered with such acts would be broken before love. —Because love for the Witch triumphed over everything.
"The half-devil shall die! And you shall receive the retribution of your sloth! Die in devotion to the Witch's favor! To the love that makes your heart tremble!"
He flailed his arms, screamed wildly, and stomped his feet.
From above, Pack's eyes gazed down upon the spectacle of Petelgeuse's frenzy on the ground with absolute cold. It was not the gaze of pity or of anger—it was the penetrating stare of one who saw no value in its subject whatsoever.
And as Petelgeuse, bathed in that gaze, reached his hands overhead in a grand, attention-grabbing gesture—behind him, among the kneeling black-robed figures, movement stirred— '**Die.**' —Raining down without mercy, blades of ice pierced into the backs of the black-robed cultists, punched through their abdomens, and pinned them to the earth like specimens.
Skewered through the torso, pinned to the ground through hands and feet, the black-robed figures died uniformly without even a groan. From the wounds left by the ice stakes, a wave of crystallization surged inward, freezing their contorted bodies in place. A line of ice sculptures formed amid the forest.
Without a single preparatory motion, Pack had snuffed out nearly twenty lives in an instant, his gaze not wavering once. But Petelgeuse, whom Pack noticed from the corner of his eye clutching his own head, was no different.
Using the brief window in which Pack's attention had shifted away from him—the very disciples he had sent to their deaths now serving as literal sacrificial pawns, to which he did not so much as glance— "—My brain is... shak... ing."
The instant Subaru saw Petelgeuse's lips twist into a ghastly grin, the madman's shadow exploded outward.
In his toppling, ninety-degree-tilted field of vision, Subaru saw black hands burst forth from Petelgeuse's shadow in layer after layer, surging toward Pack, who hovered in midair.
Black hands that, given his power, should have been impossible to avoid. Yet Pack, arms still crossed, paid no heed to the approaching threat whatsoever. —He couldn't even see it.
"Pack—!"
'**Stay quiet, Subaru. —You are the exception.**' Trying to shout a warning, Subaru was cut off by Pack's calm voice. His warning never reached the spirit, and the approaching black hands closed around the tiny body like a crushing fist.
'**Mmgh?**' Pack's small body was barely large enough to be concealed by a single adult palm.
With seven black hands converging upon it, his form was completely swallowed from Subaru's view. More to the point, any one of those hands possessed enough force to tear a human body apart with ease.
He may have been a spirit, but what would happen when subjected to that brute physical force—especially when the owner of those black hands was none other than Petelgeuse, the Witch Cult's fanatic.
"Negligent! Remiss! Which is to say—sloth! You should have struck me down immediately! You possessed the power, yet you failed to do what was necessary! That is what produced this result! This! Thiiis! Thiiiiiiis!!!"
The 'Unseen Hands' visible only to Subaru crushed inward upon Pack's enclosed body.
Within that dense, singular mass of black, the spirit's form began to be erased by the force of malice— '**How pointless.**' In the next instant, the black mist was blown apart in a flash, and Subaru saw.
'**To borrow the Witch's name with only this much— you're four hundred years too early. If you truly intend to kill me—**' Trees, unable to withstand the burden, snapped and collapsed; amid the fallen timber, a long tail lashed through the air. The black-robed figures, already transformed into ice statues, were reduced to splinters and powder—and the foreleg that had delivered the blow drove the earth into a world of absolute zero.
A single quiet exhalation was itself equivalent to a blizzard, and within the white haze, gleaming golden eyes surveyed the dying ground below with merciless light.
What stood there was— '**
The Lord of Frost—the one who had once collapsed the mansion and driven Subaru to his death in another world. This was his true, magnificent manifestation.
Having transformed into a colossus that demanded one to look up, the grey beast gazed down upon the world in the most literal sense.
The cold intensified in a single surge the moment the beast appeared, and as the field of vision bleached white, even keeping one's eyelids open became painful.
"————"
But Subaru's consciousness was no longer focused on that faint pain.
Dumbfounded, or perhaps transfixed, he could only stare at the beast in mute disbelief—the beast so enormous that nothing short of craning his neck skyward could fit it into his field of vision.
"What... did you..."
A trembling voice pierced suddenly through the frozen world.
The trembling was not caused by the needle-sharp cold. The speaker, like Subaru, had no room left in their mind to register something as trivial as the cold.
"What did you bring here!?"
Screaming, craning his head upward, shaking his head in fury—that was Petelgeuse.
His dry lips had split vertically from the force of that shriek, a trickle of seeping red blood—but even that froze in the span of a single blink, stanching the wound instantly.
With wind howling that seemed as though closing one's eyes even once would mean never opening them again, Subaru turned over Petelgeuse's words in his mind and looked up at the beast once more.
No matter how many times he thought it through, there was only one answer to Petelgeuse's words.
In other words— "Pack... is that you...?"
'**Rather obvious when you look, isn't it? Though I suppose saying that is a bit cruel.**' To Subaru's hoarse question, the grey beast moved its far-too-large mouth to respond. The mere act of forming each word conjured a gale—and the enormous beast, neither laughing nor expressing sarcasm, confirmed Subaru's suspicion.
At the same time, Subaru arrived at a single realization.
—Why, at the end of the last loop, he had died such a death.
"It... can't be..."
While Subaru sat stunned into silence, Petelgeuse forced the words out in a strained whisper.
He placed the fingers of his right hand into his mouth one by one, biting off the tips without hesitation—as though trying to forcibly anchor a consciousness that was receding from the cold.
"It can't be, can't be, can't be, can't be, can't be, can't be! A mere spirit! A spirit—to possess... to possess this kind of power is impossible! Power like this..."
'**—
A froth of blood spilled from the corner of his lips, and Petelgeuse's wide-open eyes froze in place.
What had cut through the madman's wall of denial was a single whispered word from Pack. The instant Petelgeuse heard what sounded like a name, he clamped his mouth shut.
'**If you're with the Witch Cult, you ought to understand what that name means.**' Pack pressed the question as if pushing forward Petelgeuse's stalled thoughts. The madman's reaction was dramatic.
With the sound of something hard shattering, Petelgeuse spat something out. What he had ejected was a white fragment—his back molar, broken from biting down too hard. And then— "Despicable...!!"
Bloodshot eyes glaring at Pack, Petelgeuse drooled blood from his mouth, staining his chin and the neck of his robe crimson— "To even speak that name is abhorrent! Ahhhh! You knowless, foolish, pitiful vessel of sloth! Before me—before us of the Witch Cult—to invoke the name of a fallen Witch other than the Witch of Envy, Satella—!!!"
Capillaries burst, painting his eyes a deep crimson. Shedding tears of blood from the corners of his eyes, the madman pointed his maimed, fingerless hand at Pack while spraying blood-flecked foam— "You are mocking the time—our faith, our love—that we have devoted!"
'**—Don't lecture a mere spirit on the subject of time, when you've only been alive for a few decades.**' Pack's cold retort fell upon Petelgeuse as the madman stamped his feet. The spirit's golden eyes blazed with light.
That alone was enough to halt Petelgeuse's thrashing movements. No—not voluntarily. He was being forcibly frozen, starting from the tips of his toes.
Lying on his side, his vision white with haze, Subaru watched his sworn enemy draw near to death.
The freezing Petelgeuse must have realized his end was at hand. In the face of that death, he looked up at Pack with blazing eyes— "The depth of faith has nothing to do with time! Don't lump me together with lazy creatures like you, who waste most of your infinitely vast existence in idleness! Ahhhh, my brain, is, shaaaking, sha-shaking-shaking-shaaaaking!!!"
Even as his annihilation loomed before him, not a single crack appeared in Petelgeuse's fanaticism.
For Subaru—who knew the terror of the absolute phenomenon called "death" better than anyone—Petelgeuse's attitude was, without question, beyond all reason.
To maintain one's sense of self so unyieldingly in the face of death—this was nothing less than proof of a madness that was utterly, purely genuine.
'**Death isn't even a punishment for you. —That's exactly why I despise you.**' "The trial has been fulfilled! Sooner or later, my body will arrive at the side of the revered Witch, and I shall join her ranks... Ahh, I so look forward to... that day!!"
Arms spread wide, face turned skyward, Petelgeuse let out a cackling, unhinged laugh.
The blizzard intensified, its howling wind painting his gaunt body white. Gradually, his voice slowed, his movements grew sluggish, his presence began to recede. And still, Petelgeuse did not stop laughing—until the moment that laughter cut off, his expression remained one of radiant, transcendent madness.
'**He got away, laughing.**' Muttering, the grey beast swung a foreleg and shattered Petelgeuse's frozen statue.
In a single blow, the body was split into upper and lower halves; the falling upper torso was crushed by the weight descending upon it. The remaining lower abdomen was already buried among the fragments of the black-robed figures who had perished earlier—his death was beyond question.
—Just as Pack had said, even in death, they had not managed to break his will.
The hated enemy lay shattered, his life cruelly extinguished before Subaru's eyes—and yet what filled Subaru's chest was nothing but an overwhelming sense of emptiness.
This was the man he had hated so deeply, the man he had wanted to kill. The man Subaru had believed to be the root of everything, the epicenter of every problem. If only he could kill that man, everything would surely fall into place.
But how had things actually turned out?
Petelgeuse was defeated, and the threat of the Witch Cult could be said to have been eliminated.
But
Subaru himself, faced with the deaths of both, had tried to abandon responsibility and throw his life away—but could not even manage that. His enemy was felled by another's hand for vengeance—and that enemy's spirit remained unbroken.
In the end, he had accomplished nothing. That was the sole result of this ordeal.
'**Now then—**' While Subaru was crushed by his own helplessness, Pack—who had quietly witnessed Petelgeuse's final moments—gazed down at him.
Now, realizing once more that this colossus was Pack, Subaru felt the full weight of the beast's enormity. The knights and the Sage Council who had seen Pack in the royal castle and trembled in fear—he had watched them with the detachment of someone observing strangers.
'**Shall we... talk?**' —Now, he understood their terror with aching clarity.
From the cold, his consciousness was already fading.
All the symptoms of the pain that had been raging inside him moments ago had vanished somewhere. The battered spine, the shattered ribs, the fragments of bone that had pierced his organs—none of it could be felt.
He was hearing the footsteps of death approaching. Before those quiet, dark footsteps, even something as trivial as the sensation of pain receded into the distance.
But— '**If you thought I'd let you fade away that easily, you're gravely mistaken.**' "—ghk!!"
In the midst of the cold, the drowsiness that had been pulling his eyelids shut was shattered as the distant pain receptors were ignited in a searing blaze of agony.
His throat constricted by the violent pain, Subaru looked toward the source—and saw that his right leg, from the knee down, had been pierced through with thin needles of ice, shish-kebab style.
The visual information from the wound reached his brain, and his hypersensitive mind propagated the pain signals throughout his entire body. Blood exploded behind his eyes; his vision flooded red. Pain? Saying it hurt would be an understatement. It transcended pain entirely—it was a hell born within his own body.
'**Subaru, you have committed three sins.**' The grey beast continued speaking as though nothing had happened, looking down upon Subaru who writhed and screamed in agony.
It had grown to titanic size, its mouth lined with rows of razor-sharp fangs, even its voice entirely transformed—and yet that tone had not changed a single degree. That, in itself, was terrifying.
As Subaru tried to scatter meaningless thoughts through his mind to distract himself from the pain, Pack swung his long tail, knocking aside frozen trees— '**The first is breaking your contract with Lia. For a spirit arts user, the weight of a bound promise—you seem to understand that far too little. You shattered that contract so carelessly, and you have no idea how deeply it wounded Lia's heart...**' The instant the final word left his mouth, the tip of Subaru's left foot was skewered.
The ice stake that had entered through the sole of his foot punched out through the knee, then—while still lodged inside Subaru's body—branched outward, raking through muscle fibers and nerves, rupturing the pink flesh from the inside.
—Pain conquered his brain.
He couldn't see. Couldn't hear. Couldn't understand. Didn't want to understand. Hurt, hurt, hurt, hurt, hurt, hurt, hurt.
'**The second is returning despite Lia's request. Without that, the Witch Cult would have held back a while longer, and there would have been more time before the fog arrived. Without that, there might have been things that could still have been saved.**' Like the black-robed figures, Subaru's outstretched hands were pinned to the ground above him by icicles driven through his palms. The difference from their fate was that the ice stake—its sharp cross-section still visible—had driven through the back of his hand and then traveled upward along the arm, cleanly severing flesh, bone, blood vessels, and nerves from wrist to mid-bicep, leaving the interior exposed to the air.
'**And the third is that you let Lia die.**' Every wound froze shut simultaneously. The pain that had been grinding away at Subaru's soul like a file was abruptly swept away.
The searing, magma-like agony was suddenly stolen, and Subaru—who had forgotten how to breathe—convulsed his lungs and throat, desperately gasping for oxygen.
He panted for a while before finally grasping the trick to breathing again.
As his lungs expanded and oxygen flowed through his body and brain, consciousness slowly began to return.
He had believed until just now that pain and despair and suffering were lesser things compared to death—but that thought had now utterly vanished.
Pain, death, fear—all of those things that humans recoiled from possessed the equal power to break a fragile human named
In a world where the tears forming at the corners of his eyes instantly turned to frozen droplets, Subaru recognized that his limbs had already reached an irreversible state.
Frozen solid around the wounds, they were now one with the ground. If he tried to force movement, his shoulders or thighs would likely detach with minimal effort.
In truth, even to his own eyes it was obvious that he was essentially a scarecrow, his limbs connected in appearance only.
'**—In accordance with our contract, I will now proceed to destroy this country.**' To Subaru, whose consciousness had begun to grasp his own approaching death, Pack delivered the declaration.
This was the first time since arriving with rage burning inside him that Pack showed a glimpse of an emotion clearly distinct from anger.
'**I shall bury everything under ice and snow, and offer it up as a tribute to Lia.**' "...How... could..."
'**Whether that child would be pleased or not is irrelevant. What has been decided—what has been promised—cannot be broken. Even if it is a contract made with oneself.**' Responding to Subaru's incoherent whisper, Pack continued with the word 'but'— '**I know I won't be able to fulfill it. Even if I were to spread this world of ice across the entire land, covering it all— Reinhardt will certainly stand in my way. The Sword Saint. I cannot defeat him.**' Uttering the name of the red-haired hero, Pack murmured as if lamenting the disparity in their strength.
Those words—that meaning—were something Subaru could not believe. Even a being as overwhelmingly powerful as Pack declared he had no chance of victory against the Sword Saint.
Knowing this, knowing he would be cut down midway, and yet refusing to stop—that stubbornness, that resolve— "Why... won't you..."
'**—Lia, Emilia, is my reason for existing.**' Pack answered Subaru's unspoken question.
Rubbing his great snout against the ground as if trying to hide his face from Subaru's view, twisting his enormous body, Pack spoke in a voice tinged with something sorrowful: '**There is no meaning to my existence in a world without that child. If that's the case, then let my tantrum erase the world. —Everything about me ended the moment she died.**' Shaking his great head as he finished speaking, the wind's fury suddenly intensified.
The cold sharpened painfully, piercing skin, freezing eyelids, and beginning to freeze the blood flowing through his veins. —The end was near.
'**If you were to freeze gradually, from fingertips to extremities—where exactly would a person die? Are you curious, Subaru?**' '————' '**Silence, I'll take as agreement. And as for the answer—why don't you find out for yourself.**' Slowly, ever so slowly, the frost began to erode his body.
Beyond the already-frozen limbs, his shoulders and upper thighs began to freeze, and with that came the same level of destruction his limbs had endured—accompanied by searing pain and total despair.
'**—The fog has arrived. Before you die, you've graciously summoned something troublesome, haven't you.**' If madness could grant release from this pain, then please—shatter his sanity now. Tear it apart, rip it open, shatter his heart into pieces. Otherwise— '**The Sloth—ah, I suppose they're calling it the
Gradually the screaming faded, replaced by laughter—cackling, unhinged laughter.
Clack-clack-clack. Clack-clack-clack.
He recognized that laughter. It was the voice of the man he had hated enough to die for.
Where was it coming from? He needed to know—his consciousness scattered in pursuit of the source of that laughter.
And then he realized.
Clack-clack-clack—the uncontrollable laughter was coming from his own mouth.
The pain became meaningless. Pleasure began to dominate his brain.
The world of madness expanded, and he stepped into a landscape so distorted it was almost pleasant.
The cackling wouldn't stop.
It was laughter at his own expense.
Rem—dead. Emilia—killed by his hand. His own life—squandered for nothing.
Ah, truly, how wonderfully, how perfectly— '**—How slothful, Subaru.**** With a soft snap, his consciousness cut off.
And what severed was surely not just consciousness or life.
Something far more fundamental—something he had clung to and managed to hold together through sheer desperate will—had just, with a gentle snap, broken apart.
With a quiet, clean snap, it had broken.