——The moment he was dragged through the door, what Subaru felt was a sensation of weightlessness, as though heaven and earth had flipped upside down.
"——Owgh!?"
He landed on his back against hard ground, the impact wrenching the air from his lungs. His throat rasped as he gasped for breath. Carried by the momentum, he rolled across the floor until he slammed into a wall and finally came to a stop. Shaking his head to clear the disorientation of being thrown, Subaru opened his stinging eyes and— "
He called out the name of the girl he hadn't even gotten to say goodbye to, but by now those words could never reach her. The Door Crossing had been completed, and a barrier that could never be crossed had sprung up between them. Her rejection was vast and deep—Subaru's voice would never reach her.
"Why do I always… every single time…!"
Why was it that he could only recognize his mistakes after failing? Only after choosing the worst, most contemptible option did he finally see what he'd done wrong?
All he wished for was to draw in the best outcome, the best future—so why was he always not enough? Too weak? Too stupid?
"Why do you have the Gospel…? What even are you…!?"
The black-bound book she'd been holding—the Gospel's existence had blown open the distance between them for good.
Until now, Subaru had firmly believed that within those brief moments, he and Beatrice had built something genuine between them.
Even if they bickered at each other, even if they pulled disgusted faces the moment they saw each other—Subaru alone believed that something existed between them that went deeper than all that.
It was a delusion. It was arrogance. It was the pinnacle of misunderstanding and presumption.
What Subaru had stubbornly believed to be real was nothing more than self-serving fantasy. Beatrice had harbored nothing but the sentiments her words had laid bare. She had only gone along with Subaru because the Gospel commanded it—because it was her duty. In her heart, she found him alien and repulsive.
"…Is that really how it was?"
Even as Subaru's weak heart still clung to the hope of denial, Beatrice's voice had severed it all with brutal finality.
She had affirmed Subaru's imagination—that their bond was false. That nothing about Subaru's existence had ever stirred her heart. That everything between them had existed purely out of obligation.
"That you laughed like that, got angry, tried to protect me… all of it, every last bit, was just scripted lies…?"
Impossible, his feeble heart still wanted to believe. But the tears in Beatrice's voice at their final moment cast doubt on the truth of her words.
Everything—drawing any conclusion right now was still premature.
"Even if it's what the book says or whatever, I remember you saving me… that's an unchanging fact, and it's a debt only I know about."
In the loops that began at the mansion, Subaru had been saved by Beatrice time and again.
When he needed Return by Death to gather his thoughts, he visited her forbidden library constantly. When he was afflicted by the curse of the mabeast, she literally saved his life by granting his wish to break the curse. In a looped world that had already vanished—where
That greatest act of kindness no longer existed in this world. It lived only inside Subaru's chest.
"That time… I was happy."
When Subaru believed himself abandoned by every last ally—she had saved him.
When he saw both Rem and Ram as enemies, when he couldn't read Roswaal's scheming, when he couldn't even bring himself to trust
That fleeting, temporary contract had saved Subaru in ways beyond words. It was a debt he could never fully repay.
"I'll pay you back. Whether you lent me your power of your own free will, or out of respect for that book's will—I don't even know. So let me find out."
He could no longer hurl questions at her, her will to reject him already hardened and clear. That meant Subaru's resolve held no meaning in this world—it would have to be carried over to the next.
He raised his right hand. Three fingers missing. A shoulder and hip drawn taut with pain. A head that had been slammed. A tongue slightly shorter than it should be. Every last one of these—pain he must never forget.
Behind his closed eyelids, Rem appeared. Then Petra, Frederica, Beatrice turning her back to him, and finally Emilia.
——Everything Subaru had failed to grasp in this world.
To reclaim it, he would take whatever action he could. He would redo what Beatrice's refusal had denied him, and once more throw himself into the spiral.
"————"
He extended his shortened tongue and steeled himself once more to bite it clean through.
Thinking back on the one attempt at self-destruction that had gone wrong sent pain surging through him and made his blood run cold. Cowardice crept in; his legs trembled. Words like "resolve" were nothing more than wordplay—worthless before the end.
Suppressing those dark, negative emotions, he pushed past the ultimate negative feeling of confronting death. And praying that he could rewind far enough to redo everything, Subaru was about to close his eyes for the final moment when— "…Where the hell am I?"
He finally realized that the place he'd arrived at after passing through the Door Crossing was somewhere he'd never seen before.
* * * * * * * * * * It was, for Subaru, an unknown space that didn't resemble any part of the Roswaal mansion he was familiar with.
Damp stone tiles underfoot. Grime-covered walls choked with ivy. Haphazardly arranged desks with rusted metal—tools of some kind scattered everywhere, creating an overwhelming sense of disquiet from the visual information alone.
And above all— "Ugh—!?"
The stench. The moment he registered it, it became impossible to ignore—a foulness so thick it was suffocating.
Different from the rot of kitchen waste, but nothing that could be described as anything other than putrid, it triggered a wave of nausea. Subaru clapped a hand over his mouth and squeezed stomach bile from his empty gut.
Splattering yellowish vomit across the floor, he exhaled raggedly and surveyed his surroundings. The more he looked, the more alien the unknown space became—not just unfamiliar, but fundamentally other.
The room was a dim space paved with stone tiles, roughly twice the size of two guest rooms in the Roswaal mansion. Not spacious, but not cramped either.
In one corner lay scattered desks and mysterious apparatus, while the opposite side—the space that occupied most of the room's area—contained: "Broken desks and… crystals? Fragments of magical ore, maybe? And this hole…"
At his feet lay the wreckage of a destroyed desk and spent magical ore, and beyond them gaped a hole perhaps four meters in diameter. Even setting aside the poor lighting, it was deep enough to be bottomless.
Raising his eyes to the walls, he noticed a faint blue luminescence emanating from moss clinging to the stone surfaces. Like the varieties that grow in clusters in forests, it absorbed ambient mana to glow—a property that, along with starlight, could prevent total darkness in the wooded areas around the mansion.
Conscious of the moss as his only illumination, Subaru crawled across the ground, repulsed by the dampness soaking through his trousers and the slime coating his palms, staring down into the depths of the hole.
A cold, quiet breeze rose from below, carrying with it a stench that could twist the nose—or worse, shatter it entirely.
"Ugh… blagh. Good call not looking inside… What is that smell?"
If this had been the distinctive reek of something once alive, Subaru's imagination might have conjured something even worse than the worst he could envision. But the foulness drifting up wasn't the rot of flesh or water—closer, if anything, to the odor of industrial chemicals.
The kind of searing, unbearable pain that assaults the nostrils when you inhale a potent chemical reagent. What rose from the dim depths of the hole was precisely that kind of non-biological stench.
"——The rest."
Giving up on investigating the hole's bottom both physically and mentally, Subaru wiped his nose and made a conscious effort to breathe through his mouth as he scanned the room.
What stood out were the desk wreckage and magical ore husks at his feet. The iron desk had been subjected to a tremendous impact and crushed flat. The magical ore appeared to have been stacked on top of the desk. Flipping the crumpled wreckage over, he noticed patterns carved into the bent upper portion—engraved, as if gouged into the metal.
"It looks like a magic circle…"
Such things were something of a convention in otherworld fantasy settings, but since arriving in this world, Subaru had never laid eyes on one. Fundamentally, magic in this world operated by channeling through a living being's body to interact with the outside world. Outside of the occasional exception like magical lamps or artifacts, he'd never encountered anything resembling a magic circle.
That made his surprise at finding one no small thing.
"Do they actually work? And even if they do, why would one be placed somewhere like this… what reason could there be…?"
Perhaps it had been designed to activate magic directly from this location, or to receive some kind of remote magical effect. It was also conceivable as a system for continuously performing certain procedures without an active caster.
"In that case, it makes sense why there are spent magical ore husks lying beside it."
The magical ore that had served as an external energy tank had been drained, causing the magic circle to lose its effect—that was the most logical explanation. But what remained unexplained was the hole's true nature and the destroyed desk. There was also the unsettling possibility that the entire room had been rigged to explode when the ritual was interrupted.
Still— "In the end, I'm no closer to figuring out where this place actually is."
An impossibly deep hole of unknown length. A magic circle and magical ore suggesting some manner of ritual. A room reeking of something between rot and chemicals. And in the corner, another desk and tools—Subaru picked up one of the rusted metal implements.
Pliers or nippers of some kind, resembling tools used in plastic model kits. Coated in the same slime that fouled the floor, and more importantly, so weathered from disuse that the mere touch of his fingers sent it crumbling to dust.
Not just the tools but the desks were in the same condition—brittle from age, their legs snapped, barely holding together after being exposed to wind for too long. The lightest weight reduced them to shapeless scrap metal.
There was nothing more to glean. The only thing that stood out was: "The way these were broken, and when they broke—it's quite different from the desk near the hole…"
These had deteriorated over time and eventually collapsed, while the desks near the hole had been violently wrenched apart by obvious destructive force. Judging from the state of the flooring beneath them, that destruction had occurred recently—within the last few days at most.
"A destroyed room… who did this, and why…?"
Speaking the question aloud, Subaru suddenly found the thought itself absurd.
What good was asking such a question? It didn't seem like the kind of problem that yielded to thought. And beyond that, the pile of problems Subaru was already carrying was more than he could hold with both arms.
Stuffing another pebble between the boulders of his burdens—only to accelerate the collapse—was something he had to avoid. More than that, the very act of turning his attention elsewhere felt like a miserable, petty attempt to delay the self-destruction he'd been on the verge of.
Yet even understanding these irresistible feelings of "shame," the alienness of this room refused to release its grip on him. Something tremendously important was right in front of his eyes—— "————"
Clutching an answerless certainty, Subaru turned in a circle, searching for the room's exit. If the Door Crossing had deposited him here, there had to be a way out—there was no possibility of being thrown into a room with no exit.
Sure enough, Subaru found the door through which he'd been violently ejected—a small access hatch set high in the wall, likely for ventilation or some similar purpose.
There was no other door that might serve as an entrance or exit. The proper door, presumably, had been on the opposite side of the room—across the hole, in the unreachable section beyond.
Understanding this fact, Subaru discarded the path of choosing a reasonable escape route. He wiped the sweat from his palms and the mysterious slime onto his trousers, held his breath, and reached up toward the hatch.
The hatch was positioned at a height that required stretching to reach—its size was probably closest to a dumbwaiter. Not too narrow for a person to fit through, but Subaru was hardly slender enough to use it comfortably.
Struggling with the reduced grip of his right hand's missing fingers, he managed to wrench the rusted hatch open with a protesting groan and forced his body into the narrow passage beyond. It was like a ventilation duct. He'd prepared himself for the worst—nests of vermin or rodents—but surprisingly it was relatively clean. Not exactly spotless, but the dust-covered passage was mercifully devoid of any signs of living things.
After roughly three minutes of navigating the tight passage, his crawling grew more fluid with practice. Reaching the endpoint, he found himself connected to another room via the same type of hatch. Descending through it, he did a quick survey of the surroundings, paying the utmost attention to whether any similarly ominous holes existed.
"Unlike the last room. The other one felt like some kind of lab, but this looks more like a waiting room."
About half the size of the first room, halved again. A room designed purely for passing through—it had two doors but no furnishings to speak of. It was, properly, a waiting room.
If only there were magazines and chairs to complete the setup.
"Based on the direction I've been traveling, the door on this side should lead to… yep, just as I thought."
Turning the squeaking doorknob and pushing it open revealed a crumbling floor and a hole spreading right before his eyes. At the near-lethal trap, he let out a small breath and closed the door on purely psychological grounds—it had been doing virtually nothing anyway. The stench had already crept into this room too, and he cursed his slow judgment.
Then, shaking his head lightly, he turned to the opposite door. Beyond this one lay uncharted space—and— "………!"
Unbidden, sweat returned to his palm despite having just wiped it, and cold perspiration trickled down his back.
He didn't know what lay beyond this door. But he did need to imagine the worst-case scenario of what might be waiting on the other side.
"If this is… inside the mansion…"
Even if the moment he opened it, Elsa appeared before him, it wouldn't be strange. And faced with his would-be killer, Subaru had no confidence he could maintain composure.
The searing, savage impulse to die as quickly as possible reminded him—the rage that had ground his teeth to powder had transformed into loathing.
That lunatic had murdered Petra, Frederica, Rem—the mere thought that she might be standing on the other side sent Subaru's brain boiling over with fury.
The cursing desire for her to be there, and the wretched, desperate thirst for her to be absent—he swayed between these two extremes, and Subaru carved a savage grin across his face.
"————"
Whether she was there or not, that deranged emotion could not be betrayed.
Confronted by the world that awaited him at the end of such sanity-deviant thoughts— "————ah"
He witnessed an impossible sight, and in that instant, Subaru lost himself.
* * * * * * * * * * ——Within Subaru's mind, the question of where this unfamiliar space actually was had, in fact, already been answered.
The truth was, there were almost no places in the Roswaal mansion that Subaru had never set foot in. He'd even been allowed free access to the forbidden library. If any unknown possibility remained, it could only be the place beyond the door he'd never dared open twice—the "evacuation route."
The first time, he'd been blocked by a grey-furred spirit. The second time, in this very loop, he'd been forced to retreat when confronting a killer. As a result, Subaru had never once glimpsed what lay beyond that door.
Still, while he harbored suspicion about a string of purposeless rooms, he had no doubts that this place was part of the Roswaal estate.
"Where… am I…?"
Standing in a daze, he could only let a vacant question escape to no one in particular.
Beyond the open door in front of Subaru stretched not a cold underground passage, but thick, lush green trees—dense nature, and strangest of all— "Oh, morning…?"
Looking up through gaps in the canopy, he could see the sun rising. The angle of the sunlight and the feel of the wind told his body it was early morning, sending even more confusion scraping through his brain.
Subaru had returned to the mansion before dusk. Accounting for his subsequent conversations with Petra and Frederica, the Elsa attack, and everything after, his injuries had occurred just before nightfall—and now nearly half a day had passed.
"While I was unconscious…!? That can't—!"
The first time he'd bitten through his tongue to attempt self-destruction, Subaru had lost consciousness. When he'd woken again, regret over his injuries going untreated and his failure to die had pushed everything else aside, but he hadn't considered how long he'd been unconscious in the library.
Beatrice had muttered that the place was "disconnected from the flow of time." He wasn't sure how much credence to give that, but— "If a save overwrite happened in the meantime…!"
That would be catastrophic.
Before that long-dreaded scenario became reality, Subaru had to end his own life as quickly as possible. He had to—but colliding head-on with that sense of urgency was another feeling, asserting its own existence. That feeling screamed: ——He had to confirm where this place was.
He didn't know what purpose that would serve. Looking back at everything that had happened, considering how vicious Return by Death truly was, he should kill himself immediately.
But a terribly calm corner of Subaru's mind, fully aware of his current circumstances, was making this proposal.
"——Damn it!"
Kicking off the ground and spitting, Subaru stepped into the forest before him. Pushing through gaps in the trees at a run, Petra's words surfaced in his mind.
The evacuation route led to the mountains behind the mansion, connecting to a mountain cabin. In case of emergency, escape was arranged through there along with emergency supply bags.
If he believed those words, this place was that cabin, and he was running through the mountain behind the mansion that he'd visited several times before. But— "That cabin? Where are the supply bags? For that matter… what kind of emergency supplies would be stashed in a place that looked like it'd been abandoned for that long…!?"
All he'd seen at that location was an inexplicable space and a mountain of evidence that corroborated his worst premonitions. There was far too little that matched Petra's description. More importantly, if Frederica and Rem had been regularly tending to it, the degree of deterioration made no sense. Subaru knew enough about those two women's capabilities as maids to say so with confidence.
Running through the forest, he also noticed the absence of any slope. A cabin supposedly located in the mountains, built on ground with no incline for over a hundred meters in every direction? He was starting to lose track of where he was, and the growing suspicion that he'd never been seeing it correctly made frustration simmer.
And the tipping point between that frustration and his distrust came sooner than expected.
The trees parted and his view suddenly cleared. Subaru skidded sideways, braking his momentum. The ground—roughly paved, to put it generously—was proof that people passed through here. And the houses, visible at a distance, confirmed this was inhabited land.
When his eyes registered those houses, Subaru's mind was truly seized by shock.
Because this scenery was— "The— the '
Half a day ago, he'd said goodbye to this place, estimating it would take a full day to return.
Obeying an instinctive chill, he raised his right hand. Fingers missing. Incomplete. Return by Death had not triggered. And yet, he was standing in a place he should have no right to be.
"How…? Here? Did the Door Crossing…? Is that why…?"
There was no other answer.
Subaru had been transported from the mansion's forbidden library by Beatrice's hand, sent through the Door Crossing to a corner of the Sanctuary. But why?
"Distance doesn't matter…? No, I've been teleported before—from the mansion to the village stables once…"
That distance was arguably still within acceptable range for teleportation. But the distance between the Sanctuary and the mansion was, frankly, beyond the bounds of imagination and common sense for this kind of long-range transit.
Swallowing the reality of having witnessed power that transcended the supernatural, Subaru scratched his head furiously and forced his thoughts back under control.
"Anyway! If I'm in the Sanctuary right now… Roswaal!!"
He'd race back to that clown's side and wring every last secret out of him.
Roswaal, who had treated Beatrice so well within the mansion. If anyone knew her true nature—knew why she possessed the Gospel—it would be that Demon. He would know everything.
If he knew all of it and had been toying with ignorant Subaru in the palm of his hand, fine. Subaru would smash his face in—even if it meant being burned, even if it meant being cut open—and claw at his throat until everything spilled out.
"————!"
In that moment, forgetting the constraint that he had to die, Subaru ran—his thoughts dyed blood-red with fury—sprinting to the edge of the village, toward the building where Roswaal slept.
The speed of Subaru, now the embodiment of wrath, drove his body through the Sanctuary, muscles forgetting their fatigue and pain, propelling him toward his destination.
He kicked the door open with enough force to splinter it and burst inside, baring his teeth.
"Roswaal! Show your damn face! I've got a mountain of things I want to ask you!"
Subaru stormed in with an air that suggested he wouldn't hesitate to rough up even the attending maid, opening with that savage tirade. No answer came from inside. Subaru strode down the corridor toward the bedroom and flung open the final door— "I won't hold back the white flags or the lies. Every last thing you've been hiding, spill it all—"
He was about to continue, but his voice cut off.
The room where all his concentrated resentment should have been directed was empty.
The person who should have been listening was nowhere to be found.
The fact that Roswaal had vanished sent a fresh surge of fury boiling through his brain. He kicked the bed frame with all his might, adding to the pain in his toes with even more rage, and stormed out of the building.
If Roswaal was anywhere, it would be Lyra's house—meeting with Emilia, or visiting Lyra or Garfiel. The sheer nerve to move the moment Subaru disappeared. It was almost suspiciously well-timed, making Subaru wonder if the man had been faking the severity of his injuries.
Once suspicion took hold, the spiral of negative emotions knew no end. Dominated by those thoughts, Subaru glared at the Sanctuary with sharp eyes—and once again arrived at understanding far too late.
"…Huh?"
It was early morning. As far as Subaru knew, this was the time on the Sanctuary's daily schedule when the residents would begin preparing breakfast and doing laundry. The evacuation refugees were gone, so communal cooking was no longer necessary, but each household still needed to prepare their own meals.
And yet there were no traces of that daily routine whatsoever. No—beyond even that— "It's not just Roswaal and the others… where did everyone go?"
He looked left and right. Not a single soul in sight.
Thinking back, from the moment he'd emerged from the forest and entered the Sanctuary until now, he hadn't passed a single person or seen a single face.
Even accounting for the Sanctuary's relatively small population, the odds of cutting through the village center and seeing no one were staggeringly low.
"There's no way…"
Shaking his head, trying to dispel his bad premonition, Subaru knocked on the nearest house. When no answer came even after that, he opened the door and peered inside. Unoccupied.
A pair of sisters with beast ears had been living here.
Thus emboldened, Subaru peered into every house he could see, one after another—and each time, his expectations were betrayed, layering disappointment atop disappointment.
No one. There was no one anywhere. The human presence had vanished from the Sanctuary.
"Someone! Someone's here, right!? Where did everyone go!?"
The premonition was piling up.
This anxiety, this inexplicable sense of loss—he recognized it.
It was the memory of the carnage that had greeted him when, unprepared, he'd returned too late to the village of Arlam during his confrontation with the
"————AAH!"
Terror surged up Subaru's spine, and he began to run as if pushed by an inexhaustible wave of anxiety. A scream-like sound escaped his lips as he headed for one place only.
At the edge of the village, a grander building than the rest. It was one of the few marks of respect given to the chief who governed this Sanctuary, and now it served as a bed for a certain girl who had been granted its use.
"——EMILIA!!"
Bursting through, Subaru screamed the precious girl's name as he scanned the room.
A silver-haired girl turned to look at him, eyes still groggy. After several blinks, she looked surprised, then— "Good morning, Subaru," she said with a smile that made his chest ache—and— "————"
The place that should have been looking back at him was, once again, empty.
Subaru rushed to the bed and reached out, touching the rumpled sheets. There was no warmth—whoever had slept here had already left some time ago.
Confirming only that, Subaru fled the house, this time heading for his last refuge—a place that might give him answers to this incomprehensible, senseless situation.
"Hah… hah…!"
He was running out of breath. With the taste of blood at the back of his throat, he sprinted to the deepest reaches of the Sanctuary—to the tomb where the
Along the way, he found no sign of Garfiel, who should have been sitting somewhere blocking the path. Whether that was a relief, or whether it would have been better to at least see his familiar face even if it meant being stopped— "No… who am I to…"
He, who had failed to save this man's only sister—what right did he have to show his pathetic face?
Relief at their absence, and yet unbearable anxiety at finding no one anywhere—the fact that he didn't examine this contradiction in his own weakness was hateful and repulsive.
Shaking sentiment off with a toss of his head, Subaru pressed into the tomb.
It wasn't time for the trials to begin, but perhaps some action might come from the Witch's side. Clinging to that hope, Subaru searched for the Witch's form—hoping she might answer his question— "——ha, fu"
The moment he took a step, he felt something pass through his body.
Slowly looking down—beneath his chest, above his lower abdomen, dead center of his torso—there was now a round, fist-sized hole.
"Wh… at…?"
He reached toward the hole. The moment his hand touched it, blood gushed out in a torrent. Instinctively he pressed his palm against it, but the wound went clean through to his back. He couldn't stop both sides, and his already-blood-depleted body couldn't maintain its posture. He collapsed.
—No pain. Can't understand. What just happened.
Death. Dying. He was dying. Death—something he knew well—was right in front of him.
Why—how—like this? Elsa? Following him here? How far was the mansion from the Sanctuary? Beatrice—could it be. The Gospel. Why would she. Rem. Who would. Dying. Scared. What. Who. Emilia. The Witch. The Witch. The Witch— "————ah"
His vision began to blur. The end was approaching.
Death, arriving in a form he hadn't anticipated—Subaru felt no relief at finally being able to die. Only raw, unfiltered terror.
He'd spoken of resolving himself to die, but when death came down a path entirely different from the resolve he'd steeled, this was the result. His mind fractured, his wretched thirst for life screamed, his soul refused to be torn from the world—and still, "death" slowly eroded Subaru, consuming him.
"I… can't… win…"
Nothing but helplessness streamed down his cheeks as Subaru's heartbeat came to a stop.
His awaited death, received in an unwanted form—his death mask was twisted with pain and agony, and the pathos of his dying went entirely unobserved.
"————!"
There was a sound, and something began to chew.