——What roused him to wakefulness was the sensation of water droplets falling onto his face.
The cold of water striking his cheeks in steady rhythm pulled his consciousness upward. As awareness returned, the tangible reality of being alive slowly seeped through Subaru's body.
The most unmistakable part of it was that primal, intense sensation needing no words at all—pain.
"Nngh..."
As if welcoming Subaru back from the brink, the agony that had been cradling both his hands now moved in for a closer embrace. Once that first bolt of stimulus struck, there was no dodging the ones that followed in rapid succession.
His split forehead, his snapped-right arm, his spine battered by the brutal impact—all of them were screaming. But louder than all of those, shrieking above them all— "Hurts... bad..."
When Subaru directed his gaze toward the source of the blinding pain, he saw a tree branch about two fingers thick, laced clean through the vicinity of his right collarbone. Its tip was slick with blood, glistening red. Even if he braced himself for the agony and tried to yank it out, the flesh had clamped tight around it and it wouldn't budge.
At least it had snapped partway through, so if he ignored the visual and the pain, it wouldn't actually hinder his movement all that much.
"This is... a bit much, even for fashion sense..."
Working his uncooperative body however he could, Subaru managed to sit up, then leaned his back against the nearby rock wall and drew a breath. Looking around, he appeared to be near the entrance of some kind of small cave. Morning dew—or something like it—was dripping from the upper edge of the entrance onto his cheek. —Morning dew. He registered that consciously.
"Morning...!?"
His brain processed the merciless passage of time, and a jolt of agony tore through his contorted body. A sensation of his eye-sockets flooding red, and a prickling pain like needles driven into every inch of him. Tears welled in his single eye as, slowly, Subaru's thoughts caught up with reality.
What had happened to him before consciousness faded. He remembered.
"Oh—"
Subaru remembered just how utterly pointless a tragedy his existence had produced.
He lifted his gaze tentatively. Morning sunlight was filtering through gaps in the canopy and slanting into the forest. And on the far side of the slope he had tumbled down—what kind of scene awaited there?
"..."
He held his breath. Harassed by a desperate wish to simply die right now and be done with it, Subaru began crawling toward the other side at a caterpillar's pace.
With the embedded branch limiting his movements, he inched along—slowly, yet the moment was drawing inexorably closer.
The old Subaru would have taken one imagined glimpse of the scene waiting over there and crumbled, refusing to look, fleeing in denial. But the current Subaru was not granted that luxury.
He had to see it through, swallow it down, and forge it into fuel.
That was the duty of
"Hah... hah..."
One step at a time, hauling himself up the slope on the strength of his left side alone. His breath grew ragged, the wound on his dry forehead seeping blood as sweat beaded into it. He smeared it roughly with his sleeve, face streaked with blood and mud, and kept crawling.
He edged past a fragment of the wrecked dragon carriage, circled around a felled tree, and at last his fingertips reached the intended height—returning to the ground from which
"——"
For one instant, hesitation struck.
If he lifted his head and craned his neck to peer over, Subaru would be forced to confront a reality from which there was no escape. He would no longer be permitted to retreat into imagination, to indulge in the fantasy that after he was expelled from the scene, some miracle had occurred and the majority of the evacuees had escaped alive.
"Am I an idiot? ...No, yeah, I am. I'm an idiot."
With the half of his vision that remained, Subaru had unmistakably witnessed the moment Patrasche was torn apart. The moment that loyal earth dragon sacrificed everything for Subaru—that was still burned onto the backs of his eyelids. To flee from that into dreams, into convenient illusions, would be an insult to her, who had burned the last embers of her own life for his sake.
Kindling a stubborn fire in his heart, Subaru summoned every scrap of remaining strength and forced his eyes open. In a posture like gnawing at the earth, he hauled his upper body up, climbed over the obstructing branch swaying in his field of vision, and gazed out past the open forest at the scene of carnage—— "——Huh?"
There was nothing.
Nothing at all.
"Wha... huh, what?"
Subaru had been twisting his face in anticipation of the widespread devastation, but the scene before his eyes refused to compute, and his remaining eye stared blankly.
Scattered fragments of dragon carriage wreckage, uprooted great trees toppled one after another. Deep gouges clawed into the earth, signs of destruction and chaos strewn in every direction.
And yet—the result that would have broken Subaru's heart most completely was absent.
The aftermath of the carnage. The remains of the villagers who had put their very lives on the line to help Subaru escape. The corpses of the loyal earth dragon torn in two.
Nowhere to be found.
"——"
The collision with the great beast had clearly not been a dream or an illusion; the scattered wreckage of dragon carriages proved that. But the *result* of that carnage—the bodies—had been entirely removed from this place.
Shakily, Subaru propped himself against a nearby tree and pushed himself upright. Fortunately, once he'd weathered the initial impact, the injuries to his legs and lower back were nothing worse than bruises and scrapes. Standing up, he steadied his throbbing right arm with his left hand and surveyed his surroundings.
"What the... Where's Patrasche...? Where's... Otto?"
He wasn't exactly hoping to find corpses.
Honestly, it would have been happiest if everyone had survived. But Subaru's body knew better than anyone that conditions were nowhere near favorable enough for such a fairy-tale outcome.
More than that, before he lost consciousness, Subaru had already witnessed multiple lives taken by the great beast's own paws.
The gaunt young man who had fought with everything he had and was still crushed without leaving so much as a scratch on the thing. The woman blown away along with her carriage and killed on impact. The old man snapped like dry kindling by a single swing of a limb, his body left a ghastly ruin.
Every time he recalled those deaths, pain and regret carved away at Subaru's heart. And yet even those deaths he had personally witnessed had been stolen from this place.
"Patrasche... Patrasche...?"
Thinking of lost lives, Subaru called his partner's name in a weak, desperate voice.
He had seen it—the instant her body was torn in two. He had heard it—her high, anguished death scream. Therefore, he held no fragile hope that her life remained.
And yet, even so—finding what was left of her, conveying his apology, giving her a proper send-off—there was no one else who could do that.
His pace was agonizingly slow, his energy nearly spent. His search was sluggish, feeble, and simply scanning the surrounding area consumed over two hours.
And despite all that time, the only things Subaru managed to discover in the vicinity were: "Belongings mixed in with the wreckage... scraps of clothing... and then..."
A staggering amount of bloodstains.
As if corroborating the suspicion that bordered on certainty, the site was strewn with vast traces of blood wherever the beast's claw marks were gouged into the ground. Presumably, a nauseating copper tang hung in the air—but with caked blood clogging his nostrils, Subaru's sense of smell was nonfunctional, and he could detect none of it.
Circumstantial evidence had accumulated to the point of being irrefutable. The only thing missing was conclusive proof, and the manner in which it had disappeared raised questions of its own.
More than that, while he'd been crawling around the perimeter, one question far too belated had been burning itself into his brain. Namely— "...Why am I not dead?"
That the beast had failed to finish Subaru off—that someone in as bad a state as Subaru could still be breathing was something most people would struggle to believe. But even so, not finding a single body upon returning was sloppy in exactly the wrong way. After all, Garfiel's target had been Subaru himself.
Why the beast's claws had turned on the evacuees too was still unclear. Perhaps it was meant as a message to Subaru.
If that was the case, though, the reason the bodies were missing made even less sense.
"Even if they were carried off somewhere..."
There were forty-two evacuees in total. Even if every last one of them had ended up as a corpse, hauling them all away would be logistically impossible. And Patrasche's body—along with the other earth dragons—would have to be added to that count.
"Still..."
He didn't want to imagine it, but the notion that the beast had *eaten* them was equally unrealistic, when it came to sheer numbers. Though the transport theory was still more plausible than the alternative, Subaru couldn't fathom why someone would go to that much trouble just to hide the bodies from him.
Rather than suspecting the great beast of something so roundabout, the real question was why it had simply left without delivering the killing blow to a blood-soaked Subaru.
"——"
Subaru suddenly realized this situation bore a striking resemblance to the depopulation event that had occurred in the "
The prerequisites were different this time, but the outcomes shared much in common. The destruction surrounding him was the aftermath of the great tiger's rampage—that part was unrelated to the disappearance of the evacuees or the beast itself. Setting aside those obvious signs, the utter absence of anyone was eerily similar to that previous scenario.
Which meant— "The... the Sanctuary is in the same state as before...?"
Panting, he arrived at that conclusion. Then Subaru summoned every ounce of his remaining strength and stood once more. After checking his position and the flow of the path, he oriented himself toward the Sanctuary.
——It was the morning of the sixth day.
At the mansion, last night had most likely been the deadline. He couldn't be certain, but if Elsa's attack had come, then a tragedy beyond remedy had already occurred.
And at the Sanctuary as well, something had evidently happened that caused the Garfiel-turned-great-tiger to abandon his finishing blow on Subaru. That was probably what had caused everything in this area to vanish. Why it hadn't affected Subaru, and what its true nature was—both remained completely unknown.
"——"
Which direction to head—his hesitation lasted only an instant.
What flickered through his chest was a faint ache born of tenderness. The people he had left behind in the mansion, presumably under attack. The girl still sleeping there. An attachment and guilt he could not sever.
Gritting his teeth, Subaru shook off his emotions and set off toward the Sanctuary.
With slow, belated steps, moving as if to confirm each one, Subaru made his way toward the Sanctuary.
He intended to find out what awaited him there, to burn into his eyes something worthy of the lives that had been lost, and to search—in the life he meant to spend as penance—for even the slimmest foothold of hope.
※※ ※ ※ ※ ※ ※ ※ ※ ※ ——On the way to the Sanctuary, he passed through what appeared to be the site of a battle between
The traces of wind-blades were carved into every tree trunk in sight. Familiar claw marks gouged deeper still into earth and stone in a tableau of unspeakable savagery.
He glanced around briefly, but sure enough, Ram's body was nowhere to be found either—her corpse, which by all rights should have been here.
If the conjecture that the great tiger was indeed Garfiel held true, then she was the woman he had loved for years. Subaru had wanted to believe that if those feelings ran deep enough, there was a chance...
"That it escalated into a straight-up death match and then it's all 'I love you' this and 'do you love me' that... way too many light novels, seriously."
They had reached a point where neither could yield, and so it devolved into mutual slaughter.
Whatever love or affection had existed between them—how much of a deterrent could those really be? If they truly stopped the hand wielding the weapon, the fight should never have started in the first place.
Once it did start without that, those feelings could never serve as the reason it ended.
"...I'm sorry."
He offered his apology to the figure he could not see—the one who had nonetheless fought with everything she had for his sake.
Her struggle had been in vain. Subaru pushed past his feelings and pressed on toward the Sanctuary. What he needed for the death he intended to die lay ahead.
Accumulating regrets with every step, Subaru drove himself onward toward the Sanctuary. A journey he should have completed before noon—one that had taken barely over ten minutes when riding Patrasche.
Pushing forward with his wounded body at a caterpillar's crawl, Subaru finally reached the outskirts of the Sanctuary as the sky was darkening toward evening.
"Half a day... to finally... get back..."
He had made it. Back here.
The relief nearly made him collapse on the spot, but there was not a shred of satisfaction in it. If anything, what bubbled up inside Subaru was a powerful mix of helplessness and rage at himself. And overriding those self-loathing emotions, dark and gleaming, was— "So you really came back... didn't you, Garfiel...!"
A surge of hatred and fury toward that golden-haired bastard—toward Garfiel the beast. The same loathing he had told himself, over and over, not to think about.
Three reasons had brought him back to the Sanctuary.
The first was to uncover the truth behind the mysterious depopulation phenomenon occurring within the Sanctuary. At the very least, he needed to grasp some part of its cause—an essential element for any future plan.
The second was to confirm the safety of
And the third—the fierce flame that burned so dark and deep in the pit of Subaru's heart, it eclipsed the other two reasons combined.
The overwhelming desire to tear that savage great tiger limb from limb.
He stepped into the Sanctuary. Two moss-covered pillars served as the entrance. Passing between them and entering, Subaru surveyed his surroundings while breathing low and steady.
The Sanctuary was draped in silence. True to expectation, there was no trace of human presence. Before even that, Subaru realized that during his entire crawl through the forest, he had not heard a single insect.
The disappearance of the Sanctuary's residents went further still—everything in the surrounding area seemed to have halted its activity entirely, maintaining a stillness that was almost absolute.
"——"
Even his own breathing felt too loud before this silence, and Subaru strained his throat to its breaking point in pursuit of stealth. Gasping in short, rapid bursts, he dragged himself deeper into the Sanctuary—toward the building where Emilia should be.
——At this hour before evening, Emilia would normally be spending her time before the "Trial" hugging her knees. That behavior became especially pronounced after the third day, and with absolutely no support from Subaru this time, her heart had surely been eroded even more than in previous loops by loneliness and impatience.
"She's not here...?"
He pushed open the door, peered inside, and surveyed the empty room. Subaru murmured the words to himself.
Emilia was gone. But the sheets on the unused bed were in disarray, a chair lay toppled on its side on the floor. Whether this was the result of a struggle against the cause of the depopulation, or the work of an Emilia pushed to the edge of desperation, he couldn't say.
But all along the way here, he had still not encountered a single soul.
"Maybe I should go pay Roswaal a visit...?"
Processing the fact that Emilia was not here, Subaru's mind moved on to his next course of action with an eerie calm.
The course he voiced was necessary as a way of killing off that particular line of inquiry, but privately, he had already half-resigned himself to the fact that heading there would be a wasted trip.
Just as he had feared, the Sanctuary had been depopulated. The moment Emilia—the one who should have been here—vanished, Subaru's attachment to this place was gone.
And regarding Emilia's disappearance itself—the one thing to which he should have been attached—Subaru noticed that his heart barely stirred at all.
Had he finally acquired a heart of unshakable steel, resilient and blinding?
No, that wasn't it. Subaru shook his head immediately.
A heart of steel. The steel heart he aspired to was nothing like his current state of emotional hollow. This wasn't resilience—this was what happened when anger, incomprehension, and exhaustion had ground everything down until the engine simply blew.
He hadn't become unshakeable. He had simply run out of things to be shaken about.
——He lacked the will to live.
Of course he did.
Subaru wasn't trying to live because he wanted to live. He simply couldn't die until he filled in the reason he had survived past the moment he was supposed to die.
If anything, his focus was directed not at the will to live, but at the will to die.
How could anyone keep living in this kind of world?
Emilia was gone.
No one was here. Everyone was gone. Subaru's head wasn't enough, Subaru's strength wasn't enough, Subaru's effort wasn't enough, Subaru's wish wasn't enough—and so no one had been saved. No one had been saved. It was something only Subaru could have done.
"That's why... I..."
To reclaim everything. To carry through on everything. To put every last thing back on the right path—the responsibility for that rested solely on his shoulders.
It was something only Subaru could do. Something Subaru had to do.
The sacrifices paid for that purpose had to remain inside Subaru. Everything lost for that purpose had to be remembered by Subaru alone. The price paid for that purpose had to be borne by Subaru alone.
He would pay the price. He would stockpile the sacrifices. And he would take it all back.
"——"
With a sway, Subaru stumbled out of the building.
His feet did not carry him toward the cottage where Roswaal was recuperating, but toward the deepest reaches of the Sanctuary—the graveyard. Last time, in the depopulated Sanctuary, Subaru had attempted to go there and been killed by "something." Now, he walked blithely into the same place once more.
Why? Obviously—to be killed.
If he recreated the same conditions as last time, the same method would likely be employed to kill him.
And if he knew the attack was coming, he judged he could at least avoid sustaining a fatal wound on the first strike.
Even if he was killed on the second blow—as long as he could identify the attacker's true nature, that would be enough.
Steel himself for death, and Subaru advanced one step at a time, steadily, toward his destination.
The place where he had been impaled through the abdomen from behind—he couldn't recall the exact position, but it was surely just before the graveyard's entrance.
He began to make out the graveyard in the distance, and the moment he did, his racing heartbeat sent blood coursing hot and cold through his entire body. Was it heating him or cooling him? He couldn't even tell.
His body was burning, his extremities tingling. And yet his fingertips were rigid as if packed with cold lead, and his head had gone clear enough to observe the situation with painful objectivity.
A fool who knew death awaited and walked into the killing ground anyway.
He had sworn to himself that he would stake his life and obtain results—but his expression was miles from resolute. His brow corners drooped, his lips were bitten raw, and his hands and limbs trembled past the point of endurance.
At the final hour, the gilding peeled away, revealing the weakness underneath. He loathed it, cursed it. But even so, Subaru refused to slow his steps.
No matter how weak, fragile, and foolish he might be—that could not be changed. What he wanted to be, always, was someone who found the courage to move forward from that place.
With a twisted positivity born of weakness multiplied by weakness, minus times minus, Subaru continued pressing forward along the path to the graveyard—the path to his own death.
The graveyard drew closer. His heartbeat roared. He could hear the blood rushing through his skull with crystalline clarity. Stomach acid surged back up his throat from his empty stomach, searing it. His knees threatened to buckle with every tremor, and sweat trickled into the field of his single eye, blurring his vision.
He wiped his eyes roughly with his left arm and looked forward again. That was when he noticed.
"Huh?"
With his foot raised to advance toward the graveyard, Subaru saw a change occur before his eyes.
Not even the sound of insects—only the faint whisper of leaves stirred by the occasional gust of wind. And into that silence abruptly intruded a small, intermittent cry.
At first, Subaru thought it was a small white tuft of fur that had been carried toward him on the wind.
But the tuft of fur stopped a few paces ahead of him, began to quiver in small, rapid shivers, and right before Subaru's skeptical gaze, it pricked up two long ears.
"A... rabbit...?"
Long ears, fluffy white fur—this small animal's most distinctive feature was a pair of round red eyes. It twitched its mouth busily, glancing around with restless movements, then tilted its small head up toward Subaru and let out a high-pitched cry.
A tiny, absurdly tiny rabbit. Roughly the size of Subaru's fist, indistinguishable from a hamster at first glance. Its ears were so disproportionately large they rivaled the rest of its body, making it look almost too big to fit in one's hand, but— In a place where every trace of insect, human, and earth dragon alike had been erased, a rabbit had appeared without warning.
Perhaps it was a creature that had been living in the forest all along, but for Subaru—who hadn't encountered a single other living thing until now—it was startlingly out of place.
"Why is there a rabbit... here? It is a rabbit, right?"
Questions spilled endlessly from his mouth. Warily scanning his surroundings, Subaru searched for any sign that some other creature besides this rabbit had found its way into the Sanctuary. Then, almost absentmindedly, he reached toward the rabbit, hoping to learn something by touching its fur—— "——"
In the next instant, everything from Subaru's left wrist upward had been torn clean off.
Blood sprayed from the crude, jagged wound. Blue-green veins dangled from the severed edge. The white, slender strands were either flesh fibers or nerves—in either case, the sight of a human body being destroyed was grotesque to the last degree. And for the few seconds before his mind could process any of that— An otherworldly pain smashed into Subaru's brain. His body convulsed and collapsed to the ground. The branch through his collarbone snapped halfway on impact, sending a fresh lance of agony through him. Pain, pain, pain.
"Gah!? O-Oh gaaah! Oh, ohhhh, agaaahh!!"
His thoughts went white-hot.
Hurt, the word dominated every fiber of his being, hurt, he could no longer even properly perceive reality through the pain, hurt, why did it hurt this badly, did he have to suffer like this, hurt, where did this come from, hurt, what had happened, hurt, where was he hurting, why did it hurt, what part of him hurt, how could anything hurt this much, hurt, hurt, hurt, hurt, hurt— Writhing, he pressed his spurting left wrist against the ground. In his unconscious agony, he bit into the earth, chewing on mud in some meaningless reflex. The bitterness of the soil and the difficulty of breathing brought his thoughts back ever so slightly. His vision swam in search of the cause, and Subaru's gaze fell upon the white tuft of fur at his feet—stained now with red splotches against its white coat, a small animal stuffing something into its tiny mouth. Beneath its black nose, cheeks bulging with effort. And protruding from its mouth—Subaru's left pinky finger.
He understood. He got it. What had happened. He was being eaten. He was being eaten. He was being eaten.
"G-ghwaaaah!!"
Screaming in a voice torn between understanding and agony, Subaru rolled his body toward the rabbit. His right arm was shattered and useless; from the left wrist down, his arm was inside the rabbit's stomach. There was nothing he could do—but at the very least, he needed to see what it really was— A searing sensation on his calf. A blindingly sharp pain, like a rasp mercilessly grinding away flesh and bone—he went cross-eyed without a shred of humor and froth surged from the depths of his throat. If only his head could fall off and he could pass out, but the sheer intensity of the agony refused to let go of his consciousness.
Foaming blood spilled from the corners of his mouth. He convulsed like a fish washed ashore. The fact that Subaru's ears still functioned at this point was a miracle—and a cruelty too monstrous to be anything but God's handiwork.
*Tap-tap-tap.* Countless footsteps seized his eardrums.
Bounding movements. Small, light bodies. The cascade of cries was enormous—even if he had retained his full vision, he wouldn't have had the heart to count them.
And in this moment, it was truly a blessing that only his ears still worked.
Simultaneously, the sensation of fangs sinking into every part of his body made Subaru viscerally aware, through the pain of being devoured, that the threats surrounding him numbered no fewer than a hundred.
A scream. He was rolled onto his back, staring up at the sky, his throat vibrating with it. In the same instant, a furred creature forced its way into his body through his open mouth. His tongue was torn loose, sharp teeth flashed in the back of his throat, and the passage from his esophagus to his stomach was ravaged from the inside.
A threat that had entered through his lower body collided with the one that had come from above, and the two vied with each other—ripping left and right, shredding his organs to pieces, grinding Natsuki Subaru into mincemeat.
While still alive, feeling himself reduced to fragments of flesh inside the body of another creature.
Fear was gone. Pain was gone. He didn't understand why his consciousness still persisted.
Being eaten. Being devoured. His left eye was eaten. His ears were gone. His organs—all devoured—and now the skin of his face was being peeled away. A hole opened in his skull; fangs invaded, lapping at the brain matter that threatened to spill—— ——.
———.
————.
——————.
——————————————aaaaah.