In a stone-walled room, Subaru stared blankly at his own two hands, a listless girl sprawled out before him.
"—"
He couldn't process what had just happened. Not at all.
There were cuts on his wrists, his throat was raw, and his heartbeat was ridiculously fast. But none of that connected to any memory—it was like a bug that had spawned in some blank zone in his brain.
Beyond those physical traces, his mind—his soul—had been left behind by the situation.
If there was only one thing he could say with certainty, it was this: —the girl lying before him had already had her life's flame snuffed out.
"—Ah, it's still... too early to stop flickering."
Breathing ragged, Subaru shook his head and rushed to the side of the fallen girl.
Each step was heavy, his feet dragging as though the soles of his shoes were glued to the floor. He finally wrenched them free and crouched beside the girl—beside Meili.
"—"
Meili lay with her mouth hanging open, her thin white limbs sprawled and utterly still.
Her expression looked stunned, and her lightless eyes were focused vaguely on some distant point.
She had always been a girl who gave off an elusive impression, but now that impression was only amplified— "M-Meili... Hey, Meili!"
He called out.
No response.
When voice alone didn't work, Subaru shook Meili's shoulder and lightly slapped her cheek with his palm.
Still no response. Her open eyelids didn't even blink.
"Me—"
Cutting himself off, Subaru held his breath and attempted every resuscitation technique he could remember.
He placed both hands on her thin chest and pressed down with his body weight—cardiac massage. He'd heard that the heart's position was about two finger-widths up from the pit of the stomach, and he pressed his palm down according to that knowledge.
"Hah... hah...! Meili! Hey, Meili!"
"—"
"Damn it!"
No answer. The girl's body swayed limply, her face deathly pale.
Cursing under his breath, Subaru tilted her head back to open her airway and attempted rescue breathing. The procedure for CPR was repeating chest compressions and artificial respiration.
"What else. What else is there? What else, what else—damn it, damn it, damn it!"
Frantically raking through his memory, Subaru desperately tried to think of anything else he could do.
But in the end, it was all half-baked knowledge gleaned from television, a smattering of crude first aid. The harder he tried, the more the futility of groping through the fog tormented him.
In the end, he simply persisted—repeating chest compressions and rescue breathing, over and over, over and over.
He couldn't feel a heartbeat through the palms pressed against her chest. Even with his mouth directly forcing air into her lungs, there was no tactile sense of will being conveyed into the girl's body.
And so, he continued CPR until he reached his physical limit— "—Son of a bitch."
Sweat beading on his forehead, breathing harsh and ragged, Subaru collapsed backward onto the floor.
"Hah, hah... damn it, damn it...!"
Grabbing a fistful of his own bangs, Subaru could do nothing but curse in sheer frustration.
Meili had not drawn breath again. Just as her initial impression had suggested.
The girl's life flame had been extinguished, and it would never be relit.
—Meili was dead.
Mercilessly, fate had cruelly stolen away the life of a young girl. No—expressions of comfort like that didn't suit this situation at all.
What killed her was not fate. It was something far more definite—murderous intent had killed her.
The proof was right there: a grotesque, dark-blue bruise remained on Meili's slender neck.
"—"
Silently catching his breath, Subaru turned his gaze toward his own palms, regret gnawing at him.
The arms that moments ago had been desperately trying to save Meili's life—on each wrist, there were jagged scratch marks.
Wounds that looked as though they'd been clawed with all one's strength, with one's life on the line.
He wasn't so dull as to not understand what that meant.
"—"
Subaru straightened up and arranged Meili's appearance.
He straightened her disheveled clothes, clasped her hands over her chest, and gently closed her half-open eyelids. Having at least paid that much respect to the dead, he slowly moved his hand to her slender neck.
A sick chill running through him, he traced his fingers over the dark-blue bruise on Meili's neck.
"...It's a perfect fit."
A weak, unsurprising, dry murmur simply gave voice to the fact.
The dark-blue bruise on Meili's neck—the one that looked like fingerprints—and the shape of the fingers Subaru overlaid on it matched perfectly, even to an untrained eye.
At this point, there was no room left to doubt the truth.
Meili had been strangled to death.
And the perpetrator was none other than— "—Ugh, blegh."
The instant he realized that unassailable fact, nausea surged up Subaru's throat. Reflexively turning his face away, he rolled sideways, careful not to defile Meili's corpse.
What spilled out was the breakfast he'd barely had time to put in his stomach not long ago. After vomiting it spectacularly all over the floor until his stomach was completely empty— "I really just... puke my guts out, huh..."
Wiping his mouth roughly with his sleeve, Subaru muttered with a self-deprecating edge.
In truth, he'd lost count of how many times he'd vomited. It might have been the first time since this new day had begun, but in the previous day, he'd been in a terrible state.
He felt like he hadn't managed to properly digest a single thing he'd eaten. He wanted to apologize with all his soul to every farmer in the country for being such a waste of their efforts.
And if he didn't keep diverting his consciousness to those trivial thoughts, his mind would crack and shatter into pieces.
"—"
The circumstantial evidence was too complete.
There were only the two of them in this room, and the fingerprints on Meili's neck matched his own. Subaru was not the sort of optimist who believed he could talk his way out of a situation like this.
He didn't consider that someone had framed him.
Creating this kind of situation didn't require anyone else's hand. This place had long since transcended the level where someone else's help would be necessary to manufacture such a scene.
If there were hands needed to create this nightmare, then they numbered only two.
—if
"...I don't get it."
Having faced that truth head-on, Subaru put his bewilderment into words.
Incomprehensible, unexplainable, situationally impossible—no matter which word you used, this was an unreproducible situation. And yet, there was no conclusion other than that this crime had been committed by Natsuki Subaru himself.
But Subaru himself didn't have even a fragment of that memory.
"What happened? What happened? Remember. Remember, remember, remember...!"
Standing up, Subaru paced around the room in circles, trying to wrench open his memories.
He'd died, woken up, met
And then, Meili had said she had business with Subaru, and brought up something she wanted to talk about— "Something about... last night, what was it... what did she say..."
He scrunched up his face at the fuzzy, hazy memories and chewed over Meili's words.
But right after she'd started to state her business, Subaru's consciousness had cut out, and whatever words Meili might have said were tattered to shreds—like thoughts on the verge of sleep.
"She asked about the night. That much I'm sure of. Before I woke up? Before I fell asleep? Anyway, it was about one of those—she asked me something, and then..."
He didn't know what came after that.
All he knew was that what Meili had asked about likely related to the "nighttime actions" that even Subaru himself wanted to understand.
According to Emilia and the others, this morning's Subaru had been found collapsed in the archive.
His movements in the dead of night, before that collapse, were completely unknown. At the very least, whatever had happened during that time was undoubtedly connected to his memory loss.
And surely, Meili must have had some connection to those lost memories of Subaru's— "She's dead. And I strangled her...? Why would I do something like..."
Looking down at his hands, even though he had no memory of it, he felt a vivid sensation return to his palms.
The arms that had squeezed—by force—until a young girl stopped breathing. The marks on his wrists were probably traces of Meili's desperate resistance as she was being strangled.
Looking closely, there was blood under the nails of the girl's clasped hands, and the physical evidence of their struggle remained firmly in place.
The deep gouges carved into his arms seemed to Subaru like the voice of the girl's lingering resentment— "—Huh?"
Lost in his increasingly wild speculation, Subaru's throat suddenly let out a strangled gasp.
The cause of that stunned exhalation was on Subaru's arm. Not the wounds on his wrist that he'd stared at until holes formed—his gaze had fallen on his own right hand's fingernails.
Under those nails, just like Meili's, there was blood from scratching someone and skin that had been gouged out.
"—"
Puzzled by the inexplicable bloodstains, Subaru turned his gaze back to Meili's corpse.
The body had been arranged with respect for the dead—a neat, composed death. It was little comfort, but apart from the bruise on her neck, the girl's corpse had retained the loveliness she'd had in life.
At least, within visible range, there were no scratch marks. The ugly, gouging wounds Subaru's nails could have left were nowhere on the girl's body.
Then what were the blood and skin left on these nails—the traces of malice?
"No way..."
Looking down at his throbbing arm with growing unease, Subaru's lips trembled with dread.
He had fresh memory of the grotesque black transformation from his right elbow down, but it was his left arm that was pulsing with pain.
The ache emanating from the inside of his elbow, beneath his sleeve, prompted Subaru to slowly begin rolling up his sleeve. The faint sensation of fabric sticking was the feeling of dried blood peeling away.
Holding his breath, Subaru rolled his sleeve all the way up to his shoulder in one motion.
And looking at his left arm, with its considerable amount of bleeding, he exhaled the breath he'd been holding.
"—"
Scraping away the dark red blood with his fingers, he focused on the wound that was crying out in pain.
There, just as he'd imagined, was a scratch mark that appeared to have been made by his own right hand. The agonizing wound running from the inside of his elbow to his upper arm didn't simply end as a wound.
It was letters.
It was twisted, uneven text, carved into flesh with fingernails.
And what was written there was this: — "Natsuki Subaru, reporting!"
"—Ha."
The instant he read it, a single, irrepressible breath escaped him.
Wondering if he'd misread it, Subaru wiped the wound on his left arm with his finger, again and again, rubbing it so hard that the blood that had stopped began to flow once more.
But there was no other way to read it. This clearly, unmistakably said "Natsuki Subaru, reporting!" Written so that Subaru could read it, in sloppy handwriting, in Japanese—Natsuki Subaru, reporting!
Blatant. An incredibly blatant self-assertion. He'd heard that criminals sometimes left evidence at the scene to prove the crime was theirs, and this was exactly the same thing. He'd left his name, making absolutely clear whose crime this was. How considerate, what ambition, what a display of narcissism— "You... what the hell are you?!"
Confronted with a reality too unbearable to accept, Subaru screamed in a voice that cracked with anguish. He flailed his left arm—the one he couldn't cut off—turned his face away as if to distance himself from the filth, and his feet tangled beneath him.
He fell. Sitting hard on the ground, Subaru slammed his left arm against the floor through gritted teeth. Again and again, he struck it, and blood seeped from the corner of his mouth where he'd bitten down to endure the bone-rattling pain.
But even that didn't change reality. The wound on his arm didn't vanish.
"I didn't have this! I absolutely didn't have a wound like this!"
Shaking his head from side to side, Subaru insisted—to Meili, the only one left in this room who could no longer move—that this wound on his left arm was something he'd received after losing consciousness.
The throbbing wound on his left arm was fresh; it was not something that had simply gone unnoticed until now. Whoever had strangled Meili had similarly inflicted a wound on Subaru—no, that wasn't right.
No. No, it was wrong. Absolutely wrong. It was erroneous. It was mistaken.
Accept it already. Understand it. You already know. It wasn't someone else. This was the crime of Natsuki Subaru and no one else.
A "Natsuki Subaru" who was not Subaru had killed Meili, and had carved a medal onto his arm as though to boast of the deed.
"Cr-crazy..."
I'm losing my mind. I've gone nuts. There was no other way to interpret it.
—Was "Natsuki Subaru" the name of an incomprehensible monster?
"—"
This was not the first time Subaru had felt distrust toward "Natsuki Subaru."
Starting with the unnatural behavior from last night that still had no explanation, "Natsuki Subaru" had clearly been acting in ways that defied reason.
And beyond that—the affair with
Honestly, it would have been far more convincing if someone had told him that a completely different entity had been possessing Subaru's body.
"But that's not it either..."
As much as he despised it, focusing on the wound on his left arm forced him to deny that suspicion.
His own name, carved into his arm—admittedly, the handwriting was entirely different from what he'd produce with a pen or brush, but still, a person's handwriting had its quirks.
Specifically, the strokes and hooks in the characters had a habit that Subaru recognized as his own. Without deliberately imitating it, no one else could have achieved that level of similarity.
In other words, this was unmistakably the handwriting of a "Natsuki Subaru" who shared the same roots.
And the moment that was discovered, a fact became clear.
It was this— "—While my consciousness was cut off, 'Natsuki Subaru' came back?"
And that "Natsuki Subaru," in some form, had a falling out with Meili, killed her, left the evidence on Subaru's arm, and then once again vanished into the gap between consciousness?
That was the one part he truly couldn't understand.
"When I have my own body, why... no, what am I? What are you trying to do? Who are you...?"
Pressing his hand against his face as if crushing it, Subaru murmured in a trembling voice.
In an otherworld where he had no allies, where he couldn't tell friend from foe, Subaru had finally been forced to remove himself from the category of harmless existence.
"—"
His legs wavered, and the fear that he could no longer even stand properly seized his chest.
But Subaru fought against that feeling and let out a long, deep breath.
He couldn't maintain composure. His heart was in complete disarray.
But he refused—absolutely refused—to remain ignorant and be jerked around by "Natsuki Subaru's" whims.
And so— "—Who the hell are you?"
Muttering hatred toward an opponent he could only face without a mirror, Subaru dug the nails of his left hand into his right arm—the arm where grotesque patterns ran beneath the skin.
With a soft, tearing sound, red drops of blood indeed welled up from the blackened skin.
—and with dark irony, he thought: so the blood that flows from this black skin is red too.