The garden, which had witnessed the same morning time and again, had transformed into a hell unlike anything he had ever seen.
The small but vibrant flower beds had been blown apart, crushed and scorched, while the trees that lined the estate's perimeter were snapped in half or toppled over.
Here and there, gouged-out craters in the ground bore witness to something of tremendous mass detonating with ferocious force—and it had not been content to ravage the earth alone, but had sent shards of flesh flying in every direction.
The green lawn was stained black with blood. Collapsed amid the dark, sinking into eternal silence were corpses clad in black robes. Most of them had lost any semblance of their original form—heads blown clean off, torsos crushed to pulp, bodies torn in half—their grisly state surpassing even the carnage Subaru had witnessed in the village.
It was proof of just how much fury the blood-stained iron ball had been wielded with—the very instrument that had wrought this devastation upon the pitiful victims it had reduced to corpses.
That iron ball, chained to its handle, had crushed and annihilated countless adversaries—but midway through the battle, its owner had released it, and now it lay discarded in a corner of the garden.
And the "demon" who had fought alongside it single-handedly— "—
Rem's corpse greeted Subaru, her entire body studded with an innumerable quantity of blades, her left arm severed clean off.
Judging from the sheer number of corpses scattered across this garden, she was not alone.
She had fought. She had fought against the malice that slaughtered the villagers and turned its fangs upon the estate itself. She had fought hard, felling one enemy after another until her body was riddled with wounds, pierced by blade after blade, stripped of her weapon and the arm that wielded it—yet she continued to resist, and then she died.
The black-toned, apron-less outfit she wore was torn and punctured everywhere, its fabric stained a dark, ugly crimson from the blood that had spewed from every wound.
The murderous implements protruding from her body were too numerous even to count—cross-shaped, bladed at the tips, a grotesque design. An obscene number of them had been driven into her small frame, more than ten fingers could tally.
And more revolting still, the wounds that marred Rem's fallen body far exceeded even the number of those weapons.
Again. Again. And again.
After she had fallen, they had driven blades into her body, pulled them out, tormented her while she still drew breath, toyed with her life, violated her dignity, trampled her very existence into the dirt—and then plunged them in again, leaving wounds that would never heal.
What sin could possibly have warranted such treatment?
What could they have been thinking when they killed her?
What did those people know about Rem? She was hardworking, diligent, attentive to others, prone to jumping to conclusions—and that was her one flaw. She spoiled Subaru with gentle indulgence, yet could be cuttingly harsh when the situation called for it. She supported Subaru through his darkest moments, but also left him behind. She adored her sister, loathed herself, but had only just begun to love herself even a little— She had spent her whole life believing she was a substitute for someone else, and had only just begun walking forward as herself.
Rem was not moving. No matter how Subaru shook her, her cold body had already gone stiff. The soft blue hair he had stroked so many times was now matted and clumped with dried blood. She lay face-down, her cheek pressed to the ground, and Subaru did not have the courage to see her face.
Whether her expression had been one of anguish, of desperate resolve to fight to the last, or—if by some miracle—peaceful in death, he did not have the courage to face it.
Because Rem had died because of him.
Subaru knelt and shook Rem's unresponsive body, then slowly raised his head. He had noticed something unnatural about where she had fallen.
Her corpse—this body that had fought to the death against despair in the garden—had been discarded far from the estate, at the garden's edge, at a distance from even the flower beds, in a space that no one would normally enter.
That didn't seem particularly strange. During the fight, she could have been surrounded by enemies, or chased into this corner while trying to evade them, and simply met her end here.
But Subaru found it strange.
And as his sluggish mind churned, he realized what that strangeness was.
The way Rem had fallen forward, her remaining arm spread out as she collapsed—the posture of someone who had been fighting with their back against something, and had fallen only because life left her mid-battle.
Subaru raised his gaze. Behind Rem's fallen body stood a wooden shed used for storing gardening shears, flower seeds, and other supplies.
The shed also served as temporary storage for disused furniture and furnishings. It was modestly sized—only as large as a small cabin, despite being called a shed.
Subaru rose and crawled toward its entrance. As he drew closer, he noticed it.
A sensation he had tasted many times before. A thick, cloying dampness that clung to the skin, drained the moisture from his mouth until it went parched, and dulled his thoughts into a bleak, heavy fog—the presence of death.
Reaching the front of the closed door, Subaru caught the scent of it with painful acuity, then lowered his gaze. At his feet, beneath the shed's sealed door, a massive quantity of blood had flowed out, staining the young grass crimson.
He swallowed hard, gulped down his saliva, forced the rising gorge back down, and reached for the door handle. His hand was trembling, but not from caution. It was fear.
There was no presence of anyone inside. He didn't need to worry about that, and more importantly, he had no mental bandwidth to spare for such concerns.
His fingertips grazed the handle, then pulled back as though refusing to grip it, jerking away again and again. The frustration was unbearable, and tears welled up at his own useless body's refusal to obey. Yet through repeated attempts, his little finger finally caught the handle, and with a groan of protest, the door opened.
In that instant, a wall of stench erupted outward—so overwhelming that it flooded his nostrils and still was not enough to contain the sheer volume of blood that had filled the shed.
Subaru clamped his hand over his nose and mouth, fighting back the nausea, and peered inside. He had given up even imagining what scene awaited him; he simply wanted to burn the reality before his eyes into his mind as it was.
—Inside the shed were the children of the village.
The moment he registered this, Subaru swallowed the bile that surged up into his mouth and stumbled outside the shed with lurching steps.
He pitched forward onto the grass and vomited everything he had. And kept vomiting. His stomach was empty; all that came up was yellowish bile. Yet he vomited. He kept vomiting. Even as his insides screamed in agony, his throat was seared by gastric acid, and the sourness ravaged every inch of his mouth, Subaru kept throwing up.
He could not vomit in there. In that shed.
No one—no one at all—had any right to defile those children any further.
"Rem was…"
She had fought to protect the children. And she had died for it.
The only dead child Subaru had found in the village was a girl named Petra. He hadn't gone searching through every villager's corpse, so the possibility of survivors had completely escaped his mind.
The adults had fought in the village, and the children alone had been evacuated to the lord's estate. And even there, despair had descended upon them, producing the same result.
Mercilessly, ruthlessly, cruelly—all lives had been snatched away.
"Hh—"
Suddenly, a strangled sound leaked from Subaru's throat.
Nothing had triggered it. He had simply, suddenly become terrified.
He had come back seeking someone he knew—someone who knew him. He had returned to the village, to the estate, looking for just one familiar soul. But not a single living person remained, and only the silent dead stood in judgment of Subaru's return.
He felt as though he was being told—by those empty eyes that reflected nothing.
He felt as though he was being accused—by those parted, blood-dripping lips.
He felt as though he was being hated—by the memory of the days he had spent with them, the times they had interacted, the times they had laughed together.
"No…no, no, no, no, no…"
—Why are you the one still alive?
—Why did we have to die?
"No…I'm not…this isn't…this isn't what I wanted…not like this…"
There had been an ideal. A hope he had been delusional about.
When he had heard that
Just as he always had, Subaru would save Emilia, earn her gratitude, bridge the small misunderstandings between them, and walk forward hand in hand with her.
Every crisis, every danger, every tragedy that arose—he had been smug enough to believe they were merely stepping stones toward that goal. No matter what happened, he was certain he could turn things around.
And the price for that arrogance was this—this staggering number of the dead.
"It's not my fault… I didn't… I…"
Subaru shook his head, staggered to his feet, turned away from the shed, turned away from Rem's body, and ran toward the estate.
"Someone…someone, someone someone someone someone someone someone—!!"
He cut across the lawn, rounded to the front of the estate, and threw himself at the entrance door, trying to wrench it open. But the door refused to budge, as if it had deemed him an outsider, and no amount of slamming his body against it or kicking it in fury would make it yield.
In desperation, he gave the door one final kick and retreated back to the garden. He leaped over and stomped across the black-robed corpses, making his way to what he was after.
He picked it up—the iron ball and its chain, so heavy it strained his arm—and dragged it toward the estate's garden-side terrace. He drew a deep breath, tensed every muscle in his body, and— "—Aaah!"
The centrifugal force of the chain sent the iron ball spinning, and the window shattered into countless fragments that exploded inward across the room.
Subaru squeezed through the breach he had so violently created and slipped inside the estate. The half-broken glass cut shallowly across his skin, leaving lacerations all over his hands and arms, but the sharp pain meant nothing to him in his current state.
"Someone someone someone someone someone someone someone—"
Like a drowning man grasping at straws, as though possessed, Subaru's lips continued to beg for the existence of another.
It was the same as when he had raced into the village, yet also different—what he sought now had shifted into something else entirely.
Namely, "It's not my fault…it's not my fault…it's not my fault…"
He wanted someone, anyone alive, to tell him that.
Or rather, the mere fact of someone else surviving would itself be that affirmation.
That was why Subaru sought the living. He craved them. He had to find someone.
Otherwise, Subaru could not affirm his own existence.
If he allowed himself to believe that this devastation had been caused by his own recklessness, there was no way his mind could hold together.
To keep his sanity from shattering, to avoid bearing the responsibility for this mountain of dead, he had to shield himself with whatever plausible logic he could muster.
Subaru staggered through the estate, his upper body swaying.
Unlike the garden, the interior showed no signs of ransacking or destruction. The familiar layout of the estate stretched before him, and the fact that this place had somehow retained its normalcy—despite the death that saturated the outside—struck Subaru as profoundly terrifying.
He grabbed the handle of the nearest room, wrenched it open, checked inside, clicked his tongue, and slammed it shut with brute force. The estate had far more rooms than it had people to fill them.
Of the estate's residents, Subaru had yet to confirm the survival of four people—until he found one of them, he would throw open door after door in a desperate sweep.
"Damn it…damn it! Why…why is no one…usually I can…"
He muttered in a half-sobbing, twisted voice, violently raking his fingers through his hair.
Normally, Subaru could find
He would have given anything for that sharp-tongued voice right now.
He could endure being treated like an insect, endure the sighs of undisguised contempt. If only she were alive—that would be enough to affirm his existence.
"Come out…come out, please…I'm begging you…help me…help me…!!"
Subaru could no longer hold back his tears. They streamed down his cheeks as he raced through the estate. All that spilled from his mouth was weeping and the pathetic, pleading refrain of someone searching for salvation—anyone who would pull him out of this despair.
He passed through the guest room where he had first awakened, trampled the carpet that had been stuck in an infinite loop by Beatrice's magic, crawled through the dining hall he had crossed countless times, turned his back on the kitchen where he had once struggled to make mayonnaise, left behind the grand bath where he had been assigned the heaviest cleaning duty of any task he was given, then bolted up the floor where the servants' quarters were clustered, wrenching open every nearby door to peer inside— In the seventh room, he found
Subaru knew instantly that Ram was not merely asleep. After seeing so many dead in such a short time, the distinction was obvious.
Her translucently pale skin had lost all color, turning ashen, while her lips stood out in stark contrast—rouser, more vivid than they ever were in life. As though in opposition to her sister's nearly identical appearance in death, Ram's visage—even with death makeup applied—was almost eerily delicate in its beauty.
She had always joked that if she kept quiet, she could pass for a lovely maid.
She had not died peacefully in her bed. Someone had carried her body here and arranged her like this, tidying her appearance in death.
Probably Rem. What must Rem have thought, facing her sister's death? How many tears had she shed while applying that death makeup? And with what feelings had she left her sister behind alone?
And now that Rem herself had been killed so brutally, Subaru would never know.
Subaru touched his fingertip to Ram's cold lip. A faint trace of red pigment clung to his nail. He rubbed his fingertips together, toying with the color, and before he knew it, he had sunk into the corner of the room.
He raised his head dazedly. There lay the dead—one who, if told she was merely sleeping peacefully, he could have believed.
She had welcomed Subaru's return in silence. Her silent form stood in accusation against Subaru the living.
Just like all those hollow eyes that had gazed up at him in the village.
Lips that would never tremble again poured an endless, silent curse upon Subaru.
"Hh—"
Subaru crawled away from Ram's bed as though fleeing. He forced his trembling arms and disobedient knees to lock straight, staggered to the wall, and used it to support himself as he put as much distance between himself and that room as quickly as possible.
"Stop it…no…it's not me…I didn't… I didn't do anything—!"
He covered his ears, shook his head, and tried to weave words of self-defense with his hoarse throat, attempting to distance himself from the whispers of resentment that seemed to murmur at his ears. But the voices—the despair—followed him everywhere, mocking his flight.
He dragged himself down the corridor and reached the landing with the staircase. On all fours, he climbed the stairs. Along the way, he fell repeatedly, twisted his joints, split his lip until blood dripped down his chin—and at last, he reached the upstairs hall and pressed on.
The dead were the only ones to greet him. Ram was dead; three living souls remained. His feet instinctively avoided Emilia's room on the same floor. On the second floor—the room where Ram lay was her own personal quarters, assigned to her as a servant. The image of Ram dead in her own bed flashed through his mind, and tears he thought spent surged anew. He had thought he had wrung every last drop of moisture from his body, that his sobs and his bile had run dry—yet this grief, endless and inexhaustible, throbbed deep in his chest and drove him to keep running.
If not for that, he could have simply sat down, buried his head in his hands, seen nothing, heard nothing, known nothing, sought nothing, been given nothing, had nothing taken away, loved nothing, been loved by nothing, begun nothing, ended nothing, changed nothing—and simply remained in stasis.
Tears streamed down his tear-streaked, contorted face as Subaru staggered to the top floor—stopping before Roswaal's office. The heavy double doors stood in silent, fortified repose, appearing so robust that they might repel even the malice bearing down on this estate.
But that hope dissolved instantly.
In this place where everything had ended, there could be no sanctuary. There could be no refuge.
He pushed the doors open, and a cold draft flowed out into the hallway.
The chill bit into his arms, and Subaru suddenly remembered how underdressed he was—vulnerable against the cold. He tried to recall where he had left his coat, then remembered he had given it to Petra in the village, and was exasperated by the fact that he was still using such pointless reasoning to shield himself.
He stepped inside. Part of him had half-resigned himself to the possibility that Roswaal's corpse was slumped over the desk.
Rem was dead. Ram's life had been snuffed out. To cling to hope for others in the midst of that was nearly impossible. Was he racing through the estate seeking the living, or was he dragging despair along as he trampled through his own memories for the purpose of losing that hope? Even he no longer knew.
But the world—which had betrayed Subaru three times in the village, in the garden, and in that private room—was not yet prepared to deliver a fourth betrayal.
The office was empty.
Subaru scanned the vacant room, crawling on hands and knees to check behind the desk, beneath the shelves of furnishings, even behind the meeting table, but found no trace of anyone.
Relief washed over him to a considerable degree.
It was relief at not having to confirm whether Roswaal was alive or dead—and a self-indulgent relief that he had not been given one more reason to be tormented by the dead.
"—?"
Suddenly, he heard the sound of a window swaying in the wind and turned around.
The moment he had opened the doors connecting to the hallway, an unnaturally cold draft had flowed into the room, rattling the window and stirring the leaves of a potted plant in the corner.
A current of air had been created.
Having found its pathway through the opened doors, the cold draft circled the room before blowing back out. Subaru felt this on his skin and began searching for the source, relying on the direction and feel of the wind— "A contraption…like this…"
The instant he fiddled with the mechanism hidden beneath the ebony desk, the grinding sound of interlocking gears filled the air. Then came a low rumble like a millstone turning, and the bookshelf built into the far wall of the office slid nearly a meter to the side.
Subaru stared in astonishment at the hidden mechanism. Beyond the shifted bookshelf, a dark, gaping hole had appeared.
He approached cautiously and peered inside. A stone passageway extended for a few steps, and beyond that, a spiral staircase descended below.
"A hidden…passage?"
Almost certainly designed for emergencies. For a marginal lord who held the title of Border Count, securing an escape route was standard self-defense. Whether or not the opportunity to actually use it ever arose was another matter—but it was easy to imagine him preparing it with an eager, almost gleeful enthusiasm.
Who could have predicted that such an opportunity would actually arrive?
The cold air flowing through the room appeared to be coming from this hidden hole. In other words, the draft originated from somewhere even deeper and colder beyond, channeled through the passageway on the other side.
Subaru swallowed hard, drew several deep breaths, and the moment he felt his heart's wild, pounding rate ease even slightly, he threw himself into the opening.
The walls were cold to the touch—he couldn't tell what material they were made of. They emitted a faint, pale blue glow that illuminated his vision for several meters ahead.
By that light, one hand pressed against the wall, Subaru descended the spiral stone staircase with painstaking care, terrified of missing a step.
The anxiety of venturing into a completely unknown place—how far did it extend, where did it lead—squeezed his insides. But what burned his back with even greater intensity than that dread was rage—at the existence of this concealed passage.
Wind was blowing, which meant there was an exit.
In other words, someone had used this hidden hole to escape. Of the surviving residents he had yet to locate—given whose office this was, he didn't need to think hard about who had abandoned the estate's horrors and fled.
They had left those people to die. They had abandoned that devastation. They had left that girl—who had devoted herself to them—to die, and they had run. Pathetically, cowardly, fleeing for the sake of their own wretched lives.
Subaru's teeth were chattering—from rage, and from a twisted elation. He didn't even notice.
The elation of finding someone to direct his resentment toward. Someone who had abandoned their duty, who deserved to be condemned, who had committed a contemptible vice.
The joy of having found a target upon whom he could heap all the resentment, all the curses, all the contempt, all the invective—every silent accusation of the dead.
A deranged grin twisted across his face—emotions tangled into madness—as tears flowed without end, blood dripped from his bitten lip, and the madman descended.
How many flights had he climbed down? By steps, it was considerable; by height, it was the equivalent of three stories to ground level. The passage appeared to lead beneath the estate, and at the bottom of the staircase, another straight corridor continued onward. The walls were still the same luminous blue mineral, and as Subaru pressed his palm against their heat-stealing surface, he advanced with a grimacing smile.
He was chasing the trail of the living. That single thought made Subaru happy in his current state.
The fact that whoever waited ahead had made choices as wretched as his own—atrocious enough to deserve every insult—made him glad.
In a world where only the dead remained, to find a living person, to confirm that he was truly alive—or perhaps already dead—and to verify which of those was the case, was genuinely, truly a relief.
"Nn, o—"
His palm, pressed against the wall, suddenly lost contact with the surface and groped through empty space. His momentum carried him forward, and he found himself in a small chamber—wider in every direction than the corridor he had been traversing.
In the dim, ghostly light, numerous pillars stood at irregular intervals. The uneven spacing gave them an unsettling quality, but given that this passage itself looked like a rush job, the shoddy design was not entirely surprising.
Accepting this, Subaru squeezed past the obstructive pillars. By now his limbs had grown terribly sluggish and heavy, as though lead had been packed into his fingertips. His thoughts, already growing hazy, began to dull further.
Even stepping forward one pace was a battle. His mouth was so parched it actually hurt, and the blood that had been flowing from his lip had stopped at some point without his noticing.
His eyelids were heavy, his shoulders pressed down as though bearing stones, and yet it was nothing but sheer stubbornness—grudge, obsession, madness—that drove Subaru forward.
He navigated around the pillars scattered throughout the chamber, passed through it, and spotted an iron door ahead in the blue-tinged light. Corridor, staircase, corridor, chamber, and then a door—was what he sought beyond this?
—What exactly was he even seeking again?
Before his stagnating thoughts could arrive at an answer, his bloodless fingers reached out faster. Standing before the door, Subaru gasped for breath, mouth opening and closing like a fish, and abandoned all thought, clutching at the door handle on nothing but a sense of mission.
—The instant his right hand touched the handle, searing pain erupted through it.
"Gah—ahh!"
His throat screamed. Subaru tore his right hand away as though ripping it off. The burning pain covered his entire palm. Clutching his wounded hand, Subaru looked down at its condition.
—His right index finger was gone.
"…What?"
Dumbfounded, Subaru raised his right hand before his eyes and stared at it.
The hand had turned white, the skin of the palm peeled back in ragged strips—and of the five outstretched fingers, the index finger alone was missing from its base.
Slowly, his gaze drifted to the door before him. Still clinging to the handle he had gripped was Subaru's right index finger.
—I've got to—pull myself together.
That stray thought was all that surfaced as Subaru reached for the handle again, trying to retrieve the severed finger. But moving his body had become far harder than before—will could not reach from shoulder to elbow, from elbow to fingertip. The immobility was infuriating, so he tried to press closer to the door—his right ankle shattered from the root, and he toppled sideways to the ground.
"Ahhh—ahhhhh—"
A sound that was not even a voice leaked from his throat.
Whether it was a scream of pain or simply the meaningless outpouring of a life spent, he didn't know. But amid what he didn't know, there was one thing he understood.
The moment his mouth opened to exhale, something white had flooded in from the inside as well, and his body had begun to freeze solid.
His lungs seized. Breathing became shallow, ragged. He fought to pump oxygen into lungs that would not expand, darting his eyes in frantic bewilderment at this extraordinary state.
He didn't understand what had happened. But every sensation across his body had gone terribly vague.
His right ankle had been pulverized—pain and a sense of loss unlike anything he had ever felt. And the moment he fell, the right half of his body had been crushed beneath his own weight, its parts crumbling away just like his ankle.
From lips that could no longer tremble, he barely managed to exhale the breath sustaining his life. Only then did he notice, belatedly, that his breath was visible—white in the frigid air.
His face was pressed flat against the floor. He knew that if he turned his head, his cheek would tear away. He no longer felt pain. He twisted his head roughly, and the flesh of his cheek and the outer portion of his right eye came away entirely. It didn't matter. Now facing upward, his vision—upside-down—caught the small chamber he had passed through.
Looking at it from below, he finally understood why the pillars in the chamber had been arranged so unevenly.
They were not the product of shoddy construction.
They were human beings, frozen in ice and dead.
Victims who had wandered into this white apocalypse, just like Subaru, and been reduced to ice sculptures. And they would be his fate as well.
His breathing had already stopped.
The limited oxygen circulating to his brain kept consciousness alive in a bizarrely sluggish manner, teetering on the edge of oblivion in this world of extreme cold.
He understood nothing.
He could see nothing.
From the tips of his toes, his body was crumbling into fragments of ice, ceasing to be
If one were to be precise, perhaps the person who had been in this place was no longer Natsuki Subaru, but merely a madman wearing his skin.
Sensation had vanished from his lower body. His arms were nowhere to be found. Now his right eye fell away. It was strange that his remaining left eye could still see. Where did life reside? In the brain, or the heart?
That question would never be answered in this frozen world, and— "—It's too late now."
A temperatureless whisper echoed through the world consumed by white— —And Natsuki Subaru shattered into countless fragments, vanishing from the world.