What he saw was light. Nothing but light.
He remembered looking up, craning his neck.
Immediately after, part of the tower ahead lit up white, and he squinted at the blinding brilliance.
But his memory ended there. After that, he remembered nothing.
No pain, no impact, no fear — he hadn't felt a single thing.
For
There was no pain that made him want to scream, no impact of flesh being torn apart, no terror of everything being lost.
Or perhaps this particular death had been kinder than any of the deaths Subaru knew.
Not that Subaru, whose brain had been evaporated along with the rest of him, had any time to think such things, nor any luxury of reminiscing about them.
As if in the blink of an eye, his vision went dark for just an instant, and then Natsuki Subaru's lost "life" was restored, reversed, and thrown back into reality once more.
Thrown back.
※ ※ ※ ※ ※ ※ ※ ※ ※ ※ ※ ※ ※ "Che che che."
"—!"
For a moment, an oppressive weight pressed down on all five senses, making it hard to breathe, and Subaru's eyes shot open.
The sound of blood coursing through every vein in his body was deafening, and his contracting muscles screamed in pain. The reins were clenched so tightly his nails dug into his palms, and
"...Huh?"
In his dim vision, Subaru was looking down at the back of Beatrice's head, close enough to touch.
The violently sweet scent slipping through his nostrils was different from the one that rose when he held the girl in his arms. Beatrice's scent was like sweet pastries, but this was everywhere — clinging and cloying, like a viscous poison.
This sweetness was familiar. Of course it was. He'd been smelling it nonstop until just moments ago.
Rather, the fact that it had been interrupted for even a few brief seconds was the real anomaly.
"Che che che che."
Through the fog clouding his consciousness, a faint sound — like a tongue clicking — reached him in a steady rhythm.
Ahead of him, Beatrice was tense, and even
A fearsome magical beast with fine roots spread across its entire body, hungry for blood — an Oiran Bear.
In that instant, a raw, visceral sense of reality returned to Subaru — something no mere déjà vu could capture.
There was no doubting this sensation. It was Return by Death.
Natsuki Subaru had just experienced death and returned to this point in time.
"—!"
— But of all the times to be thrown back, why this one?!
More than the events at the moment of death itself, Subaru cursed the terrible timing of his return.
It was Meili who was trying to lure the mabeast away with sounds like tongue-clicks, drawing its attention and attempting to get it to move aside peacefully from in front of the dragon carriage. Her plan had been working up until the very last moment, and then it failed.
That was because Giant, the earth dragon pulling the carriage, couldn't withstand the pressure of the mabeast.
"— — —"
Subaru knew this, yet he hesitated in making a split-second decision.
He couldn't see Giant's condition from behind. But Julius, who held the reins, hadn't noticed the earth dragon's distress either. Even he had no spare attention to spare for it.
Everyone in the dragon carriage was praying for Meili's contact with the Oiran Bear to succeed.
But unfortunately — "Che che che... chee."
Meili's voice took on a slight edge of tension, and her finger pointed to the right side of the carriage. The Oiran Bear followed the gesture and slowly shuffled in that direction.
A sense of relief began to bloom in the dragon carriage, and in Beatrice too. But Giant couldn't survive the snapping of that taut thread of tension.
"Yuli —"
"—!!"
Before Subaru could make the right call, his shout was drowned out by Giant's roar.
As if replaying the exact same sequence as before, Giant stamped the ground while bellowing, and the combined sound of its cries and the thunder of hooves snapped all the Oiran Bears back to full awareness at once.
The mabeast's bloodshot eyes went even wider, drool dripping from its jaws as it lunged. A pale blue light pierced through its skull and shattered it completely — the exact same flow as before.
"El Hyuma!"
From the roof of the dragon carriage, Emilia spun her hands through the air, and with movements like a dancer, she created a vortex of ice blades in the sky. The spinning ice shot down toward the ground one after another, and the horde of Oiran Bears was swallowed by the circular ice weapons, limbs severed and agonized screams rising.
"Go, go, go, go, go, GO —!!"
Subaru pulled the reins and urged Patrasche forward with a shout, and the dragon carriage began to move.
Glancing to the side at the driver's seat, he saw
It was exactly the same.
Following this same sequence, Subaru ground his molars hard.
The fact that his consciousness couldn't keep up with the sudden Return by Death was no excuse.
Putting aside the shock of having died, Subaru's heart was consumed by regret.
This was the first time since becoming aware of Return by Death that Subaru had so thoroughly wasted it.
There had been times when he'd mishandled the information gained from Return by Death and ended up dying again. But this was the first time he'd gone through Return by Death only to helplessly trace the exact same situation — not through any choice of his own, but along the same rails of fate.
"—Subaru! There's no time to zone out!"
"—!"
As Subaru bowed his head in frustration and gripped the reins tight, Beatrice slammed her back against his chest. The light impact and her voice drew his eyes forward, and he could see the savage mabeast bearing down on them.
At the same time, he grasped the small hand reaching toward him and set Beatrice standing atop the carriage. The counterattack began.
"Minya! Minya! One more Minya, perhaps!"
Mana was drawn from Subaru's body through their connected hands — mana with nowhere to go — and through Beatrice, it was converted into power. The purple crystals produced pierced the mabeasts blocking their path, crystallized their bodies, and shattered them as Patrasche trampled the fragments and pressed forward.
"Desperate times call for desperate worms!"
He heard Meili's almost desperate shout, and at the edge of his vision, sand erupted upward.
Beneath the sand sea covered by Oiran Bears, a Sandworm rose from even deeper below. It shoved several mabeasts into its massive jaws, and its towering body crushed the rest in one sweeping motion.
Monster versus monster, round two — but Subaru knew the odds were against them.
"—Baru! Drive them like your life depends on it — because it does!"
A sharp, commanding voice pierced through Subaru's mounting panic.
It was Ram, working the reins from the driver's seat and wrestling Giant under control. Her skillful handling of the reins rivaled Rem's, keeping the earth dragon under command, but things couldn't go on like this.
"We can't keep going straight like this! Ram, change course!"
"—! What are you saying? The Watchtower is dead ahead, and the surrounding area is crawling with mabeasts!"
"I know that, but we can't go this way!"
Patrasche lowered her head and slammed upward into the belly of the Oiran Bear blocking their path. With the thrashing mabeast draped over her snout, the pitch-black earth dragon charged forward, using the creature's body as a shield. Raking claws tore into the mabeast's flesh, and scattered petals and fresh blood drenched the sea of sand.
"Baru, what did you figure out? Explain yourself!"
"If I could explain it clearly, I wouldn't be struggling! Just change course!"
Ram's irritated words left Subaru with no choice but to snap back just as harshly. He knew he was being unreasonable, but there was no other way.
After all, Subaru still didn't know what had killed him.
He was certain he'd experienced Return by Death, but he couldn't remember the cause of death.
The fact that he'd simply "realized he'd already returned" was closer to the feeling of his first death at the Roswaal mansion.
First, he needed to confirm the cause of death and eliminate that threat.
"I don't have the luxury of thinking about it!"
Had he been caught by the mabeasts and torn apart by their claws? Had he had his intestines scooped out and become a miserable meal, just as the tavern owner had warned? Or had he accidentally fallen from Patrasche and broken his neck? As absurd as it sounded, there was even a possibility he'd wasted so much of Beatrice's mana that he'd died from exhaustion.
"None of them would result in such a perfectly clean gap in my memory."
Whether he'd been torn open, frozen solid, crushed by an iron ball, devoured whole by rabbits, or caught in the crossfire of some incomprehensible Authority — Subaru had always come back from death.
And regardless of the cause, he'd always used the events immediately preceding his death to diagnose his dead-end situation and find a way to break through it.
But this time, he couldn't find that fragile thread of fate anywhere.
And there was no time to search for it.
— This was, quietly, the worst kind of Return by Death suppression.
If he died the same way again, he'd be starting completely from scratch.
Before that happened — "I'm making a move! Just stay away from the tower!"
"That still doesn't explain —"
"The tower is going to shine! That light — it's probably what killed me!"
"Hah —?!"
In this desperate situation, Ram had no time to lace her words with venom as she responded. As Subaru received her blunt denial, he pulled the reins and conveyed his intent to Patrasche.
Not straight ahead — turn, any direction but forward.
"The tower's still visible straight ahead, but...!"
In the middle of the vast sand sea where Oiran Bears surged in from all directions, the
To avoid that, Subaru's choice was — "We're going back! It's better to go through the Sand Time desert again! Back to the last dune!"
"What kind of insane —"
"Ram! Do as Subaru says!"
Emilia stopped Ram from voicing her objections — objections anyone would consider justified given the seemingly insane decision. She swept aside the mabeasts with countless ice projectiles and nodded to Subaru.
"There's no way Subaru would say something like that without a good reason!"
"Baru routinely spouts delusions and nonsense as a matter of daily life."
"There's no way Subaru would say something like that without a good reason when we're in danger!"
"Thank you for going out of your way to rephrase that!!"
Should he lament being treated like the boy who cried wolf, or celebrate being seen as a reliable man in a crisis?
Putting both self-reflection and self-satisfaction aside for later, Patrasche plunged her feet into the sand and executed a sharp turn. Her whipping tail slashed across a mabeast's body, her hind leg kicked another Oiran Bear hard in the face, and they bolted in the opposite direction.
"—! You two on top and on the side — don't get thrown off!"
Seeing Subaru and company's sudden reversal, Ram skillfully reversed Giant's course as well. Naturally, the dragon carriage lurched violently, nearly tipping over from the centrifugal force — "Emilia-sama! The footing!"
"Huh? Oh, right! Okay!"
Julius, bracing himself by driving his sword into the carriage frame, called out to Emilia for help stabilizing the tilting carriage. Emilia's eyes went wide at his words, and instantly her mana surged beneath the carriage. An ice slope appeared to support the angled wheels, and the dragon carriage curved in a half-circle, narrowly avoiding a rollover.
Without losing momentum, they continued their reversal in pursuit of Patrasche.
— And right after.
"What...!?!"
The instant they began their retreat, a sharp, piercing sound rang out — like metal scraping against eardrums.
Subaru instinctively flinched. Behind him, wind materialized out of nowhere.
"That was — wait, wait, wait, wait!?"
"What is it — eek!?"
Subaru and Beatrice simultaneously recoiled in shock at the mysterious sensation behind them.
On the dragon carriage running right behind them, Emilia and Julius stared wide-eyed as well.
"The Sandworm... it..."
Leaning out from the driver's seat, Meili's voice trembled with shock.
Before her eyes, the Sandworm's colossal body had risen up behind the dragon carriage like a wall. Over ten meters long, its body was so thick that two grown men wrapping their arms around it couldn't reach all the way. Its head, thrust above the ground, surveyed its prey like the king of the sand sea itself.
And that Sandworm's body had just been blown to smithereens by a direct hit.
Its slimy skin was torn to shreds, and its thick, massive body was split cleanly in two. The torso, now headless, toppled sideways, while the severed head — now bereft of support — slowly, slowly toppled toward them — "Dodge, DODGE IT —!!"
The falling Sandworm head had enough mass to crush the dragon carriage flat.
With the dying screams of mabeasts that had been crushed by the torso first echoing behind them, Subaru and Ram relayed commands to their respective earth dragons, forcing them off course to escape the Sandworm's trajectory.
"— — —"
The Sandworm's head plummeted into the sand sea with a shrill shriek.
Sand exploded upward. Oiran Bears that failed to escape were crushed to bone and dust. Others were swept up in the shockwave and blown apart. The Sandworm's head bounced, rolled, taking more mabeasts with it, and was finally shredded into meat by countless clawing attacks.
"Close call, close call, TOO CLOSE!"
"Subaru, we're in trouble!"
Subaru sighed in relief at the narrow escape, but Beatrice immediately shot down his moment of respite.
"What's wrong?" he asked, looking down at the girl in his arms. She was brushing away falling petals with an irritated expression, glancing behind them as she spoke.
"With that, we've been separated from their carriage! It's just us!"
"What!?"
Subaru frantically looked around and confirmed that no other dragon carriage was anywhere in sight.
All he could see at a distance was the pale blue glow of mana, the roar of mabeasts, and small eruptions of sand — letting him know that Emilia was fighting hard and Meili was commanding her new servant. But even if he wanted to regroup with them, the gap between them was filled with countless Oiran Bears. And the mabeasts' assault on the now-depleted Subaru and Beatrice showed no sign of letting up.
"Simply put, we're at half strength! And the enemy count has doubled!"
"Four times harder than before, I'd say!"
The tip of Beatrice's whip cracked against the face of an Oiran Bear lunging at them.
The impact happened to smash the mabeast's eye, and Patrasche used the writhing, pain-stricken creature as a breakthrough point to start running again. But the direction she was heading was away from Emilia's carriage.
"Patrasche! Not this way —"
"This earth dragon is making the best call she can for survival. Right now, trusting her instincts is far better than listening to you or Betty!"
Beatrice cut off Subaru's protest, scattering the Oiran Bears in their path with magic. Patrasche punched through the thinnest point in the encirclement, fighting desperately to protect the two on her back.
"Dammit! Not again... not this pattern again! What am I even doing!?"
He cracked his whip, deflecting a mabeast's face as it tried to close in. But the frenzied charge of a creature that had lost all reason couldn't be stopped by that alone.
With a sword, he could deal lethal blows. With magic, he could cripple their mobility. — The power Subaru had chosen fell far short of either. Cleverness gets crushed in the face of overwhelming force.
He'd done what he could, expanded what he was capable of, and thought he'd gotten a little better.
Was fate simply going to laugh in his face and trample all of Natsuki Subaru's petty little efforts?
"That bastard Regulus was a million times more manageable...!"
"There's no time to stand there brooding! Think of something —"
"Betty, cast Murak on Patrasche! Lighten her load and clear the swarm!"
"—! Murak!"
At Subaru's command, Beatrice cast Murak — the gravity-reducing spell — on Patrasche, and her running speed surged. Each stride covered twice the distance, and Patrasche leaped, trying to escape the writhing field of mabeasts by stepping on their backs.
But — "Light —!?"
White light flashed at the edge of his vision, and in the instant his voice cracked, it came streaking across the sky.
A white beam of light tore across the ground, blasting away the sand sea with terrifying force. Where the light passed, mabeasts were ripped apart, pillars of blood erupted, and bodies flew and flew and flew.
The shockwave swept toward Patrasche as well. The earth dragon's massive body was caught by the blast and effortlessly sent tumbling.
"Beatrice! Hold on tight!!"
"You'd better hold onto me properly too!!"
"———!"
Patrasche neighed as Subaru wrapped his arms around Beatrice's entire body and clung tight.
Spinning through the air, Patrasche's massive body bounced wildly over the Oiran Bears' heads. White light rained down after them in rapid succession.
Sand exploded. Mabeasts caught in the blast exploded. A glancing hit made Patrasche cry out in pain.
"Aaagh —!?"
During the barrage, the Blessing of Wind Resistance wore off, and Subaru took the full brunt of the impact.
He gripped the reins and Beatrice, clamping his legs tight around Patrasche's saddle, but the force was tossing him around, slamming his body against everything in sight, threatening to tear away consciousness.
And yet, even in this state, an Oiran Bear's claws slashed at him from below.
Subaru was swallowed by the devastating impact, clawing desperately to avoid being thrown off. If he fell now, there was absolutely no surviving. The only thing keeping him barely alive was the fact that he refused to give up.
"But if this keeps up —"
"We're in trouble...!"
"—Patrasche!?"
A particularly violent impact rang out, and Patrasche's pained neigh trailed high and sharp.
Looking down, he saw that Patrasche's flank — normally light and bouncy thanks to Murak — had finally been sliced open by an Oiran Bear's claws. Ugly gashes were carved into the pitch-black scales, and fresh blood spilled from the wounds.
"—!?"
Carried by the momentum, Patrasche finally collapsed onto the sand. Subaru and Beatrice were thrown to the ground simultaneously, left behind in the feeding ground surrounded by Oiran Bears.
Subaru shook his head and pushed himself upright. He was still holding Beatrice's hand. She brushed off her dress and stood as well, scanning their surroundings with sharp vigilance. But the disadvantage was undeniable.
"Don't you dare lay a finger on Patrasche!"
"Minya!"
Magic bolts slammed into the mabeasts swarming toward the injured, groaning Patrasche. Subaru pulled Beatrice's hand and ran to the earth dragon, kneeling to examine the wound.
The claws hadn't reached the organs, but any strenuous movement could cause the abdominal pressure to force intestines out. He couldn't push her. He needed time to heal.
"Beatrice! Shamak! Disrupt the mabeasts' perception of our surroundings!"
"Now!? That would only buy us a little time! And besides —"
"We need that time right now! Hurry!"
The mabeasts crouched forward with bloodshot eyes, watching for an opening to strike.
If attacked from all four sides, there'd be no way to defend. Which mabeast would charge first and set off the chain reaction depended on their patience — and that was probably not going to work in their favor.
"—! El Shamak!"
Beatrice pressed her palms together, and something drained entirely from Subaru's inner reserves.
In the girl's hands, it spiraled into a vortex and became a silent force that swept across the sand sea. A radius of over ten meters around them was engulfed in black mist.
The foundational Yin magic — the activation of Shamak, the great equalizer.
As Shamak's perception-disrupting effect spread, the Oiran Bears froze completely. Their thoughts vanished beyond the reach of comprehension, and even their predatory instincts were erased.
Of course, it had no effect on them as the casters. But it wouldn't last long.
"Once the ones outside the range find their way in, it'll be disrupted eventually. Before that happens, we need to escape with that earth dragon!"
"I know! Is the Murak effect still active? If so, I'll carry Patrasche and keep casting Shamak to reach their carriage —"
Prioritizing escape from the killing field, Subaru reached for Patrasche.
Normally, the earth dragon weighed several hundred kilograms, but with Beatrice's Murak still active, her body was light — well, maybe not feather-light, but significantly so. Carrying her away would be no trouble.
Yellow eyes fixed on Subaru with an unwavering gaze. The emotion flickering through them was complex and eloquent in a way no earth dragon should have been capable of.
Those eyes told a story. — Let me go.
"—Subaru!"
Right after the look in Patrasche's eyes had seized his attention, Beatrice cried out sharply.
She rushed toward him, thrust her palm forward, and a surge of mana formed a shield — a purple magical wall materialized right beside Subaru, deflecting the white beam that had been aimed at him.
"Guah!?!"
A sharp sound rang out like steel striking steel, and Subaru's body was flung sideways by the impact. He tumbled across the sand in a sprawl, coughing, and tried to push himself up — only to realize.
Blood was dripping from his right flank, soaking his right leg entirely.
"What... did I just take...?"
Clutching his bleeding side, Subaru knelt on one knee and exhaled dazedly.
The next instant, the sensation of his insides being clawed apart surged up as nausea, and a torrent of stomach acid and blood poured from the corner of his mouth.
Air escaped through the ruptured abdomen, and a fart-like, idiotic sound leaked out amid the blood bubbles.
"Ah, hhh..."
"—Baru! Subaru!"
A ragged breath escaped him, and his vision tilted sideways at the same moment.
He'd fallen on his side, unable to move. He understood that, but couldn't process anything further. The wound in his flank was growing hot, and a pain spread through him as if his body were melting away.
Desperately, he could hear someone calling his name.
"Subaru! Subaru, are you okay!? Don't die... d-don't die...! Don't leave me alone...! Please don't...!"
Hands shook his shoulders. A tearful voice — he wanted to reach out and comfort her, but he couldn't move.
As if his brain had been scorched, he couldn't even remember the face of the girl before him.
A cute face, but crying — and he thought he shouldn't let her cry, shouldn't make her cry like that.
Beyond her, a massive, massive lizard lay fallen.
A black lizard with a beautiful appearance. Its body was pierced through with countless long, thin white rods, and it was clearly dead — not moving a single twitch.
He realized he'd probably been hit by those too.
"Don't leave Betty behind...!"
Sobbing, the girl desperately pulled Subaru's body closer.
Her small frame was too heavy for his drained strength. But she tried her hardest anyway.
Tears streamed down her cheeks. He wished he could wipe at least those tears away.
He searched for a place inside his body that could move, but found none. So instead, he reached for something that moved not from within his body, but from somewhere else entirely.
"Unn..."
"Subaru?"
An invisible "hand" — visible only to him — wiped the tears from the girl's cheek.
Black fingertips traced the path of a teardrop. The girl looked at him with an expression of dawning awareness. He wanted to smile reassuringly, but he no longer had the strength.
"Subar —"
For an instant, the girl began to say something.
But her words were cut short by a beam of white light flying in from far behind her.
"— — —"
A second impact pierced through Subaru's chest.
Slowly lowering his gaze, he saw the light had passed through the back of the girl who was holding him, continued through his own chest, and exited out the other side.
"Ah..."
With a faint, rasping exhale, the girl embracing Subaru vanished.
As if she had never existed in this world at all, the girl's form disappeared.
Losing his support, Subaru collapsed to the ground. He couldn't move. There was no reason to.
"Co..."
His barely moving fingertips scraped the sand, and that was all.
Without their caster, the black mist that had separated them from the surrounding space was scattered by the wind.
Once the demon's power of perception disruption was lifted, all that remained were the corpse of an earth dragon and a dying boy. The swarm of mabeasts licked their lips and closed in on their prey.
"— — —"
His breathing stopped, and his vision blurred.
It was different from blood-loss death. Something — something fatal — had been poured into him.
He couldn't understand anything anymore.
Right beside him, he could hear the growl of an Oiran Bear raising its claw.
Would that claw come crashing down and shatter his skull?
Or was it the faintly glowing "something" he'd glimpsed at the edge of his fading vision just moments ago?
He didn't know which was the cause, but Natsuki Subaru's life came to an end.