His throat trembles. His soul screams.
Flesh is torn open, nerves are invaded, and a sharp, maddening agony that could drive him insane hammers at his brain.
"Aaaaaaaaah—!!"
His vision goes red. He can't grasp reality at all.
A black beast has sunk its teeth into his right thigh. Before the thought of prying it off even forms, his body is already screaming in pain.
—It hurts, it hurts, it hurts, it hurts, it hurts, it hurts.
His entire mind is filled with nothing but that. There's no room to even think of a counterattack.
Suddenly, his sense of balance collapses. The beast that latched onto him shakes its head while still driving its fangs deeper, and its weight advantage—nearly twice Subaru's—drags him face-first into the ground.
"Gwah—!"
The force sends him tumbling half a rotation, slamming him prone into the dirt. He fails to brace himself, and his face plows into the earth, crushing his nose with a sickening sensation and filling his mouth with the taste of soil.
Above and below, pain continues asserting itself, and as he spits out dirt, Subaru's throat keeps issuing low groans. Then, at that point, he notices the fangs have withdrawn from his right leg, and he frantically rolls over.
"Shit…!"
He flips onto his back and pushes himself upright.
His right leg is hemorrhaging badly, and the skin beneath his torn clothes is peeled back, the flesh curling upward. Pain throbs from the wound like it was gouged out with a knife, but more pressing than that is getting to his feet—except he's too late.
The pitch-black shadow, intent on finishing off its prey before moving in for the killing blow, is too fast to track.
Bouncing left and right off the ground as it closes in, the wild beast leaves Subaru with only one possible reaction: shielding his upper body with both arms.
A gleaming swipe of razor-sharp claws arcs down, slicing Subaru's right arm from the back of his hand all the way to the shoulder in one clean stroke. Blood erupts from the fresh wound, his pain receptors cheering wildly at the new insult, and Subaru's brain boils in a symphony of agony.
Before severing his throat, the beast intends to crush all four limbs and strip away any capacity for resistance.
Experiencing firsthand the cruelty of a predator's hunt, Subaru lets out a scream of pure terror.
The meaningless shriek does nothing to influence the horned beast's movements. As if performing a routine task it has done countless times, the creature bites down on Subaru's left wrist, robbing him of the use of his third limb.
The sensation of fangs piercing through his left wrist.
A feeling that has transcended pain itself, reduced to nothing more than a trigger for screaming. His vision flickers, his thoughts can't even run properly, yet the only thing propelling Subaru forward now is pure, reflexive survival instinct.
"Aaaaaah—!! Son of a bitch—!!"
He screams and, with every ounce of strength he has, slams the beast into the ground along with the left wrist still trapped in its jaws. The creature's bite isn't strong enough for that to dislodge the fangs—its jaws aren't that loose. Even as blood and drool stain its black fur, the horned beast seems to mock Subaru's resistance by driving its teeth in even deeper.
Then, right across its face— "Don't get cocky—!!"
The feather pen he'd never let go of plunges deep into the beast's left eye.
The eyeball bursts, and the sensation of something scraping around inside the socket makes the horned beast the one to let out a howl.
Met with unexpected retaliation from what it had written off as helpless prey, the creature thrashes its entire body in resistance. But Subaru has already judged that if he lets this chance slip, there's nothing left.
Of course he keeps his right arm—still driving the pen deeper—and he doesn't release his left arm either. Instead, he throws his entire body over the beast, determined never to let it escape.
"It hurts it hurts it hurts it hurts it hurts—"
His right leg, with nerves damaged all the way to the bone, can't brace for anything. His left arm is dangling by a single strip of skin at the wrist. His right arm's wound is peeled open so deep he can see the bone beneath.
Blood pours nonstop from his smashed nose, and he's pretty sure two or three of his front teeth are missing.
Even in this state, he throws everything he has into escaping the crisis before him.
There is pain. There is suffering. There is fear. He is alive.
Both he and this beast are still breathing.
"Gaaah—"
The beast's wildly flailing claws rake across his forehead, and the jolt to his brain loosens his grip just slightly. Seizing that opening, the horned beast shoves Subaru away and leaps back, the feather pen still embedded in its left eye.
A single bound carries it several meters, and the pitch-black shadow melts into the forest and vanishes.
Subaru, still sitting collapsed on the dirt, searches for where it went, momentarily forgetting even his pain.
He can't afford to be optimistic, thinking it retreated because it was injured.
A wounded beast is dangerous—that much he's heard plenty of times. And to the beast, Subaru is now a wounded target as well.
For both of them, the other is something whose life must end right here and now.
"—Ow."
He props himself up on his right knee—it can't bear weight anymore—using only his left leg. Both arms are a horrifying sight, especially his left, which he can't even bear to look at directly without feeling his will crumble.
A throbbing sensation like someone's hammering his temples. He shoves the relentless alarm bell of pain into temporary unconsciousness and fixes his glare on the forest where the beast disappeared.
It'll come back. For sure.
That conviction, devoid of any concrete basis, was perhaps one of the few gifts Subaru had gained in this world from having faced death more than a few times.
"————!!"
The scream—that breathless, strangled cry—whose was it, Subaru's or the beast's?
All he knows is this: right before his eyes, a maw lined with razor-sharp fangs gapes open, and the horned beast rockets toward him like a bullet.
The full-force impact of a thirty-kilo creature charging without restraint hits Subaru's entire body. And he has to endure it without the luxury of both feet planted on the ground.
Instinctively his right arm comes up, and the horned beast's bite lands on empty air, its jaws snapping shut on nothing as Subaru deflects its chin upward. But he can't absorb even a fraction of the charging force, and his body goes tumbling across the ground together with the beast.
"Ooooooaaaah—"
Blown backward, slamming against the earth again and again, Subaru flails his arms in a frenzy. Midway through, he feels something solid beneath his fingers—coarse fur—he grabs hold with everything he has, and even without knowing what part of the creature it is, he refuses to let go.
Tumbling together across the ground, Subaru and the beast soon roll onto a slope. Far from slowing, they pick up speed, hurtling toward the bottom—until finally— "You're kidding me…"
The hard ground he'd been slamming against suddenly vanishes.
A moment later, a sensation of weightlessness washes over him, and Subaru realizes he's gone off the edge of a cliff.
"————!!"
The wordless scream—was it Subaru or the beast that cried out?
In the end, the scream didn't last long.
The feeling of floating is cut short after barely two seconds, replaced by yet another full-body impact that makes his bones creak. A dull crack sounds—something definitely broke, he thinks. But his body decides that's a problem for later.
He extends his left arm—the one he can't feel past the wrist—and claws at the rock face, trying to arrest the momentum of the tumble. The nails on his spread fingers are ripped away, and blood sprays across the stone wall in a mottled streak, like a spray-painted pattern.
Only after that does his momentum finally slow, and Subaru's body comes to a halt right at the edge of the cliff. Hanging half his body over nothing, he frantically rolls back toward solid ground.
"Pfaah… haa… aah, aah, aah, damn it!"
He pinches his nose and blows hard, clearing the blood that hasn't finished draining.
Whether the liquid filling his mouth is saliva, blood, or stomach acid, he can't even tell—and he spits it all out along with a string of curses.
Gasping for breath, his face twisted in pain from the lacerations and bruises screaming across every part of his body, Subaru suddenly realizes the beast that fell with him isn't anywhere in sight.
"Hey, where the hell—!?"
This is no time to be grateful for surviving the fall.
If the beast attacks again while Subaru's still trapped on the cliff edge, this time it really will be the end. Imagining the horned beast nimbly leaping about and threatening him from nearby, Subaru changes position and scans his surroundings.
And almost immediately, he spots the black shape.
"…So that's how it is. Couldn't make it, huh?"
The horned beast lies below him, at the base of the cliff.
Unlike Subaru, it hadn't been able to avoid a second fall. Unable to withstand a plunge from more than twice the height of the first, the beast had hit headfirst, and now it lay in a massive pool of blood, not moving so much as a twitch.
—It seemed Subaru had once again managed to pick up his life.
"You piece of shit… This is a joke…"
Perhaps it was because he'd witnessed the end of that life that relief finally seeped into the cracks of his heart.
Subaru, who was also bleeding far too much to ignore, lets himself collapse sideways onto the ground. Unable to resist the sleep that crashes over him, he closes his eyes.
Just like that, with no room left to think about anything, his consciousness drops away and vanishes.