Re:Zero – Starting Life in Another World. Volume. 11.
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‘Chapter 6:- LOVE-LOVE-LOVE-LOVE-LOVE-LOVE-YOU.’
Sub-chapter 1.
“Uegh! Geho! Gehh!”
The instant he awoke, Subaru spat out the bitter taste of dirt inside his mouth in spectacular fashion.
Kneeling on the cold floor, he desperately retched until there were tears in his eyes. He earnestly spat out saliva reeking of mud and gravel.
“This gonna happen every time…?!!”
When he finished spitting out the foreign substances, Subaru cursed as he shook his head, urging his waking mind to fully awaken.
Slowly, he reflected on what had happened while he slept, and a fog seemed to lift as his memories came back to life—
“The Great Rabbit got me… I came back and got invited to the tea party…”
Tea party and Witch—when those keywords floated up, a rich variety of memories about the Witches played on the back of his eyelids. The fact that he remembered made Subaru comprehend that Echidna had fulfilled her part of the vow.
Without thinking, he touched his wrist with his hand. He felt cloth; Petra’s handkerchief was there too, safe and sound.
“…So Echidna kept her promise, huh? For a Witch, she really doesn’t seem that bad.”
Subaru made a little sigh. Perhaps it was a sigh of lament; perhaps a sigh of praise.
Echidna, not as witchy as her title suggested, was one of his precious few allies for that loop. She had both intellect and wisdom. The tea parties and the Trial provided limited opportunities to rely on either, but—
“—The flip side is, they bring the biggest advantage. That’s a big deal.”
Touching a hand to his chest, Subaru mentally trembled anew that he’d been able to confess Return by Death.
The conditions had been limited to that place, where it was only him, Echidna, and the other Witches. But being able to reveal Return by Death to someone and talk to her about it was something he didn’t dare wish for by that point.
Thanks to that, he’d gained information on the Great Rabbit and hypotheses about Return by Death’s characteristics.
Perhaps the most disturbing piece of information he’d returned with was that the Witch of Envy was the cause of the Authority dwelling in Subaru and that, one day, he would most certainly come to face the Witch.
“But right now, I’ll rely on that power of yours. I’ll use the lives you give me as many times as I need to.”
If this put him closer to the answers, he was all the gladder for it. It was a small price to pay for the sake of the future.
Subaru crudely wiped his lips with his sleeve and stood up then and there. He wore a strong expression full of determination, but then it flipped; an ill feeling changed it to apprehension.
“Emilia had to have been the one who…woke me up, but…”
Properly speaking, Subaru’s mind had been called awake through external interference. But in this case, it was a slight and trivial difference…one that evaporated in light of the larger current issue.
Namely, there in the tomb’s stone room where the first Trial took place—Emilia was nowhere to be found.
“…No way, right?”
Murmuring in astonishment, Subaru looked all around the dimly lit stonework room.
However, there was no sight of Emilia anywhere within the Trial room. Emilia, who should have been in anguish from the nightmare she was having until the moment Subaru touched and awakened her, was gone.
“So she woke up before me, then tried to wake me up, and then…and then?”
—And then, with Subaru not awakening, she just left, leaving him there?
That would not have been a very Emilia-like act. It was more likely that Emilia would carry the unconscious Subaru out of the tomb than go outside to call for aid.
Or perhaps her mental state was so much at odds with its normal condition that she’d commit such an un-Emilia-like act.
“—!!”
It was then that Subaru realized he had come far too late.
As he repeated events, it was the fourth time he had awakened in that place. But until then, never once had Emilia awoken before him; this was the first time.
Now, he was unable to console the brokenhearted Emilia, a hole bored in her heart by nightmares from the past.
“Don’t tell me she ran outside all in a panic…!”
Thinking back to how much Emilia was flustered by the past, he couldn’t say with any certainty that it was impossible.
Ram and Otto were outside of the tomb. Even if Emilia did leave in tears, they ought to have been able to skillfully calm her back down. Besides, outside were—
“—Garfiel and Ryuzu are there.”
When he turned around, about to make a run for the tomb’s exit, his legs came to a halt. Right after Return by Death, Subaru’s miasma had probably increased in density again. He still hadn’t been able to work out countermeasures for that.
If his miasma was thicker than the previous time around, there was no telling when Garfiel and company would come after him. It wasn’t certain they wouldn’t attack him right after he left the tomb.
“…Nah, I have to go.”
He was concerned for Emilia’s safety. There was no way he could put that on the back burner.
Besides, if his miasma thickened the more he repeated, every error in judgment made the situation worse. Subaru’s excuses might only pass muster while the count was still low. That time might have been his last for that.
Subaru’s emotional state also made the short-tempered Garfiel difficult to persuade. But he might get somewhere with Ryuzu by pleading that the miasma business was a misunderstanding.
“This time gotta bet on that conversation—!”
Betting everything on a possibility limited to that time around, he forced his once-stopped legs to move. After the first step came down, there was no more hesitation. He ran across the hard floor full-force.
The sounds of his shoes echoed throughout the cold tomb, mixing with Subaru’s breathing as he hurried outside. A lukewarm breeze blew in from the entrance, rubbing Subaru the wrong way, something he brushed aside as he ran.
As Subaru clenched his teeth tightly, the moonlight filtering in straight in front of him brought the entrance into view. Subaru leaped over the vines covering the corridor’s floor and walls, determined to move even if he could see nothing on his way outside.
When he raced out of the tomb, he wondered if it would be Emilia, or perhaps Garfiel, first entering his eyes.
“—Huh?”
Instantly, he hit the emergency brakes, crudely bringing his body to a halt. He pitched forward, then righted himself.
However, his heart, struck by surprise at the unexpected, could not be righted so easily.
“”
In his mind, he traced two scenes—Emilia in tears, Garfiel turning with enmity as Subaru raced out of the tomb—that represented his worst-case scenarios. But the result was neither of the two.
There was neither Emilia nor Garfiel nor, for that matter, Ram or Otto or Ryuzu either.
What was there was—
“—A shadow.”
Haltingly, without thinking, Subaru let the murmur trickle out, bluntly describing the scene.
Outside the tomb, the Sanctuary, surrounded by both forest and barrier, was entirely engulfed in pitch-black shadow.
Sub-chapter 2.
Shadow—truly, there was no other way to express the spectacle before his eyes.
A change had come over the landscape he surveyed from the entrance of the tomb. The clearing in front of the tomb, the settlement visible in the distance, and the bonfire for illuminating the nighttime path…none of these entered his vision.
He turned his face skyward. There, the waning, pale moon and the countless stars glimmered, giving off their light.
Neither the moonlight nor the starlight had any effect upon the shadow smothering the Sanctuary in darkness.
“”
Swallowing his breath, Subaru hardened his will and stepped down the tomb’s stairs, setting his feet upon the clearing before his eyes. His soles came into contact with the shadow. He felt the soles stepping on grass and soil, though his eyes could not see either. There was no sign that he was sinking into the shadow like quicksand. But he was engulfed by shadow up to ankle level.
Instantly, the creepy shadow felt repulsive. Subaru’s throat shuddered as he yelled.
“E-Emilia! Emilia, where are you! Where are you?! Please answer me, Emilia!”
The uncertainty about the world that was present, the warping of the world shown through his eyes—these sent fear running through Subaru.
His resolve in the face of come-what-may was blotted out by the absurdity of not even understanding what had happened.
Emilia did not respond. There was no sound or sight of her to be found.
“Ram! Ryuzu! Even Otto! You’re here, right?! Come on out, please!”
If that moment was right after taking the Trial, all of the people he named ought to have been present in the clearing. What ought to have happened was Subaru soothing the panicked Emilia and being greeted by those people when he brought her outside.
That was what ought to have happened, but this time, nothing was going according to Subaru’s experiences.
“Am I stupid…? No, I am stupid. This ain’t the time to get cold feet. Whatever happened, I’ve gotta be as cool as if I was wearing a watercooler over my head…!”
Biting his lip, blood coursing to his jaw, Subaru strived to maintain his calm in the face of the anomaly. He’d wasted enough time in futile things like his mind going awry, getting emotional, and being buffeted by events; no more.
—Hadn’t he only just hardened his resolve at the tomb, at Echidna’s tea party?
However indecipherable the circumstance, if he faced it resolutely, even if he didn’t arrive at the right answer but simply took a step forward closer to where his hand could reach, a step closer to payback, such a death would have meaning.
“…I have to find out where the heck Emilia and the others went.”
Speaking aloud that which he must do, Subaru settled on challenging the shadow before him as his interim plan.
He was walking toward the settlement. His options were the Cathedral that had taken in the people of Earlham Village and the Ryuzu residence where Roswaal was convalescing—the Cathedral was closer and had more people. So he headed there.
Pursuing that thought, Subaru lifted up a foot from the shadow to break into a run—
“—Uh?”
The instant he tried to run, Subaru stopped moving at the very first step. It wasn’t out of timidity. The reason he stopped was that the wind was suddenly blowing right before his eyes.
It was a lukewarm wind, and there was a color to it. Its black color greatly resembled the shadow enveloping the Sanctuary.
“”
The wind brushed against Subaru as if licking his entire body, passing behind him. Feeling the skin on the back of his neck tickle from the graze, Subaru slowly, slowly turned around.
His eyes followed the wind. It was a foolish act, but there was a tangible reason why he did it.
“Aa”
In the Sanctuary, befallen by darkness, shadow shrouded the surface of the clearing, in which there was no one besides Subaru.
But there, close enough to breathe upon it, that shadow silently stood.
He hadn’t noticed until it was very close. He hadn’t noticed it getting very close. Even having come so very close, it had raised no voice, though it gazed at him.
He could not see the other person’s face. And yet, it was that face he could not see, more than anything else, that revealed who this was.
“—?!!”
The next moment, the shadow blanketing the ground swelled up in explosive fashion, and the fragile landscape known as the Sanctuary completely collapsed, swallowed by a sea of shadow that blotted out the darkness-covered forest, the settlement, and the world.
But faced with such an enormous anomaly before him, Subaru could not spare a thought for the world being swallowed by the shadow.
His thoughts were stolen by the being before his eyes and remorse that should not have existed.
“You’re…”
His voice trembled. He could not continue further. With Subaru’s voice caught in his throat, the shadow whispered in his stead.
It could not have expressed what it intended in a fashion easier to comprehend.
“—I love you.”
Thus did the shadow whisper, infused with hot, passionate affection, enough to set the entire world aflame.
Sub-chapter 3.
Before the shadow’s erosion, physical barriers such as doors and walls held no meaning.
Stonework walls, weathered wooden doors, metal tables…they were placed here and there like a child’s toys of questionable value. They became dyed in shadow, along with the time and thought that had gone into piling them up.
“—Goodness. I truuuuly have no luck. To think I do not even know if the Trial was overcome or no.”
The individual lying upon the bed let such deeply sentimental comments trickle out while he gazed absentmindedly at the residence being eroded thus from the center of the room being engulfed by shadow.
The voice was not nervous. There was no surprise at the presence of the shadow whatsoever. It simply felt hollow, with an air of resignation.
Hollowness and resignation: these were the emotions lingering in the individual’s differently colored eyes. However, to a degree others could not even begin to surmise, he felt deeply and at great length the pondering weight of months and years as they passed.
He had kept up the struggle for such a long period of time, only to ultimately arrive at hollowness and resignation. That was exactly how he felt.
“Lady Emilia went to challenge the Trial, and you go to save her. This, and eventually, inevitably, the situation shall change… But it seems it is not I who shall see it.”
Sighing, the individual slowly sat up and then gently moved from the bed down to the floor. The room’s floor had already been engulfed by shadow, and that erosion began to reach his feet as well.
The shadow was merciless, grabbing hold of his slender ankles. It writhed as it climbed higher and higher, blotting out his existence.
There had to have been pain accompanying erosion by shadow. However, as the shadow pervaded the flesh of his legs, the color of the individual’s face did not change whatsoever— No, his face was concealed under white makeup. Therefore, his expression would never falter. Perhaps such mental strength was wondrous…or simply mad.
When the shadow swallowed his legs in their entirety, the erosion arrived at his hips. During that time, the individual unbound the bandages wrapped around his upper body, revealing the painful wounds remaining on his supple flesh.
He dropped the blood-smeared bandages to his feet. Not watching as they were engulfed by shadow, the individual stretched a hand toward the bed. He moved the pillow aside and picked up that which lay beneath.
Then, very, very tenderly, he held it to his chest: a black-covered, title-less book.
He embraced it like a loved one. It was as if the book itself was someone he cared for very deeply.
His crimson-smeared lips took on the shape of a strange-looking smile as his voice trickled out like a whisper.
“If it is hell that you have chosen, it is there I shall greet you. If you walk the path of hell, I shall gladly accompany you. If it is in hell you live, then it is that hell I desire.”
His whisper reached no one.
It was simply a fruitless, meaningless act to kill time, a soliloquy that would be eternally unheard.
But he continued those lonely words, that lonely charade, as he tightly clutched the book.
In a place none could reach, with a voice that could reach no one, with only himself around to hear, he stated…
“—Next time, make no mistakes, yes, Subaru Natsuki?”
It was then, finally, that the smile was consumed by shadow. The book fell to the floor—whereupon all sank into darkness and vanished.
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