ReZERO_Starting Life in Another World Vol. 5 Page 13

  —Rem was dead in the courtyard.

  7

  The courtyard he had seen on many a morning had turned into a hell unlike anything he’d ever seen.

  The small but vivid flower bed had been trampled awry, and the trees standing around the mansion had been felled, snapped in half.

  The green grass had been dyed black with blood, with the prostrate corpse joined by the remains of several black-robed figures. Each showed signs of being subjected to incredible violence, with few remaining relatively whole. The gruesome damage to the remains exceeded what he had seen in Earlham Village, no doubt evidence of the great rage behind the murder weapon that had turned these unfortunate victims into mincemeat.

  The deadly tool that had wreaked such havoc upon them, a bloodstained iron ball, lay fallen among the dark figures in the center of the garden. The metal orb, linked to a handle via a chain, had smashed apart a number of foes, but in the midst of battle, its mistress had somehow relinquished her grip; it seemed to regret having been unable to fight alongside her to the very end.

  And as for the demon who he presumed had wielded it one-handed in ferocious battle…

  “—Rem.”

  …She was long gone from that place.

  In a corner of the courtyard, a short distance removed from the iron weapon, was Rem, her servant’s uniform dyed crimson red. The surface of the ground where she had fallen was drenched with a great quantity of blood that spoke of the heroism of her demise.

  “—”

  Looking at the large number of corpses besides Rem’s in the courtyard, he knew. She had fought. The fangs that had slaughtered the villagers had menaced the mansion with ill intent. She had battled hard to defeat a number of them, struggled while heavily wounded, and died.

  “—”

  What had the group of black figures been thinking in killing Rem?

  Why? Why? Why, why, why, why, why?

  What did they know about her? Rem tried her best, always worked hard, always took care of others, jumped to too many conclusions, was kind and gentle and stern to Subaru; when times were tough, she was on his side, but she’d left him behind; she loved her sister and hated herself, but she’d just begun to like herself a little more, and— Just when she’d stopped calling herself a substitute for her older sister, just when she’d begun to walk down her own path in life, she…

  “…Rem.”

  Though he called out to her, she made no response.

  Though he shook her, her body had already gone cold and hard. He tried to stroke her soft hair several times over, but it clung to her forehead, sticky with blood.

  Subaru didn’t even have the courage to turn her over and see the look on her face.

  Maybe her expression was bitter, locked in place as she struggled against death to her final breath. Perhaps it was peaceful. He didn’t have the right to accept either.

  After all, it was Subaru Natsuki who’d as good as killed her.

  “—”

  He left Rem, fallen with her arms wide to the sides, when he noticed the shed containing gardening tools.

  Rem’s unnatural location. The shed that she seemed to be protecting. And the blood that had flowed out from under the closed door. Despite the scent of death, Subaru suppressed his nausea as he reached toward the shed.

  With a creak, the door opened; the next instant, the scent of overflowing blood assaulted Subaru’s nostrils. He reflexively covered his mouth with his hands as he beheld the results of Rem’s attempt at defense.

  —Not a single one of the children inside the shed was still alive.

  Subaru fell down and pathetically crawled onto the grass, heaving the contents of his stomach upon the lawn. He thought that his overflowing tears and vomit would stop, but there was no apparent limit.

  “Uh, fuggh…”

  Rem had died to protect the children and failed.

  He thought back to the villagers who’d apparently picked up arms and fought. They hadn’t run, either. The adults had stayed in the village so that the children could escape. The little ones had run to the manor, with Rem fighting heroically in the courtyard to protect them as they huddled in the closed shed, praying for salvation.

  But their prayers were cruelly, mercilessly trampled on, and then their lives were taken from them as well.

  “Hyeek.”

  Abruptly, a cry in falsetto escaped his throat.

  It wasn’t that anything had happened. It was simply that the forgotten terror had suddenly reared its ugly head once more.

  Subaru had returned to the village and the mansion in the hope of finding someone who knew him. And yet, not a single living soul was left. Only the silent dead greeted Subaru.

  He felt like those hollow, empty eyes were saying something to him. He felt like the blood-drenched tongues in their wide, gaping mouths were berating him. He felt like they hated him. He recalled the days they had spent sharing smiles with each other.

  “No… No, no, no, no, no…!”

  —Why are you alive?

  —Why did we have to die instead?

  “No… I didn’t… This isn’t what I wanted at…”

  He’d had an ideal. He had dreamed of a hope.

  When Subaru heard that Emilia had fallen into peril, he had thought it a blessing from heaven. Since she had lost all faith in him, he believed this was his chance to get back into her good graces. He’d believed he would save her from peril as he had done before, she would thank him, and they’d put their meager differences behind them to walk side by side, hand in hand.

  He had disparaged the suffering, the danger, the tragedy that had occurred as nothing more than a means to that end. He had taken it lightly, believing he could fix anything, no matter what happened.

  And if the cost of that was a vast number of dead bodies—

  “It’s…not my fault… I-I didn’t…!”

  Subaru shook his head, rose to his feet, averted his eyes from the shed, turned his back on Rem’s corpse, and ran toward the mansion. He cut through the courtyard, kicking in a window on the terrace and climbing through to intrude into the mansion. The dimly lit manor seemed to treat Subaru like an outsider as the soles of his shoes crushed fragments of glass. He began to run around the building, clinging obsessively to the search for another living soul.

  “Someone, anyone, anyone, anyone, anyone, anyone, anyone, anyone, anyone…”

  Just as when he had run from the village—no, even baser hopes continued flowing from him.

  “It’s not my fault… It’s not my fault… It’s not my…fault…!”

  —I didn’t want this to happen. So it’s not my fault.

  He wanted someone to be alive so that they could agree. Or perhaps, the fact that someone had survived at all would be enough to affirm his claim. So Subaru kept searching for survivors.

  He had to find one. If he couldn’t, he’d never be able to live with himself.

  Now faced with the notion that his own, flippant thoughts had brought this tragedy about, there was no way that he could stay composed. To stop his mind from shattering, and to not have to bear the burden of the multitude of dead, he required a more tangible defense.

  He violently thrust open the door of the nearest room, peering in to find it empty. Dejected, he moved to the next chamber. Checking whatever room was closest at hand, Subaru continued his search for the four people who ought to have been at the mansion: for Ram, for Beatrice, for Roswaal, and above all, for Emilia.

  Subaru’s half-crying voice carried a heavy imprint of despair.

  “Come on… Come on… I’m begging you… Help me… Help me, please…!!”

  Normally, Subaru would have been able to easily reach Beatrice’s archive of forbidden books, even without trying. Yet when he needed to most, he was unable to find it no matter how hard he looked.

  He wanted to hear invective from her sharp tongue almost more than air itself.

  Subaru, dragging his feet along in unmanly fashion, still had tear
s rolling down his cheeks.

  Distracted by sobbing breaths, Subaru continued to walk in search of the living, his own eyes like those of the dead.

  —He found Ram’s body in the room at the end of the second floor.

  Having seen so much death in such a short time, Subaru knew immediately that she was not asleep as she lay on the bed.

  Her light skin had grown so pale that you could almost see through her. In contrast, her tongue stood out for being redder than normal. Unlike how her identical younger sister had passed away, Ram, adorned by the cosmetics of death, was lovely even after her passing. Subaru had always glibly said that she’d be cute if she only kept her mouth shut.

  —But he’d never said that out of a desire to see her like this.

  “Hgheee.”

  Subaru felt like he heard a curse. The same curse upon Subaru’s life spoken by the dead in the village and the courtyard.

  Subaru stumbled clumsily out of Ram’s bedroom and fled. He put his hands on the wall, slapping his uncooperative knees, and distanced himself as fast as he humanly could.

  Closing his ears, shaking his head, Subaru arrived at the dance hall on that floor. He crawled on hands and knees, stumbling several times midway, and pathetically climbed up the stairs.

  Ram was dead. That left three survivors. As if they had a mind of their own, his feet avoided the floor where Emilia’s room was and climbed to the top level toward the chamber at the center of the main wing.

  This was Roswaal’s study. The thick double doors remained shut in silence, their formidable solemnity making them seem removed from the wickedness that had infested the rest of the mansion.

  The doors weren’t locked. He stepped inside and looked all around, feeling half resigned to the possibility of finding Roswaal’s corpse slumped over the desk.

  Rem was dead. Ram had passed away in the mansion. Subaru himself was no longer certain if he was really looking for survivors or to find the despair that would eradicate his last hope.

  “—”

  There was no one in the study.

  There was no sign of anyone having broken into the room. The desk and the writing supplies on it were just like he remembered.

  A slight feeling of relief took hold of Subaru, not only because he was unable to confirm that Roswaal was dead or alive but also because there would not be another casualty to weigh upon his battered conscience any further.

  “—?”

  No, he realized that his earlier feeling, that the room looked just like he’d remembered it, was off. There was actually one thing that was significantly different from his memory. Namely, the bookshelf wasn’t in the same location as usual.

  “A secret…passage…?”

  The bookshelf on the wall had slid well to the right, revealing the entrance to a dark corridor behind it. He timidly drew close and peered within, finding stairs spiraling downward.

  A thought rose up in the back of Subaru’s mind. An emergency escape route.

  As a marquis and lord of the land, it was no surprise that Roswaal had such measures in place for his own protection. It was the sort of thing he’d gleefully arrange beforehand.

  The cold wind blowing through the secret passage suggested that it continued for quite a way down. He naturally imagined that the route was for safely escaping from the mansion itself.

  “If so, then Emilia…”

  Subaru took several deep breaths, hardened his resolve, and stepped into the escape route. When he touched the rather cold wall, he wondered what it must be made of; as he did so, it gave off a pale-blue glow that allowed him to see several meters ahead. Relying on the light, he kept one hand touching the wall as he carefully followed the steps downward, making sure not to slip.

  Apparently the hidden passage went underground. When he reached the end of the stairs, the tunnel stretched forward in a straight line. The source of light didn’t change, leaving him relying solely on the radiance from the walls. But the feeling that he was really chasing after survivors was enough to support Subaru for the moment.

  Whether he himself was dead or alive seemed ambiguous to him now.

  “—Nn, oh?”

  The wall he had been touching suddenly ended, leaving him abruptly groping into thin air.

  Subaru unwittingly flailed forward and was greeted by a hall in the middle of the passage.

  Really, it was more the size of a lounge than a hall. Smaller than a guest room, the space was supported by unevenly distributed pillars, so haphazard that he felt like the architect had a twisted mind.

  Slipping past the annoying supports, Subaru sluggishly advanced. Ever since he’d gone underground, he’d felt like his limbs were stuffed with lead as languor dulled his movements. Even his thoughts were clouding; even his memories from mere seconds before seemed vague.

  It was a hard battle to take even a single step at a time. His eyelids were heavy; both his shoulders felt like millstones holding him still. Even so, a combination of tenacity, hatred, sense of duty, and madness pushed Subaru’s body forward.

  Threading between the pillars, he headed straight forward to see an iron door at the back of the room. When he reached it, the breeze slipping between the split at the center told him that the path continued ahead.

  —What was I looking for, anyway?

  He reached out with bloodless fingertips before his stagnant thoughts could produce an answer. Subaru opened and shut his mouth as he breathed hard, grasping the door for no reason other than his sense of responsibility.

  “—Agauaa!”

  Screaming in fierce pain, Subaru shook his right arm as if trying to tear it off. Touching the doorknob had left his entire hand in scalding pain. Subaru anticipated further agony as he lowered his eyes onto his right hand.

  —He saw that it was missing its index finger.

  “—Huh?”

  Dumbfounded and astounded, Subaru lifted his hand before his eyes and spread it out. Now colored white, with cracked skin, it was missing its index finger from the knuckle. The middle finger and thumb were also missing their tips.

  “—”

  Slowly, his gaze returned to the door. Subaru’s finger was stuck to the door where he’d grabbed it.

  More precisely, it had ripped his finger right off.

  —Gotta get it back on, quick.

  With only that incoherent thought in his head, Subaru reached out once more to take back the finger he’d lost. But lethargy afflicted his body even more than before; his thoughts reached his shoulder and elbow but not any further than that. Impatient that his arm would not move, Subaru tried to step toward the door, but the instant he did, his right foot shattered from the ankle down.

  “—aaa!”

  Subaru fell on his side, his voice trickling out of his throat though he was unable to form words. He didn’t know if he was screaming out of pain or in a futile struggle to live.

  The instant he drew in breath to scream more, white frost filled the inside of his chest, and he could move no more.

  His lungs convulsed. In a single moment, his ability to breathe came to an end. He made short, shallow gasps, but his lungs could not expand nor take in oxygen anymore. In that perilous state, Subaru’s eyes alone desperately shifted about.

  He had very little feeling anywhere in his body. It was the second time he’d lost a leg, but the pain and sense of loss from its shattering were on a different level than mere severing. The right side of his torso, now the underside of him, was cracked in several places.

  His tongue stopped trembling as white breath came over it. Only then did Subaru realize the truth.

  His cheek was now in contact with the ground. If he moved his head, his flesh would probably crack and tear right off. He no longer felt any pain. He moved violently, tearing his right cheek and ear right off, but he didn’t care. He spent some time repositioning his body so that he was lying faceup. When he looked back at the upside down view of the little room, he understood.

  Of course the pil
lars were in irregular locations. They weren’t pillars at all. No, they were pillars, but their function wasn’t to hold up a structure.

  These were human pillars, men who had frozen over and died.

  Subaru had wandered into the same white apocalypse, and his body would become a frozen statue like the other victims’. And it would happen very soon.

  His breathing had already stopped.

  His limited oxygen flowed to his brain, but in the world of absolute cold, which would end sooner, his brain functions or his life?

  He understood nothing. He saw nothing.

  From the tips of his fingers, the being called Subaru Natsuki was coming to an end, replaced by a fragment of ice.

  Or perhaps it would have been more accurate to say it was no longer Subaru Natsuki there but a madman wearing his flesh?

  Perhaps his mind had died long before, the moment he arrived in the village.

  He lost all feeling in his lower body. He couldn’t see his arm anymore. It was strange that his brain was functioning at all. Where did one’s life reside? The brain or the heart?

  There was no way that he would find the answer in that freezing world.

  In the realm ruled by nothing but white, there was a frigid murmur.

  “—You are far too late.”

  And then…

  —Subaru Natsuki shattered into tiny pieces, into white crystals, and vanished from the world.

  CHAPTER 4

  ON THE PERIPHERY OF MADNESS

  1

  —When the darkness split apart and he awoke, it began with the pain of sunlight burning his eyes.

  “—id?”

  Warm blood flowed through his limbs. His shattered lower body was firmly standing upon the ground.

  Right after the first blink, all his lost mental functions seemed to return at once. His brain instantly restarted and then short-circuited from information overload, making his eyes literally spin.

  Where the ringing in his ears had dominated his world, the sounds of thronging humans going about their lives came rushing in. Various people mingled along the dusty road, burying his field of vision in the living souls he had so craved.