PROLOGUE
THE ROAD TO REDEMPTION BEGINS
—Even now, she deeply recalled the feelings she had at the time.
Familiar sights had flames all around them; people she knew had turned into silent corpses.
A world coming to an end. A closed world. A thankless world.
A world that was harsh, senseless, and brought nothing but pain.
Even so, she reached out with her hand, moved her fingers, quivered her lips, and pleaded.
After all, while it was a world beyond saving, it was still the only one she had.
It was a world that always had its back turned to her, locked away before her eyes, a world she could gaze into only from afar.
She wanted to abruptly tear down that wall; squint at the broad, dazzling world before her; and carve into her unopened eyes the color of sunbaked skin, the color and smell of burned meat, the color of the beautiful “horns” that danced in the sky—
Here was the world about to end, and what was she thinking about?
For even then, she could still remember the feelings she had at the time—
Thereafter, she devoted each and every day to expunging her guilt over those feelings above all else.
CHAPTER 1
SELF-CONSCIOUS FEELINGS
1
The first thing that flew into his eyes as they blinked open was an artificial sense of dazzling white. Beyond the light, a broad ceiling spread before him, with crystals attached to it providing flickering light that illuminated the room’s interior.
Confirming in his head that he was waking up, Subaru’s mind immediately grasped how good his wake-up felt.
“…The pillow feels different, huh. Smells better, too… Definitely higher class than usual.”
Subaru savored the feel of the blanket and the other fine scents as he sat up in bed.
At a glance, he knew it was a room for the upper class. Subaru had slept in a king-size bed that could fit five people to spare; the room was about ninety square feet, oddly spacious with only a bed in it.
“The quality of the painting on the wall is so high it makes the room feel lonelier, huh. A guest room, then?”
Subaru, now completely awake, gently swung his legs over the side of the bed and checked his physical condition. He made sure he could rotate his legs and shoulders, finally pulling up his clothes and gingerly touching his belly.
“Abdominal wound…totally gone. No bruises, of course no scar, either… This world’s medical tech is pretty awesome to not leave sewing marks. Assuming my big scene wasn’t all just in my imagination, anyway.”
He recalled the string of events leading up to his abdomen being deeply slashed.
Subaru, a completely ordinary Japanese schoolboy, was abruptly summoned to another world in a painfully cliché manner, coming face-to-face with death, literally, on multiple occasions.
That he was still alive was thanks to a string of coincidences that one could only call miraculous.
“But how much time’s passed since then… No way to tell the time, huh?”
He glanced all around the room, unable to find any sign of calendars, clocks, or anything similar. The gold-glowing crystal above the door stood out; the darkness outside the window told him it was night, which was news to him.
Subaru slumped his shoulders and took a deep breath. Then, he voiced the inescapable conclusion on his lips and finally resigned himself to face reality.
“Any way you slice it…this time I managed to avoid Return by Death, huh?”
2
“First time, it was a pathetic death; second time, it was a bold death; third time, I died like a dog; fourth time, I got involved in mortal combat and died from a stray blow—is what I would be saying if I hadn’t overcome that development. Man, if I died then, I’d be on a one-way ticket to mob-ville.”
Flopping back into the bed, Subaru counted the causes of his deaths on his fingers.
Looking back on it, armed robbery included, he’d been slashed to death every time. He didn’t want to see a blade again anytime soon.
At any rate, he’d somehow managed to avoid Return by Death and had finally been able to move time forward. The fact that he was all right after sustaining a plainly lethal wound meant…
“Considering the situation, it was that girl’s…Emilia’s healing magic, huh?”
An image arose in the back of his mind of a beautiful lilac-eyed girl with silver hair—Emilia.
He thought it was safe to assume she’d healed his abdominal wound. Having had a wound healed by Emilia once before, it was a natural assumption for Subaru to make. Subaru reasoned that, as a result, the guest room he was resting in was part of a mansion owned by Emilia. Then again…
“It’s entirely possible this mansion’s connected to Reinhard’s family… But, well.”
Glancing toward the door, Subaru let out a dissatisfied sigh at the lack of information on his current situation.
“Normally, there’d be a pretty girl at your bedside when you open your eyes, saying, ‘Are you awake?’ And there weren’t any pretty girls when I was summoned, either. For a summons, this one sure has some glaring inadequacies…”
This summons was definitely third-rate. He couldn’t slice through armies, and he’d barely had any meaningful encounters.
“Besides, nothing’s happening so far… So it’s up to me to do recon and make myself comfortable.”
Subaru practically leapt to his feet and put his hand on the door. The refreshingly cool air blew in through the open doorway and the floor transferred the cold directly to his bare feet.
When he left the room, the walls and floor of a corridor, all in warm colors, unfolded before him. The passageway continued on and on to both the left and right.
Frighteningly, he couldn’t see either end of the corridor.
“It’s so much like a palace that all I can say is whoa. It’s insanely huge… Can’t even tell if anyone’s here.”
Delicately walking down the corridor on bare feet, Subaru scowled at the silence. It was as if he couldn’t hear any signs of life that should normally be there.
“It’s too quiet, even for the night… Makes me not wanna raise my voice…”
Personality-wise, Subaru was geared toward asking, Is anybody here?! in a loud voice, but the present circumstances made that too dangerous.
After all, Subaru had not yet determined whether this was a safe place for him or not.
Subaru had accepted as a matter of course that the host was friendly, but in the worst case, it was possible the assassin with a love of slitting bellies might have returned and abducted him.
All the same, he wouldn’t be able to lift a finger if he assumed everything was doomed.
“Kenichi once said, life must be lived. That’s what I think, too.”
Incidentally, Kenichi was Subaru’s father. It was very fitting that a person like him was his father.
Subaru’s steps forward did not falter. But after walking awhile, Subaru twisted his neck a bit.
“I’ve walked this much, but I haven’t hit a bend. Is that even possible?”
Unsurprisingly, he could not contain his misgivings. Subaru turned around, thinking about going back the other way.
Then he raised an eyebrow and remarked, “Huh…? That painting… I think it was right in front of me when I came out of the room…”
Subaru crossed his arms as he stood in front of the oil painting decorating the corridor.
The painting was of a forest scene at night. He felt like it was the same as the one he’d seen when he stepped out of the room.
Unless Subaru had
moved at the literal pace of a snail, he jumped at the only possibility he could think of.
“Maybe the floor has some trick that makes it move around on its own or…could it be that the corridor loops around…?”
He’d probably turned in the opposite map direction after going a certain way. It was a field trap like you’d see in an RPG.
“If the corridor’s looping, maybe it’s got something to do with Return by Death.”
Subaru, hoping someone out there agreed with him, grasped the doorknob of the closest room and opened it. When he did, a no-frills room that had nothing within greeted him. Of course, no one was in it, either.
“A looping corridor with any number of rooms… So if I don’t find the right one, I can’t get out?”
Though he hadn’t yet truly accepted he’d been summoned to another world, here he was facing a new fantasy element right after waking.
“So if this goes according to cliché, it could take me hours to find the right one. I’ll go hungry; my mind’ll give out, then my body will, too. If that’s the case…” The situation made Subaru want to hold his head.
Taking a deep breath, Subaru wiped the sweat off his brow and took the first decisive step forward.
He twisted the doorknob of the door facing the oil painting—in other words, the door that looked like the one Subaru had exited.
“I’ll sleep in my room till someone comes. Maybe that first room was the goal anyway.”
Speaking his characteristically flippant thoughts, Subaru entered the room—
“…How do you look like such a deeply irritating person, I wonder?”
Within the book-filled archive that Subaru had no recollection of seeing earlier, a girl with curly hair glared right at him.
3
—It was a room that truly screamed book archive at you.
The breadth of the room was about twice that of the first one, chock-full of bookshelves that rose to the ceiling. Each shelf was lined with books; it hurt to even try to guesstimate.
“Man, here in a place full of books and I can’t read a single one… What a bummer.”
His breath caught when he looked all around the bookshelves, unable to find a single one with the title on its spine in Japanese.
It wasn’t some sort of alphabet, either; rather, these were characters like those he saw in the royal capital—the characters in common use in that world.
Subaru let out a sigh as he looked over the characters he couldn’t read no matter how hard he tried.
“Looking all over someone else’s bookshelves, and sighing on top of that… Are you trying to offend, I wonder? Perhaps I should respond in kind?”
“Your pretty face’ll go all to waste if you’re that prickly. C’mon, smile, smile!”
“I am simply pretty by nature. I suppose my contemptuous sneer should be enough for the likes of you.”
Putting the tips of her fingers to her cheeks, the girl formed a cruel smile.
Betty was a sweet, lovely girl—a sight he’d seen several times in this world already.
She looked younger than Felt in the slums, no more than eleven or twelve years old. Her frilly hairstyle matched her ornate dress, both framing her lovely face.
Her pale, cream-colored hair was worn long, distinctive for its swirling rolls. If she’d only smile properly, there was no one’s heart she’d fail to melt.
She held a large book in her hands as she sat on a wooden footstool, from which she looked up at Subaru.
“You know big words like contemptuous sneer, huh…and you’re in a bad mood because I got it right in one go? My bad! I’ve been doing stuff like this since way back.”
Subaru Natsuki had a knack for picking the right answer to difficult questions with many options, without hints, on the first try. In the past, Subaru had unwittingly ruined many a scheme like that. The corridor from before made one more on the list.
“All my hard work constructing the domain, all for naught, just like that… It is quite horrid.”
“I suppose GMs would want me to trigger all their events instead of skipping to the end, so I get it. My bad, my bad.”
Subaru made a light wave of his hand in apology while the girl glared at him with half-lidded eyes. Apparently, it was this girl’s scheme that Subaru’s thoughtless act had foiled.
“Well, let’s make that water under the bridge. Could you tell me where this is?”
“Hmph. It is my archive, my sleeping quarters…my private chambers, perhaps?”
“Shouldn’t that make me feel kind of sad for you? I mean, you don’t have your own bedroom to sleep in? That’s horrible. Or about you using a library as your private chambers…maybe I should just laugh?”
“Are those remarks intended with a touch of teasing, I wonder?!”
The annoyed girl replying with blunt sarcasm, who called herself Betty, puffed out her cheeks and advanced upon Subaru.
“I am finally reaching the limit of my patience. You should be put in your place a little, I suppose.”
“Hey, whatever you’re planning, let’s not? I’m just an ordinary guy, no combat ability at all here?”
His eyes became smaller and damper as his body made tiny quivers in a showy pose. But the speed of the girl’s soft footsteps increased.
“—Stay right there.”
Suddenly, Subaru was assailed by a feeling like a chill up his spine.
The girl, already before his eyes, stretched out her hand all the way to Subaru. Subaru froze as the girl, her height not reaching near his upper chest, stared at him with pale blue eyes.
His skin broke out in goose bumps as a quiet, high-pitched ringing echoed inside his skull.
“Is there something you wish to say…?”
As the girl posed her question, he unfroze for a moment. Subaru searched for the best thing to say during the instant he had been permitted. Subaru’s gaze wandered as his lips quivered.
“I-it’s not gonna hurt, is it?”
“Should I applaud your devotion to your flippant tongue, I wonder?”
Speaking with a tone of genuine admiration, the girl reached her hand to Subaru’s chest. Her palm pushed against his breast, her fingertips pressing softly against the surface. It felt ticklish. And—
“Bwah…!”
—the next moment, Subaru felt like his entire body was on fire.
Something was running wild inside him, making him feel like he was on fire from the tips of his fingers to the very ends of his hair. The eerie pain was as if a finger of flame were tracing his internal organs.
His vision darkened. When Subaru came to, he had fallen onto his knees, a large amount of tears flowing from him.
“It seems you did not faint. Perhaps you are as sturdy as I heard?”
“Wh-what did you do, drill loli…”
“I simply interfered with the mana inside your body. Does the circulation feel slightly off, I wonder?”
The girl calmly murmured as she knelt down and jabbed a finger into Subaru’s body.
“Well, it would be good to confirm whether you had hostile intent or not. And, for your rudeness toward my hard work, your mana should be confiscated before letting you go, I suppose.”
Subaru, having reached his limit, was unable to remain upright from the jab, his head falling to the floor. Despite this, he was able to slowly use his neck, looking up as the girl glared down at him with a sadistic smile.
“You’re not…human, are you? And I don’t mean your personality….”
“You are quite slow to grasp that for someone who has met Puckie already.”
The girl looked down with amusement as Subaru crawled. She looked younger than her choice of words hinted at, feeling like the sort of little girl who’d rip the wings off an insect in a cruel game.
“Correction… Your personality’s…inhuman, too…”
“Surely a sublime being far beyond your ability to measure, human.”
It was an overly glacial statement coming from the lip
s of a little girl.
Subaru felt the inside of his chest smolder. But he had no strength left to describe the heat with words. Subaru’s consciousness sank into darkness against his will.
—Geez, I just woke up and I’m getting knocked out again?!
“If you died here, your husk would be troublesome to remove. I shall speak to the others.”
—Don’t say husk, it makes me sound like an insect, you little brat—
Subaru returned to sleep once more, unable to move even his frivolous tongue.
4
“My, it seems he has awakened, Sister.”
“Yes, Rem. He is awake.”
When he next awoke, two girls spoke, their voices sharing the same timbre.
He was in the same soft, comfortable bed as before. The slight opening of the curtains let in the dazzling rays of the sun, burning sleepy Subaru’s eyelids. He instinctively assumed it was morning.
“Ugh, I’m not so much nocturnal as I am a denizen of the night. Waking up in the morning makes my chest burn…”
Wide awake, Subaru sat up as he remembered that his day and night cycles were inverted while school was out. He looked around, rotated his shoulders, and shifted his hips toward the window as he looked in that direction.
“Dear Guest, it is now Seven Solartime.”
“Dear Guest, it is about Seven Solartime.”
Their friendly voices conveyed the time of day. Seven Solartime—he didn’t know what that meant, but he guessed it meant something similar to seven AM.
“That being the case, if you don’t count the wake-up earlier, I’ve slept for about a whole day, huh? Well, my record is two and a half days, so this is no big deal, really.”
“Sister, did you hear? Quite a lazy thing to say.”
“Yes, Rem, I heard. Quite a good-for-nothing thing to say.”
“So who’re these ladies who’ve been chewing me out in stereo here?!”
Subaru sat up quickly, taken by surprise at the girls, sandwiching the bed from both sides. The girls rushed a short distance to a corner of the room, joining hands and drawing their faces close as they looked at him.
Re:ZERO -Starting Life in Another World-, Vol. 2 Page 1
