Re:ZERO -Starting Life in Another World-, Vol. 12

by Tappei Nagatsuki

  The floor split and fragmented, blood mixing with those shards Wilhelm’s fist had split along as well. With blood dripping from his hand, Wilhelm raised his face to the heavens in lamentation.

  In contrast to Wilhelm’s raw, ferocious emotions, Ferris let out a little exhale and said, “…Weakling, coward. Everyone has precious people leave them, don’t they? …Pushing all your pain and hardship onto everyone else… Are you satisfied with that?”

  As sarcasm, it was harsh. As an accusation, it was all too charitable.

  Having abandoned all comprehension, Subaru’s consciousness could not decipher such a complex state of mind. But from Wilhelm’s and Ferris’s demeanor, one thing was perfectly clear.

  —Subaru had carved deep, lasting wounds upon their hearts.

  “”

  Notwithstanding his absentminded daze, he was a being of consciousness alone—yet that fact thrust very deep indeed.

  Subaru was seeing something. He was being shown something. What was this supposed to be?

  —He was being shown his crime.

  “—Even though you told me…”

  It was low. It was thin. And as her voice reverberated hollowly in the silence the two had created, it struck into Subaru like a stake.

  As Wilhelm and Ferris succumbed to resignation, Emilia continued clutching her knees behind them, still sobbing. Her cheeks displayed tracks of dried tears, but without paying this any heed, she carried on with a trembling voice.

  “Even though you told me that you love me…!”

  He did. Yes, he had certainly said that. He’d only just managed to say the words he’d wanted to for so long.

  It was Emilia, who flashed a tearful smile when she heard those words, that Subaru had left behind.

  —Suddenly, as if someone had turned out the lights, the world he was watching snapped out of existence.

  6

  “—T-t…”

  The pain of his face slamming against the ground woke Subaru.

  Groaning from his chin hitting the cool floor, Subaru shook his head. Realizing that he had the sensation of his hand touching his bumped chin, he was certain of his own physical existence. —Nothing was out of place.

  “T-tomb. Inside the…”

  Murmuring with a trembling voice, his gaze wandered as he confirmed his own location. Suddenly, he was there in the room of the Trial he had surely been in until just before losing consciousness, having in no way leaped beyond it in either time or space.

  Emilia wasn’t there, either. He hadn’t Returned by Death. He was there right after his wish had come.

  “But that was…no daydream or anything close…”

  Putting a hand to his mouth, Subaru felt every inner organ spasm at once at the scene burned into the core of his mind.

  It was an unanticipated scene, an impossible world, a nonexistent stage that he had surely left behind—that was unmistakably the “Scene After Subaru’s Death.”

  “U…bu—”

  The instant his comprehension redoubled, his trembling intestines reached their limit, and the contents of Subaru’s stomach were expelled.

  A supper of which he had only a distant memory of eating spewed onto the floor along with his stomach fluids. It was no great amount. Even so, wringing his stomach repeatedly made him feel a small easing of his nausea.

  “Haah, haah… Th-this is…”

  After vomiting repeatedly, Subaru moaned from the burning pain of stomach fluids in his throat as he sank into thought.

  What the heck had happened? Had Subaru, seeking an invitation to the castle of dreams, fallen into some sort of aberrant situation? Given the place, if he had to put his finger on a possibility, the only one that came to mind was—

  “Wait, don’t tell me that was the Trial just now…? Not the one of the past but the second one…?!”

  This was the room of the Trial inside the tomb of the Witch—so having cleared the first gate, it was natural for there to be a second. It was only natural, but to Subaru, this natural thing was exceedingly unexpected.

  Of course, that went for not just the Trial starting; the most frightening thing of all was the Trial’s contents.

  —If what he’d seen earlier was the second Trial, to Subaru, it was the worst development possible.

  When it came to Hell, Subaru had seen it repeatedly. He was well aware of the fact.

  And to grasp an optimal future, he’d resigned himself to seeing that Hell as many times as it took.

  —But how could he maintain his determination after learning of something that went beyond Hell, something more terrifying than Hell itself?

  “—Behold the unknowable present.”

  “Wha—?!”

  Subaru could practically feel his blood freezing as his body trembled. Someone’s whisper had suddenly grazed his eardrums.

  Raising a cry at that fact, his body stiffened and that instant—the loss of consciousness came once more.

  He thrust out his arms, but they could not hold on to anything. Falling shoulder-first onto the floor, he could not force his eyelids open. His consciousness proceeded to rapidly fall into the abyss and vanish.

  —So that the Trial and the world beyond Hell might chastise Subaru Natsuki.

  7

  Shallowly, sharply, the blade that brought his life to an end was so elegant it was enchanting.

  The minimal bleeding was proof of the precise skill with which the single fatal blow was landed. But specks of that minute blood spatter remained on his white mantle, which looked akin to proof of the knight’s crime.

  As Subaru’s remains lay faceup, a purple-haired knight looked down upon them. To his side, Ferris had sunken down to the ground on his backside, and it was clear at a glance he was in an exceedingly haggard state.

  “”

  As Subaru gazed down upon that scene—what lay beyond Hell—he felt his consciousness fraying.

  With nothing but his consciousness, Subaru had no means to stop the scene or even avert his eyes. The crime he had committed remained undiminished, and the resentments of the world he had left behind served as a rasp that filed down his very soul.

  And this scene, too, kicked Subaru when he was— No, the blow that came was even greater than what had preceded it.

  “…Su…baru?”

  With a sound of footsteps on grass, someone was approaching the encirclement formed by the knights. With wobbly steps, this individual walked closer to the boy lying fallen at its center.

  In a daze, Emilia stood beside the deceased Subaru. Beside her stood a knight—Julius.

  “Lady Emilia, please wipe his…Subaru’s face.”

  “”

  “I believe he would have desired that it be you rather than I who does it. At the least, it should be by your hand.”

  Offering a white handkerchief, Julius spoke to Emilia, who was lost in a daze.

  However, Emilia did not give any reply. She simply stood there, her round eyes bewildered, filled with emotion.

  Sluggishly, Emilia touched Subaru’s face with her trembling fingers. Heedless of her hand being sullied, Emilia wiped the dried sweat and a slight amount of blood that had come from his mouth with her very own palm.

  And when by doing so, she was tidying up Subaru’s dead face bit by bit, Emilia haltingly murmured, “Why…? Why did Subaru come back, only to end up like this…?”

  As if there had to be some mistake, Emilia murmured the question—asking someone eternally unable to answer.

  A dead body had no ears with which to hear it or a mouth with which to reply.

  And Subaru’s consciousness, being chastised for his crime, had no way of interfering with their world.

  “”

  He understood just which death was being reenacted in this new world beyond Hell.

  This was the scene of the death brought about by the battle with Petelgeuse.

  After defeating the White Whale, in the first battle in which he and the expeditionary force had challenged Pe
telgeuse—Subaru, having failed to see through his Possession ability, had his body stolen by the madman. And to defeat the worst-case scenario, where he would not even be permitted to Return by Death, Subaru had borrowed the strength of Julius and Ferris, opting for his own death.

  Ferris’s magic had greatly disrupted the circulation inside his body, and Subaru’s demise had left a terrible expression on his face. It was thanks to Julius’s intervention that Subaru had averted a horrific appearance in death.

  But if the question was whether this was any comfort to those left behind, that was a different story.

  “Sir Subaru… I am so very sorry…!”

  Wilhelm, his entire body covered with wounds, fell to his knees and lowered his head in shame.

  Pushing his wounded body, Wilhelm wept grandly over Subaru’s death. As he lowered his face with an expression of regret, aged knights stood around him, wearing similar faces of silent pain.

  Each was one of the comrades in battle with whom Subaru had challenged the White Whale. Having struck down the Witch Cult, they had promised each other a triumphant return to the royal capital, and the hearts of all were pained to be unable to fulfill that promise; some among them were driven to tears.

  Subaru gaped at to just what extent they were afflicted by his death.

  Or perhaps those tears struck Subaru so hard because he was seeing them from the world after death.

  “Why did Subaru come to help me, only to end up like this…? Why did this happen?”

  With Subaru saying nothing in return, Emilia kept a hand pressed to his cheek, continuing to call out to him in a voice that could not reach.

  From that sad and painful sight, Subaru knew very well what was within her chest. In that world, Subaru had not given an answer to Emilia’s question. In death, it had been postponed for all eternity.

  —Accordingly, going forward, Emilia would never know the reason for Subaru’s devotion.

  “The Witch Cult has long brought suffering to this world. Its vanguard, the Archbishop of the Deadly Sins of Sloth, has been slain. To the world, this is an exceptional victory. —But.”

  Speaking to Subaru’s remains, Julius used his fingers to rap the scabbard of the knight’s sword on his hip. He repeated the gesture over and over, the intervals between them gradually shortening.

  “That does not mean all the sacrifices for its sake are pardonable. —I had hoped to exchange more words with you, Subaru Natsuki.”

  With that painful murmur, Julius averted his face from Subaru’s dead visage.

  Lifting his face toward the sky dyed by the setting sun, gloom rested in the knight’s eyes as he said, “—I wanted to call you friend.”

  Julius’s whisper in a powerless voice trickled into the forest in vain.

  8

  The world’s stage lights suddenly turned off, and his consciousness returned. He awoke with a start.

  “—Bwha, whaa! Whu, ah, ahhh?!”

  His body writhed. When he came to, he found his body atop a cool, hard floor.

  In that room, filled with air chilly enough to make his nostrils hurt, Subaru lost himself as he rolled around. There was no meaning behind the action. Through actions made in a frenzy, he wanted to reject having to think about anything.

  He could not allow himself to think about what he had just seen. He could not allow himself to comprehend.

  He rolled and rolled, making his inner ear hurt as he scraped his head against the floor, as if trying to escape the storm spawned from his own internal organs. He tried to reduce the possibility of conscious thought by even the tiniest degree.

  “Gah…!!”

  But as he evaded reality in that manner, he bumped into the wall, and his bounce off it brought that process to an end.

  The hard collision by his back made his bones creak, and his forehead was oozing blood from all the scraping against the ground. Yet, as he lay facedown, it was most certainly not the pain that had caused Subaru’s tears to flow.

  —Subaru’s sobs were for the shame he felt toward his spineless self.

  Just how often, how many times over, would Subaru Natsuki’s weakness continue to torment him?

  Just how could he obtain a heart of steel that would never, ever waver, no matter the predicament, no matter the ordeal?

  It was because Subaru was so weak, so frail, that so many times before he’d…

  “The stuff I pretended not to see, the stuff I turned my back on… That’s what this is…?”

  It wasn’t…that he had never thought about it.

  The possibility had floated up in a corner of Subaru’s mind a number of times.

  The fact that he’d made no attempt to seriously come to grips with it was nothing save himself subconsciously rejecting any verification of the possibility, any inquiry into it, all out of fear.

  The idea that when Subaru Returned by Death, the worlds continued after his demise—if he openly considered the possibility, if he even suspected it, the foundation of how Subaru fought would crumble under his feet.

  That Subaru, wishing to save others, had been left behind by everyone.

  —No, it was Subaru who had left them behind. Shamefully, selfishly embracing his own death, Subaru left the world behind, as only he escaped into a brand-new world.

  His irresponsibility had borne terrible fruit. That was the truth behind those scenes, what had created Hell beyond Hell itself.

  “—Behold the unknowable present.”

  You can’t escape, the whispering voice close to Subaru’s ears seemed to declare.

  The forced estrangement of his consciousness that differed from sleep made Subaru fall into a world of white.

  When the whisper ended for the third time, he wondered why the voice sounded familiar—then he realized the answer.

  —Without the slightest doubt, the voice he heard…was his own.

  9

  There was a girl. She was kneeling in front of a corpse with its skull smashed apart.

  Unable to withstand a fall from a great height, the corpse had bloomed upon the ground as a flower of blood. From the fragments that had cruelly flown apart, it was barely discernible that this had once been a black-haired boy.

  “”

  Subaru was no longer surprised to awaken as a consciousness alone.

  Once again, his consciousness had been forcibly switched; once again, Subaru was being shown what came after his death.

  The only thing Subaru’s consciousness couldn’t expect was just which reenactment of death he had been called to—

  “Right up until the very, very end, you kept saying the most nonsensical things…”

  In front of the Subaru who had tumbled to his death, a pink-haired girl spat out the words—it was Ram.

  Her physical appearance was askew, and her uniform was torn in several places. The expression of Ram, a girl who normally strove to maintain her cool at all times, bore the color of complex, unpalatable emotions, as well as burning anger.

  Her expression was not so much regret at Subaru’s death…as nigh-unendurable anger toward it.

  “Is this, too, all according to your expectations, Lady Beatrice? Is this why you obstructed Ram’s path…?!”

  In a way unlike her usual self, Ram lobbed accusations one after the other before interrupting her words midway.

  Ram’s pink eyes beheld Subaru’s corpse and Beatrice standing at his side. Caring nothing for the grime that marred the hem of her skirt, she stared at the smashed Subaru and spoke one word.

  “—Why?”

  Haltingly, a melancholic voice spilled out.

  The presence of Ram, right beside her, didn’t even register; Beatrice’s gaze was trained upon dead Subaru alone.

  He could see transparent droplets falling from the corners of her blue eyes onto her cheeks.

  —Beatrice…was crying.

  That fact filled Subaru with a sense of guilt, an agony that felt like he’d swallowed molten lead.

  The pain gouged a hol
e in his heart, filling the back of his nonexistent eyes with an unbearable heat. That very moment, he wanted to rush to the girl’s side, to speak some kind words to her. He wanted to make the tears stop.

  But Subaru lacked the legs, the arms, and the mouth with which to do so—

  “I knew that…at the least, you weren’t That Person…but…”

  With all expression vanished, Beatrice seemed delirious, teardrops continuing to fall as she murmured.

  Apparently the sight was so painful that it convinced Ram to abandon pressing Beatrice any further. She simply let out a quiet sigh, turning scornful eyes toward Subaru and murmured softly as she took in his spectacular demise.

  “What ‘love.’ —Truly, this is a helpless tale.”

  10

  “—Behold the unknowable present.”

  11

  The atmosphere was dyed white. The world was ruled by such cold it seemed as if the very nighttime sky might freeze.

  As the wind blew, frozen trees cracked and broke apart, returning to dust as the mana required for maintaining the forest’s existence was sucked from it.

  The trees, the buildings, the living creatures, the world itself were slowly vanishing into that white end.

  “”

  The next scene Subaru laid eyes upon was the end of the world itself.

  Enveloped by cold, compassionate destruction, the world progressively sank toward its end as if falling asleep.

  But—

  “—So…you have come.”

  That low voice made the very air rumble as his acknowledgment echoed with a roar.

  The next moment, the ground shook like an earthquake had struck as a gargantuan impact raced through the ground and altered the landscape in the blink of an eye. Raging winds mowed down the trees, their fallen trunks collapsing as if they were pillars of snow, and an entire section of forest was transformed into a snowy plain.

  The frozen forest was leveled until there was only flat soil, and the cause of this destruction was a four-legged beast, with long gray fur suggesting the creature was some kind of feline, with a body size so great, he actually had to look up at it.