In that state of near death…
“…That’s right! Satella!”
Satella, who must have been worried about Subaru and entered the building, had also been cut down by the same weapon that took him out.
As soon as Subaru realized that, he felt his innards twisting in pain. The feeling of guilt was even stronger than the feeling of pain he had felt when he himself was attacked.
“Wasn’t I told to take care of Satella?!”
Subaru thought back to Puck’s words right before he disappeared.
The promise Subaru made with that cat certainly wasn’t a joke. Despite the fact that there were at least three times he should have turned back, he had missed every opportunity to do so.
Satella had told him as well. If anything happened he was to call her. He didn’t even do that.
“Am I an idiot? Well, of course I am. I don’t even have time to just hang my head depressed like this. I’ve got to go find Satella and Puck…”
Both of them might be dead. When that thought crossed his mind, Subaru shook his head to brush it away.
Subaru didn’t have any positive qualities, and he couldn’t make himself useful at all. He was something like a mob character, or at best the comic relief character, and yet he was still alive.
If that were the case, there was no way that good-natured Satella, who could use magic and wasn’t honest with herself but was true to her ideals, or that aloof weirdo spirit cat could be dead.
At the very least, he didn’t want them to be.
“At any rate, I’ve got to go back to the loot cellar…”
Since that was the last place he was in before his consciousness was cut off, there must be some kind of hint left there.
As soon as he thought of that, Subaru moved to act. This was where his quick decision-making could shine. In the previous world, most of that was used in decisions like “I’m not going to school today,” but right now it was important for him to act quickly and cut off all his doubts.
However, as soon as Subaru had made his decision and was ready to go…
“Hey, kiddo. How about let’s have some fun.”
Subaru unfortunately had his path from the alley cut off by three men. When Subaru looked at who had talked to him, he couldn’t help but gape.
“Hey, what’s with the stupid look on yer face?”
“I bet he doesn’t realize the mess he’s gotten himself into. How ’bout we tell ’im?” said another man in the group mocking Subaru, as they smiled with sinister smiles.
After staring at the men for a little longer, Subaru felt as though he was being forced to watch a farce.
There were three men. Even if you were trying to be nice, you couldn’t call them well put together. Their bad personalities and bad upbringings just seeped out of them. They were classic thugs.
With all of this, Subaru was feeling an incredible sense of déjà vu.
“Did all of you guys hit your heads on something while I wasn’t looking?”
These were the same guys who had served as the reason for Subaru and Satella’s meeting just hours before.
Sure, they were nothing more than mob characters, but it was hard to imagine that three other guys with the exact same faces were doing the exact same thing.
“In other words, now that you’ve found me alone, you want to get revenge…is that it? I understand that you want to kick me when I’m down, but this is really not the time for me to be dealing with you. You guys…”
“What the hell are you babbling about? Have you lost your mind or something?”
Subaru had wanted to just talk his way out of this, peacefully, but given the way these guys were acting, even Subaru was starting to get ticked off. The only reason that he wanted to solve the issue peacefully in the first place was because he was in a hurry. Normally, Subaru had a pretty short fuse.
“Now listen here, kiddo. If you just put down everything you’ve got and walk away, we’ll let you go.”
“Ah, is that right? Everything I’ve got. Gotcha. I’m in a hurry, so that’s fine with me, really.”
“But you’ve got to get down on all fours and act like a dog first! Say, ‘Save me, save me, please!’ too!”
“All right, I’ve had it with you idiots!” They just had to push it too far, didn’t they? Subaru had already lost it.
The men weren’t prepared for Subaru’s sudden change of attitude, and were shaking. Of the three, as they stood dumbfounded, Subaru picked the skinniest of the group to hit first. It was the one who had the knife, the source of Subaru’s defeat before.
“You’re first! Guys like you who don’t know the preciousness of life can go to hell!”
Subaru landed an uppercut on the man’s jaw with all his strength, and then threw a punch into his open abdomen. The man slammed against the wall and was out like a light. Subaru immediately moved to trip the next man beside him.
Unable to react, the kick landed and the man fell over. As soon as he was down, Subaru tackled the remaining man. His tackle aimed low, and with the force of it he was able to carry the man and slam him into the wall.
After the man lost his breath from the impact of his back against the wall, Subaru landed another kick to finish him.
Subaru then turned around to the man he had just tripped and motioned him with his hand.
“Now it’s one-on-one! Come at me with all you’ve got!”
“Who’re you to act all fair and square with that surprise attack?! You little punk!”
The man ran at Subaru and grabbed his collar, trying to push him into the wall.
“Not good enough!” Subaru yelled, and took hold of both of the man’s wrists and pulled them away. Looking at the startled man’s face, Subaru’s expression twisted into a fiendish smile. “Don’t underestimate the free time of a truant! I spent so much time swinging around a sword because I didn’t have anything better to do that my grip strength is over seventy kilograms of force! I can bench eighty kilos, too!”
The man cried out as Subaru crushed his wrists, and as soon as he had broken his stance, Subaru struck him with his elbow, and the thug cried out.
As Subaru spun around behind him and put his arms around his waist he said, “If I accidentally kill you, don’t hate me too much for this, but I’ve always wanted to try doing a suplex on someone without mats!”
Subaru lifted the man up part of the way and then threw him backward. Unable to react, the thug’s head collided with the wall behind them and he slumped to the ground, unmoving.
After making sure the other two men were silent, Subaru walked over to the first man he hit, the one with the knife.
Although the man had comparatively taken little damage, you could see that he was sweating. As Subaru came closer he tried to pull out his knife. But as he did, Subaru kicked him relentlessly in the face. He was out.
“Hmph! Well that was easy! In this world, evil never triumphs!” said Subaru Natsuki as he struck a pose to celebrate his victory.
After checking for sure that none of the men had actually died, Subaru immediately left the alley.
“Even with this, it’s not like the situation has gotten any better. I’ve got to hurry to the loot cellar.”
Subaru noticed as he was leaving that there were onlookers who were wowing and gasping in surprise that he had left the alley unscathed.
If you realized I was back there, then you should have gone to the guards! Subaru thought as he held back the urge to lecture them. Right now he couldn’t let any minute go to waste.
3
After having enacted his revenge back in the alley, Subaru headed toward the deepest part of the slums, and when he arrived at the entrance to the loot cellar, the sun had already moved far across the sky.
“F-finally…finally I’ve found it. …It sure took me a long time, damn,” said Subaru, wiping the sweat from his brow, and slumping down to rest.
He had spent nearly two hours running around before he finally had reached his
destination.
“I was just here, so I thought I would be able to find it again without getting lost, but…”
Probably the biggest problem was that Subaru couldn’t read any of the signs. Additionally, it wasn’t as if he could mention the name “loot cellar” outside of the slums, so he had to rely completely on his memory.
“Last time we came here I was talking with Satella, and my eyes were on her most of the time, so I guess it’s no surprise I don’t remember the way very well, damn it,” said Subaru as he continued to drip with sweat.
However, the greatest sin Subaru had to face was now right in front of him. While he was doing his best to ignore it by talking to himself, his heart wouldn’t be fooled. It started to beat louder and louder as his pulse quickened, and Subaru felt his hands grow heavy. His mouth felt dry and his ears were ringing again and again inside his head as though someone was hitting him.
The answers that Subaru sought were inside that loot cellar.
For an instant, Subaru had a flashback as he closed his eyes: the old man’s corpse, his own sliced-open abdomen, and the figure of Satella, whom he had dragged into all of this.
“Don’t be scared. Don’t be scared. Don’t be scared. Are you an idiot? …Well, of course I am, but do you think I’m really going to come all this way and then go back empty-handed?”
Of course, it wasn’t as though Subaru had any place to return to. Right now, this was the only place that he could cling to.
Finding his determination and facing forward, Subaru realized that his knees were shaking as he tried to walk. He slapped his legs to calm himself down and after a deep breath he finally moved forward.
In the orange light of the early evening, the rough door to the loot cellar looked as though it was wordlessly rejecting him.
“Is there anyone home?”
After pushing away these negative feelings, Subaru knocked on the door and raised his voice.
The dull sound rang out, but there was no answer. With uncomfortable silence as his only answer, Subaru became frightened by that very silence and knocked harder on the door.
“Someone… I know there’s someone in there! Come on, answer me! …Please.”
Clinging to a fleeting sense of hope, hoping and praying that what was happening right before him was somehow a mistake, he beat harder. Unable to take the force of Subaru’s sudden desperation, the door began to creak and its hinges started to bend, and then…
“Cut it out already! What are you doing, trying to break the door down just because you don’t know the password?!”
The door was suddenly opened with a great force, and Subaru, who had been leaning up against it, was thrown back.
Subaru was thrown about five meters from the entrance to the cellar, where he rolled a few times and then looked up, completely startled. At the end of Subaru’s gaze was a giant, red-faced, bald old man.
The man had ragged clothes that covered his muscular body, and the red light of the setting sun shone on his polished bald head. In other words, it was a giant, very energetic-looking old geezer.
“Who are you, boy?! I’ve not seen you around here before! How did you know where to find this place? How did you get here? Who told you?!”
With astonishing speed, the old man closed the distance between him and Subaru and lifted Subaru up by the collar.
Feeling his feet leave the ground, Subaru very quickly learned his place. Subaru had thought that in most circumstances he could win in a fight, but these were not ordinary circumstances. As he was held up by this six-or seven-foot-tall old man, Subaru lost all desire to resist.
“My name is Natsuki Subaru, the ever-busy and never-free wandering vagrant…… For now at least, would you be so kind as to put me down? Let’s talk with both our feet on the ground,” Subaru added, giving it his all just to squeeze out that indirect request.
4
While his violent first encounter in the place had left a terrible first impression, in the end, Subaru was let in to the loot cellar.
Subaru had described the man from whom he’d first gotten information about the loot cellar, and told the giant old man that he was the one who introduced him to the place.
In front of the counter that was facing the front door, Subaru sat on a fixed chair meant for visitors and shifted uncomfortably. There were splinters sticking up out of the seat, and they kept poking him in the rear. If he’d had to go to the bathroom, those splinters could have been the trigger to make him pop.
“Why do you keep moving about like that? Are you that concerned about where your balls are?”
“Of course not. My boys are just fine. But, really? That’s the first thing that comes out of your mouth in this situation?”
“Giant” was the best way to describe the old man, since he wasn’t just tall, and he looked cramped as he bent down behind the counter. When he came back up, he had a bottle of liquor in his hand, and after pouring himself a glass, brought it to his lips.
“Well, you interrupted my drinking time. I hope you have a good reason for coming here. If not, that’s just terrible.”
“The sun’s just started to set and you’re already drinking? You’re going to die an early death if you keep that up.” With that retort, Subaru, holding his chin up with his hand and elbow on the counter, took a quick look around the inside of the loot cellar.
There was not a single trace of the tragedy that Subaru had witnessed the previous evening he had been here. As he looked at all of the various stolen items strewn about the room, he couldn’t tell whether they were organized in some way or not.
The old man noticed Subaru looking about, and narrowed his eyes in a knowing way.
“So, kid, are you interested in some of these goods?” he said, striking right away at the heart of the matter. The giant old man, who had given his name as “Rom,” smiled as he poured himself another shot of liquor into his dirty glass. “There are really only two reasons that people come to this place: they’re either bringing something in they stole, or they have some business with the stolen items themselves.”
“…Well, one of those is one of the reasons I’m here.”
“One of the reasons…huh. So that means you’ve got some other business being here?” Rom raised one of his eyebrows as Subaru gave a conditional agreement.
Subaru nodded, and then, reluctantly, knowing full well that he probably wasn’t going to be taken seriously, said, “This may sound a bit odd, but… Old man, have you…uh, died recently?”
Subaru decided not to add in the details about the decapitated arm or sliced throat.
Old Man Rom opened his gray eyes wide for a few moments before; as if to signal time starting back up again, he broke into a laugh.
“Ga-ha-ha-ha! I was wondering what you were going to say! Now I may be an old man with not much time left to live, but too bad, I haven’t died yet! I suppose when you get to this age, I don’t imagine it being that far off, though.”
Apparently, Rom took Subaru’s question as some kind of edgy joke, and took out another glass for Subaru. “Want a drink?”
Subaru refused the alcohol with a hand signal, followed up by a “Sorry, not right now.”
Subaru had managed to get his first question out, but the others inside him were multiplying.
The corpse that Subaru had seen in the loot cellar…there was no question about it. It was definitely the corpse of the old man who was sitting in front of him right now.
Sure, it was dark, and it was the first time Subaru had ever seen a corpse, so it wasn’t as though he’d been in a perfect state of mind. However, this old man had so many characteristic features about him, Subaru couldn’t imagine mistaking him for someone else.
But Subaru could turn the question he just asked on himself. He, too, had been inflicted with mortal wounds as well.
Subaru started to think that it had somehow been all a dream. He wasn’t sure he could trust what was inside his own head.
Was all of what ha
ppened here really a dream? If it was, then how much of it was a dream, and why am I here in the first place?
The burning pain Subaru had felt, the warmth he felt from that girl’s touch, the overwhelming pangs of guilt…if they were all just some leftover traces of a dream, then why was he here right now?
It would make more sense to say that everything since he’d been summoned to this world in the first place was a dream.
“Rom, have you seen a silver-haired girl around here lately?”
“Silver hair…? No, I can’t say I have. Silver hair’s one of those things that stands out in a bad way, too, so even if my memory’s starting to fail me, I don’t think I would have forgotten if I saw someone like that,” said Rom, following up with a laugh.
But that didn’t make Subaru feel any better.
Rom must have noticed the seriousness in Subaru’s expression, because he wiped his own smile away and said, “Drink,” putting a glass in front of Subaru again.
Rom tilted the glass and filled it up full with an amber-colored liquid. Seeing that Subaru did nothing but stare silently at the glass, once more he said, “Drink.”
“I’m sorry, but I don’t feel up to it right now. Plus, I’m not so much a little kid that I want to drink to act like I’m cool.”
“What are you talking about? Drinking and acting up is exactly what kids like you are supposed to do! So go ahead and take a big gulp and burn up your insides. When you do that you’ll be able to cough up a bunch of things you’ve got stuck inside because they won’t be able to take the heat. So drink!” said Rom a third time, pushing the glass on Subaru.
Overpowered by his attitude, Subaru took the glass in his hand and brought the amber liquid to his nose. A strong smell of alcohol struck the inside of his nose and Subaru’s face twisted as he almost started coughing.
However, despite all of Subaru’s resistance, there was a part of him that wanted to do as Rom said. Subaru had thought that drowning one’s troubles in alcohol was the mark of a lame adult, but…
Re: Zero -Starting Life in Another World- Vol. 1 Page 8
