Re:ZERO -Starting Life in Another World-, Vol. 5

by Tappei Nagatsuk

  If the slaughter of the village had been that madman’s deeds, he’d surely directed his vile actions at the mansion as well. If that was the case, was this destruction Petelgeuse’s?

  “What in the world is he doing…?”

  Faced with a spectacle beyond his understanding, Subaru continued to carry Rem as he exhaled white breaths. Discouraged, he craved a stronger sensation within his arms, but it was cold that flowed through his hands and turned to sadness in his chest. His body shivered; he coughed at the cold pain in his lungs.

  —Far too late, Subaru finally realized that his own ragged breaths looked like white clouds.

  “—?!”

  The moment he realized it, pain enveloped his body, stabbing at his skin. His exhalations were white, and the air he inhaled was freezing his internal organs, like he was breathing blowing snow. He felt like his body was dying from the inside out. Subaru’s instincts screamed to him that his life was in jeopardy.

  I…don’t…know…what’s…going…on.

  His entire body robbed of its warmth, it became hard to even stand, and so he buckled.

  He squatted down on the spot, leaning forward before he hit the ground, and fell on his side, still carrying Rem. That was his final act of resistance. His fallen body froze to the very core, his limbs no longer able to even tremble.

  Unable to convey his thoughts to his limbs, Subaru knew that his mind had been severed from his body. Subaru had already experienced it several times, but he’d never get used to that feeling of desolate helplessness.

  His nervous system sent commands to his entire body to resist the impending end even a little, to somewhere, anywhere that could move. Behind his closed right eyelid, his eye was barely functional.

  With all his spirit, Subaru moved his eyelid, using his barely functional eye to look up at an angle, in the direction of the mansion. Once it reached that position, it would probably never move again. Before the view faded, he saw something…

  “…a.”

  —He saw a beast standing on the wreckage of the collapsed mansion.

  It was a holy beast, with gray fur all over its body, with glowing golden eyes.

  The sight of it standing on all fours, calmly swaying its long, long tail, was most mysterious.

  More than anything, the beast was enormous, rivaling the mansion itself.

  “—”

  Beholding the sight from afar, Subaru understood what had caused the mansion’s collapse: the sudden appearance of that beast from inside it. Of course the building couldn’t withstand the pressure of something that huge emerging from inside.

  “—”

  The gray beast swayed, surveying the area with its eyes. Its face most resembled that of a great feline predator. Sharp fangs poked out of its mouth; the giant being exhaled breaths like blowing white snow, repainted the world into a frozen hell with the white powder to freeze all that lived.

  What was that?

  As he thought about it, his vision whited out. He realized then that he’d stopped breathing. At some point, he’d stopped feeling the bitter cold. Warmth, though, he could feel.

  That warmth tempted Subaru to give himself entirely to it, to forget the burning hatred, to forget sadness enough to tear his soul asunder, to forget anything and everything.

  Forget, forget. Let your mind wander to oblivion and the frozen warmth within.

  Just before he fell asleep, he felt like he heard someone’s voice.

  “Sleep…together with my daughter.”

  It was a low, ferocious voice. Yet it somehow sounded forlorn and sad. He didn’t understand. He didn’t understand. Not within the meaningless serenity.

  Subaru Natsuki melted. He melted, he melted, he melted, and then disappeared.

  8

  —He realized that his mind was in deep, deep darkness.

  His consciousness, dead to the world within the expanding, eternal darkness, shifted its gaze in search of any change. It wondered just how long the pitch-black world of the end would continue. It felt as if it had been locked away, completely beyond the world’s reach.

  What is this place? What am I doing here?

  It was odd for him to have such questions. To begin with, he didn’t understand who he was to be thinking in such a manner.

  His mind was all that hung in emptiness, lacking any body to support it or receive its thoughts.

  He stood. His legs were on the ground. But what he thought was beneath his feet blended with the darkness covering his vision, and so his footing was uncertain.

  —Abruptly, there was a change in the vast world of nothing but darkness.

  A shadow warped and flattened out, and a crack emerged in the nothingness. Without a sound, the rip in space rent apart the world of eternal darkness, connecting the interior of that void to another void.

  Just after the momentary anomaly, a lone human silhouette emerged from the widening crack.

  “—”

  He thought that the figure was a woman.

  The instant he recognized it, emotions he could not put into words nearly took over his mind.

  He felt fierce, explosive emotions well up. He wanted to run to the figure, embrace her slender body, put his lips to her nape, to drive home that he was himself.

  And yet, he lacked the legs with which to rush to her, the arms with which to embrace her, the lips with which to kiss her and prove that he existed.

  Even though his chagrin made him want to cry, he didn’t understand why these emotions manifested.

  He didn’t know. He didn’t understand. He comprehended nothing.

  But the figure seemed to understand how he felt, slowly reaching out with her arms, somehow closing the unchanging distance on her own. Those two hands gently came close enough to firmly embrace him.

  As the fingertips touched him, great happiness flooded into him, as if joy was gushing from every cell in her body, filling every nook and cranny of his consciousness.

  And then she said…

  “—I love you.”

  9

  The moment Subaru’s consciousness went back in time and inhabited his body once more, the boy spectacularly tumbled to the ground.

  Cadmon, standing behind the counter as he watched him fall onto the road without any forewarning, leaned over in a rush.

  “Whoa! Wh-what’s wrong, kid?!”

  Subaru scowled, having fallen right over without softening the blow and earned himself meaningless injury.

  “Er… I just slipped a bit.”

  “That ‘slip’ was so bad, I wondered if you’d lost a leg or something. Can you stand and walk? I can’t associate with you if you don’t quit all this crazy stuff.”

  “What do you mean, ‘crazy’? You’re making me sound like some sort of scoundrel with no common sense.”

  “A mischief-maker either way, and that goes for how you come and go without proper clothes on, too. I get the sense you’re a troublesome sort who’s hard to deal with, to be honest.”

  Having said those terrible things, Cadmon tut-tutted in a show of dissatisfaction.

  And when Subaru abruptly felt a tug on his sleeve, he looked back. He couldn’t help but gasp.

  “Subaru, are you all right?”

  He saw a girl standing there, setting her hand on his wounds.

  When she began to heal him with magic, she noticed Subaru staring at her and tilted her head a little. Her pretty blue hair swayed above her shoulders. Seeing her stirred fierce emotions in Subaru’s chest.

  Memories, memories, memories flooded in, rushing to the back of his mind. He silently widened his eyes as he felt the raging torrent wash over his freshly returned consciousness.

  What should I say? What can I say? he thought, his mouth agape as answers escaped him.

  “—”

  He tried instantly to call out her name, but his parched tongue wouldn’t immediately form the sounds. His consciousness whirled in the air as the welling emotions weighed upon his chest enough to crush
it.

  Biting his tongue in his impatience, Subaru’s lips quivered as he spoke the girl’s name.

  “Re…m…”

  The word was formed so softly within his mouth and was so faint and halting, he didn’t know if it reached her. Concerned she hadn’t heard it, he breathed in to immediately speak her name again.

  “—Yes, I am Rem.”

  And yet, a reply came. A moment before he repeated her name, the girl—Rem—smiled in response to Subaru’s clumsy address.

  He had called out to Rem, and she had answered.

  “Rem.”

  “Subaru?”

  “Rem, Rem…Rem.”

  Rem raised her eyebrows, looking conflicted at hearing her name so many times.

  Subaru, too, thought it was strange and bizarre. Yet even knowing this, he couldn’t stop the word from pouring out.

  He’d called her name, and Rem had answered, right before his eyes. That was enough to make him happy. After she died so brutally, he was happy just to have her before his eyes again. He had never been that happy in his life.

  “What is wrong? You are making an expression like you have just seen a ghost. I assure you, I am right here. I am your Rem, Subaru.”

  Rem smiled pleasantly, joking for once.

  It surely hurt her to see Subaru as haggard as he was. And the phrase she had used, that he had “just seen a ghost,” was not one he could laugh away.

  Really, truly, he couldn’t laugh off those words at all.

  “Rem, I… I…”

  “You are a difficult audience. I think that a smile suits you far better than that dark expression, Subaru. Therefore, I thought I would make you smile, but…”

  Rem lowered her eyes in disappointment. During that time, she’d finished neatly healing Subaru’s wound. After a visual confirmation, she declared, “I am finished,” and began withdrawing her fingertips.

  “Subaru?”

  As her fingers began to move, Subaru caught them with his hand to keep that warmth from slipping away.

  Rem’s face registered surprise at his bold action, but she immediately noticed the keen emotions thickly covering Subaru’s face.

  “Really, what is it? I mean… I am happy to have you be the one doing this, but it is rather sudden and took me by surprise.”

  “Thin. Small… Warm, huh.”

  He felt Rem’s small fingers as they rested snugly in his own hand. That soft warmth was proof that she was alive. Her body with blood flowing through it felt so different than her stiff, bloodless flesh.

  She lived. She was alive. She’d come back to life.

  Such an obvious thing consoled Subaru’s heart, once shattered.

  “Subaru, I somewhat mind being called small, so I do not wish to hear it often, but it is fine if it’s you. As for warm, that goes without saying. I am alive, after all.”

  That last phrase made Subaru gasp and look up at Rem. Face-to-face, their eyes met, with deep compassion in Rem’s pale-blue irises.

  “Are you anxious? But I am here. I will save you, Subaru, even at the cost of my life, so it’s all right.”

  —No. She was wrong.

  Subaru had let Rem die. He’d killed her. Twice. Ruthlessly. Mercilessly.

  The first time, one could claim he had nothing to do with it. But the second time was different. The second time, he could make no excuses whatsoever: Rem had died for Subaru’s sake.

  To protect him, to save him, for his sake, she had used her life and wrung it out to the last, dying for Subaru’s sake.

  The Rem before his eyes didn’t know this. Subaru alone knew.

  “—”

  Before he realized it, he was gripping Rem’s small hand, bowing his face so that she would not see it.

  Seeing his behavior, Rem felt her fingers tremble in anxiety, wondering if she had done something to inconvenience him. But that was only for a single moment.

  “It’s all right. It’s all right. Everything is fine.”

  Rem realized through her fingers that Subaru was afraid. So she used her free hand to pat his back, gently consoling him like a child.

  And this she did, stroking him, showing him affection, until Subaru raised his head. Always gentle, always loving.

  10

  “Sorry to interrupt your touching moment, but I can’t do any business like this.”

  Cadmon gazed at the episode in front of his shop and waved both away as he spoke. Normally, that would have rubbed Subaru the wrong way, prompting him to say something like, “It’s not like you were gonna get any business done whether we were here or not,” but here, Subaru followed the lead of Rem’s hand, gently departing from that place.

  If Cadmon had really wanted to get in the way, he would’ve done something five minutes earlier. He was a fundamentally good person, and that was why he’d waited for Subaru to calm down before breaking out his capitalist spirit.

  For his part, Subaru did not have any room to notice such benevolence. That moment, the inside of his chest was governed by one emotion alone.

  —Kill. Kill. Kill. Kill. Kill. Kill. Kill. Kill. Kill. Kill.

  Even though Return by Death had remade the world, that hatred was the one thing that had not been erased.

  This time, Subaru had a mortal enemy. And that enemy had a name.

  Petelgeuse Romanée-Conti.

  He was the worst of all madmen and had committed the great, unforgivable crime of slaughtering Rem and the villagers.

  It was Subaru’s duty to use the power of Return by Death to kill that man.

  As Rem led Subaru away from the front of the shop by the hand, she stopped.

  “…Subaru, if you have a moment?”

  When Rem looked back, Subaru replied, “What is it?” with a casual shrug of his shoulders, making light of the dark emotions inside his heart. She stared at him, making a small sound through her well-shaped nose.

  “No… I might be mistaken. It is simply that…I feel like the bad odor coming from you has grown stronger.”

  “A bad odor, huh?”

  When she pointed it out, Subaru gave his own arm a sniff, but he couldn’t make out anything.

  Coming from Rem, those words likely meant that she smelled the scent of the Witch. Thinking back, he felt that Petelgeuse had ranted about Subaru’s nature in some capacity.

  “So my Return by Death does have to do with the Witch…?”

  The more he Returned by Death, the stronger the Witch’s presence became around Subaru.

  He’d used that to strike back at the demon beasts in the forest, and afterward, he’d been too busy to look into the matter deeply so had dropped it.

  Maybe that subconscious urge to make that conclusion was part of the Witch’s power.

  As Subaru pondered these thoughts, Rem watched him with a look of concern. Subaru hadn’t meant to cause her any trouble. He pushed those thoughts off for later.

  “Don’t make that face, Rem. Your lovely features will go to waste, and that would make for a dark future.”

  “I’m sorry. I’m quite a worrywart, really…”

  As Rem babbled, Subaru thought of what he might say to put her at ease. Promptly, he lightly lifted their still-intertwined hands.

  “Well, if you’re worried about my running off somewhere, just keep a hold of me like this, okay?”

  “Eh?”

  “There’s no way I can out-muscle you, so you should feel safer that way, right?”

  As he made the statement, hiding the unexpected blush that came with it, Rem looked between Subaru and their joined hands.

  “Yes.”

  With a pleasant smile, she nodded, standing neither before Subaru nor behind him but right at his side.

  From there, the two walked abreast. Rem stared at the hand she was holding, firmly shut her mouth, and matched her pace to Subaru’s.

  As he walked with that adorable girl, smiling softly from the warmth she felt through the touch of his palm… Subaru continued to seethe with bloodlust and hat
red.

  Even though their hands were together, their hearts were at opposite poles.

  Subaru Natsuki’s heart was tempted far into that deep, deep, dark abyss—

 

  AFTERWORD

  Good day! Good evening! Good morning!

  Thank you for buying Volume 5! This is Tappei Nagatsuki aka Gray-Colored Mouse!

  Greetings are more important than anything. Incidentally, at my workplace, we greet people with “Good morning,” no matter if it’s morning, noon, or night. Beyond that, “I’m heading to the john for a bit” carries the hidden meaning of “I’m going to number Five.” No particular relation to Volume 5, mind you.

  And so, we quickly plunge into Re:ZERO -Starting Life in Another World-’s fifth volume.

  As the fifth in the series, the story is finally plunging into its heart. You can expect many more twists and turns, with shocking details concerning the tantalizing romance between our main character and our heroine.

  But! I’m sorry about the storyline! Here we are, just charging into the center of the tale as the wrapping paper is starting to come off, and the main character and heroine clash and go their separate ways just before they can fall in love, with no calm in the fifth volume to be had.

  In the first place, even though the author lives a busy personal life with no time for calm whatsoever, I have nothing in my psyche for granting heartwarming lives to the characters in my story.

  I write these afterwords at the end of each volume, but the writing conditions for the work on Volume 5 were particularly severe.

  First, it’s summer. Midsummer, to be exact.

  Just looking at the word makes most grown men go limp. That’s true for me as well. It’s not as if my efficiency goes up when my computer cries out in the heat. Who was it who got my hopes up for a cool summer this year? Nostradamus? Granny, perchance?

  There were factors beyond summer that provided a severe jolt to my system. Very severe.

  As is long-established practice in Japan, I set out to involve myself in various events before I meet my honored ancestors, such as my first signing event, my first TRPG, and my first online purchase, all involving a different mix of pleasures and troubles that threatened to make me into an honored ancestor.