*This chapter is an edited MTL
Anxiety, the kind of anxiety that makes you want to claw your throat out, was taking over his entire body.
His feet were moving forward, his mind was moving toward the future, and his will was moving toward his goal, but he felt as if an unidentifiable fear was slowly chasing him from behind.
The feeling of vomiting was terrible. His ears were ringing. His heart was thumping so loudly that it felt like it was about to spill out of his chest, and his feet were kicking so weakly and unreliably that if he was not aware of them, they seemed to be scraping away at their tips.
Why, was he in such a mess?
Everything should be going well. Everything should be going in the right direction.
It was just a bad turn of events. The timing just wasn't right.
If he did it, he could do it. If you know what you have to do, you can do it without hesitation.
He knew what he had to do. He just needed to save Emilia.
If she was in a tight spot, it was Subaru's role to rescue her from it.
That's what he has always done. That's what he would do this time, too. Then everything would be fine. He was sure she would reconsider him. He was sure she'd realize that she's no good without Subaru, and she'll keep him by her side.
He didn’t want to be abandoned. He didn’t want to be abandoned. He didn’t want to be looked down upon. He didn’t want to be given up on.
Subaru ruminated with desperate thoughts, with a strong will, and with determination.
He was out of breath. His lungs ached, his overworked body creaked, and he could feel every part of his unhealed body screaming. –But there was no way he could stop.
He had to run, even a second faster, even a fraction of a second faster.
Otherwise, they would catch up with him. Something inexplicable was coming up behind him, and it would devour him.
He didn’t want that. He didn’t want that. That's the only thing he was afraid of right now.
He wanted to see Emilia, he wanted her to smile at him. Why did Rem leave him? Where did the warmth that should have touched him last night go? Beatrice's hateful words, and Ram's slanderous words, are now terribly nostalgic and endearing. How comforting is Roswaal’s eccentricity and Puck's quietness.
How he wished he could have stayed here forever.
All along, Subaru's time should have been buried in the days of that mansion.
It was a mistake to go to the Royal Capital.
The time he spent in Royal Capital was the cause of his current predicament.
Reinhardt, Felt, Rom, Crusch, Ferris, Julius, Anastasia, Al, Priscilla, the members of the Council of Sages, and the members of the Order of Knights all came to mind one after another, and all of them could only become objects of hatred for Subaru now.
Let them be cursed, let them suffer, let them die in pain.
If it were not for them, Subaru would not have lost sight of himself.
If he could return to the mansion, reconcile with Emilia, and return to those exciting days, he would gladly give up everything.
There is nothing left, nothing left.
Everything has fallen out of his hands. So now he was going to pick it up.
That's why, that's why, that's why he kept running.
Suffering that threatens to burn his lungs, regret that threatens to shatter his heart, ringing in his ears that threatens to bury his consciousness, Subaru runs, enduring it all.
As if to repeat them incessantly, thoughts of vindictiveness and regret pass through his mind.
How much time had passed since he had begun running forward with such a backward mentality?
Suddenly, the trees that had been overgrown begin to open up, and the natural environment begins to show signs of having been cut open by human activity.
Subaru looked up and noticed a gently rising slope and involuntarily lifted his cheeks.
He came upon a vaguely familiar path.
There were no landmarks, and to the casual observer, it might have seemed like the same old forest road.
However, to Subaru, who had driven along this road several times in search of change, it was the end of this endless green labyrinth.
It was not that he had arrived at the mansion.
Just in front of the mansion, beyond the slope, was the village nearest to the mansion.
Suddenly, the familiar faces of the people he had come into contact with many times during his days at the villa, who until then had only been the faces of the villa, began to flow into his mind.
The familiar children, the villagers who lacked a sense of caution to the point of being strange. They were the oddballs who didn't laugh at the ridiculousness of his otherworldly knowledge, but accepted it as it was.
It was so nostalgic that it almost brought tears to his eyes.
He didn't even know how he had forgotten them. There were still other places besides the mansion where Subaru could return to, places that would warmly accept him.
There, too, the value of Subaru being Subaru remains.
That village was saved by Subaru. It is a village that might have disappeared without Subaru. It was Subaru's achievement. As a result of Subaru’s actions, there is nothing wrong.
Subaru's feet strayed further as he recalled his own stronghold, which was right under his nose.
Beyond the slope, beyond the shelter of the trees, trailing in the early morning sky is the symbol of daily activities: rising white smoke.
Is it food cooking or boiling water? It could be from a blacksmith or metalworking workshop. Either way, it was proof that someone was there.
For now, it was just enough.
He wanted someone who knew him, who accepted him for who he was, to call him by name now. He wanted them to prove, in a friendly, fraternal way, that it was okay to be here.
Running through. Running up. The end of the slope nears and the base of the white smoke comes into view. He had made it to the top. Sweat trickled down his forehead and onto his eyelids. Subaru wiped it off roughly, feeling annoyed, and then looked at the village with a clear mind.
–Then, at last, Subaru was caught up by the nightmare that loomed behind him.
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When he ran into the entrance of the village, the first thing Subaru did was to wander his gaze in search of the villagers—he noticed something strange and raised his eyebrows.
Once he stopped, the burden he had been under immediately hit his cardiopulmonary functions.
Repeatedly breathing roughly and spitting out drool and phlegm, I tried to recover my strength by bending over with my hands on my knees on the spot. Of course, all the while, he keeps his eyes up.
At first glance, there seemed to be nothing strange about the village.
However, there was something obviously wrong.
The cool air of the village in the early morning was moderately stuffy, and the light of the sunrise poured into his sleepy head. And yet, for some reason, there was no sign of human presence anywhere.
After folding his arms and thinking silently for a while, Subaru realized with an, "Ah.”
Subaru, who had been running all night, had been unaware of this, but it was still early morning, when few villagers were active.
Therefore, he might not see any people who had gone out of their houses and started to go about their daily tasks.
After thinking about this and being satisfied with the lack of people, he went to check out the white smoke rising in the sky.
It is said that where there is no fire, there is no smoke. If he headed that way, he was sure that he would run into someone.
However, this plan failed to work, and Subaru was unable to meet anyone.
When he arrived at the edge of the village, where the white smoke was rising, there was no one there.
There was only the smoldering remains of the smoke’s fire burning weakly, and looking around, the perpetrator who had done it was nowhere to be seen.
This time, a distinct uneasiness, not a vague one, enveloped Subaru.
His breathing quickened for reasons other than fatigue, and his heart began to beat faster again. Subaru, roused by these reactions, was unable to hold his breath and tapped roughly on the door of a nearby house.
There is no response. Stirred by a bad premonition, he roughly pushes open the door, which is not even locked, and pushes his way inside. But the place is empty, too. No one is there.
Muttering a useless joke about whether the whole family is doing some kind of stray work, Subaru goes outside with a dry smile on his face. Without stopping his momentum, he went to the neighbor's house. This time, he skipped even the knocking procedure and entered the house. There was a scream, and the resident shouted and reprimanded Subaru for trespassing. This place is also uninhabited.
Finally, his understanding of the situation begins to fail.
Subaru desperately chases after the shadows of the people he encountered on his way through the forest.
But no matter how much he ran around, no matter how much he called out for people until his throat ran dry, no matter how much he scoured all the places where children might hide for mischief, he could not find a single person.
Silence had fallen here again, and Subaru was left behind in the world.
Sitting down on the ground with his body slumped and weak, Subaru let out a long, deep breath.
No matter how many times he encounters a situation in which he does not understand the meaning, he cannot get used to it. Of course, it is also the same thing when you know what it means and it is an unreasonable development.
Subaru's current situation, in which he is constantly being pushed around by both of these factors, cannot even be described in words such as "under siege" or "difficult times ahead.”
Suddenly, Subaru felt a sharp pain in his skull, and he immediately put his hand on his forehead. However, the moment he did, discomfort spread over his skin.
Looking at his right hand, which he had placed on the ground when he sat down, he found that it had been exposed to the dirt from the wet ground and had hit himself in the face with it without realizing it.
The sensation of reddish brown mud running down the bridge of his nose was the height of discomfort, and Subaru used his clean left arm to wipe it away, then turned his resentful gaze to the ground that had soiled his right hand.
It had been bothering him since he had been running around, but this morning it was terribly muddy and difficult to run. The entrance to the village and the smoky surroundings were especially bad, and he couldn't tell you how many times he almost lost his footing while running around looking for villagers.
He chose a spot on the ground where it was less likely to happen and sat down, but judging from the state of his right hand, his buttocks might also be badly dirtied. As he began to become aware of it, he felt a kind of dampness in his lower abdomen, and he let out an even louder sigh.
He thought he was getting very stupid.
No wonder. He had barely slept for more than a day and a night during the grueling journey. He had only filled my stomach with tasteless emergency rations that Otto had shared with him, and it was hard to say that he had enough to eat. In addition, while he was conscious, his brain was working at a dizzying pace, worrying about Emilia's well-being. If Subaru was not fatigued by this, he was not a human being but a super high-performance artificial AI.
A useless joke came to mind, and Subaru again gave a thirsty laugh.
He brushes off his buttocks, and after forcing the dirt on his right hand against the wall to get rid of it, he turns his body and searches the village again. It was his final bad move.
He had called out so hard, ran around, and still no one had shown their face. Perhaps there was no one in the village. He couldn’t figure out where they went or why, but once he was convinced of that, he had no choice but to make a break for it.
After making a roundabout tour of the village, Subaru finally went to the edge of the village, where white smoke was trailing once again. It seemed as if time was passing only in that place, swaying in the wind, and even at times, it seemed to soothe the loneliness of being left behind.
When he arrived at his destination, the smoldering white smoke was on the verge of dying down.
The feeble smoke was being hit by a gentle breeze, and it was fizzling out, swaying unreliably to the left and to the right. Subaru looked around with eyes that were not expecting to see anyone.
However, there was still no one to be seen. The search seemed to have ended in vain.
Sighing for the umpteenth time already, Subaru kicked the ground in frustration. His toes dig into the muddy ground, and the mud that splatters on the ground ends the white smoke, which had seemingly come to an end.
A small sizzle as the fire extinguishes tickles the eardrums, and the smoke is cut off at its source and disappears into the sky. The last of the white smoke is blown away by the wind, and when it is gone, there is nothing left.
Subaru looked away from the disappearing white smoke and slowly lowered his gaze.
Once the smoke is gone, the place is just like any other place, a place where time has stopped, isolated from the rest of the world. There is nothing to attract Subaru's attention anymore.
There was only Muraosa, who had been emitting white smoke, lying on the floor.
Subaru scratched his head, then removed his consciousness and looked around. A young man with a square-cropped head was lying down by the wall, as if he had been thrown away. He was lying on his back with a weapon lodged in his chest, bleeding profusely and staining the ground red.
In the first house he had entered, he found a middle-aged man and woman lying on top of each other in the corner of a room just inside.
At the next house and the one after that, there were no signs of the people Subaru had sought. All that was left was the wreckage of people who had been robbed of their dignity and had had their lives raped like rags and tatters.
The number of wreckage piled up is enormous, and Subaru searches for a figure while looking through them. He was looking for someone who might call out his name, and that was all he could do.
However, no matter how many times he went around the village, his wish was never fulfilled.
There was nothing Subaru wanted here. Understanding only that, Subaru abandoned all other understandings and abandoned his activities in the village and headed for the road leading to the mansion.
It was an unnecessary detour. This is the result of not following through on my original intention. He wasted a lot of time and had not yet reached the peace of mind that he should have already attained. It was all for nothing. Everything was in vain. There is nothing but waste here. Including Subaru, there is nothing but waste.
As he muttered this to himself as if he were throwing up, Subaru walked onward with unsteady steps. And then, on the way out of the village, Subaru suddenly caught his foot on something and fell.
By the time he realized that his foot had slipped, it was too late. There was nothing around him to prevent him from falling, and he fell to the ground on his shoulder.
Pain pinched his brain, and Subaru's voice exploded into a moan at the back of his throat, and he stared down at his feet, tears forming in the corners of his eyes as he searched for the cause of his fall.
—He met Petra's eyes, which were hollow and no longer reflected anything.
Subaru: "AAAaaaahhhh—!!"
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–He could not escape.
Subaru's throat was shaking as he cried himself hoarse and tears streamed down his cheeks as he held Petra's corpse, which had been thrown to the ground.
Petra's body had long since lost its warmth, and her limbs had begun to stiffen. An unconscious human body should be much heavier than a conscious one, but Petra's body was too light, even taking into account her small stature.
Surely, the amount of blood that flowed out of the wound that pierced her chest was too much.
Petra's eyes widened and she looked surprised in her death. The only thing that saved her was that there was no trace of pain in her expression, meaning that her heart was destroyed and she had died instantly.
There was no reason for this girl to even taste pain as she was dying with a hole in her chest.
Her once lovely face had lost its blood, and her brownish curly hair was now stained with blood and mud, a shadow of its former self. He wanted to close her wide-open eyes at least, but her eyelids, which had begun to stiffen, would not even give her that mercy.
Laying Petra's corpse on the ground, Subaru at least tried to make amends by putting his jacket over her wide-open eyes and prayed that her sleep would be peaceful.
Then, he lifted his gaze, fearing to see what he had continued to look away from—finally accepting the reality that the familiar village had turned into hell.
Fluttering in the smoldering white smoke was the body of Muraosa, who had been burned to death.
The youths of the youth group must have fought with swords in their hands. The familiar sword now pierced through his chest, creating a pool of blood that submerged the chieftan.
The man and woman lying on top of each other were a married couple. The husband was holding his wife from above as if to protect her, and as it was, the two of them together were pierced by a weapon and died.
There was a slaughtered body. There were bodies that had been burned to death. There were bodies torn apart. There was a crushed corpse. There were crushed bodies. There were only dead bodies.
Death was everywhere in the village.
There was a dense silence in the village where all the corpses were lying, and everything had ended long before Subaru's arrival.
Now, only Subaru was left alone to witness the end of the tragedy that had taken place here, holding out his hands too late, panting without anyone to take them.
What had happened?
Something had happened. Something extraordinary had happened.
Something that had raped this village with relentless tyranny, violating the sanctity of all life, and killing all the innocent villagers.
There is no one left alive. Not a single survivor.
They were relentlessly and meticulously searched everywhere for a place to hide, and even found bodies that appeared to have been burned to death while still in hiding.
He couldn't think straight. Liquid was pouring out of every hole in his face.
Tears, snot, and drool continue to stain my face, which has lost the will to endure.
He understood what had happened. But he doesn't understand.
He doesn't know what happened, not a single thing. He doesn't understand anything, but there is one thing he did understand.
That is the fact that this tragedy could not have ended here.
When he reached this understanding too late, he felt a chill like he had never felt before.
It was one of the greatest fears Subaru had ever felt since he had fallen into this world, even in the many times he had overcome or succumbed to the threat of death.
The roots of his teeth trembled.
Eyes that even ached from shedding too many tears flickered, and dazed vision looked up at the sky.
The sky is a loathsome blue, and a mansion awaits Subaru beneath it.
The place he had wanted to return to for so long, the place he had sought for so long, the place that was just a stone's throw away, now seemed so terrifying.
He didn't know what happened.
He was sure that something happened.
Something that surely wouldn't have let him miss the place.
It was scary. He was afraid.
He didn't even want to consider the possibility. He was afraid that if he thought about it, much less said anything about it, it would become a reality.
So Subaru shook his head and shook off his imagination.
However, once it passed through his mind, it evaded his arm as he tried to shake it off and refused to be forgotten as if it were whispering in his ear.
Therefore, Subaru gave up trying to shake it off and clung to another means.
If only she would speak of that possibility, if only it would endanger her.
Subaru: "What about Rem...? What's… wrong with Rem...?"
A girl who should have reached this place before him. Spinning words of concern for her safety, Subaru tried to trick his mind in the worst possible way.
Subaru: "If Rem had returned, there's no way she would have missed the village being like this..."
Excuses. He was making excuses that even he couldn't fool himself with, in a place where he was the only one.
Subaru: "What's wrong...? No way, I had some trouble on the way to..."
It sucked. It was the worst. He didn't want to understand, but he did.
He had tricked his mind into believing that if he would rather talk about the possibility of losing his beloved girl, if he would rather have his heart broken by it, then he would just prepare another sacrifice.
He betrayed her trust.
Subaru: "Yes... Rem... Rem... Rem... Rem is..."
Wobbly, Subaru stood up and began to advance with unsteady steps.
Leaving Petra's corpse behind, he walked with a dragging gait and continued slowly toward the exit of the village—toward the direction of the mansion, at the speed of a turtle.
He was still unsure of what was waiting for him at the end of the road. He didn't want to know, he knew he had to know, but he didn't have the courage to start running.
As if dragging his feet, clinging to the girl's name as if clinging to her, Subaru slowly, slowly, slowly walked up the slope toward the mansion.
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― Rem was dead in the garden.