CHAPTER 5
THE WATCHTOWER GUARDIAN
1
“—Anastasia, watch out, the ceiling is low here.”
“Got it. Thanks.”
“Ram, the footing here is a bit rough. It should be okay for Patlash, but be careful.”
“…Understood…”
“Right, are you getting cold, Ram? You can take my cloak if you need it.”
“ ”
Subaru stopped and took off his cloak and held it up to Ram on the dragon, worrying about her body’s condition. Faced with his concern, Ram fell silent and stared at him.
It was uncomfortable standing there beneath her gaze as she seemed to be trying to read his mind.
“Wh-what? What is it?”
“I could ask you the same question. What is with your weird sense of chivalry? Are you plotting something?”
“I’m not plotting anything. I just want the two of you to be healthy—”
“How lewd.”
“It’s not lewd at all?!”
He raised his voice a bit at her scornful gaze, but seeing how poorly the suggestion had been received, he put his cloak back on himself. And then he scratched his head and turned away from them.
—Honestly, Ram’s suspicion was entirely reasonable. Subaru was confused by his own actions, too.
It wasn’t as if he was trying to butter them up to avoid what happened the last time he died. He could tell that was the sort of abnormality that wouldn’t just happen out of nowhere.
But he was genuinely worried about them.
This feeling is probably not unrelated to having just seen them die before my eyes.
“ ”
“Why are you making such a bitter face? If there’s something you want to say, then say it.”
“…No, it’s nothing. Just the sand in my boots feels bad is all.”
“If you want to hide it, then do a better job of it. Don’t trouble a woman because of your awkwardness.”
Subaru’s mouth turned down at the corners at that retort.
It was obvious what Ram meant, but what was he supposed to say? “You are important to me, and I’m worried about you, so please just let me escort you as best I can”?
“…How lewd…”
“I didn’t say anything! Don’t put your own weird interpretation on silence, too, you paranoiac!”
“Putting yourself up on a special pedestal saying that? You are incorrigible.”
“If I’m putting myself on a pedestal, then you must be putting yourself all the way up in heaven to be able to look down on me.”
“Hah!”
As Subaru struggled to get a handle on how he was feeling, Ram, who had no memories of the last loop, was being utterly merciless. That fact was annoying but also a relief, leaving Subaru’s mind to deal with a bizarre and complex mess of emotions.
“You really don’t hold back with Natsuki, do you?”
Meanwhile, Anastasia let out a wry chuckle at that one-sided tirade. It was an unobtrusive attempt to keep the peace as she put her hand to her cheek.
“Or did something happen while I was gone?”
“If you left Barusu and me alone, nothing would happen. Barusu’s corpse would just be found the next day is all.”
“The hell? Are you the werewolf? Scary.”
Subaru continued walking as he kept bantering. Anastasia cocked her head as she watched him out in front.
“Natsuki, jokes aside, pushing yourself too much isn’t good. It’s not like there was anything pointing one way or the other at that fork in the road before.”
“Though you did give Zhuge Liang a hard time up there.”
Both Anastasia and Ram had their guesses at the cause of Subaru’s change. He couldn’t do anything other than scratch his cheek vaguely.
—On what was now his second time searching the labyrinth of sand, they had already reached the problematic crossroads, and this time they had gone left instead of right.
Subaru didn’t imagine he had done a particularly good job of naturally guiding the consensus to the left side. But the both of them had been willing to go along because of how desperate he had been.
If we went right, it would have meant being driven mad by the miasma. I don’t want to go through that catastrophe ever again.
But there was no guarantee that the left path was safe. Because of that, Subaru was being especially careful and leaving no stone unturned in order to keep everyone out of harm’s way.
“Is this disgusting gentleman act a symptom of hitting your head when we were sent here?”
“What?! Is me being considerate really that abnormal to you? I’m not even doing anything different than Julius usually does! Why’s it okay for him but not for me?!”
“Julius does it naturally, but when you do it, it’s unhealthy…and unnatural.”
“Did you call it unhealthy?!”
Subaru’s eyes widened at that hideous description, but neither of them paid it much mind. He was getting depressed at being ignored like that when Patlash prodded his shoulder with her nose, trying to cheer him up.
“…You’re nice. You really are a great partner.”
Subaru was ashamed of himself for the brief moment of hesitation he felt when Patlash comforted him.
He tensed up at having gotten Ram and Anastasia suspicious and making Patlash worry about him. Can you really protect them like this? Subaru slapped his cheeks and fired himself up again.
For the moment, they needed to clear the sand labyrinth as soon as possible and meet back up with everyone else.
—Having the restart point change after such a short amount of time had been quite disturbing, but there was something that bothered him even more than that.
The fact was that with the reset point having changed, there might be people he wanted to save that he could no longer save. Just like he had been unable to rescue Rem who had had her name and memories eaten. There might be a tragedy befalling one or all of the people who were separated from him.
He was scared of a loss that he couldn’t begin to make right with his own life.
“We need to find them again soon…!”
Emilia, Beatrice, Julius, and Meili. And Rem.
He prayed that nothing bad happened to them.
That nothing hurt them while they were somewhere he couldn’t reach them.
That was why…
“Keep pushing forward, step by step. But carefully, so that nobody gets hurt. If you notice anything, say something. Anything I can do, I will do.”
“…He’s a terminal case.”
The clash between a desire to hurry up and safety first robbed Subaru’s words of their consistency. Ram was exasperated, and Anastasia just flashed a wry smile. Patlash whinnied a little bit.
—I don’t know if it’s a good thing or not, but we’ve already come a pretty long way from the fork and still haven’t run into any of those stupid metal doors. I think it’s probably safe to say we’ve avoided being driven mad by the overflowing miasma behind them and killing each other.
However, it was hard to imagine that the left path was just the right path all along with no hitches.
“—What? What’s that strange smell?”
“Smell?”
Anastasia sniffed the air as Subaru furrowed his brow. Following her lead, he closed his eyes and focused on his nose. He quickly noticed the problematic smell.
The smell coming from down the passage, beyond where their light reached was—
“The smell of something burning.”
There was a faint heat in the air coming from down the passage.
Subaru and Anastasia both nodded at Ram’s observation. It was the smell of something burning. The simple smell of fire was slipping into their nostrils and making itself known.
“Do you suppose it might just be Lady Emilia carelessly starting a campfire and resting?”
“I agree Emilia-tan might just be careless enough to light a fire and set up camp, but given the situation and the timing, that’s a little too…”
“It’s too suspicious. It is possible it’s Emilia, though.”
In some sense, it was the sort of change they had been wanting after wandering through the unchanging labyrinth. But faced with an actual development, all three of them were cautious.
Not knowing who or what was on the other side, they couldn’t just call out, either. But nothing would change with them just hanging back and staring down a dark corridor.
“—I’m going to go take a look. I’ll turn out the light and be as stealthy as possible, so whatever or whoever it is won’t notice me.”
Turning off the lantern in his hand, Subaru volunteered for the scouting job. Of the three of them, he was the best fit in terms of skills and mindset for the most dangerous task.
“If anything happens, we’ll use you as a distraction. Don’t hold a grudge.”
“If the worst happens, I’ll be sure to curse you from beyond the grave.”
Ram would never say anything so cute as actual encouragement, but Subaru still found it reassuring.
Subaru left them behind and slowly moved forward in the darkness, walking as stealthily as he could.
“ ”
Breathing shallowly, he carefully, quietly stepped on the sand as he made his way to the source of the smell. It would have been great if it really was just Emilia and the others, and they had started a campfire to rest at. And even if it wasn’t them, it would still be a relief to find some trace of other people. Even if it was just the Sage making some barbeque, he wouldn’t mind that.
Subaru was praying for some sort of development as he stepped forward a little bit more solidly.
—Just then, the ground under his foot crumbled, and his body was swallowed up in a shifting mountain of sand.
“Whaaaaaa—?!”
Subaru could do nothing as he was pulled diagonally downward by the sudden collapse of his footing. Rolling a dozen yards, he finally stopped when his head slammed into a mound of sand.
“Ugh! Bleh! Sand again… No, more importantly, why did…?”
Tasting some sand again for the first time in a couple of hours, Subaru spat out what he could as he got himself up. And the grumbles that had started to slip from his lips trailed off as his pupils widened.
—He found himself in a wide space, and a dozen or so yards below where he had been standing before.
“ ”
There was a faint orange light illuminating the big space.
It had a high, domed ceiling that seemed to connect to the surface of the desert.
The ceiling was a natural trap hole, and sand from aboveground and any poor prey that got caught up in it fell through. The poor prey in this case were the adventurers who tried to challenge the Auguria Dunes, as well as wandering demon beasts who lived in the dunes.
“ Raaaaargh!”
There was a thunderous roar as an oiran bear that had been sleeping on the ground in the room woke up.
It had probably been on the surface before it got caught in the trap and fallen through the hole. The demon beast that camouflaged itself as a single bed of flowers had heard Subaru’s scream when he fell and had leaped up in a furious mood.
Its eyes robbed of life by the flowers in its back focused on Subaru, who was sitting in the darkness.
There was only one enemy, but just like a bear, it was impossibly menacing for Subaru to face alone.
“—Ngh.”
Gritting his teeth, Subaru frantically tried to stand up as it approached him. There were two choices that flashed through his mind. Fight or flight.
If he climbed the mound of sand he had fallen down, it wouldn’t be impossible to get back to the previous passage. It was a shallow slant, and it was just sand, so he could find a way to get up it. But that would expose the others to danger.
—That brief moment’s indecision ended up robbing him of either choice.
“—Ah.”
He didn’t have enough time to grab his whip or to climb the mound of sand. The demon beast charging at him raised its arm as it got close.
The oiran bear’s fiendish claws were about to shred Subaru—
“ Giiiiiii!”
—But at the very last moment, something big and bright pierced the oiran bear’s torso from the side.
“ Raaargh!”
The attack had come hurtling at great speed. The oiran bear howled as a sharp, spear-like object pierced it. It was a howl of rage and pain, but it didn’t last long. Because without any warning, the oiran bear’s whole body burst into flames.
“ ”
The demon beast was burning so intensely that it made it pointless to wonder where the flames had even started.
The pathetic oiran bear didn’t have even a moment to resist as its life was burned to ash in the blink of an eye.
As a result, Subaru was still alive, but he wasn’t fool enough to breathe a sigh of relief at that.
The thing that had burned the oiran bear was even more menacing.
In the back of his head, what little bit of his mind was still thinking clearly recognized that the scent of burning flesh filling his nostrils was the source of the burning smell they had noticed in the passage.
And the rest of his mind was entirely overwhelmed by what had appeared before his eyes.
“ Giiiiiii!”
—The odd-looking demon beast made a noise like countless babies crying as one.
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