5
“Basically, I am an artificial spirit who moved together with Ana. The fox scarf that she has on her everywhere she goes—you could call that my real body.”
“I see…but… You are a different person than the Echidna we knew, right?” Emilia asked.
“That’s correct. I explained my circumstances to Natsuki…well, Natsuki before he lost his memories.”
Echidna shrugged and Emilia hummed pensively, which was adorable.
The group sat in a circle, finishing breakfast while talking. The subject was a more detailed investigation into the second major problem that had been brought up that morning: Echidna’s situation.
The breakfast consisted of meat jerky, a staple for long trips. If Subaru were being honest, it didn’t exactly taste bad, but it was lacking a little something for a palate used to modern Japanese cooking.
While his mind made note of that, Echidna smiled wryly at Emilia’s reaction.
“Natsuki was more or less the same. I guess the name really is a problem.”
“Ah, sorry if my reaction upset you. Subaru and I had a really horrible experience with another person called Echidna…”
“Running into someone else named Echidna, huh. And that Echidna caused some serious mischief.”
Whatever happened must’ve been real awful if that bad Echidna kept us from getting along with this one.
Emilia nodded.
“Mm-hmm, Echidna really caused us a lot of problems… If we meet her again, I’ll definitely be having a word with her.”
“Please do so for my sake as well. My reputation is suffering quite a bit thanks to her.”
“Okay. But it isn’t just your name that’s surprising. I had no idea Anastasia was a spirit user.”
“To be precise, Ana and I aren’t bound like that. Ana isn’t a spirit user. I’m…more like a friend who is a bit older than her.”
“Hm? Not family?”
Echidna’s eyes widened for a moment when Emilia raised that question. Then she put her finger to her lips in thought.
“Family… Family, huh? …It’s a little bit embarrassing when you put it like that… But it does feel right.”
“Then that’s enough, I think. A contract isn’t the important part. What matters is that you both care a lot about each other. Right, Beatrice?”
“Wh-why did you…ahem, the expression is a little too gentle, but Betty wouldn’t say that your view is wrong.”
Beatrice’s cheeks flushed slightly as she glanced over at Subaru.
In the green room, he’d heard that they were partners. And sure enough, he could practically feel the trust and that bond from her intense closeness.
Most likely Anastasia and Echidna’s connection was something similar.
“She… Echidna is not malicious, and her goal is to return Lady Anastasia’s body back to her. I have confirmed that much. And she does not seem to be lying.”
“It would have been better if we could just figure out how to do that here in the tower, but an unexpected development occurred. And given that, I decided it was pointless to try to hide it any longer. Though Natsuki and Beatrice already knew about it…”
“Wait, really?!”
Subaru was the most startled by Echidna’s latest revelation.
Why did an outsider like him know such privileged information? Of course, he didn’t have any way of knowing in his current state.
“I’m begging you, don’t look at me like that, Ram…”
“You’ve kept quite a lot of secrets. How many more are there, I wonder? Perhaps you tucked your memories away on a shelf with the rest of those secrets and just couldn’t find them again in such a large jumble?”
“That’s a little too much!”
Her voice was calm, but her tongue was razor sharp.
Subaru was faltering under Ram’s assault when Beatrice stepped in to back him up.
“Wait. Subaru kept it secret in order to avoid making a commotion. As proof, he did tell Betty. Because Betty is his partner.”
“Ohhh? Then does that mean he didn’t trust anyone else?” Meili shot back teasingly.
“Can you not add any more kindling? I’d rather not start World War Lolita here…” Subaru sighed.
The reason he’d chosen not to reveal the truth about Echidna before was unclear at the moment, but Beatrice’s explanation made sense.
“Ultimately, there’s no way to figure out the exact reason right now,” Subaru concluded.
“—Not to hound you too much on the subject of losing your memories, but…”
Judging the discussion around Echidna’s identity to have settled down, Julius shifted the topic. Finishing his food and dabbing his mouth with a white napkin, he looked at Subaru.
“I would like to talk about your situation further. About memories.”
“Look, I get why you want to, but it’s not like I’m going to suddenly remember—”
“Not that. It may also relate to recovering your memories, but the crucial information is how you came to lose your memories. More specifically, whether that memory loss is due to the effect of something in the tower.”
“It’d be a problem if any of us were to end up in the same situation as Barusu,” Ram concluded.
“Indeed.” Julius nodded.
Subaru quickly understood what they were after.
“True, that’s important for sure. Not to make it too much about me, but it really is a pain in the ass losing your memory.”
“You talk as if it were someone else’s problem…,” Beatrice grumbled.
“Still, though, the whole predicament started with me waking up without my memories, so I don’t really have any details to share… How did you end up finding me?”
“That’s…you were collapsed in the third-floor archive,” Emilia explained.
Third floor was another phrase that didn’t really bear much significance to Subaru, but the others looked surprised when they heard it.
“The third floor is one of multiple levels that make up this tower. We are currently on the fourth floor, and we are attempting to reach the first floor, which sits at the top of the tower. We successfully cleared the third floor…thanks to your efforts.”
Julius provided a concise and helpful explanation for Subaru, who couldn’t really share in the group’s surprise.
As for that last part, was that just lip service for me since I don’t remember?
“In this situation, I can’t really imagine being able to contribute that much…”
“It’s true, Subaru. The riddle was like gobbledygook to all of us, but you immediately figured it out by yourself…it was really cool.”
“Hahaha, thanks… Gobbledygook’s not a word you hear much nowadays.”
“ ”
Subaru scratched his cheek in embarrassment. Emilia fell quiet at that, though. For an instant, he saw her eyes waver with a deep emotion, but he couldn’t tell what was the cause.
Either way, he couldn’t chase after something as fleeting as a ripple on the water’s surface.
“So I collapsed on the third floor, and you carried me into that green room… Also, I heard that place is a healing room, but any chance that my memory loss was actually caused by it?”
“Eh?! I hadn’t thought of that, but…” Emilia trailed off uncertainly.
“That’s an intriguing possibility, but it seems unlikely. I was in that room for longer than you, so I should have experienced any change first.” Apparently, Echidna had been in the green room before him, so she rejected his hypothesis. She gently touched her body—the body she was borrowing. “Of course, my own problem has nothing to do with that room. But to take another tack…has your land dragon in there forgotten about you?”
“Land dragon…ah, that big lizard? It was weirdly friendly with me.”
When he had first woken up in the green room, the black lizard—land dragon—had been worried about him as much as Emilia and Beatrice. Apparently, that was his dragon.
“That makes sense why it was acting so familiar. Based on that, it doesn’t seem like it’s forgotten me…”
“I believe it’s safe to say that the cause of the problem is more likely to be the Taygeta archive than that room. Especially since it is an archive filled with those troublesome books of the dead.”
“Wait, wait, wait. Taygeta? And books of the dead?”
The sudden burst of new information raised all sorts of questions for Subaru. The name Taygeta rang a bell, but even more than that, books of the dead was a clear point of interest.
“Now there’s a phrase that’ll set any middle school boy’s heart aflutter. What is that…?”
“There is no proof yet, but the books in the third-floor archive seem to bear the names of dead people from all around the world. These books of the dead allow readers to experience memories from the lives of the dead,” Echidna said.
“That’s seriously messed up! There should be a limit to how far fantasy worlds are allowed to go, right?!”
“That incredibly intense sensation of memories being burned into your mind…is not something I would like to experience many times.”
Julius looked down. His obvious experience lent a heavy credence to his explanation.
An archive filled with books of the dead that allowed the reader to inhabit the memories of someone who was no longer of this world. It was an absurd place just to imagine, but if that was where Subaru had collapsed…
“So did I get knocked out after reading a book? Did my brain just fry from the overload and that’s how I lost my memories?”
Nodding at Subaru’s guess, Echidna glanced at Shaula. “We can’t rule that out. What do you think, ‘Sage’?”
“…Huh? Are you askin’ me?”
Even with that implication, though, it was hard to imagine anyone calling Shaula a sage. She seemed like the polar opposite of how a sage should be, sitting cross-legged and shaking her head.
“Ask all you want, my answer’s still the same. I don’t know anything other than the rules of the tower. Whatever Master did to the tower is on him and totally out of my hands.”
“…It’s a bit late to ask now, but why is Shaula calling me Master?”
“Don’t worry. On that point, your response is the same as before you lost your memories, Barusu. Simply ignoring it and taking advantage of the convenient situation… You really are the worst.”
“Say whatever you like, that doesn’t make it true!”
Hearing that Shaula’s affection for him was maxed out for some unknown reason maxed out Subaru’s bewilderment in turn. Ordinarily having such a glamorous woman chasing after him wouldn’t have felt so bad, but not understanding why she liked him made him more confused than anything else.
Also there was something slightly off about Shaula’s affection. Something fundamentally different from the earnest trust he felt coming from Emilia and Beatrice.
He couldn’t say if that was just because of his lack of memory, but…
“Either way, it’s not like there is some chronic disease where you just randomly get bouts of amnesia. In terms of external causes, the archive is the most suspicious. Going to investigate it would be an option.”
“Agreed. In a situation where so many difficult tasks have been set before us, having as few problems to trouble us as possible would be best. With things as they are now, it’s a revelation,” Julius said.
“About what?”
“Just how much you supported us.”
Subaru was caught off guard by Julius’s response. And then he screwed up his face.
Not to hide his embarrassment, but because a genuine albeit awkward smile had slipped out.
You’re asking way too much. Relying on Subaru Natsuki of all people is a recipe for doom.
Misfortune never comes alone. He felt deeply apologetic for how much worry his memory loss was causing everyone.
“After we clean up from breakfast, let’s go take a look. If my memories are spilled across the floor, I’ll just have to pick them up and shove them back in.”
“That weird phrasing is really just like you, Subaru,” Emilia said.
“The way you say that makes it sound like that isn’t really a compliment!”
Emilia smiled just a little at his intentionally light-hearted response. He could feel the mood in the room improving again.
He clenched his fist while telling himself That’s good enough.
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