CHAPTER 1
1
—As he fell from the tower, his final words were lost in the wind right before Natsuki Subaru’s consciousness cut to black.
“ ”
It was a bit cynical to think so, but death this time was calculated. He had probed Shaula’s motives, uncovered the hidden fifth rule of the tower, and confirmed that saving Shaula wasn’t just something he desperately wanted to do but was also the right thing to do.
Subaru had found all the answers he wanted. Maybe that was why he felt oddly calm in the face of death. Of course, there was still the inevitable dread that came with jumping to his own death, but…
“Huh, this is probably the first time I’ve ever confronted death so fully.”
He didn’t delude himself into believing that committing suicide here was going to save Shaula. She’d begged for the order to kill herself rather than to watch him die, and instead, he had jumped to his death right before her very eyes. He couldn’t even imagine how that would affect someone who had been waiting for four hundred years.
No, this was nothing more than an act of self-gratification. What made it worse was that he wouldn’t even be sticking around to see the result.
“…So what?”
Even if it was just self-gratification or hypocrisy, what did it matter?
In the end, how you take things is up to you. A good deed that can never be done is meaningless, and taken to the extreme, hypocrisy—false virtue—doesn’t exist.
Now that he’d hashed things out with Shaula, Subaru settled on his endgame—everyone had to make it out alive. They would resolve this crisis in the desert tower without losing anyone. And that included Shaula.
I’ll do whatever it takes. That’s…
“That’s why I exist. Isn’t that right, Natsuki Subaru?”
In the same instant that he steeled his resolve, something awakened in the bottomless abyss of death—
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