Re:Zero Kara Hajimeru Isekai Seikatsu (LN) - Volume 25 - Chapter 5.7

7

From a young age, Ram had hated the feeling of her blood boiling and the overflowing exaltation.

The feeling of omnipotence that made her feel like she could rule over everything in this world.

If she allowed herself to remain drunk on that illusion, even with as stout a mind as she had been blessed with, there would surely come a day when she took the wrong path.

She was aware of her excellence. But it wasn’t something worth putting too much stock in. She could make mistakes. She did have the determination to be careful not to make mistakes, and she was committed to correcting any mistakes she did make.

And the reason she was able to adopt that posture was because she had not become intoxicated by apparent omnipotence. Not mistaking herself as something wonderful, as did those around her who lionized her, she didn’t become a puppet of those beings who held to ancient mysticism and withered old customs.

And what was the reason she had managed to avoid being crushed by those external things? She knew that it was surely thanks to something that she couldn’t remember.

Because…

“I’m not just cute, I’m also wise.”

Singing her own praises, Ram stepped down, breaking the step of the staircase.

The next instant, the peach-haired Oni clad in the wind swung her arm, cleanly breaking the arm of her opponent who tried to stop it. Wrist, elbow, shoulder all twisted in the blink of an eye, snapping loudly.

“—Gah!”

His reaction was too late. As he started to cry out, her fist slammed into the side of his face, and Ram’s pale fingers became a barrage.

Pummeled all over by countless blows, Lye went flying backward with a cough of blood. Chasing after him, Ram rode the wind she created beneath her feat, leaping high into the air.

“Hee-hee!”

Lye swung both legs upward, as if to catch Ram.

The next moment, a distortion in space touched Ram’s shoulder, leaving a shallow cut on her clothes and skin—an invisible blade in midair, an impudent trap born of wind magic left behind for her.

“Something like this—”

“You think you can blow it away with a gust of wind? Nope, nope, nope! That’s fixed in space right there! Even you can’t brush it aside, Sister. Too bad!”

Reading her intent, Lye kicked off the air with a bloody grin on his face.

He wasn’t actually kicking space but using the blade that had cut Ram’s shoulder to walk through the air—a foothold whose position only he knew. Using them, he freely leaped all around the spiral staircase that covered so much of the tower. However…

“—Clairvoyance.”

Even if it was impossible to perceive them with her eyes, it was simple enough to deduce their locations using the trap-setter’s eyes. And so Ram used the exact same footholds, leaping out overhead even faster than Lye.

“Hah! Aha-ha-ha-ha-ha! Are you kidding? Seriously, sister?!”

“You sound almost like Barusu. Thank you, that removes any hesitation I had to slap you down.”

Ram mercilessly brought her heel down on Lye’s unpleasant, stunned face.

“Now, how many times will you taste the sole of my shoes until you fall down?”

Lye groaned as his nose was crushed and his small body spun in midair. What stopped his ascent was Ram’s kick, sending him straight down. And following up, Ram raised her hands upward, generating a wind to descend rapidly, landing a second, third, and fourth kick to Lye’s face as he fell.

Mercilessly, she shattered his nose, teeth, jaw, and forehead with each blow.

Every time he called Ram sister with that grin of his was repulsive.

“Well? Do you regret it?”

Deftly controlling herself in midair, Ram rested her feet on his face and chest.

Not answering, Lye furrowed his bloody face in annoyance as he tried to swing the swords in his hands. But in that moment, Ram’s hands slashed, dislocating both of his arms at the shoulder. No matter how amazing his techniques, he couldn’t swing his arms with joints that didn’t work.

“Well? Do you regret it?”

Looking down at his wide-eyed, stunned face, Ram asked again.

Staring into his eyes, she looked for a sign of fear. Engraving that into him was her goal. The dread, pain, and a sense of defeat so that he felt he couldn’t go against her. But it wasn’t for something so small as mere revenge.

“Rem…”

To get her back.

And all the countless other victims of Gluttony as well. To return all those who had had their names and memories, their histories stolen away from them.

If killing him was enough, Ram could do that in the blink of an eye.

With the same effort she had put into destroying his face, she could make a blade of wind on the bottom of her foot and cut his head off. Even as repulsively resilient as Witch Cultists were famed to be, it had already been demonstrated that severing their heads would still kill them.

In the burning Oni village, when she had been fighting with those who had destroyed the village.

In the first place, she already knew the cultists were nothing more than a band of weak fools who happened to be hideously twisted.

Because of that, she was asking him questions to destroy his spirit before ending his life.

“Well? Do you regret it?”

“—ghh, Solar Eclipse!”

With the third question, there was a trace of terror in his bloodred eyes.

But it disappeared in truly the blink of an eye.

Not in the sense of moving at extreme speed. The sensation of crushing his head was missing.

But her vision still overlapped with his, through using Clairvoyance. She quickly discerned where he had fled in the middle of the stairs. Clad in wind, she chased after him, only to find a bald old man in a monk’s robes.

The change in appearance might have stunned anyone other than Ram. But by sharing his vision, she knew for a fact it was Lye, even if his appearance had changed.

“I heard that transforming was Lust’s trick, but I don’t have time to indulge you with your games.”

The fight was overwhelmingly one-sided. But it had been more than a minute since Ram had undone a big limiter—there was a slight burden on her, too, but the vast majority of it was flowing to Subaru.

She had told him to limit himself to just modulating it, but as expected, he had gone and decided to just assume all of her burden. Always trying to act cool.

That was something he should just save for Rem and the girl he cared about.

“…Return everything you have consumed as Gluttony. If you do…”

“If we do, what, young lady? You would let us go?”

“Not at all. If you do, I will kill you quickly. A good deal, don’t you think? Even though you have earned thousands of deaths, you will be allowed to die just the once.”

“Fwha.”

Even Lye’s mannerisms took on an elderly man’s affect as he let out a hoarse chuckle.

Watching his movements, Ram had a supposition that this change of form was necessary to fully make use of a person’s abilities. The way he had disappeared from in front of Ram earlier was a technique that allowed him to leap across space covering small distances. The person who had originally been able to do that was probably the old, bald-headed man Lye had transformed into.

“But it’s odd. If you had something like this up your sleeve, it wouldn’t have been strange for you to use it earlier. So why hide it this long, I wonder?”

“ ”

“…Is there some reason you didn’t want to use it? It strains your body, perhaps?”

“Golly gee…we have never encountered such a fearsome lass before… Not at all. You really are terrifying, sister.”

The old man’s form gradually shifted back into a smaller body.

It was an acknowledgment of Ram’s conjecture and also proof that the transformation had not removed the damage that she had done. Lye was still bloody, and his face was still in terrible shape.

“Your shoulders?”

“Fixed using the wall. Going in blind just isn’t enough…oww, the pain.”

Lye swung his arms in a big circle, confirming the feel of his readjusted shoulders. Ram reflected on her decision, deciding that she should have cut his arms off rather than simply dislocating his shoulders. Or if she had just mangled the ends of all four of his limbs, it would put an end to all his foolish tricks.

“Anticipating every single last one of the things we do…you really are incredible, sister. Are you maybe using some kind of authority, like he is?”

“How rude. Ram’s discerning eye is just that excellent. Don’t lump it in together with Barusu’s incomprehensible intuition. It’s unpleasant. Die at once.”

“Aha-ha-ha. So harsh. But, but, ahh, that’s right.”

His long, torn tongue hung from his broken-toothed mouth in a bloody grin. Eyes widening slightly at his ominous gesture, Ram tensed her shoulders.

If he did something strange—no.

“Take this before you can.”

Before he could do anything, Ram chose to tear his limbs away with a blade of wind.

There were ways of stopping bleeding. There was no stopping the pain, but the interrogation could continue so long as he didn’t die. With that judgment, she unleashed unbridled blades of wind, but…

“—Your loss is our gain!”

As the blades landed, a big, round, bearded man leaped backward. His skin was so thick that the wind blades bounced off without even leaving a red mark on his skin.

“Like, you just don’t get it, do ya, sis? Let’s be real. You aren’t the only one watching your opponent here.”

Ram was about to give chase, to prevent the big man from escaping, when that voice rang out.

The next instant, a blade left in space for Ram lightly nicked her neck, slowing her chase by a half step. And the old man Lye thrust into that tiniest of openings.

“Our approach, followed by our punch!”

In a blink, the old man disappeared, and the being that appeared behind her swelled in menace. Without even the time to spin around, she felt an intense punch land right in her side, sending her slender body flying.

Watching her groan was a stout man with a wild air about him—three different figures had traded places in an instant, and their unique traits were all perfectly applied…

“But even so. Don’t imagine the same trick will work twice—”

“We don’t. We don’t at all. Of course not. We don’t already!”

Lye roared while turning into the old man again and covering one of his eyes with his hand.

Worried about that movement, Ram stretched her long legs, kicked off the wall, and quickly tried to adjust her position to leap at him.

However, she wasn’t fast enough.

“We know. Rem’s big sister can’t keep moving like this without some sort of trick.”

He reached that answer by using Rem’s knowledge, not by observing Ram’s movements. Seeing Ram’s movements that surpassed the limits of a hornless Oni, Lye was sure of his interpretation, and when Ram returned to the stairs, his evil intent was already complete.

“Sister, we don’t particularly care about winning a test of strength with you.”

With a crafty smirk, he disappeared into the air.

Teleportation by distorting space across short distances—by continually doing that, it was easy to flee a battlefield. He had no intention of stopping and fighting to the death.

“You are quick to decide to flee. No…”

If he knew about Ram’s Clairvoyance, then he should not be expecting to simply run away. The reason he took his distance even knowing about it was that he realized she was working under a time constraint. And unfortunately, she’d had a not insignificant amount of time stolen away from her.

The burden on Subaru was increasing by the second.

She needed to find where Lye had fled into the tower as soon as possible.

Just as she thought that, though, she noticed.

The Archbishop that was a pure ball of malice wasn’t just running into the tower to get away.

He was thinking carefully about how best to torment Ram to the greatest extent.

That was…

“Rem.”

As she finally connected back to his evil gaze, it reflected in her eyes.

The tail of the black ground dragon running, and the sleeping prince on the dragon’s back.