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The next instant, Subaru’s consciousness rose from the darkness.
“Gagh!”
The agony of drowning he’d been experiencing just moments earlier vanished in an instant, only to be replaced by the pain of his erratic breathing and the unmistakable feeling of the ground under his back.
“Cough, cough. Ack, bleugh.”
Subaru sat up while rubbing his throat, recalling what had just transpired.
He peered down at his chest and couldn’t see an arrow anywhere. Additionally, the scratches he’d gotten from pushing through the underbrush were gone as well.
Of course they were.
He had suffered a terrible blow right through his chest.
“I…died…”
With a shudder and the unshakable feeling that the ground had fallen out from under him, Subaru’s blood turned cold.
After the Pleiades Watchtower was swallowed up by shadow, he’d been carried far, far away, and been awake for not even an hour before abruptly losing his life.
As it dawned on him how dangerous the situation was, Subaru stood up on wobbly feet. He steadied himself and looked around him.
“Damn it. Of course it’s like this…”
He was in the middle of a big meadow, and as luck would have it, he couldn’t see the one person he was hoping would be there.
Unmistakably, it was the same meadow where he had ended up after being whisked away from the tower. The problem was, Rem and Louis were nowhere to be found. Meaning Subaru’s reset point was—
“Right after Rem strangled me…!”
He was starting over from the exact moment after Rem had knocked him out.
It was fortunate that he hadn’t ended up at a point before Rem had woken up, or at a point that would undo their victory at the Pleiades Watchtower. That said, a small part of him had hoped he might be able to talk to Shaula again had he returned to that final part of the previous loop.
“What am I, stupid? Yeah, I guess I am.”
If you’re gonna keep clinging to that, then you should have made more time to listen to her, to be with her, to ask her how she felt. You didn’t, though, so you don’t have the right to grieve now.
“Right now, I have to focus on finding Rem.”
He needed to chase after her and clear up the misunderstanding.
If Rem’s distrust was due to the lingering scent of the Witch, then the smell might have become even stronger after yet another instance of Return by Death. But even if that made her less willing to trust him, he still had to protect her.
“Someone in that forest killed me… That wasn’t Rem’s handiwork.”
She had already strangled him once. It was entirely possible she might attack him again. But there shouldn’t have been enough time for her to find or make a bow and arrows, never mind learn how to use them.
“If my attacker could nail me that accurately from a good distance away, it could be dangerous for Rem, too.”
Since her legs were currently out of commission, she wouldn’t be able to flee if that archer came after her. He had to find her first, even if she didn’t believe he was her ally.
“Let’s do this, Subaru Natsuki. Lemme see just how great you are.”
He slapped his cheeks to clear his mind of that shocking death and the grief of being hated by a girl he cared about so much. It wasn’t clear if he could convince her to stick together even if he found her, but he had to take this one step at a time.
Grief and anger were things you could only feel while still alive.
“ ”
Once he’d taken a deep breath, Subaru looked for Rem’s tracks in the grass, then charged into the jungle once more. This time, though, he was deeply unsure whether he should raise his voice and call out to Rem.
The archer’s baptism earlier had happened because the enemy had found Subaru defenseless. Their identity was unclear, as was their goal, but having killed him in one shot, it was difficult to imagine that they were friendly. He should assume that being discovered would mean death.
“But a bow and arrow means it’s not a demon beast. It’s gotta be a person.”
There was a chance he could avoid a fight to the death, depending on how negotiations went. Whether they would be willing to sit down and talk was another question, though.
All of Subaru’s deaths had more or less been caused equally by demon beasts and people. People might even have had the edge. Just because the opponent was someone he could communicate with didn’t necessarily mean it would be possible to make friends.
It would be easier to find Rem with more people helping him, but…
“Cor Leonis.”
Closing his eyes, Subaru swept away all extraneous thoughts and activated the authority that lay within him. The new power that he had used to go wild in the Pleiades Watchtower, Cor Leonis, allowed Subaru to locate allies nearby as long as they were willing to support the Little King.
He had hoped it would let him find Rem, but…
“…Nope, there’s no response. Either she’s insanely far away, or she doesn’t consider me an ally.”
He didn’t know the exact range of Cor Leonis, but when it was active, a faint light marked the location of his allies. Sadly, he couldn’t see any lights now, and he concluded that this was either due to distance or the state of their relationship.
At the moment, he also couldn’t sense Emilia and the others who had previously been marked by his power. And even after he had gotten acquainted with Reid or Gluttony in the tower, it still never marked them.
Subaru quickly concluded that Emilia and the others must no longer be in range, and that Rem was in range but didn’t think of him as an ally. His inability to track Louis was also consistent with this conclusion.
“I would never treat her like an ally in a million years. Anyway, looks like my one-sided feelings for Rem aren’t enough for the radar to work.”
He regretted all the misunderstandings that had given Rem the wrong impression.
With the Witch’s scent all over him, maybe convincing Rem to trust him had been impossible from the start. Even so, he hadn’t even bothered to pretend to take care of Louis, or to suggest bringing her along.
“Damn it, damn it… Why…?! Rem… Rem finally woke up, so why do I…?”
Why do I have to chase after her like this?
Even though he had waited so long for the day she could stand up and walk on her own two legs again, now that his wish had finally come true, it was causing him some awful trouble.
And thinking about who was to blame for all this, he felt nothing but rage at Louis and all the other Gluttonies.
“ ”
Subaru’s thoughts were stuck in a loop as he carefully moved through the trees.
He crouched down as a desperate measure to evade the person who had killed him— I’ll call them the hunter for now.
“Think, think… This is all my crafty head is good for. Rem’s forgotten her memories and doesn’t remember a thing. But she still had the ability to wrestle me to the ground and detect the Witch’s scent. That’s gotta be episodic memory loss.”
Amnesia was a common trope in fiction, and in most cases, it tended to be some form of episodic memory loss. This generally manifested as being able to remember the names of things and retaining ingrained reflexes but failing to recall people or specific memories.
Based on the way Rem had spoken and how she’d doubted Subaru because of his scent, he was convinced.
“Rem’s probably disoriented right now. She can’t run forever. After getting some distance from me, she’ll take some time to calm down and collect herself. And assuming she took Louis with her, that would be all the more reason to stop sooner rather than later.”
It seemed like an insane thing to hope for, but he wanted Louis to slow Rem’s flight down as much as possible. If she threw a tantrum, refused to keep walking, or just generally caused Rem problems, it would give Subaru a chance to catch up to them.
Or was it possible that Louis would become too much to handle and be abandoned by Rem…?
“…Hard to say.”
He honestly wasn’t sure if Rem was capable of abandoning someone who looked like a defenseless little girl.
With her amnesia, Rem didn’t even know who she was herself. She didn’t have the inferiority complex toward Ram that had developed from a young age, or a concrete sense of self.
Ram’s ability to stay composed as if nothing had happened even after losing Rem’s existence was abnormal, but would that also be true of Rem? Without any sisterly bond, without the pride of being an oni or an inferiority complex because of her sister, and having absolutely no opinion about Subaru Natsuki, what would Rem…?
“Hgh!”
As he imagined it, it felt like flames were licking at his heart.
Subaru lurched forward, stepping on a twig that snapped with a loud crack. He almost slipped on the muddy ground underneath and ended up stumbling forward through the high grass.
“Huh?”
Suddenly, the woods opened up and he found himself in a clearing.
A scary thought entered his mind, and he quickly checked to see if he had been wandering through the rainforest all that time only to end up back in the same spot. After a careful study of his surroundings, he confirmed he was in a different clearing.
It was similar to the first meadow, but the grass here was taller. And the first meadow was surrounded by rainforest on all sides, but here there was only the jungle that he had stumbled out of.
Before him, all he could see was the horizon. The sky seemed impossibly high, and staring at it made him feel unsteady on his feet, as if he might get drawn up into it if he wasn’t careful.
But what caught his attention most of all wasn’t the sky. There was a spot in the meadow that had been cleared and was littered with camping tools…
Put simply, there were signs that someone had been here.
“ ”
Subaru’s body tensed cautiously, and his field of view narrowed.
Fortunately, he couldn’t spot anyone at the simple campsite—only the traces of someone making camp. It was hard to imagine this was an elaborate trap.
The question was, who had set up this campsite?
“The simplest answer would be…the person who killed me.”
If the hunter was actively roaming the woods, then this was probably their base camp.
Subaru realized he should immediately leave and get himself to safety.
Whether it was in the woods or a clearing, the hunter was undeniably a dangerous person to run into.
It was not unheard of for traditional hunters stalking the mountains to mistake a person for a deer and shoot them. But given the apparent skill of the hunter, it seemed impossible they’d mistaken him for a deer when he’d been shouting at the top of his lungs.
The hunter was a dangerous enemy. That was the premise Subaru needed to act on.
However…
“If I could snag at least a knife here…”
The underbrush was incredibly thick. He could really use a tool or two to make faster progress. Unfortunately, all he had on him was his trusty Guilty Whip, crafted from the remains of a powerful enemy.
The clothes he had for dealing with the desert were in a strange way still somewhat useful in a jungle, but having some kind of blade would make a dramatic improvement in his ability to cut through the foliage.
He just needed to get some kind of tool from this camp.
“There’s signs of a fire, and it’s rough…but I think that’s a bed?”
He’d found the remains of a campfire and what looked like a mat of cut foliage beside it. Someone had spent time here for sure.
The camp was otherwise empty, and Subaru couldn’t find anything noteworthy…
“If I could just find anything that can cut stuff…”
“Oh. Looking for a blade? You have shown up in quite the fortunate place, then.”
While he scanned the campsite again in search of any tool that might be useful, a voice suddenly called out to Subaru from behind. He froze, feeling something cold pressed against his neck.
Careful to not even breathe, he slowly looked down and saw a beautifully polished sword resting against the right side of his neck.
“ ”
Subaru took a deep breath. He understood that his attacker had full control of this situation.
But at the same time, he was confused.
He had been on guard. His life was on the line, so he had been extremely vigilant.
There were superhumans in this world who could move so fast, his eyes wouldn’t be able to keep up. And some could even effectively teleport.
“But come on… How unlucky do I have to be to run into one of those rarities here, of all places?”
“Fool. Who told you to speak? Choose your every word and move with caution. Do not forget that your life rests in my hands.”
While Subaru was bemoaning his luck, the person behind him spoke mercilessly.
Subaru knew that if he tried anything, he would most likely lose his head. He frantically tried to think of some sort of way out.
Judging from their voice, his attacker was a man. Probably around the same age as Subaru, or maybe a little older. There was a distinctiveness to his word choice, but it didn’t sound forced or unnatural.
And more than anything…
“It seems you are probing all of your knowledge while keeping your mouth closed. But you do not risk your life to attack. Hmmm… ”
The man was perceptive enough to pick up on what Subaru was thinking just from his silence.
Evidently, he was contemplating something.
“An outfit ill-suited to Badheim’s climate. Pale skin… You must not be a local.”
“I-I… Whoa.”
“Silence. Who told you to open your mouth? Bother me again, and you can see what it’s like trying to speak out of turn with your head separated from your neck.”
He put a shallow cut in Subaru’s neck, indicating he had no intention of holding a conversation.
There was a twinge of pain, and a rivulet of blood trickled down Subaru’s neck. Apparently, the man did not intend to end his examination of Subaru.
“That whip at your hip. Far too inconvenient to use in the rainforest. Arms and legs developed to a degree, but not enough to match a wolf… It seems you were not tracking me.”
“ ”
“Why are you silent? Explain yourself. Or would you rather die here?”
“What?! Now I can talk?! Can’t you be a little more reasonable?!”
Subaru started to complain, but he could practically feel the intense gaze boring a hole in the back of his head. He stiffened, realizing he’d said something he probably shouldn’t have, but he finally breathed a sigh of relief when the blade at his neck was pulled away.
“Slowly turn around. If you attempt anything…”
“Off with my head?”
“No. I shall sever each of your limbs, carve out your heart, and burn it before your eyes.”
“That’s way too cruel!”
The threat was ghastly, so Subaru raised his hands to show he had no intention of resisting as he slowly turned around.
Then he took a careful look at the person who’d been standing behind him.
“…Seriously?”
He had locked eyes with a man whose face was covered by a rag wrapped around his head.
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