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I wanted to make an announcement: this fanfic is going on hiatus. My subscription to the AI I used to create the chapters has expired, and I don't have the $20 needed to pay for it or to invest in a different AI. Just to clarify, it won't go on hiatus immediately—I've already managed to create 62 complete chapters—but once I reach chapter 62, if the AI doesn't offer another free trial, the story will be paused. With that said, please enjoy the chapters.
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The night of the fourth day of the second loop fell over the Roswaal mansion like a sheet too clean covering something rotten.
During dinner, Subaru had spoken less than usual. He still protested when Ram called him Barusu, still tried to turn every glance from Emilia into a reason to live, and still pretended the puppy bite was nothing more than a humiliating anecdote from the village, but Link had already learned to distinguish the difference between noisy Subaru and the Subaru who used noise so no one would hear the tremor in his breathing. That night, he was like that. Smiling, yes, but his bandaged hand rested too close to his plate, and every so often his eyes lowered toward it as if he expected something invisible to start moving beneath the skin. Rem was watching him too. Not obviously, not with open hostility, but with that silent attention of hers that turned even the act of serving water into a complete observation. Ram, for her part, seemed the same as always, but Link no longer trusted the word "always" inside a mansion where days could repeat with small new cracks.
After dinner, the Lemon Carlota had disappeared little by little between restrained spoonfuls, Subaru's comments about "medicinal dessert for victims of canine attacks," and an "acceptable" from Ram that he celebrated as if he had survived a royal trial. Emilia smiled when she tasted it, and that smile seemed to give Subaru a little air. Rem ate her portion calmly, and when she said the texture had turned out better than the day before, Link almost made the mistake of answering that she had said something similar in another life. He swallowed the phrase with difficulty, lowered his gaze toward his plate, and let the conversation continue without him for a few seconds. It was exhausting to live among things being born again and having to pretend he did not remember their first death.
The mansion began to go dark with its usual rhythm. Puck had already returned to Emilia's crystal, Beatrice had disappeared into her library without bothering to pretend to say goodbye, Roswaal did not appear after dinner, and the twins moved through the hallways, correcting the final details of the night. Subaru was supposed to go to his room; Link to his, near the wing facing the gardens. When they crossed paths in the hallway, both stopped without needing to agree on it. No one was close enough, but even so, they spoke quietly.
"I'm not going to sleep," Subaru said.
Link looked at him in silence.
"I know."
"I can't. If I fall asleep, it might happen the same way as before. If the curse, the smell, the dog, whatever it is... if something comes, I need to see it."
"And if seeing it isn't enough, scream."
Subaru let out a dry laugh.
"I'm good at that."
"Not this time. Don't scream like an idiot. Scream my name if something happens."
Subaru's smile cracked a little. For an instant, without Emilia nearby, without Ram correcting him, without children to entertain or desserts to use as a distraction, he looked exactly as he was: a tired, frightened boy, furious that he had to repeat the same road while waiting for death to appear somewhere else.
"Don't go out alone either," Subaru said.
Link did not answer.
Subaru narrowed his eyes.
"Link."
"I'm going to watch from outside."
"That isn't 'not going out alone.' That's going out alone with more dramatic wording."
"From my room, I can reach the roof. From up there, I can see the windows, the paths, the garden, and part of the entrances. If something approaches your room, Emilia's, or Ram and Rem's wing, I'll see it first."
"And if what's coming can't be seen?"
Link clenched his jaw.
"Then I'll smell it."
Subaru lowered his gaze toward his bandaged hand.
"You didn't smell enough to prevent the bite."
The blow was low, but not unfair. Link did not get angry. The worst part was that Subaru was right. He had noticed the dog's strange smell, had felt the repulsion in his nose, had seen the scene approaching like a cursed repetition, and even so, he had not stopped the teeth from touching skin. He had been too careful with canon, too unsure of how much he could change, too trapped in the idea of not breaking everything before understanding it. And now Subaru was there, with a small bite that could be an invisible sentence.
"That's why I'm not staying in bed," Link said.
Subaru closed his eyes and took a deep breath.
"This is a terrible idea."
"Yes."
"Ours usually are."
"Also yes."
"If you die again, I'm going to insult you in the next loop."
Link smiled without joy.
"If I die again, you'd better come with me to hell to complain."
"Deal."
They did not shake hands. Subaru had the bite bandaged, and both of them knew that touching it would have made the fear they were trying to keep under control far too real. They only looked at each other for one more second. Then Subaru turned toward his room and Link toward his own, each carrying a different part of the same sentence.
Link closed the door to his room without turning on any lamps.
The room was dark, crossed only by a line of moonlight falling over the wooden floor. The clean bed waited for him with silent mockery. He was not going to use it. Not that night. He took off his work jacket and left it on a chair. Then he checked the window, pushing it carefully so the hinges would not creak. The night air came in cold, smelling of garden, damp stone, leaves, and a distance that seemed more honest to him than the mansion's interior silence. He leaned out. The exterior wall had not been made to be climbed by a normal person, but he had stopped being normal too many deaths ago.
First, he flexed his legs.
The strength was there, sleeping beneath human muscle like an animal waiting for permission. It was not only physical power; there was something more in the way his body responded when he concentrated pressure in his thighs and calves. Something Oni, perhaps, though he still did not know how to read it. Something that made the ground seem less like a limitation and more like a point of support. He took a deep breath, crouched on the window frame, and jumped.
The night opened beneath him for an instant.
It was not an elegant jump. He was not a trained hero or a rooftop assassin. But his legs propelled him with absurd strength, enough to reach a stone ledge several meters above. His fingers dug into the edge. The stone cracked under the pressure of his hands, and Link loosened his grip immediately so he would not rip off half a decoration from the façade. He felt the weight of his body hanging over the darkness, the wind brushing his shirt, his heart pounding in his chest. Then he called the kagune.
Not with rage.
Not with hunger.
With necessity.
A red limb emerged from the lower part of his back, tearing the fabric with a wet, familiar pressure. It stretched upward like a long arm, clumsy but more obedient than days before, and hooked onto another ledge. Then a second came out, slower, trembling slightly before tensing. Link used both kagunes as supports, not weapons. He climbed with them and with his legs, digging fingers into stone, pushing his body upward, measuring every movement so he would not break too much or make noise. For a moment, he thought about how ridiculous he must have looked from outside: a gardener with red limbs climbing a noble mansion like some nightmare insect.
Subaru would have laughed.
Rem would have said it was reckless.
Ram would have said it was costly if he broke the façade.
The thought almost made him smile.
He reached the roof with one final push from his legs and rolled over the slanted tiles, cushioning the sound with the kagune before his body struck too hard. He stayed face down for a few seconds, breathing against the cold of the night ceramic. Then he slowly sat up. From there, the mansion was something else. It no longer seemed like a labyrinth of hallways, but like a beast spread through the darkness, with wings, windows, chimneys, and shadows. The gardens surrounded the structure like a black sea cut by pale paths. The moon illuminated the edges of the hedges, the treetops, and the line of the village in the distance, hidden beyond fields and roads.
Link stood carefully on the roof.
Then he stopped holding back.
The kagune fully released.
A third limb burst from his back with a sharper pull than the first two, but Link controlled it before it struck the tiles. The three rose behind him, red, organic, flexible, opening like tails of a creature that did not belong to the kingdom of Lugunica. He felt his balance change. His center of gravity became wider, lower, as if those limbs could hold him against the slope of the roof. Then he truly opened his eyes.
The kakugan awakened.
The sclera turned black, and red lit his irises like freshly uncovered embers. The darkness lost part of its dominion. Shapes became clearer, edges sharper, shadows deeper but less opaque. The night world filled with small details: trembling leaves, moisture shining on a tile, the movement of a curtain behind a distant window, the faint heat trace of a recently extinguished lamp. His breathing became lower. More animal. He was not hungry, not in the ravenous way he remembered from that anime, but Kaneki's image crossed his mind like lightning: the madness, the pain, the violence, that desperate transformation of someone pushed beyond the limit until he became something that could no longer ask the world for permission.
If he had to become like that, he would.
The thought did not frighten him as much as it should have.
"Not this time," he whispered, his voice distorted by the tension in his jaw. "I'm not going to let it happen again."
He looked toward the wing where Subaru was.
"I'm going to protect you, idiot."
Then toward the rooms near Emilia's section.
"You too, Emilia."
After that, toward the hallways where, as he remembered, Ram and Rem performed their final tasks before retiring.
"Ram."
And finally, without meaning to, the name came out lower.
"Rem."
The wind moved his hair.
Or so he believed.
Link extended his senses. He opened his nose to the night air, letting his sense of smell search through layers as in the kitchen, as in the village, as in the cold storage. Earth, wood, stone, dampness, leaves, distant traces of animals, extinguished smoke, cloth, soap, the entire mansion breathing beneath him. He tried to locate Subaru's dark smell, but from the roof, he only perceived a diffuse stain, too diluted, as if something were pushing it away from him. He tried with his hearing. He expected to hear footsteps, doors, the murmur of Ram or Rem, perhaps Subaru moving in his room. Nothing clear. The mansion was too quiet. Not dead, not empty, but muffled around him in a strange way, as if sound slipped away before reaching him.
He frowned.
His senses were not failing.
The problem was something else.
Around the roof, invisible beneath the moonlight, a current of wind spun in a circle too perfect to be natural. It was not a storm, it did not shake the nearby trees, it did not whistle along the edges of the tiles. It was a barrier. A film of obedient air that diverted smells, distorted sounds, and wrapped the space around Link like a transparent bell. If he had understood his Oni side better, if he knew how to feel mana as something more than pressure in his horns or heat beneath his skin, he would have noticed the structure immediately. He would have perceived that the wind was not born from the weather, but from a will. That the night was not still: it was being bent around him.
But Link did not know that.
To him, it was only a night too silent.
"Come on..." he murmured, turning slowly on the roof. "Show me something."
His kagunes moved behind him, tense, ready to propel him in any direction. One brushed the tiles with the faintest sound. Link lowered his body, adopting an almost crouched posture. From there, he could jump toward the garden, toward another wing, toward a window. He could break a roof if necessary. He could descend a wall with the kagune, enter through a window, and pull Subaru out of his room even if he had to drag him by the neck. He could protect them. He had to be able to.
The night gave him no answer.
Minutes passed.
Or so he believed.
Time on the roof became strange. The moon did not seem to move, but his body felt every second like a drop falling onto stone. The kakugan burned a little, not with unbearable pain, but with sustained use. The kagunes were beginning to weigh like muscles kept tense too long. At another moment, he would have withdrawn at least one to rest, but not tonight. He could not afford to lower his guard. He could not afford to be the idiot who hid on the roof and still let someone die.
He thought of Subaru, awake in his room, probably pretending bravery while listening to every creak of the mansion.
He thought of Emilia, sleeping without knowing that her promised morning had already been stolen once.
He thought of Ram, dry, cruel, efficient, alive.
He thought of Rem.
Rem holding him beneath the moon of another loop. Rem saying his name as if she did not know she was turning it into something important. Rem eating mint-chocolate ice cream. Rem supervising his kagune without stepping back. Rem asking him why he wanted to walk with her in the village. Rem, who now remained dangerous, suspicious, pierced by secrets and by the Witch's scent Subaru carried like a curse. Rem, who tonight could perhaps be an enemy, an ally, or both depending on a truth Link still did not understand.
"Even if I have to go insane," he said through clenched teeth, "I'm not going to let anything happen to you."
He did not even know exactly whom he was saying it to.
To Subaru.
To Rem.
To himself.
Then he felt cold.
It did not come from the wind. It did not come from the roof or the night or the dampness. It was born in the center of his chest like a hand of ice closing around a flame. Link's eyes widened. The kakugan, red over black, contracted with a violent glow. His three kagunes tensed at once, striking the tiles with a crack that would have made anyone inside the room beneath him tremble.
"No..."
There was no enemy.
There was no smell.
There was no sound.
There was no time.
The cold spread through his veins with the same clean brutality as in the forest, with the same indifference as in the moonlit hallway. It was a death without knife, without wound, without battle, without a chance to bite back. Link tried to drive a kagune into the roof to hold himself up, but the command did not arrive complete. The limb moved late, struck the tiles, and split them without anchoring. His body lost strength all at once, as if someone had cut every thread at the same time. The kakugan went out in his eyes before he could understand what had failed.
His last thought was not a heroic phrase.
It was rage.
Rage at not having heard anything. Rage at not having smelled anything. Rage at dying again without even knowing from what direction death had come. Rage at imagining Subaru falling somewhere in the mansion while he, with all his monstrous power deployed, had not been able to move even one step to save him.
The kagune half-retracted by instinct, without an order, like wounded limbs returning to the body. The tiles beneath his feet gave way with a snap. Link fell to his knees, then to his side, and his lifeless weight rolled down the slope of the roof. One hand tried to grab onto an irregularity in the ceramic, but his fingers no longer had strength. The body kept sliding down, struck the edge, broke a stone gutter, and vanished over the outer angle of the mansion.
From below, someone saw him fall.
Rem was in the garden.
The chained mace rested at her side, still at last. Her breathing was not disturbed, though her fingers remained clenched tightly around the weapon. In the air, there remained a metallic trace, the dark scent of the Witch dispersing from another direction, and also the current of wind Ram had raised around the roof so that no inconvenient sound would reach the one who should not intervene. Rem was not looking up at first. Her attention was on another death, on another eliminated threat, on the silence that had to protect the mansion, Emilia-sama, and Ram.
Then she heard the strike against the tiles.
She lifted her gaze.
A shadow fell from the roof.
It did not fall like someone wounded trying to save himself. It did not flail its arms, it did not scream, it did not throw out a red limb to grab the wall. It fell the way something already lifeless falls before touching the ground. The body first struck a lower cornice, bounced with a dry sound, and ended up collapsing onto the wet grass of the garden, several steps from her. The moon illuminated Link's face for an instant. His eyes were normal again. His forehead had no horns. His back no longer showed the kagune. Only the torn shirt remained, the pale skin, the mouth barely open, and an impossible stillness.
Rem stood motionless.
Link's strange scent was still there, mixed with earth, the minimal blood from the blows of the fall, and a shadow similar to Subaru's, but weaker, more confused. She did not understand why he had died. She had not touched him. Neither had Ram, as far as Rem knew. The wind barrier was only meant to isolate him, not kill him. He had been on the roof, alive one instant before, with his monstrous determination deployed toward a threat he had not managed to see.
And now he was dead.
The current of wind slowly came undone, like a hand releasing an invisible curtain. The air began moving naturally around the garden again. The smells returned all at once. So did the sound of the world. Rem could hear leaves, wood, her own breathing, the distant echo of a mansion that continued sleeping because almost no one knew what had just happened.
She looked at Link's body.
Two complete horns had appeared once in the dining room. Two horns that did not belong to Ram or Rem. Two impossible horns on someone who did not know how to be Oni, but carried that blood anyway. For three days, Rem had tried not to think about what it meant. She had tried to reduce him to an anomaly, a suspicion, a dangerous worker, a useful stranger who cooked desserts and moved branches with red limbs. But seeing him there, lifeless on the grass, did not bring her relief.
That was the worst part.
She did not feel relief.
Only an uncomfortable hollow, small and deep, in the place where there should have been nothing.
Rem took one step closer.
Then another.
The moon kept illuminating the garden, indifferent.
Behind her, the Witch's scent still burned in the memory of the night. In front of her, Link's body remained motionless, as if the world had corrected an anomaly that should never have sat at the table, never have used gardening gloves, never have said he liked talking to her.
Rem lowered her gaze.
The number of Onis in the mansion returned to two.