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The third day of the third loop ended with Subaru Natsuki and Link far from the bed, far from the table, far from the library, and far from anything that could be called an intelligent decision.
The Roswaal mansion stood on the other side of the distance, cut against the night sky like a house far too beautiful to be innocent. From the edge of the forest, its lit windows looked like eyes separated by walls, curtains, and secrets. Some lights had gone out little by little throughout the night, one after another, until the building was almost asleep beneath the moon. Almost. Subaru no longer trusted the word asleep. Nor did he trust calm, routine, safety, or morning. All those words had proven they had teeth.
The place they had chosen to keep watch was not comfortable, but it was useful. They were in a slightly elevated area, behind a few twisted trees that grew near the road connecting the mansion to the forest and, beyond it, to the village. From there, they could see part of the façade, the front courtyard, some side entrances, and, if one leaned carefully, the dark outline of the path they had taken hours earlier while pretending they were leaving the mansion forever. Some distance away, hidden by weeds and stones, there was an old drainage channel belonging to the property, a low stone conduit partly covered by dirt and roots. Link had noticed it because of the smell of stagnant dampness. Subaru had noticed it because he had nearly fallen into it while searching for a place to hide, then tried to salvage his dignity by calling it "strategic terrain reconnaissance."
They had not lit a fire. They had barely eaten anything. Subaru's bag was propped against a root, holding the rope, water, knife, and the few objects that could make their departure look like a real journey in case someone checked too late. Link carried less baggage. His body was the baggage. Horns hidden beneath the skin, kagune sleeping behind his back, senses tense in the night, and a notebook from Beatrice that was no longer with him, but whose final warning remained lodged in his head with uncomfortable clarity: when the air seemed too still, he should not look for wind, but for the hand forcing it to stay still.
"This is still a terrible idea," Subaru murmured, sitting with his back against the trunk of a tree and his knees close to his chest.
"You said that ten minutes ago."
"The quality of an observation does not decrease through repetition."
"The patience of the listener does."
Subaru turned his head toward him. In the gloom, his face looked thinner than during the day, not from hunger, but from fear. He was trying to cover it with a grimace of annoyance, with comments, with that habit of his of turning any horror into conversation before silence could put its hands around his throat. Link knew him well enough to understand. Not enough to save him from everything, but enough to know when his friend was talking because if he stopped, he would start trembling.
"I'm just saying we could have tried something more traditional," Subaru continued. "Warn Emilia. Ask Roswaal to hire guards. Hide under Beatrice's bed. I would've voted for the third one, though I probably would've ended up turned into decorative bark."
"We couldn't warn them without proof."
"I know."
"We couldn't explain what we remember."
"I know."
"And if the attacker changes plans because the mansion gets altered, we lose the only clue we have."
Subaru shut his mouth for a few seconds. Then he lowered his gaze toward his hands, intact, without marks, without bandages, without puppy bite, without dried blood from work that had never existed in this line. The hands of someone who should know nothing and who, even so, was waiting for a death by appointment.
"The only clue we have is the sound of a chain and my personal history of being split open like overripe fruit," he finally said. "Not exactly an investigation plan approved by responsible adults."
Link did not answer right away. His eyes were narrowed, his nose open to the air, his shoulders still in a way that was not rest. Since they had taken position there, he had been separating scents into layers: damp earth, wood, crushed leaves, fungus, cold stone, small animals, the distant trace of the mansion, soap, extinguished smoke, Subaru's smell beneath everything else, that dark stain still without a name, one that did not disappear no matter how many baths he took. He did not know what it was. He did not know why it made Rem look at him that way. He did not know why it seemed to intensify after every return. He only knew it was there, clinging to his friend like a sentence written in a language no one had taught them.
"We're not attacking first," Link said. "That still stands."
Subaru lifted his eyes.
"You say that as if you're the one who can split trees with tentacles."
"Because I am."
"Exactly. There's my point."
Link placed a hand on the earth, feeling the moisture seep between his fingers. He did not want to bring out the kagune too soon. As long as it stayed hidden, he could save energy, avoid leaving unnecessary traces, and prevent his body from entering that state where every threat felt like an invitation to become less human. But his back had been itching for almost an hour. Not pain. Not hunger. Preparation. As if something beneath his skin had already heard the fight before he had.
"If someone appears, you run to the mansion."
Subaru straightened abruptly.
"No."
"Subaru."
"Don't start with that 'I'm the resistant monster and you're the human in charge of logistical support' tone. I hate that tone. It's a very specific tone, and I hate it."
"You're not logistical support. You're the one who can reach Beatrice, Emilia, Puck if he isn't completely asleep yet, Roswaal if he decides to be useful by accident, or anyone who can intervene before this ends badly."
"That sounds a hell of a lot like logistical support with trauma."
"It sounds like I can take a few hits and you can't."
Subaru clenched his teeth. Link knew he had touched an ugly part, but he could not soften it without lying. They had seen what the chain weapon did. Or rather, Subaru had seen it in his memories, in fragments of death and metallic noise. Link only knew the result: a friend waking with the memory of having lost part of his body before the world decided to begin again.
"I don't like leaving you alone," Subaru said, no joke left in his voice.
"I don't like being left alone either."
"Then don't send me running."
"Precisely because I don't like it, I'm telling you to do it before I have to scream it while something is being ripped off me."
Subaru lowered his gaze. The answer hurt him, but he had nowhere to argue from. That was horrible too: knowing your friend was right and still wanting to deny it because accepting reason looked too much like abandoning him. For a long moment, only the rustle of leaves and the faint murmur of the night could be heard. Then Subaru took a deep breath, rubbed his eyes with the heel of his hand, and nodded once.
"If I run, it's not because I'm leaving you."
"I know."
"It's because I'm going to bring help."
"I know."
"And if you die before I come back, I'm going to insult you in the next loop."
Link tried to smile.
"You already promised that."
"I'm reinforcing the contract."
"Don't make weird contracts in this mansion. Beatrice might charge commission."
Subaru let out a short laugh, too low to be joy, but enough for the night not to close completely around them. Link was grateful for that sound. He did not say it. There were things between them that no longer needed to be said because both were too tired to decorate them.
The wait continued.
Time lost its edges. Subaru mentally counted the intervals by breathing, then got sick of it because every number seemed to bring him closer to the moment when something terrible was supposed to happen. Link shifted twice to change the weight of his body, careful not to snap dry branches. The mansion remained still. The moon rose enough to paint the edges of the leaves silver and turn every shadow into something suspicious. Far away, some nocturnal creature shrieked among the trees. Subaru flinched. Link raised a hand, asking for silence.
Subaru went still.
So did Link.
At first, it was not a clear sound. It was not the long scrape of a chain dragging over stone, nor the violent spin of a weapon. It was something smaller: a metallic brush so faint it could have been mistaken for a buckle moved by the wind. But the wind was not moving anything. The nearby leaves remained too still. The high branches were not swaying either. The air around them was not dead; it was contained.
Link felt his back go cold.
"Subaru," he whispered.
Subaru was already moving. They had agreed on that: if Link said his name like that, he did not ask questions. He crouched, grabbed the bag by reflex, then dropped it when he remembered running with weight could kill him. He only took the knife and the small rope coiled at his belt. Link did not wait for him to finish. The pressure beneath his forehead rose like compressed fire, and the horns emerged with a familiar pain, less clumsy than at first, but still far too brutal to call natural. At the same time, the fabric of his back tightened and split open with a wet sound.
The first impact arrived before Subaru could stand.
A huge, dark, spiked iron ball burst out from between the trees with the violence of a sentence. It was not coming toward them: it was coming through them. The air split in front of the weapon with a heavy whistle, and Subaru would only have seen the blow when it was already too late if Link had not released the kagune through pure instinct. Two red limbs burst from his back and crossed in front of them, forming an irregular defense. The Morning Star struck against the hardened flesh of the kagune with a wet, metallic roar. The force of the impact did not stop completely; it passed through the defense like a wave, pushed Link backward, and drove his heels into the dirt while splinters, leaves, and soil leapt around them. The trees behind them trembled. One of the kagunes tore partially, not cut, but crushed into a deep line that made Link feel the pain all the way into his teeth.
Subaru fell onto his back, eyes wide open.
"Run!" Link growled.
"Link!"
The chain tightened to retrieve the weapon. Link reacted before thinking. A third kagune emerged, thinner, faster, wrapped around the axis of the spiked ball, and diverted it to the side just as the attacker pulled it back. The Morning Star carved a furrow into the ground and tore away part of a root. Link felt the pull as if someone were trying to rip out his spine. The horns vibrated on his forehead, capturing pressure, movement, a current in the air that did not belong to the weather. Beatrice had been right. The night was being forced to stay still.
"To the mansion!" Link shouted without looking back. "Subaru, now!"
Subaru stood clumsily. His entire body screamed at him not to leave. Everything he had learned in that world told him that staying beside someone stronger did not make him useful, but that logic was worthless against the terror of watching Link place himself between him and the same weapon that had killed him. Then the air moved to the left, not like normal wind, but like an invisible line of intent. Link turned sharply and raised a wounded kagune before Subaru understood what was happening. A blade of wind struck the red limb and split it open in a clean line, raising dark blood over the grass.
Subaru felt the color drain from his face.
It was not only the chain.
There was another attacker.
"Run!" Link repeated, this time with a fury that left no room for pride.
Subaru ran.
It was not heroic. It was not elegant. He had no time for a farewell line or a dramatic promise. He ran toward the mansion with his chest burning, his legs trembling, and his throat full of a guilt that already tasted like blood. Behind him, the clash of the chain against the earth roared again. A tree split apart. Something red struck something metallic. Link screamed, not from fear, but from contained pain. Subaru almost looked back. He did not. If he looked, he would stop. If he stopped, Link's order would mean nothing. So he ran, hating himself for every step that took him farther away.
Link felt when Subaru left the immediate range of the attack. Not because he could see him clearly between the trees, but because the smell of his fear began to drift away, mixing with overturned soil and crushed leaves. Good. That was good. That was the right thing. That was unbearable.
The Morning Star moved again.
Link lowered his body, the three kagunes deployed like tense tails behind him, the horns capturing an irregular flow in the air. He could not see the owner of the weapon. The chain came from the darkness between trees beyond his field of vision, disappeared, reappeared with each spin, and the weapon moved at a speed that should not belong to something so heavy. His first impulse was to attack in a straight line toward the origin of the chain. The second, more sensible one, was to remember that invisible wind was waiting for his mistakes.
The spiked ball came head-on, low, seeking his legs. Link jumped backward and used one kagune as support against the ground, propelling himself sideways. The Morning Star swept through the space where his knees had been and pulverized a moss-covered stone. Before he could land, the pressure to his right changed. He did not look for wind. He looked for the hand. There was a direction, an intent compressed, something pushing the air into a line too narrow. Link crossed two kagunes before his torso, and the invisible blade crashed against them. The cut passed between both defenses and opened a long wound in his shoulder, not deep, but painful enough to remind him that detecting was not the same as dodging.
"Two," he muttered through clenched teeth. "There are two."
The chain attacker did not speak. Neither did the wind attacker. That made them worse. Elsa laughed, spoke, enjoyed herself. The thugs shouted. Even Beatrice insulted before doing harm. These attacks came in silence, one heavy and brutal, the other clean and surgical. The combination was ugly. The weapon forced movement; the wind punished movement.
Link could not win like this.
But he did not need to win.
He needed to hold out until Subaru brought help.
The chain sounded again. This time, Link did not retreat. He drove two kagunes into the ground, let the third stretch toward the weapon's trajectory, and received the blow at an inclined angle, not blocking it directly, but diverting it downward. The earth exploded beside him. The impact made his bones tremble, but the weapon stayed one second too close, the chain still tense, the weight not yet fully recovered by its owner. Link acted before fear could argue with him. A fourth kagune burst from his back with a painful tug, more unstable than the others, and wrapped around the chain. Then another. Then the third joined in, squeezing metal against red flesh.
He pulled.
The owner of the weapon pulled at the same time.
The strength he received from the other side was monstrous. It was not simple technique. It was not an ordinary maid wielding a weapon too large for her. Something on the other side of the chain possessed absurd power, a physical capacity that made Link feel his arms, back, and horns vibrate at once. His feet slid over the earth. Roots creaked beneath his heels. The kagunes tensed until the flesh began to open in darker red lines.
"No..." Link growled. "Not this time."
He remembered Beatrice telling him that pushing was not listening. He remembered Rem correcting his strength with branches, telling him without saying it that less was more. He remembered Subaru running and the mansion behind him, full of people who did not remember having died. Then he stopped trying to win the pull through pure strength. He loosened for an instant, just enough for the other side to compensate, and then pulled downward and to his right, using the kagunes anchored to the ground as living pulleys. The chain changed angle. The weapon got stuck against a broken root. The attacker's pull lost its cleanliness.
Link smiled through clenched teeth.
"Got you."
The kakugan awakened.
The sclera turned black, the red iris burned beneath the moon, and the world changed texture. Edges sharpened. The darkness stopped being a wall and became a fabric full of seams. Link opened every kagune he could endure. Four red limbs rose behind him, two wounded, one trembling, one too thick at the base. They were not elegant. They were not perfect. But they obeyed. They joined over his right shoulder, twisting, coiling around one another, compacting into a brutal mass, as if several tails had decided to become a single gigantic arm. The shape reminded him of Jason, of an image of impossible violence that he had once seen on a screen in another world without imagining that one day he would try to imitate it with his own flesh.
The red arm closed into an enormous fist.
Link pulled the chain with his entire body.
This time, something came out of the darkness.
First, he saw the shape. A light silhouette dragged toward him at absurd speed, not because it was weak, but because the angle of the pull had betrayed it. Then he saw the uniform, the black and white of a maid moving beneath the moon. Then the blue hair. Then the visible eye, cold, concentrated, determined.
Rem.
Link's world stopped in a way that had nothing to do with magic.
The gigantic arm was already raised. The trajectory was perfect. If he brought it down, he would crush whoever was coming toward him against the earth with a strength even he did not know how to measure. There was no time to think about strategy. No time to wonder whether it was an illusion, whether she had been controlled, whether there was another Rem, whether the world was mocking him with the exact shape of the person he least wanted to find at the end of his blow. There was only an instant, a decision, and Rem's face approaching with the Morning Star in one hand and the chain around the other.
Link did not strike.
He diverted the fist.
The red arm fell to one side with a roar that tore open the earth, burst roots, and raised a wave of mud and leaves. The impact was so strong that Rem was thrown out of her own attack line and rolled over the ground, recovering with an agility that would have seemed beautiful in any other context. Link immediately released the chain as if it burned. The kagunes trembled behind him. The kakugan remained active, but inside, something had gone out.
"Rem..."
She stood without answering. She wore an expression Link had not seen in the lines where he had cooked, where she had supervised branches, where she had said his movements were clumsy but useful. This Rem was not the maid who served water calmly or the young woman who tasted desserts without admitting enjoyment. She was a human weapon holding another weapon. Her blue eye was not empty. That was the worst part. There was pain beneath it, perhaps rage, perhaps conviction, perhaps fear turned into duty. But not enough doubt.
"Why?" Link asked, and he hated how broken his voice sounded. "Why are you attacking us?"
Rem tightened the chain. The Morning Star dragged over the earth until it rested beside her again.
"That is the question Rem should be asking."
"We didn't do anything."
"You hid outside the mansion after pretending to leave. You watched Roswaal-sama's property during the night. Subaru-sama carries an impossible-to-ignore stench, and you..." Her gaze rose toward Link's horns, then lowered toward the kagunes still partially fused as a monstrous arm. "You showed a dangerous nature from the first day. Even so, Rem tried to observe. There is nothing left to observe."
Link felt his throat go dry.
"We don't know what that smell is."
Rem did not blink.
"That does not make it innocent."
"Subaru is not Emilia's enemy."
"Bad people can also pronounce names with affection."
"You don't know him."
"Rem knows enough."
The phrase hurt more than the wind cut. Link knew it was unfair to demand memory from someone who could not have it. He knew this Rem had not lived the Carlota, or the mint-chocolate ice cream, or the days where the garden had served as a clumsy bridge between them. He knew that to her, he was an anomaly with horns, tentacles, and a smell related to Subaru, hidden in the forest on the third day. Seen from the outside, the suspicion was not absurd. That made it crueler.
"Rem," he said carefully. "If we wanted to attack the mansion, Subaru wouldn't have run toward it to ask for help."
"Or to warn an accomplice."
"There is no accomplice!"
The air moved before Rem could answer.
Link turned too late. He had been looking at Rem, and that was a mistake. A line of wind cut from the left, aiming for his neck. Link raised the fused red arm to protect himself, but the invisible blade split it diagonally, separating part of the kagune mass with white-hot pain. He stepped back and lifted his gaze toward the trees.
"Ram too..."
He did not see the pink-haired maid. Not directly. He only felt the pressure of the air, the hand forcing it to stay still, the flow coming from a high point among branches and shadows. Ram did not need to show herself. Rem was the hammer. Ram was the invisible blade.
"Do not come any closer to Rem," said a dry voice from the darkness.
Link swallowed.
"Ram, listen to me. We aren't—"
The Morning Star attacked before he could finish the sentence.
Rem did not launch herself with disordered fury. She attacked with precision, taking advantage of the moment when Link lifted his head toward Ram's voice. The weapon spun in a low, brutal arc directly toward his ribs. Link managed to interpose two kagunes, but the spiked ball tore halfway through one of them and crushed it against the other. The force sent him sideways. Before he could regain his stance, the wind came from above. This time, it was not a thin blade, but a cutting pressure that sought to force him to crouch. Link dropped to one knee, drove a kagune into the earth, and launched the red arm toward Rem, not to strike her, but to push her away.
He stopped before touching her.
That half-second condemned him.
Rem saw the hesitation. Ram too. Link knew it by the way the air changed. It was not gratuitous malice. It was tactics. If the enemy would not attack Rem even when he could, then that restriction was an opening. And Ram, with the precise coldness Link had seen so many times at the table, did not waste openings.
"Rem," Ram's voice said.
The chain sounded.
The wind answered.
Both attacks arrived almost at the same time.
Link tried to do three things at once: withdraw the red arm so he would not strike Rem, raise his wounded kagunes to stop the Morning Star, and lower his head because he felt the invisible hand closing around the air near his horns. It was a bad movement, not because any part of it was incorrect, but because all of them came late. Beatrice had told him: he would not learn more by suffering more. Listening to where the air stopped being air required calm. And there was no possible calm when Rem stood on the other side of his death.
The blade of wind passed over his forehead.
For an instant, he felt no pain.
Only emptiness.
Then the horns were cut.
They did not fall like broken ornaments. They fell as if someone had torn two burning organs out of his skull. The world overturned inside Link. The mana, which until then had vibrated with clumsiness but obedience, exploded in contradictory directions. The night lost depth. The smells mixed into an unbearable mass. The balance of the kagunes came undone. A scream tore out of his chest before he could stop it, raw, animal, so different from his voice that even Rem stopped for the smallest fraction of a second.
That fraction did not save Link.
The Morning Star struck him.
The fused red arm received the blow first and came apart in an explosion of dark flesh and red fragments. The kagune mass absorbed part of the force, but not enough. The spiked ball broke through the shattered defense and smashed Link's right arm against his own torso. The bone in his forearm gave way with a horrible sound, his shoulder dislocated, and several ribs broke at the same time, sinking in deep enough for the air to leave his lungs in a dry impact. The world became impact. His body was launched backward as if the night had spat him out.
He crashed through the first tree with his back.
It did not split completely, but the trunk cracked and the bark opened under the blow. He bounced against another, then a third, leaving blood, torn fabric, and fragments of kagune retracting by instinct like wounded animals. The absence of the horns was a pain greater than any fracture, a mutilation he did not know how to process. His kakugan flickered and half went out. His right eye returned to brown for an instant, the left remained red over black, and that asymmetry made the forest look like two badly joined worlds.
He fell near the old drainage channel.
The earth gave way beneath his weight. The damp stones at the edge broke, and Link rolled into the narrow sewer, striking the wall with his destroyed shoulder. He could not scream. He had no air. Dirty water reached his cheek. The smell of dampness, mold, and blood filled everything. He tried to move a kagune to get up, but only an incomplete limb emerged a few centimeters before retracting with a spasm. Without horns, without balance, without an arm, with his torso broken, his body no longer responded as monster or human.
Above, among the broken branches, he heard footsteps.
Rem.
Or perhaps Ram.
Or perhaps both.
He could not turn his head. His vision filled with dark spots. He thought of Subaru running. He thought of the mansion. He thought of Beatrice telling him she did not repeat warnings to dead students. He thought that, of all possible endings, dying in a drain after having avoided striking Rem was so ridiculous that Subaru would have enough material to insult him for three full loops.
Then he heard a door.
Not a step. Not a chain. Not wind.
A door.
The sound did not belong in the sewer. There was no wood nearby, no hinges, no room behind a moss-covered stone wall. Even so, in front of his face, on the dark side of the conduit, a vertical line of warm light appeared, as if someone had drawn the edge of a door over reality and then opened it from the other side. The air of the Archive of Forbidden Books entered, mixed with the smell of old paper, clean dust, and the faint sweetness of melted vanilla.
A small hand grabbed him by the collar of his torn shirt.
"Betty told you not to die, I suppose."
Link tried to answer, but only expelled blood and insufficient air.
Beatrice's figure appeared in the impossible threshold, her face tense with fury and something else she would never have accepted naming. Her blue eyes looked at the severed horns, the destroyed arm, the sunken torso, the dirty water, the trace of the Morning Star in the forest, and Rem's shadow approaching from above. For an instant, everything remained suspended between the world of the mansion and the cold hole beneath the earth.
"Idiot with horns," Beatrice murmured, even though the horns were no longer where they should have been. "Even when dying, you are problematic."
The door opened wider.
The sewer disappeared beneath library light.
And before the chain could sound again, Beatrice dragged Link to the other side.