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The Archive of Forbidden Books smelled of old paper, clean dust, and melted vanilla ice cream.
It was an absurd combination, improper for a room that had survived centuries apart from the clumsy hands of noisy humans. Beatrice noticed it the moment she crossed the threshold with Link dragged by the collar of his torn shirt, and irritation came to her immediately, not because the smell was unpleasant, but because she recognized which of those three things did not belong there. Old paper did. Clean dust did. Blood, even, could be explained by the stupidity of the horned guest. But the vanilla still floated in a corner of the library like an insolent reminder that that idiot had entered her space, had written in her notebooks, had left clumsy phrases of gratitude, and had made Betty think about things she did not want to think about.
Link fell onto the carpet with a wet sound.
He did not complain. That was the first thing that infuriated her.
Humans complained. Subaru would have complained even if someone had only stepped on his foot. The other one, however, lay on his side with his right arm destroyed at an unacceptable angle, his torso sunken beneath torn clothing, his back open at the points where the kagune had half-retracted, his forehead stained with blood in the places where his horns no longer were. The stumps were not external bone or broken decoration. They were amputated organs, living wounds expelling a dark mixture of blood and disordered mana. Every breath Link took sounded as if the air had to pass through a collapsed house before reaching his lungs.
Beatrice closed the door.
The sound of wood separated the archive from the outside world, but it did not separate Betty from the image she had just seen. Rem in the darkness. The chain. Ram hidden among the trees, the air obeying her will. The blow that had turned the idiot with horns into a broken mass. It was not difficult to reconstruct what had happened. Link had done something reckless, of course. Subaru too, because if there was stupidity nearby, that human seemed to have a supernatural talent for finding it and giving it a name. They had left the mansion, hidden themselves, waited for a threat, and the threat had answered.
"You are incredibly stupid," Beatrice said, kneeling beside him without realizing her voice had come out lower than usual. "Betty gave you a simple warning. Just one. And you could not even use it without ending up like trash in a drain."
Link opened one eye.
Only one.
The other seemed lost between the pain and the blood covering part of his face. His gaze took time to focus on her. When it did, he tried to speak. The first response was a broken sound, air mixed with something wet that made his chest tremble. Beatrice clenched her teeth.
"Do not speak. Your body is busy failing in very unpleasant ways, I suppose."
Link smiled.
It was almost nothing. A tiny, crooked, absurd movement.
"Thanks..."
Beatrice went still.
For an instant, the word seemed worse to her than the blood on the carpet. Not because it was unexpected. Not because she did not know what it meant. But because it had no right to sound like that. Link was half-crushed, mutilated, with his horns cut off and his arm reduced to something no normal body would have kept attached. And yet, the first useful word he managed to force out was a form of gratitude.
"Do not thank me for something so obvious," she replied sharply. "If you died in that hole, Betty would have to endure the smell of your corpse in the memory of the Door Crossing."
"What... sweet... consideration..."
"If you make jokes while your ribs are trying to pierce you from the inside, I will let you die for poor taste."
Link closed his eye and released a breath that might have wanted to be a laugh. It was a mistake. His torso contracted, and blood rose into his mouth. Beatrice immediately raised her hand, touching the air above his chest without placing it directly on the wound. The mana of the archive responded to her order, not as complete healing, because Betty was not going to waste explanations on a body that did not even understand what it was, but as containment. A clean pressure around the points where the broken bones threatened to destroy what remained of his organs. Link's flow was a disaster. Without horns, the mana moved like water released from a broken vessel, pushing in useless directions. Worse still, beneath that stirred the red thing, the nature he called kagune, which did not respond like mana or normal flesh. It was hunger for repair. It was instinct. It was a tiny swarm awakening inside the blood.
Beatrice felt it.
The wounds began to close.
Not gently. Not with the delicacy of healing magic from a trained person. It was more like watching a collapsed wall forcibly rebuild itself using bricks still stained with mud. The right arm cracked. The displaced bones moved beneath the skin with a sound that would have made Subaru vomit. The torn muscles tightened, broke again, aligned, then covered the fracture once more. The sunken ribs slowly emerged, one by one, not completely healed, but enough for Link's chest to stop sounding like a bellows pierced by stones. The flesh of his back closed the openings where the kagune had withdrawn badly. On his forehead, the stumps of the horns pulsed with a dark light, red at the center, black at the edges.
Beatrice slowly withdrew her hand.
"How disgusting."
Link opened his eye again.
"That... was... almost... concern."
"It was anatomical evaluation. Do not confuse things due to lack of blood in your brain."
"I think... there is... a lack."
"Then be quiet."
The cells of his body kept working. Beatrice did not know how to call them by the name Link would have used in his world; she knew nothing of RC Cells, nor kagunes from a foreign story, nor monsters that ate human flesh in modern cities. But she understood the function. Accelerated repair. Tissue production. Brutal reorganization of the body around an almost offensive will to survive. It was not immortality. That was important. It was not invulnerability. The pain was there, the damage was there, the expenditure was monstrous, and the loss of the horns had left something unstable in his mana. But the arm no longer hung like trash. His chest rose and fell again. And the horns, those damned impossible horns, were growing back.
First, there were two small tips beneath the blood. Then dark structures pushing from his forehead with such violent pressure that Link arched his back and choked a scream between his teeth. Beatrice watched the bases force their way through, watched the skin tighten around them, watched the mana that had been spilling out find imperfect channels again. They were not identical to before. Not yet. The tips were rougher, the reddish color more vivid, the shape less polished. But they were there.
"You should not move," Beatrice said.
Link took a deep breath.
This time, the air entered better.
"Subaru."
Beatrice closed her eyes for one second.
Of course.
The idiot had been crushed, dragged through an impossible door, saved from dying in a drain, and still the first thing he did when his body remembered how to function was ask about the other idiot.
"Betty is not your messenger."
"Where... is Subaru?"
"I do not know."
The lie came out too quickly.
Link tried to sit up. His right arm, freshly reconstructed, failed for an instant and made him fall onto one hand again. Pain deformed his expression, but it did not stop him. Beatrice felt irritation rise up her throat like fire.
"I told you not to move."
"Beatrice..." he said, and for the first time, there was no joke or softness in his voice. "Where is he?"
The archive went still.
Betty could have told him she did not care. She could have closed all the doors and let Subaru solve his stupidity with the death that seemed so determined to pursue him. She could have reminded him that she had no obligation to protect anyone outside a pact, and that noisy human had not even formed one with her in this loop. She could do it. She should do it. It was the correct thing for someone who remained apart from the world. For someone who did not get involved more than necessary. For someone who did not think of "that person" every time an idiot gave thanks with blood in his mouth.
But Subaru appeared in her mind.
Subaru opening doors he should not. Subaru talking too much. Subaru trying to sound brave with broken eyes. Subaru carrying that smell that made Rem act like a blade. Subaru and Link leaving the mansion together with a calm so false that even Betty, from the other side of a door, had been able to see it crack.
Beatrice clicked her tongue.
"Do not do it."
Link looked at her.
"You do not even know what I'm going to ask."
"Yes, I do. You are going to ask for another stupidity."
"I need to see him."
"No."
"Beatrice."
"No."
"Please."
The word was not strong. It was not demanding. That made it worse.
Beatrice stood with the book pressed against her chest. She looked toward one of the archive doors, though she knew no ordinary door would be enough to find what Link wanted. The Door Crossing was not just any window into the world. It was her domain, her way of arranging the mansion's entrances, of bending the connection between rooms that belonged to the property. She had managed to drag Link from the drain because that old conduit connected to the mansion's underground structure, because there was a forgotten maintenance door on the other side, because Betty had pushed more than she should have and because, perhaps, the idiot had caught her attention enough for the possibility to open.
Finding Subaru in the forest was another matter.
Not impossible.
But annoying.
Very annoying.
"If Betty shows you something you do not want to see, do not make noise."
Link went still.
"You can see him?"
"I can search for a nearby door. And I can look. Do not get your hopes up like an idiotic human."
"Do it."
"Do not order me."
"Please, do it."
Beatrice pressed the book against her chest and lifted one hand. The shelves of the archive darkened slightly, not because the light disappeared, but because the space between them stopped behaving like a normal room. The doors of the archive, all possible doors, began to respond. A vibration ran through the wood. There was no wind, but there was pressure. Mana tensed around the frames like invisible threads pulled from many points of the mansion toward a single knot. Beatrice searched for Subaru's scent, not with her nose, but through relation: guest, intruder, noisy human, poor mana, dark smell that was not mana and yet dirtied the air. She found him the way one finds a stain on white cloth.
The nearest door changed.
It did not open into a mansion hallway. On the other side, there was night, trees, and a strip of earth lit by moonlight. Beatrice kept the door barely ajar, enough to look without fully revealing the archive. Link dragged himself to it despite the order not to move. Betty gave him a look that would have reduced the pride of any decent person to ashes. Link had no decency available; only fear.
And then he saw Subaru.
He was not running.
He had not reached the mansion.
He was tied to a tree, or rather held against it by a combination of chain, injury, and exhaustion that made further ropes unnecessary. His clothes were torn, his face stained with blood, one cheek opened by a chain strike, and one leg bent at an angle that should not have allowed him to remain conscious. Rem stood in front of him, with the Morning Star resting on the ground, the chain in one hand and the other extended toward Subaru's chest with a soft light that had nothing merciful about it. The healing closed just enough to keep him alive. Not to relieve him. Not to save him. Only to return his body's ability to keep feeling.
Link stopped breathing.
Subaru did not seem to have enough air either.
"Tell the truth," Rem was saying.
Her voice was serene. That made it unbearable. She did not scream. She did not cry. She did not sound pleased. She was a maid performing a horrible task with the conviction that the horror was necessary.
"I... already did..." Subaru murmured.
His voice was a thread.
Rem raised the chain.
"Subaru-sama contradicts himself. He hides near the mansion. He sends Link-sama to block Rem. He carries that smell. He approaches Emilia-sama without explanation. And still he insists he has no hostile intent."
Subaru lifted his head with effort. His eyes did not find Link. They could not. The door was too far away, hidden at an angle of shadow among the trees, held by Beatrice like a discreet crack. Subaru looked at Rem and, beneath the fear, there was such desperate incomprehension that Link felt something inside him break again.
"I don't know... what smell..." Subaru said. "I swear... I don't know..."
Rem did not react like someone hearing a plea. She reacted like someone being offered an expected lie.
"Then say who sent you."
"Nobody."
"Say why you were watching the mansion."
"To... protect you..."
The chain moved.
It was not a full blow. It was a controlled lash against Subaru's side. The sound of the impact reached the archive like a wet slap. Subaru screamed. It was not a long scream. It cut off from lack of air. Link dug his fingers into the doorframe until the wood creaked.
"Send me there," he said.
Beatrice did not look at him.
"No."
"Send me there."
"You cannot even stand."
Link stood.
It was an ugly action. Nothing heroic. His regenerated body was not ready yet. His right arm trembled, his newly grown horns vibrated with an internal hum, the skin of his torso tightened over ribs that had not finished settling. But he stood. A small kagune came out of his back, not deployed like a weapon, but as support against the floor. Then another. They were not the four from before. They were not perfect. But they were enough to hold him up.
Beatrice watched him with mute fury.
"Your regeneration does not mean you are healed."
"Enough."
"No. Not enough. If you go there, you will die."
Link looked at Subaru through the door.
Rem had healed another wound again. Subaru trembled, crying without realizing it, trying to breathe between questions he could not answer because the truth he had could not be spoken, and the truth Rem wanted did not exist. Link did not know about the punishment. He did not know that Subaru's invisible heart would be squeezed if he tried to reveal Return by Death. He did not know there was a rule behind that silence. He only saw his friend destroyed because he could not give the correct answer.
"Then I die after trying," he said.
Beatrice felt those words fall somewhere that should no longer exist.
"You are just as much of an idiot as he is."
"I know."
"That is not praise."
"He wouldn't take it as an insult either."
"Do not speak as if you have known him forever."
Link finally looked at her.
And Beatrice hated what she saw.
It was not courage. Human courage was usually bright, noisy, full of useless declarations. This was something else. Accepted terror. Link was afraid. Very afraid. Enough for his reconstructed hand to close and open without control. Enough for the kagunes to tremble at his back. But that fear no longer decided for him.
"Beatrice, please."
Betty did not want to.
She did not want to open that door. She did not want to throw him back into the night. She did not want to see him break again. She did not want to care. Above all, she did not want to remember the closed notebook on the table, with those clumsy characters forming a "thank you" that seemed more dangerous than any spell.
"If you die, I am not cleaning this up," she said.
Link nodded.
"Thank you."
"Do not thank me."
"Thank you."
Beatrice opened the door.
Link crossed.
The night received him with the smell of blood, overturned earth, and that dark stench that still had no name to him. He arrived not in the middle of the clearing, but a few steps behind Rem, from a door that had opened between two twisted trees with silent impossibility. The Door Crossing closed behind him before the air finished understanding him. Rem barely turned, but Link was already moving. It was not as fast as before. It did not have that brutal elegance from the previous fight. It was a charge sustained by fresh regeneration, rage, and the support of two kagunes he drove into the earth to propel himself.
Rem raised the Morning Star.
Link did not attack her.
He attacked the chain.
A kagune wrapped around the metal and pulled downward. The weapon struck the ground before completing its arc. Rem changed her stance with admirable speed, releasing part of the chain so she would not be dragged like before, but Link was already on top of her. His right arm, freshly regenerated, caught the wrist holding the weapon. His strength was not enough to break the bone. He did not want to break it. But it was enough to stop her.
"Enough!" Link roared.
Rem looked at him.
For the first time since the night began, her face showed true surprise. Not much. Barely a crack in her serenity. But it was there. Her gaze went to his horns, regenerated. To the arm she had seen destroyed. To the torso that should have been caved in. To the kagunes that were still trembling, not from threat, but exhaustion.
"Link-sama..."
"Don't touch him anymore."
Subaru lifted his head with difficulty.
His eyes took time to recognize him. When they did, something in his face broke in a way Link had never wanted to see. Relief. Guilt. Horror. All mixed together.
"Link... no... why...?"
"Shut up, Subaru. For once in your life, shut up and breathe."
Subaru released a choked laugh that turned into a cough.
Rem tried to free her wrist. Link squeezed a little more, without breaking, without crushing, but making it clear he was not going to release her. She did not scream. She did not ask for help. She only looked at him with that blue eye that, in other loops, had learned to read plates, branches, desserts, gloves, and clumsiness. Now it looked at him like a threat that did not quite fit into her own sentence.
"You are interfering with Rem's duty," she said.
"Your duty is not to torture someone who does not even understand what he is being accused of."
"Subaru-sama understands."
"He understands nothing. Neither do I. That smell, that suspicion, whatever you think we are... we do not know."
Rem pressed her lips together.
"The guilty always deny guilt."
"And the innocent do too, when they are accused of something they do not know."
The phrase reached her. Link saw it. It was not a victory. It was one second of doubt. Small, fragile, surrounded by too much blood to survive long. But it was there.
"Rem," Link said, lowering his voice even though his body begged him to scream. "If you wanted to protect the mansion, you already did. If you want to take us to Roswaal, take us. If you want Beatrice to examine us, let her. If you want to lock us up, do it. But do not keep doing this."
"Roswaal-sama does not need to carry threats when Rem can eliminate them."
"And Ram? Does she know what you're doing?"
Rem did not answer.
Link remembered Subaru's question in another line. He remembered Rem's canonical answer, though he did not have it as canon, but as a repeated wound: she wanted to finish before her sister found out. In this loop, Ram was there. That changed the shape, but not the center. Rem was still Rem. Still protecting. Still destroying herself for the idea that protecting others justified staining her hands alone.
"Rem..."
The air changed.
Link felt it.
Not because he was skilled. Not because Beatrice had trained him enough. He felt it because, after having lost his horns once, any abnormal pressure near them produced physical panic in him. The world around Subaru stopped moving. Not completely. A tiny detail: the leaves near his throat flattened in an impossible direction. The humidity in the air split. An invisible hand closed the space.
Link turned.
Too late.
The wind cut crossed the clearing.
It was not aimed at him.
It was aimed at Subaru.
"No!"
Link's kagune launched forward, but it was exhausted, incomplete, too far away. The red limb barely managed to brush the trajectory before the invisible blade reached its target. There was no great explosion. No heavy blow. It was clean in a cruel way. A thin, precise cut crossed Subaru's throat and opened a red line that took an instant to understand it should bleed.
Subaru stopped breathing.
His eyes opened wider, not with understanding, but with pure bewilderment. As if even after everything that had happened, part of him still expected death to ask permission before entering. Blood came out in a dark pulse. He tried to speak. He could not. His body shook against the tree, hands uselessly searching for the wound, fingers slipping over warm blood. His lips formed something that might have been Emilia's name, or Link's, or an absurd complaint against the universe for choosing such a miserable way to end.
He never managed to say it.
Subaru's gaze went out.
Link still had his hand on Rem's wrist.
He saw Subaru die.
He did not understand what that meant.
Not yet.
His mind did not manage to connect the pieces. Subaru dead. Link alive. Chain. Anchor. Loop. Library. Cold. No. There was no time. There was only a sudden sensation in the center of his chest, an icy hand closing around a flame that did not entirely belong to him. Link's body, which a moment earlier had been held up by rage and regeneration, lost all strength as if someone had cut the main thread from somewhere else.
"What...?"
Rem felt it before she saw it. The pressure around her wrist disappeared.
Link's kagunes loosened and fell onto the earth with a wet sound. His horns vibrated once, not like active organs, but like bells struck from within by something coming from very far away. The kakugan did not awaken. His eyes opened, brown, human, confused. He looked at Subaru, then at Rem, then toward the darkness where the wind had been born. His mouth tried to form a question.
Why?
Why him too?
Why now?
Nothing came out.
The cold rose from his chest to his throat, descended down his spine, and shut off every nerve at a speed no regeneration could chase. The RC Cells stirred beneath his skin, trying to repair damage that did not exist in flesh. There was no broken bone, no cut, no destroyed organ. There was nothing to close. His body was simply receiving an order of death from a rule deeper than his biology.
Link fell to his knees.
Rem released the chain.
"Link-sama...?"
He did not look at her.
Or perhaps he did, but he no longer saw well.
The last image that managed to take shape was Subaru hanging against the tree, his throat opened by a cruel mercy that had been mercy for neither of them. Then he saw a line of light behind Rem, between two trees. A door. Beatrice.
And then his body fell forward.
There was no heroic impact. No final speech. Link collapsed onto the damp earth a short distance from Subaru, his horns intact again, his regenerated arm extended forward as if still trying to reach him, and the kagunes retracting beneath his skin with involuntary slowness.
The door of the Archive of Forbidden Books burst open.
Beatrice appeared in the threshold.
She had felt the cut of the improvised pact before seeing it, not a formal pact, not a declared protection, but the thread of surveillance she had left on the idiot with horns when she pushed him through the door. She had felt his clumsy mana tense, then suddenly go out. Not like when someone faints. Not like when a wounded body gives in. Like a candle being ripped from the world by an invisible hand.
"Link."
Her voice did not sound like an order.
That infuriated her.
She stepped out of the threshold with the book pressed against her chest. First, she saw Subaru. The noisy human was dead. That, somehow, explained the sudden silence of the world. She saw Rem, still, with the chain in her hand, her face stained by an emotion she could not quite arrange. She saw Ram's shadow among the trees, too far, too still. And then she saw Link.
He was dead.
Not almost dead.
Not dying.
Dead.
Beatrice took a step closer.
The earth beneath her shoes was damp. There was blood, but not too much around Link. That was the impossible part. The body that, minutes earlier, had rebuilt arm, ribs, and horns lay comparatively intact, as if it had simply decided to shut off for no reason. His expression preserved the question he had not managed to pronounce. Beatrice hated it. She hated that question. Hated recognizing it. Hated that the corpse of an idiot could look so human after having survived as a monster.
"No," she said.
The word came out small.
Too small.
Rem heard it.
"Beatrice-sama..."
"Be quiet."
The air in the clearing changed.
Not because of Ram.
Because of Beatrice.
The Door Crossing trembled behind her as if the entire archive had inhaled with fury. The shadows between the trees stretched toward the frame. The book in her arms vibrated. Beatrice lowered her gaze toward Link, toward the freshly regenerated horns, toward the extended hand, toward the blood that explained nothing. He had thanked her. He had said he would try not to waste the lessons. He had written to her that the vanilla ice cream could still improve. He had called her teacher just to irritate her, then smiled as if the world had time for jokes like that.
And now he was not breathing.
Betty had seen corpses.
She had seen more years of death than any human could imagine.
But this one should not have been there.
Not yet.
Not like this.
"I told you..." she murmured, not knowing whether she was speaking to him, to Subaru, to Rem, to the world, or to some old promise that never answered. "I told you not to die."
Link did not answer.
Neither did the library on the other side of the door.
Beatrice remained standing before the lifeless body of the horned boy, fury clenched in one hand and something far worse than fury silently opening inside her chest.
For the first time since she had met him, she could not find a sufficient insult.
She only stood there, staring at the corpse of someone who was not that person.
And yet, for some unbearable reason, it felt as if the world had stolen something from her.