The Royal Capital had never looked so beautiful.
Not because of the architecture.
Not because of the bustling markets.
Not because of the majestic castles or noble estates.
No.
It was beautiful because absolutely nothing was trying to kill me.
The carriage rolled through the city gates.
People cheered.
Merchants shouted.
Children ran through the streets.
Nobody was summoning invisible hands.
Nobody was exploding into witch cultists.
Nobody was attempting to consume my soul.
Civilization.
What a concept.
I nearly cried.
By the time the coalition separated and the various reports were handed off to the proper authorities, I was functioning entirely on instinct.
Smile.
Nod.
Accept praise.
Avoid responsibility.
Repeat.
Somewhere along the way, Crusch's people arranged accommodations.
Apparently "the Prophet Subaru who helped kill the White Whale" didn't get assigned a luxurious inn.
Instead, I was escorted into a building so luxuriously expensive that I immediately became suspicious.
The room alone was three times larger than my entire apartment back on Earth.
My eyes scanned the interior.
Polished furniture.
Fresh linens.
A private bath.
Actual glass windows.
A chandelier.
A bed.
A gigantic bed.
A beautiful bed.
A bed so soft it looked like it had personally offended gravity.
The servant finished explaining something about available amenities.
I heard none of it.
The moment the door clicked shut behind me, I dropped the Prophet.
Gone.
Deleted.
Terminated.
My cane clattered against the wall.
I stared at the cane.
Maybe I should burn you, why do I carry you around?
The cane stared back... menacingly.
I ignored it.
My shoes flew off.
And then I launched myself directly at the mattress.
Face first.
WHUMP.
"..."
The bed swallowed me whole.
My body sank several inches.
I emitted a noise that should never come from a grown man.
"Uuuuuuuuuuuuuugh..."
Pure bliss.
I stretched out like a dying starfish.
For several minutes, I didn't move.
Didn't think.
Didn't strategize.
Didn't calculate survival odds.
Just existed.
This is it.
This is the reward.
This is why people pay taxes.
Then I remembered Lugunica probably didn't have taxes.
Or it had thrice the amount of taxes people pay.
A tragedy.
Eventually my brain reluctantly rebooted.
Alright.
Status report.
I stared at the ceiling.
White Whale.
Dead. HEHEHAHAHA
Petelgeuse.
Dead. MY BRAIN DOES NOT TREMBLES DESU!
Witch Cult attack.
Prevented. NEVER HAPPENED HAHAHAHA
Village.
Safe. OBVIOUSLY MMMHMMMMHAHAHAHAHAH
Mansion.
Safe. wasn't going to be attacked anyway... probably
Rem.
Alive. I don't really care but it's good I prevented it
Ram.
Alive. She ain't gonna die anytime soon anyway.
Beatrice.
Still cute and terrifying.
But alive.
My limbs remained attached.
My organs remained internal.
The sheer absurdity of that achievement slowly settled into my exhausted brain.
Then something even more ridiculous happened.
I started laughing.
Quietly at first.
Then harder.
Then I had to bury my face into a pillow because I couldn't stop.
I actually did it.
Holy crap.
I actually did it.
The White Whale.
Petelgeuse.
The Witch Cult.
Every single terrifying event that should have resulted in my immediate death.
Gone.
And I was still here.
Breathing.
Warm.
Comfortable.
Unpossessed.
For the first time since arriving in this world, survival no longer felt temporary.
It felt real.
I rolled onto my back.
Stared at the ceiling.
And let out the longest sigh of relief in human history.
"Mission accomplished."
Then I immediately fell asleep.
When I woke up again, sunlight was streaming through the windows.
A tray of breakfast sat nearby.
Someone had apparently entered my room while I was unconscious.
The realization should have alarmed me.
Instead, I was too comfortable to care.
I slowly sat up.
Grabbed a piece of bread.
Took a bite.
And finally allowed my brain to think about the future.
Which immediately proved to be a mistake.
Because Arc 4 existed.
I groaned.
"Right."
The next disaster.
My memories were fuzzy.
Not because of time.
Because most of my knowledge came from memes.
Years of LARPING.
I AM A LARP MASTER.
Compressed information.
Secondhand discussions.
YouTube clips.
Episodes I watched like 4 years ago or something.
My understanding of Arc 4 resembled a corrupted hard drive.
Still.
The important pieces remained.
I closed my eyes.
Mentally sorting through the fragments.
Okay.
What happens next?
Subaru goes back to the mansion.
Meets Frederica.
Gets a shiny blue crystal.
Travels somewhere called Sanctuary.
Gets trapped.
Everything immediately catches fire.
Standard Re procedure.
More memories surfaced.
A foggy forest.
A magical barrier.
Trials.
A tomb.
A tea party.
A witch.
Several witches.
Actually way too many witches.
An enormous amount of emotional damage.
Then another memory emerged.
Rabbits.
My eyes opened instantly.
"Nope."
Absolutely not.
The Great Rabbit.
The fluffy apocalypse.
The weaponized lag machine.
The infinite rodent duplication glitch.
I was once attacked by red-eyed white rabbits because of a mod in Minecraft. Terrifying.
Just remembering it made my skin crawl.
Then came another image.
Snow.
Endless snow.
A frozen Sanctuary.
Roswaal smiling like a psychopath.
Which admittedly narrowed things down very little.
Then came the worst memory.
A dark tomb.
Blank eyes.
A lap pillow.
An Emilia who had completely lost her grip on reality.
I physically shuddered.
"Nope."
Another nope.
Several nopes.
A whole spreadsheet of nopes.
That entire place sounded cursed.
Everything I remembered about Sanctuary could be summarized as follows:
People cry.
People die.
People suffer.
Witches appear.
Rabbits happen.
Nothing improves.
The more I reviewed my memories, the more a single conclusion formed.
Why would anyone voluntarily go there?
The answer escaped me.
Mostly because I possessed functional self-preservation instincts.
I leaned back against the pillows.
Stared out the window.
And decided I would continue analyzing this problem tomorrow.
Preferably after twelve additional hours of sleep.
Possibly twenty-four.
The future could wait.
I had earned a vacation.
Then my brain, being the traitorous little goblin that it was, decided to present me with the obvious comparison.
Canon Subaru had gone to Sanctuary because Rem had been erased.
Because he was desperate.
Because he needed a cure.
Because the villagers had vanished.
Because every possible lever in his life had been ripped away and thrown into a swamp.
In other words, he had been operating under the kind of emotional pressure that turns a person into a human-shaped panic attack.
I, on the other hand, looked around my room and found... none of that.
Rem was fine.
Not erased.
Not dead.
Not missing.
Just resting in a room down the hall like a normal person who had not been deleted from existence by cosmic nonsense.
And the villagers?
The villagers were not trapped in some cursed forest.
They were not being held hostage by a cult.
They were not wandering around in the snow waiting to be eaten by eldritch rabbits.
They were sitting in a heavily fortified magical bunker with Roswaal L. Mathers.
Lugunica's greatest mage.
A man so absurdly powerful that if he wanted to, he could probably turn the entire Sanctuary into a decorative crater.
Which meant, by all reasonable standards, they were safe.
Probably.
As safe as anyone could be while sharing a roof with Roswaal, which admittedly was not a phrase that inspired confidence, but still.
I folded my arms behind my head and stared at the ceiling.
So let me get this straight.
Canon Subaru had a missing Rem, missing villagers, and a desperate need to fix everything.
I have none of those problems.
My Rem is alive.
The villagers are protected.
And the only thing waiting for me in Sanctuary is a hostile landlord with clown makeup and a death wish.
My expression flattened.
Roswaal.
The man was basically a walking warning label.
If he was actively waiting inside a locked, snow-filled death-trap to psychologically torture the protagonist, then why in the world would I willingly walk into that?
That wasn't bravery.
That wasn't heroism.
That was filing a complaint directly with the universe and then standing under the falling piano.
Absolutely not.
I sat up a little straighter.
Then I made the most important decision of my life.
"I veto Arc 4."
The words came out loud and clear, as if I were announcing a royal decree.
I nodded once, firmly.
"Not going."
No Sanctuary.
No magical barrier.
No rabbit apocalypse.
No witch tea party.
No emotional breakdown tomb nonsense.
No Roswaal-induced suffering simulator.
If the plot wanted me, it could come to me.
Preferably with snacks.
I sank back into the pillows, feeling immensely satisfied with my own logic.
For once, the answer was simple.
The answer was obvious.
The answer was survival.
And survival, in this case, meant staying exactly where I was, in this absurdly comfortable bed, far away from every cursed forest in the kingdom.
Then, of course, reality reminded me that I was not the only person in this camp with opinions.
Emilia existed.
Which was unfortunate, because Emilia was the kind of person who looked at a disaster zone and immediately started asking whether everyone had eaten.
She would worry about the villagers.
She would worry about Roswaal.
She would worry about the mansion.
She would worry about the fact that we had just fought a 400-year-old calamity and somehow survived long enough to be standing in a hotel room with breakfast.
And once Emilia started worrying, she would want to go back.
Back to the domain.
Back to Sanctuary.
Back to the exact place I had just mentally classified as a cursed death-trap with snow.
I stared at the ceiling harder.
No.
Absolutely not.
We are not doing that.
The problem was that Emilia was kind.
Which, in a sane world, would be a virtue.
In my current world, it was a tactical liability.
Kind people walked directly into traps because they believed other people deserved help.
Kind people heard "the villagers are in danger" and immediately started moving.
Kind people did not understand the concept of "let the hostile landlord keep the cursed forest for a few more days while we regroup."
So I needed a plan.
A very good plan.
A plan that sounded compassionate, reasonable, and impossible to argue with.
I folded my hands over my stomach and began thinking like a fraud.
Okay.
What do I have?
First: my own body.
The miasma poisoning had not exactly been a pleasant experience.
My lungs still felt like they had been personally insulted by witchcraft.
My stamina was garbage.
My magical resistance was nonexistent.
And Felix was in the Capital.
Felix.
The world's most smug catboy doctor.
If anyone could look at me, click his tongue, and declare that I needed constant observation, it was him.
Which meant I had leverage.
Beautiful, medically sanctioned leverage.
I could absolutely sell the idea that I was still fragile.
That I needed rest.
That I needed monitoring.
That if I went gallivanting off into a cursed forest immediately after surviving a near-fatal miasma incident, I might collapse dramatically and ruin everyone's day.
Which, to be fair, was not even a lie.
It was just... strategically emphasized.
I nodded to myself.