The loops dissolved into something of a drunkard's vision.
No forest.
No cold air.
No boy with the red jacket.
Just the thud of steel entering her, the snap of bone, the burst of agony, over and over: each death blurring into the next until even pain lost shape, became only colorless noise.
Subaru drifted inside it.
A void.
A numb sea.
Her mind floating like something cracked open and leaking out.
She didn't even remember starting to scream. At some point the screams weren't hers anymore… just a reflex squeezed out of a throat she no longer recognized as hers, or his, or anyone's. They belonged to the body dying, not the soul trapped inside it.
The axe cleaved her.
Reset.
Her head flew.
Reset.
Her spine snapped like a twig.
Reset.
Her torso hit the ground first, legs arriving a moment after.
Reset.
The "forest" became a flickering slideshow she barely registered.
Sometimes she saw trees.
Sometimes the boy's silhouette.
Sometimes only the flash of movement, and then darkness again.
Her thoughts were mud. Slow. Sluggish.
She couldn't even muster fear anymore. Just a tired, hollow resignation that sat where emotions used to be.
Her lips trembled each time she returned, but sound rarely came out.
Not pleas.
Not arguments.
Not curses.
Just small, broken exhales.
Like a dying animal.
At some point: maybe death thirty? Forty? A hundred?
…she wasn't sure, her brain began detaching from the events entirely.
Oh. He's swinging again.
Guess that's my stomach this time.
Warm. That's warm.
I wonder how long this one will last.
Steel tore through her ribs.
Reset.
Her body toppled backward.
Reset.
Her head rolled across wet leaves.
Reset.
Subaru wasn't even watching anymore.
She was enduring, the way someone endures a fever dream: by drifting in and out, eyes half-open, mind half-present, consciousness thinning like mist.
The boy kept killing.
And she kept dying.
And the world kept snapping back like a snapped rubber band.
Time had stopped existing.
She existed only as a cycle of start → suffer → end → start.
Somewhere inside that haze—
a memory bobbed to the surface.
Her mother's laugh.
Her father's warm, tired smile as he handed her dinner after work.
The weight of a mug of hot chocolate in both hands on a winter night.
Her room. Her posters.
Her dumb old computer that overheated when she opened too many tabs.
Things that used to annoy her.
Things she used to take for granted.
Things she wished for the first time in a long time had never, ever changed.
Her chest tightened: not from any wound, but from something far crueler.
Why did I ever… ever wish for an isekai?
She remembered being sprawled across her bed, whining to herself like an idiot:
"Man, I wish I could go to some cool fantasy world instead of this boring life…"
If she could punch that version of herself, she would.
Again and again.
Another flash.
Another death.
Another reset.
Her throat worked, and finally words stumbled out… quiet, hoarse, drenched in despair:
"…I'm sorry. I'm so sorry… mom… dad…"
The world snapped.
She was back again.
The boy lay bleeding.
The axe lay by his side.
The trees rustled as if nothing had happened at all.
Subaru didn't move.
Didn't speak.
Didn't even flinch as his head began to rise in that same agonizingly familiar motion.
She just stood there, trembling: not with fear, but with the exhaustion of someone who had been broken down so many times she no longer remembered the shape of hope.
"…please…" her voice cracked into a whisper meant for no one. "I want this to end… please… someone… anyone… make this stop…"
But the forest didn't answer.
Only the boy did.
"Demons… must die."
He rose.
And the axe gleamed as it came down again.