The sun of Lugunica knew nothing of pity.
It rose each morning with the same absolute indifference — the same white, opinionless light that stretched over the roofs of the capital, over the muddy alleys of the poor, over the gardens of the nobles, and over the country roads where ordinary people lived their ordinary lives. It did not distinguish days of mourning from days of celebration. It did not slow down for the dead.
It struck everywhere, everyone, again and again, with that quiet impartiality that, from afar, resembled cruelty.
And that morning, like every other, it also struck the balcony of an all-too-familiar manor, tucked away in a corner slightly removed from the capital.
On that balcony, in that armchair he had never deigned to change, a cup in his hand, dressed entirely in white from head to toe — Kozuwa Kurisu was there.
This was not unusual. What was unusual was the silence.
Not the performative silence he sometimes granted himself between lines, that theatrical pause calculated for effect. No. Something different. He was not sipping his tea with the nonchalance of a man watching the world from his favorite front-row seat. He was simply holding his cup, his eyes fixed on the blue morning sky, and he said nothing. His gaze, usually so sparkling with mischief or tinted with amused condescension, was silent.
He was thinking back to what had just happened.
Barely a few hours ago. He had been there — present, observant, in his usual place above events — while Subaru ran, suffered, watched the people he loved die one after another, and eventually died himself in the most absurd and anonymous way possible.
A no-Name. A stranger with neither name nor face in anyone's archives. A pitiful end. Absolute failure. Enough to fuel a week of mockery under normal circumstances.
Usually, he would have laughed.
Usually, he would have commented. Analyzed the level of pathetic reached. Congratulated the universe on its sense of timing.
But here, nothing.
He felt... no. He didn't feel anything, precisely. He had never really felt anything in this world. But this time, there was something in that void — something that was not the ordinary void. As if the space usually occupied by amusement had temporarily cleared, and something else, tiny and unexpected, was seeking to settle there.
A minute thing. Too minute to deserve a name.
He did not give it one.
Kurisu frowned. He drank his tea in one gulp and set the cup down with a little too much force on the small table. He closed his eyes, expelled the air from his lungs, and when he reopened them, the mask had returned.
The predatory smile, stretched from ear to ear, once again barred his face. He fixed his eyes on the point in the air before him that only he could see, and did what he had done since he existed in this body: he took back control.
Kurisu: « Oh... Hello everyone, dear readers. »
His voice had returned. Almost. Slightly less sharp than usual, a little less bite in the consonants — but returned nonetheless, and he was not going to let the difference linger.
Kurisu: « We left off on something rather pathetic, didn't we? »
He did not immediately sketch his usual smile. A half-second delay. Tiny.
« What is wrong with me today... » he thought — and the thought itself irritated him enough for the smile to return, thin, predatory, perfectly in its place.
Kurisu: « Good. So. This loop — I think it will be the last one. So... I have some very special plans for this ending. »
He paused, letting the void do its work.
Kurisu: « Kekeke. Oh, but that's right, you will only see it when the time comes. »
He stood up, placed his cup on the edge of the balcony with the precision of a man who had never placed anything haphazardly in his life.
Kurisu: « Anyway... In the meantime — go see how my disciple manages to look for help this time. Let's hope he fares better than in the original story... »
A pause.
Kurisu: « Kekeke. Impossible. But who knows? »
He stared at the horizon for one last second — just one, not two — letting the morning wind pass through the still air.
Kurisu: « Well, let's let Author-san tell you all that. Me... I have a few little things to prepare. Kekeke! »
With a simple snap of his fingers, the anomaly evaporated into the wind, leaving the balcony deserted.
.....
Subaru Natsuki's hell had begun as soon as he woke up in front of the apple stand. With a bubbling brain and the phantom taste of his own blood still present in his throat, he had understood that he would achieve nothing alone. He had to find help.
He hadn't slept in what he estimated to be thirty hours, and it showed very precisely on his face — provided one knew where to look.
Not in the eyes. Subaru's eyes at the moment had nothing extinguished about them. They burned. That kind of unstable, too-bright light that makes a face look like something lit from within without heat — just combustion, pressure, something consuming without producing usable heat.
Since waking up in the cold light of the capital, he had run.
Not metaphorically. Physically run. Through the streets. From one address to another. From one door to another. With this absolute and terrifying conviction in his chest that every lost minute would translate into something irreparable at the Mathers domain.
His first attempt had been the most logical. Crusch Karsten — the one he was closest to in this camp, the one whose domain had welcomed him, whose trust seemed the most accessible.
He had run to her office, his eyes bloodshot, his breathing wheezing. His hands were shaking uncontrollably.
He had said everything.
The words came out in the wrong order, too fast, too loaded — the Cult, the imminent attack, the massacre, the Mathers domain in danger. They had to go. They had to exterminate them to the last one. They had to leave now, immediately, without losing another second.
Crusch had listened to him in silence, sitting behind her desk.
Without interrupting him. Without changing her expression. With that absolute, cold attention which was her way of processing important information — she weighed it, classified it, and made her decisions with the precision of a well-adjusted scale.
Her Divine Protection of Wind Reading told her that the boy in front of her was not lying. Or rather — that he believed what he was saying with total conviction. The nuance was important.
Because the problem was not the information. The problem was the eyes.
Subaru wasn't even blinking anymore. He was staring at the void through her. The boy speaking to her did not have the look of someone seeking to save loved ones. He had the look of someone who wanted to destroy.
Something deep, burning, not entirely healthy in this way of holding his own body — the shoulders too high, the hands that couldn't find a place to rest, this tension in the jaw that didn't come from fear but from something older and more consumed. A hatred. A rage that nothing he had experienced in a single life could have been enough to build.
She knew, somewhere, that the man in white had asked for him to be taken care of.
But this boy no longer looked like someone who could be taken care of. He looked like someone burning from the inside who was going to drag everything he touched down with him.
Crusch could not entrust the lives of her men to such an unstable spirit, regardless of the veracity of his statements.
She refused. Clearly. Without detour, without unnecessary softening.
Then, as he turned to leave, she added something.
Crusch: « I see no madness in your eyes, Natsuki Subaru. »
Her voice sliced through the boy's delirium with a martial coldness. He stopped.
Crusch: « No... Only a man who has already been consumed by despair. And I refuse to sink with him. »
The words passed right through him — like a thin blade that enters without immediate pain and whose sharpness is only perceived a few seconds later.
He left without answering. Without turning back. His shoulders hunched an extra millimeter. The heavy doors of the domain closed behind his back with a dull thud. He had resumed his run.
His second attempt led him before Priscilla Barielle. And that was the worst mistake of his day.
He had fallen to one knee. He. Natsuki Subaru had placed a knee on the floor before Priscilla Barielle and had implored, swallowing all his pride, forgetting all dignity.
She looked at him from above — literally, from the natural height of someone who had never lowered her eyes in her life. And she looked at him for a long time. Longer than he expected, longer than she herself expected.
What she saw intrigued her.
Not the words — the words of a man begging are always the same, and Priscilla Barielle had heard enough well-constructed ones for those not to particularly move her. No. It was something else. This boy was linked to the man from whom even the Saint of the Sword could not do much.
She had seen what happened in the capital. She had seen what this man in white was capable of. And this same man had apparently chosen this boy as his disciple — had trained him, accompanied him, invested his time and attention in him.
So why was the disciple of such an entity coming to kneel before her like a beggar?
Two explanations. Either it was a particularly elaborate trap, or the man in white had abandoned this boy.
And if the second hypothesis was true —
— then this boy was worth nothing anymore.
Craaack.
Her heel came down violently on Subaru's jaw. Cleanly. With the natural precision of someone who had never had to calculate her movements. The taste of blood flooded the boy's mouth.
He flew back slightly and found the floor with his shoulder, and she leaned slightly toward him with the exact smile of someone who had just confirmed a hypothesis.
Priscilla: « Tell me, Commoner... »
Her voice was sweet. It was the kind of sweetness that prepared nothing good. She closed her fan with a sharp snap, a cruel smile stretching her lips.
Priscilla: « Where has that man in white who serves as your master gone? »
She let the question float for a second — just enough time for him to start forming an answer she wasn't expecting.
Priscilla: « Or has he finally grown tired of you, seeing how pathetic you were? »
She laughed. Not nastily — with the light sincerity of someone who finds the situation objectively amusing.
Priscilla: « That wouldn't be surprising... Come back and beg when you are worth more than a simple broken toy. Have him thrown out. »
She turned away and gave the boy on the floor no further look.
Subaru remained there for a few seconds. He had been thrown into the street like a piece of trash.
His jaw hurt. Not only physically. But physical pain was nothing. Priscilla's sentence had just opened a gaping fault in his mind.
Kurisu knew what awaited him. He had told him upon leaving — you will suffer.
He knew. Subaru had just died twice in abominable suffering. And yet... he was not coming. He was not intervening. He was nowhere.
Had he simply dropped him? Had he left him to his own infernal fate for fun? Had he grown tired, as Priscilla had just suggested with the air of someone stating the obvious?
This doubt gnawed at him like acid.
He didn't know. That uncertainty was almost worse than the rest.
He got up. He left.
His last hope was Anastasia Hoshin.
Anastasia had received him in her company's offices — or rather, at the entrance to her offices, surrounded by the ordinary buzz of a commercial organization that runs without stopping for anyone.
He had explained. Again. The same words in a slightly different order, with a voice that crumbled a little more with each repetition.
Anastasia listened while tilting her head slightly, with the concentrated and neutral expression of a woman evaluating a business proposition. Because that was exactly what she was doing — she was evaluating.
This boy was linked to that anomaly. The one who had exposed all secrets, humiliated Julius, broken then rebuilt, stopped time in front of all of Lugunica. This man who knew her most important secret and seemed not to care about using it. And now his disciple was coming to beg her.
Was it a test? A trap? An indirect maneuver?
She had too many questions. Not enough answers. And in business, in her conception of the world, a decision without sufficient information was an irresponsible decision.
And that is exactly why she refused.
Anastasia: « Sorry. »
Her smile was polite. Calibrated.
Anastasia: « But business is business. I cannot invest in mere hypotheses. And I refuse to bet on a pawn that its own player has preferred to abandon. »
Subaru looked at her for a second.
She held his gaze without blinking, with the serenity proper to people who learned very early that the emotions of others were not their responsibility.
He left.
There were no more doors.
He had tried the royal guard after that — and the answer had been administrative, polite, and absolutely void of meaning:
— « This type of report is common; we will examine the situation within the regulatory deadlines. »
The formula of someone who has learned to say no without pronouncing the word.
Subaru walked.
He was no longer running. Running consumed energy he no longer had to waste, and it gave the illusion of a goal that didn't exist yet. So he walked, and Rem walked beside him, and between them was that particular silence of two people who both know something important has just closed permanently.
« If I leave during the day — the Cult is already there... If I leave at night — the Whale is on the road... »
The thought spun. Not like reasoning — like something stuck, a wheel searching for a surface and finding only void. He felt that the universe had constructed this trap with a precision too perfect to be accidental.
Two threats, two temporal trajectories, zero angle of approach that avoids both.
As if something — or someone — were having fun ensuring there was no clean way out.
He kept this thought to himself.
.....
The carriage ride with Rem was a long slide into silent madness.
Subaru had resigned himself to leaving alone with her. Sitting in the carriage, he was biting his nails until they bled. His gaze darted from one corner of the landscape to the other without really seeing it. In his skull, the thought spun in a loop, hitting the walls of his consciousness like a fly trapped in a jar.
Across from him, Rem watched him in silence. She said nothing. But her eyes did not leave Subaru's profile, and in those eyes could be read something she did not put into words: she had watched him knock on every door.
She had watched him get refused every single time.
She had seen his face after Crusch, after Priscilla, after Anastasia — and each time, something microscopic had changed in his way of holding his own body, a slight extra twist in something internal that was not made to twist that much.
She saw his hands shaking, she saw the feverish and broken glow in the depths of his pupils. Externally, he tried to appear stoic, but she knew. He was drowning.
She saw. She kept it inside, tight, and she said nothing.
They eventually stopped at a relay inn. The ambient noise of the tavern — the clashing mugs, the fat laughter of merchants, the heat of the fireplace — clashed violently with the macabre cold that inhabited Subaru.
Otto was at the bar — as usual, at this hour, in this city, with that expression of someone calculating profit margins in his head and who is never completely present in the room where his body is.
He saw them enter. He saw Rem, who looked like someone bearing something heavy in silence. He saw Subaru.
He said nothing immediately.
Subaru explained the situation — brief, direct, with an economy of words that came less from efficiency than from exhaustion. Merchants to cross to the Mathers domain, in the early morning, before dawn, hoping to slip between the beast's fog and the arrival of the cultists. The compensation was generous, more than generous — the kind of offer one does not refuse when one has creditors.
Otto convinced the merchants present. They accepted, perplexed but not enough to decline.
Subaru had isolated himself on a bench near a carriage to wait, arms crossed over his knees, eyes fixed on a point between his feet. He hadn't decided to sit there. His body had found the place all by itself, while his head continued to spin on the same axis.
« The night — the Whale... The day — the Cult... The night — the Whale... The day — »
He was sweating profusely, muttering incomprehensible words. The paradox was driving him crazy. The whole world was laying a perfect trap for him. There was no way out.
Otto approached. Hesitated. Sat next to him with the clumsiness of someone who knows they might not be in their place but who cannot do otherwise.
Otto: « Uh... Natsuki-san? »
Subaru started, his shoulders contracting suddenly. He turned his head slowly.
Subaru: « Yes, Otto? A problem? »
Otto: « Uh... are you sure you're okay? »
Subaru raised his eyes. Looked at Otto. The question was simple and there was no simple answer to provide, so he did not try to construct one.
He forced something that looked like a smile — not a real one, just the mechanical form of what people do when they don't want others to worry.
Subaru: « Of course! I'm feeling great, Otto. Why do you say that? »
His voice was a little too high, a little too loud.
Otto looked away slightly, uncomfortable in the face of the unhealthy aura the boy was giving off.
Otto: « You look... tired. »
The word landed in the silence between them and no one picked it up. Subaru did not answer. Because "tired" was the word used when one didn't have others, when one didn't know how to call what it really was — this thing that resembles exhaustion but comes from a place that sleep doesn't reach.
An extremely heavy silence fell between them. Otto lowered his eyes to the floor, incapable of sustaining that mad look, not daring to add another word.
Around them, the bar continued — glasses, voices, the ordinary noise of the ordinary world.
The tension was broken by the appearance of Rem.
She had approached without a sound, and her eyes passed from Otto to Subaru with that calm and total attention she had for everything concerning this boy.
Rem: « Subaru-kun... I think Otto is right. »
Subaru: « Don't start — » Paranoia exploded in his voice.
Rem: « You need to rest. »
Subaru turned his head violently toward her. The something burning in his eyes intensified by a notch.
Subaru: « Rem, what are you talking about? The situation is too critical to — »
Otto: « Uh... Natsuki-san, calm down, she's just worried about you... » stuttered the merchant, increasingly lost.
But Rem waited no more.
She approached Subaru. Gently, without any animosity, she wrapped her arms around him and squeezed him tenderly against her chest — simply, without preamble, her arms surrounding him with that soft firmness that was her way of holding important things.
Subaru stopped talking, totally disconcerted by the warmth of this embrace. His mind, continually on the defensive, glitched for a split second.
Subaru: « Rem...? »
Rem: « Rem knows the situation is critical. »
Her voice was low. Calm. She wasn't shaking.
Subaru: « Then... why... »
Rem: « That's why... Rem will take care of the rest. »
Subaru: « Huh? What are you — »
The pressure arrived at the neck. Precise, calibrated — not violent, just sufficient, applied by someone who knew exactly where and how.
The world flipped.
His knees gave out instantly. His eyes rolled back as the black veil of unconsciousness fell over him. His body fell heavily, caught just in time by the delicate arms of the maid.
Rem: « Sleep well, Subaru-kun. You need to rest. »
He did not hear the sentence. He was already elsewhere.
Rem held him in her arms for a moment — motionless, eyes lowered on his face, on that expression that resembled rest but that she knew was not really so.
She stroked his hair once with the gesture she would never have made if he were awake and which was perhaps why.
Otto, on the other side of the table, who had just witnessed the scene, had his mouth open on something he didn't know how to formulate.
Otto: « Wow... ah... What did you... just do? » he exclaimed, hands trembling.
Rem got back up. She handed Subaru to Otto with the care of someone entrusting something irreplaceable, her face betraying no emotion other than unwavering resolve.
Rem: « Take care of him. Until he wakes up. »
She hesitated for a second.
Rem: « Keep the money, too. »
Otto looked at the unconscious Subaru in his arms. Looked at Rem. Understood — not everything, but enough. Looking into the blue-haired girl's eyes, he knew she had no intention of returning. He wasn't going to stop her. He didn't even know if he had the right or the desire to.
Otto: « You love him very much... don't you? » he murmured, throat tight.
Rem offered him a smile.
It wasn't a happy smile. It was something calmer and heavier than that — the smile of someone who has already made peace with a decision they did not choose with a light heart.
The most beautiful and saddest of smiles.
Rem: « Yes... More than anything. »
She turned and left without looking back.
And the bar continued its ordinary noise, and the world continued to be the world, and Natsuki Subaru slept in the arms of a merchant who didn't yet know what he had just been dragged into.
...
Subaru opened his eyes with a start, his chest rising in a violent spasm as he tore his arms from the void.
The inn room was silent.
Not the silence of rest. The silence of something missing — that particular void one feels when looking for a presence and finding only air in its place.
He sat up violently, arms stretched forward like someone trying to catch something he hadn't yet realized he had lost.
Subaru: « Rem! »
His voice tore through the silence. His scream bounced off unknown wooden walls. Nothing answered. Gasping, gaze haggard, he inspected the premises. The wooden walls, the gray morning window, the empty chair in the corner, the bed where he was alone.
He was no longer in the cart, nor on the paved road of the capital. He was standing alone, sitting on an austere mattress within a room at the town inn. Alone. The echo of his own screams died down slowly.
His hands opened on the sheets.
Alone.
Then, the puzzle pieces reassembled with methodical cruelty in his mind. The memories came back in layers.
The conversation at the inn.
Otto who was worried, standing before him with that look of someone who doesn't know how to help.
Rem who had squeezed him against her with all the sweetness and firmness of the world.
That precise blow to the neck that had plunged him into total nothingness.
And then the black.
And then this.
Subaru: « Rem... »
It was said differently this time. Lower. Not a scream — something rising from deeper, from that place in the chest where one stores the things one didn't want to know.
In his eyes burned something that no longer had much to do with simple betrayal. It was vaster than that, darker, and it now included Rem in a list that had already been too long for too long.
Subaru: « Even you... »
His teeth clenched until they broke, his fingernails digging so deep into the fabric of the bed that they threatened to tear his flesh. His eyes, bloodshot, filled with black rage, a fury fueled by the poison of betrayal.
The counter of his suffering had just overflowed.
He got up. His feet found the floor.
Subaru: « If you all want to abandon me... very well. I will go alone. »
He said it out loud, into the void of the room, because saying it out loud made the decision real — and he needed it to be real to continue moving forward.
Otto was at the bar when Subaru came down the stairs, a cup in his hands, gaze on his glass with the expression of a man who hadn't slept and who had chosen it. He looked up hearing the footsteps.
Subaru: « Otto. Take me to the manor. Right now. »
Otto turned, surprised, but his expression quickly froze into a pout of categorical refusal.
What he saw was not someone who had slept, even forcedly.
Otto: « No, Natsuki-san... That's out of the question. That girl, Rem, was perfectly right. Look at yourself, you are not doing well at all! You are barely standing! »
Subaru did not wait for him to finish his sentence. He crossed the room without slowing down. His hand grabbed the collar of Otto's jacket and pulled him toward him with a sharp jerk, and he found himself thirty centimeters from the boy's face — a face that did not express rage, not exactly, something more compact and fixed than that.
Subaru: « Otto... I couldn't care less what you think. I don't care about my health. I have to go. There are lives at stake, do you understand that?! Take me to the Mathers domain, or get out of the way. »
Otto was about to protest, to invoke the promise made to the maid, but his words crystallized in his throat when he plunged his eyes into Subaru's. And what he saw there now was not quite what he thought he had seen the day before. The rage was there, yes.
But behind — something else. Something people carried when they had already lost something important and were running anyway, precisely because they could no longer afford to stop.
Not madness. It was pure determination, almost sacred, intertwined with an anguish so abyssal, so visceral, that it seemed to consume the teenager's very soul. That gaze would recoil at nothing, not even death.
Otto sighed at length, his shoulders sagging under the weight of defeat.
He set down his cup.
Otto: « Rem-san asked me to watch over you and prevent you from leaving at all costs... »
Subaru: « Then — »
Subaru opened his mouth to scream, but Otto cut him off with a gesture of his hand, a resigned and surprisingly soft smile on his lips.
Otto: « ...But she specified that this arrangement only held until morning. »
He stood up, straightened his jacket with that clumsy gesture that was his own.
Otto: « The sun is up, Natsuki-san. I can certainly escort you to the Mathers domain. Consider it a commercial favor. »
Subaru looked at him for a second. Something in his chest — something that had been contracted for so long that he had forgotten its normal shape — relaxed by a millimeter. For the first time since the beginning of this loop, something that resembled a sincere smile appeared on his face.
Subaru: « Thank you, Otto. Thank you infinitely. »
Without losing a moment, they settled into the front seat and sent the ground dragon at a triple gallop. The trip took place in a leaden silence, the sound of hooves hammering the ground like the countdown of a ticking time bomb.
The road took what it took. Subaru did not speak. Neither did Otto, by that instinctive sense of situations where words add nothing to what is already there.
Outside, the morning light moved without haste, indifferent to everything it illuminated — trees, dirt paths, two men in a carriage going toward something one of them could not yet name out loud.
After hours of a frantic race, the road sank under the dense and suffocating canopy of the forest leading to the domain.
Suddenly, the ground dragon stopped dead, its claws tearing the arable land in a shrill screech.
Without warning. Without slowing down gradually. It immobilized itself as if the path before it had ceased to exist, its flanks quivering, its nostrils flaring at something neither Subaru nor Otto perceived.
The beast began to rear, pushing out hisses of pure terror, stubbornly refusing to move forward an inch, its eyes rolled back fixing on the darkness of the trees.
Otto got out, placed a hand on the beast's neck, felt the trembling under his palms.
Subaru: « Damn it, what is the problem now?! Move, you damn beast! »
Otto frantically stroked the scales of his mount to try to calm its uncontrollable trembling.
Otto: « She is terrified, Natsuki-san... She senses something further in the woods. A presence... A smell of death. She will not take another step. »
Subaru hit the wooden edge with his closed fist, frustration consuming his last mental barriers.
Subaru: « Damn... But how do we do it then?! Are we stuck here?! »
Otto pointed to a barely visible path through the thickets.
Otto: « We are already on the Mathers' lands. The village of Alram should not be very far on foot, just on the other side of this ridge. But for my part, my road stops here. »
Subaru understood instantly. Without a word of protest, he jumped from the cart, his boots striking the loose ground with a crash. He turned briefly toward the merchant.
Subaru: « Thanks for everything, Otto. I'm leaving you here. You've done your part. Now, turn around and get out of here as fast as you can. It's too dangerous for you. »
Otto smiled, with that slightly tired but sincere smile that was his when he had accepted something he could not change.
Otto: « Very well... Take care of yourself, Natsuki-san. May the protection of the spirits be with you. »
Subaru was already leaving. The woods swallowed him, and the sound of the cart disappeared behind him, and he ran.