Blood welled on the rim of the glass, and tracing it back to its source, it led to
His arm severed and his throat slashed open, Old Man Rom foamed blood from his mouth in great frothy billows. The light drained from his grey eyes, and he collapsed to the ground.
His convulsing body had no strength left. There was no doubt—life had left him.
To the crumpled giant, Elsa gave a graceful bow, as though paying her respects.
She placed the glass—now the final weapon—at Rom's still-trembling feet.
"I'm returning this. You won't need it anymore."
Her voice was cold as she spoke those words, then she spun the kukri knife in her hand. She flicked the blood from the blade and leveled its tip at the other two.
Subaru sat slumped on the floor, speechless.
He could do nothing but stare, his consciousness commandeered by the carnage that had just unfolded before his eyes.
Only minutes ago, he had been exchanging words with the man who now lay dead. Not taken by accident or illness, but by the clear, deliberate malice of another.
"Oh my—you have more courage than he did."
Lying immobile, Subaru raised his head at Elsa's impressed voice.
In front of him,
She straightened her legs and swept her blood-stained golden hair back with one hand.
"To think you'd actually go and do that..."
Subaru couldn't see her expression from behind her.
But the hatred clenching in her voice was not tearful in the slightest.
"You know, resisting further might just hurt more."
"Even without fighting back she's gonna kill us, you damn sadist."
"I might lose my grip if you move around too much. I'm not very good with blades."
Elsa deftly spun the knife in her hand and mimed a practice cut for filleting fish.
Felt faced her with empty hands. There was no chance of winning.
Subaru's brain had already reached its conclusion: he needed to shout. Shout, draw Elsa's attention to himself, and buy Felt time to run.
At the very least, he had to give her time to call for someone—or create an opening for her to escape alone.
With his meager combat experience, he had analyzed the disparity in their fighting power and arrived at this answer.
And yet his throat was frozen, refusing to produce a sound.
No fighting spirit reached his limbs—they simply trembled, chattering with fear.
"...Sorry for dragging you into this."
"...I, I—"
That was what Felt had tossed over her shoulder at the immobilized Subaru: a small, feeble apology.
Hearing it, Subaru's head snapped up. He forgot the scream he should have been letting out, and instead only managed the opening syllable of a tearful plea—as if begging for forgiveness.
And with that, Felt left Subaru's sentimentality behind for good and bolted.
Her footsteps rang loud as she lunged, her body as light as a feather.
The moment Felt took off—in the very next instant—it was as though a gale howled through the cramped warehouse.
Right after she dashed, Subaru's eyes could barely track Felt's figure as it seemed to vanish.
She disappeared from his field of vision, and the next time Felt reappeared, she was right beside Elsa—her slender leg driven into Elsa's exposed flank. Elsa's eyes went wide at Felt's speed.
After landing the strike, Felt's body bounced back like a spring, and she mounted the wind at full speed once again.
In the confined space of the warehouse, she treated even the walls as ground, her movements unorthodox and devastating. Even Elsa could not suppress her surprise at those acrobatic maneuvers.
"The Divine Protection of Wind. Oh, how lovely. You're loved by this world, aren't you? —I'm jealous."
The ecstatic smile on Elsa's face twisted in an instant, dark hatred filling her eyes as her arm lashed out with a whistling sound.
That single motion alone— "Ahh—!"
—was enough to send Felt, sliced diagonally from shoulder to hip mid-air, tumbling helplessly to the ground without even a chance to break her fall.
The wound ran from her left shoulder down to her right side, so deep it had cleaved through bone and reached her organs.
As she lay on her back, blood gushed from the wound in time with her pulse like a fountain. She must have lost consciousness from the pain and shock of the blow—she didn't move a muscle.
Within seconds, the blood lost its force, and with that, her life's end was announced in silence.
His body would not move.
He wanted to go to Felt's side, to press her wound closed.
If that was already too late, then at least he wanted to close her open eyelids.
But even that his body refused. He had become nothing more than a useless mechanism that pumped blood and pain through his limbs.
"The old man and the girl are both down, and yet you still won't move. Have you given up?"
Elsa spoke in a voice that bordered on pity as she regarded the catatonic Subaru with a bored expression.
She approached. One flash of the knife and it would all be over. Perhaps because that outcome was plainly visible, there was not a trace of tension in her movements—she even seemed to be stifling a yawn.
That nonchalant attitude filled Subaru with irrepressible rage.
They had only known each other briefly—barely an hour's worth of a bond.
But they had talked, shared pieces of themselves with each other. To kill them so casually, without the faintest twinge of remorse—that was unforgivable.
And above all, what Subaru could least forgive was himself, for standing by and watching two people die in front of a monster he should have been spitting on.
This rage, born too late, was what finally drove motion into his limbs.
Shaking, he planted his feet on the ground and forced himself upright in a posture like a beast, sequence by agonizing sequence. Whether the trembling came from anger or fear—perhaps both.
"Oh, you're finally standing. Slow, boring—but not bad."
Rushing at Elsa as she readied her kukri, Subaru lunged with every fiber of his being.
He threw himself forward, swinging with arm strength that surpassed his limits, trying to beat her down with sheer force.
His battle cry— "But you're completely useless."
—was cut short by an elbow smash to the bridge of his nose, a counter that struck him head-on.
Elsa pivoted, hammering her elbow with minimal movement, then her long leg swept in an arc to kick the reeling Subaru clean off his feet, sending him flying backward.
He slammed into a shelf of scattered pottery, scattering shards as he tumbled.
In that single exchange, his nose and front teeth had been reduced to pulp. The kick to his ribs sent blinding pain through his side—he could feel that several bones had been taken out.
Still, he punched the ground and rose again without a moment's pause. Endorphins surged through his body, refusing to let him register the unprecedented pain.
Letting his ragged breathing ride the wave of adrenaline, Subaru charged again—reckless, thoughtless—and was beaten back once more.
His flailing arms never reached Elsa. Her supple arm came around, the kukri's spine catching Subaru's shoulder and shattering it.
As if annoyed by his groans, she drove her foot up under his chin, forcibly silencing the scream that escaped him. His broken front teeth scattered as he crumbled, and Elsa looked down at him.
"Utterly useless. Just as you look—an amateur with sloppy movements. No Divine Protection, no technique, and I was hoping you might at least have some wits, but not even that. Why on earth do you bother fighting?"
"Shut... the hell up... I got pride, y'know... that's why I didn't wanna... just let you kill me..."
His broken nose made it impossible to string even a curse together properly.
That last counter had wrecked his arm. His left shoulder onward dangled uselessly. He couldn't feel the pain, but the ringing in his ears was deafening. He retched, spewing the returned nausea along with his fury onto the ground, and staggered to his feet.
He was a wreck. His odds of winning were zero—the chance of landing even a single meaningful blow, perhaps one in ten thousand.
In a situation with not a shred of hope, Subaru stood once more, and Elsa let out a small breath.
"I'll give you credit for having extraordinary backbone. If only you'd shown it sooner, things might have been different for these two."
With the knife in her hand, she gestured toward the two severed corpses.
Drawn by the movement of the blade, Subaru looked at the bodies—and suddenly furrowed his brow at a strange sense of familiarity.
For some reason, this scene felt like something he had seen before.
A warehouse of stolen goods turned into a sea of blood. A massive body crumpled, one arm severed, throat cut. And in the dim, lightless room—a blade glinting dully with a red-copper hue.
An idea struck Subaru's mind like a lightning bolt. It was— "Let's finish this. I'll send you to meet your guardian angel."
She licked her red lips with her tongue, and her bewitching smile melted into the darkness.
Her footfalls seemed to swallow her into shadow, and Subaru's throat let out a groan as he lost sight of the threat.
"Wh-where...!?"
His eyes darted frantically around, every nerve straining to pick up a sound, a presence—anything that would tell him where she was.
It was nothing less than the wretched spectacle of prey waiting to be devoured by a predator. To Elsa, it must have been tedious—like a fish lying bare and unguarded on a chopping board.
And so, the slash that emerged from the shadows was perfectly, beautifully straight— "Ngh—!?"
—but Subaru, who had assumed the target was his stomach, managed to dodge by a hair's breadth.
He sprang backward, pulling his torso in even as he retreated, so that the horizontal blade merely grazed him. The skin across his belly split thin and shallow, and a sharp pain lanced through him. He clenched his teeth and endured through sheer willpower.
"RAAAHHHH!!"
And then a full-power roundhouse kick struck Elsa's face squarely from the side.
A blow born from twisting his entire waist—a devastating hit. The tremendous impact sent a surge of absolute conviction through his chest: "I actually landed one on her." And then— "Oh my, that one I really felt."
Elsa's second kukri knife—drawn from the small of her back—sliced roughly seventy percent of the way through Subaru's torso in a horizontal arc, spilling blood and viscera across the floor.
"...Huh?"
One step, two steps—he staggered, then slammed his shoulder against the wall and slid down it. Below him, blood poured ceaselessly from his abdomen, the contents of his gut threatening to spill out under the pressure.
With one trembling arm, he tried to push his insides back in, but the clots of blood surging upward blocked him.
"Surprised? I cut you open while we were passing each other. This is the one thing I'm good at."
Laughing, Elsa waded through the sea of blood, droplets trailing from her steps.
She came to Subaru's side, where he could do nothing but groan, and gazed with tender fascination at the organs spilling into the dark blood.
"Ah, as I thought—your intestines have such a beautiful color."
This woman was insane. Completely, utterly deranged.
Even his endorphins couldn't suppress the agony. His vision blurred, and before he knew it, Subaru's body had fallen to its side on the floor.
From that position, his trembling arm slowly reached out and weakly grasped Elsa's foot.
"Ugh... nnh..."
"Does it hurt? Is it hard? Is it tough? Are you sad? Do you wish you could just die?"
With her ankle still held, Elsa knelt down to meet Subaru's gaze.
Her eyes were enraptured, utterly devoid of any remorse over taking a human life. No—there was emotion there.
The deepest possible bliss.
"But I can't make it easy for you."
She smiled radiantly, and even while crouching, swung her blade.
And that was the last thing Subaru ever saw.
The slash flashed cleanly across his face, passing just barely over his eyes. The result— "GAHHHAAAHHH!!"
—was that both eyelids were sliced open, and he lost his light forever.
Collapsed face-down on the ground, Subaru reached for his deeply slashed eyes with his hands.
Blood and tears mingled together. His mouth, still shrieking, kept retching blood, and the void in his abdomen gave him the sensation that every last drop of blood and viscera had fallen out.
He was alive in a way that defied reason. He was alive in a way that was hell.
In this state, unable to even see himself, not knowing when death would finally come—he was in limbo between worlds.
"Slowly, slowly, slowly, slowly, slowly—writhe for me."
Like a cat toying with its prey, like someone savoring a delicacy, like someone mourning, like someone loving, like someone cherishing—Elsa's voice drummed gently against Subaru's fading eardrums.
Pain. Suffering. Rage. Grief—everything was swallowed up by pitch-black terror.
In a world where he had no sight, where he could not know when the light of life would be snuffed out, the only thing that dominated the hollow of Subaru's heart was the relentless, all-consuming fear of death.
When will I die? When will I die? Am I still alive? Am I already dead?
What defines life? Can this state—worse than an insect—be called living? Can this, where life and death are toyed with in someone's palm, be called living?
What are life and death? Why is death so terrifying? Is living necessary? Or not?
Terrified. Terrified. Terrified. Terrified. Terrified.
The endless, overwhelming rejection of death—instinct at its most absolute.
It filled Subaru's brain to the brim, the locked-out world bleaching to white— Ah, I'm dead.
With that single thought as his last,