Bathed in wind laced with spray, Subaru was struck with the illusion of having been punched square in the face.
"——!"
A gale that hammered against his entire body lifted him clean off his feet, threatening to hurl him over the driver's seat and out into open air. His reflexively outstretched fingers grasped nothing, and his body began tumbling into a pitch-black void with not a shred of shelter—in the nick of time— "Subaru-kun!"
A grip on the back of his collar forcibly dragged his trajectory straight downward. He was slammed back into his seat as though swung down by force, and at the edge of his sparking vision he saw
Her composed profile was streaked with terror, her sharp eyes locked on the direction the gale screamed from.
"——!!"
Her mouth flew open, baring the points of her fangs as she let out a roar.
But even that fierce battle cry of hers was swallowed by the storm and failed to reach Subaru, who was right beside her.
However, the mana saturating the atmosphere caught the scream her eardrums could not.
Converging around Rem's incantation as though spat forth, the mana activated a spell that would reshape the world.
What materialized was an ice lance as large as Subaru's entire body. Three of them took shape in the blink of an eye, hovering in midair with their razor tips aimed into the darkness.
After a moment's pause, the lances shot forward like arrows with devastating force.
The ice stakes, traveling at a speed barely trackable by the eye, streaked toward the darkness and struck home—embedding their points at the end of what had seemed an infinite void, at a surprisingly short distance.
Immediately after— "—Wha!?"
He felt the sensation of his neck being grabbed once more, and before he could react he was yanked straight upward. The seat receded as though being pulled from beneath him, and Subaru's body rocketed toward the night sky without so much as a chance to resist.
Launched in a clean arc over the driver's seat, abandoned by the dragon carriage, he hung in the air while the carriage below him gradually shrank into the distance.
A fall. Not a fall from a horse, but a fall from a dragon—the same kind of idle, detached thought flitted through his brain even as Subaru saw it.
A massive, lateral mass—smashing the dragon carriage into splinters.
The heavy-set body of the carriage was torn to shreds like tissue paper, and the large earth dragon pulling it was likewise blown apart by the impact—spilling blood, guts, and viscera across the highway, reduced to a mince of mixed wood chips and flesh.
The sheer unreality of the sight bleached Subaru's mind white.
He was so stunned by the carnage before his eyes that he even forgot he was currently suspended in midair. What snapped him back to his senses was— "To the left—!!"
A girl's voice, shrieked from somewhere right beside him.
In that instant his body tumbled onto a hard floor without even the chance to roll with the impact. Dull pain lanced through his shoulder and hip, but before he could so much as protest, the centripetal force of a sharp swerve whipped him sideways.
He rolled, and was about to be flung out again when his fingers caught on what felt like a rope, halting him. After a beat Subaru raised his head, looked around, and realized he was in the cargo bed of Otto's dragon carriage.
Part of the canopy's fastening hardware. He wound the dangling rope around his wrist and fought to stand upright amid the violent shaking. Then— "You can't stand up, Subaru-kun! Don't try! The earth dragon's blessing has worn off! You and Rem can barely move properly!"
A sharp warning from Rem lanced toward him.
He looked: Rem had likewise landed on Otto's carriage and was bracing herself against the floor with her right hand chopped into it, somehow keeping upright. Even with her physical abilities, standing straight in this turbulence was near-impossible.
He recognized the violent trembling—the effect of the earth dragon's blessing, which had shielded their bodies from wind, sound, and vibration, now being gone. Nausea churned in his chest, and even standing was a chore.
Understanding that, and catching sight of Rem's position, Subaru finally grasped the situation.
In other words, Rem had caught Subaru and leaped from the hurtling dragon carriage onto Otto's. Had her judgment lagged by even an instant, they would have shared the carriage's fate—limbs scattered, reduced beyond recognition to a mound of ground meat.
A chill raced up his spine. He shook it off and pressed himself against the edge of the cargo bed, then bellowed over the wind and the thunder of hooves: "Wh-what happened!? What the hell was that!?"
All of this had unfolded in a matter of seconds. The sheer density of it left his thoughts unable to keep up.
"You don't know!?"
But it was Otto who wheeled around with a scream of despair, his face ashen, teeth chattering.
"Night fog! Fog rolling in—and there's only one existent thing in the world that swims through the sky that size!"
His voice was infected with the trembling unique to a man who had already given up hope.
As though trying to confirm it, as though trying to deny it, he shook his head even as he sucked air through spasming lungs and forced the words out with everything he had.
"——It's the
※※ ※ ※ ※ ※ ※ ※ ※ ※ ——The White Whale.
He had heard that name only once before, in his very first life.
The monster they called the one that cloaked itself in fog and sealed the highway. It was because the White Whale had appeared on the Lifaus Highway that Subaru's group had been forced to detour in the first world, and that detour was precisely why they had arrived too late for the tragedies at the village and the mansion.
He had never actually encountered it, and in none of his subsequent lives had he heard it mentioned again— "To think it would show up at a time like this!?"
When they had left the capital half a day ago, there had been no report of a White Whale sighting anywhere.
Rem had said nothing about it, and even Otto and the others—people in a profession that actively avoided the White Whale—had been using the highway without hesitation. The White Whale had appeared, in other words, after Subaru's group had already set out.
——No. Worst of all, it might have manifested on the highway right now, at this very moment.
The timing worked out.
In the first world, Subaru's group had departed on the third day. By that point the highway was already sealed off by the White Whale's appearance. Now it was the middle of the night on the second day—so if the White Whale's emergence came to light at dawn, the highway would be blocked by tomorrow.
In other words, tonight was the only window for a collision.
"To run into the White Whale during this period in Lugnica… What are the odds… Oh, dragon, dragon, save me, save me…"
Otto muttered feverishly, eyes vacant, reciting those words like a prayer.
Watching him—completely devoid of the will to fight, devoid even of the spark of life—Subaru truly felt the weight behind what merchants said about fearing the White Whale.
In a previous world Otto had described the White Whale as the very embodiment of ill omens for merchants. At the time Subaru had thought he was being dramatic, but now, seeing Otto's haggard state at merely encountering the fog, he could only reflect on how naive that assessment had been.
Lips quivering, mind obviously elsewhere, Otto nonetheless kept working the reins. His earth dragon had fallen into a panic upon sensing the White Whale, and was driving itself forward at full speed with no regard for how much stamina it had left.
Feeling every jolt in his body, Subaru turned and strained his eyes into the darkness, searching for the White Whale. But the pitch black—devoid of any light source—sealed the world away entirely. This was already a night so dark that even one's own hand was hard to see without a lamp, and to make matters worse— "It's been feeling sticky and I was wondering why… so the fog's rolling in too."
He wiped his forehead and grimaced at the dampness on his palm.
On top of an already lightless night, fog meant visibility was effectively zero. In truth, the crystal lamp illuminating the earth dragon's neck ahead had been reduced to a dim blur by the night fog, its effectiveness cut by more than half.
"Rem! Can you see the White Whale!?"
"It's too dark, there's no way! …But!"
Subaru twisted around, scanning behind, to the side, above—anywhere a fish-like shadow might lurk. Rem answered his call in anguish, then stopped, as though something had given her pause.
He looked toward her, but he could make out only her silhouette; in the thick fog her expression was entirely hidden.
That he could not see the very thing responsible for this situation—the White Whale—only accelerated his terror.
When Subaru had first spotted what looked like an eye, had it been larger than the circle he could make with both arms spread wide?
If a single eyeball was that massive, then the White Whale truly lived up to its name, rivaling an actual whale in size.
"But Rem's preemptive strike should have hit. …Maybe it pulled back?"
Was he being too optimistic?
The ice lance Rem's incantation had produced was, in terms of sheer destructive power, among the top few spells Subaru had ever witnessed—he himself would have died from just one, three times over.
Even for a creature that size, a serious wound should give it pause.
"The other carriages…"
"They've scattered and are fleeing. The procedure when fog appears is to split up immediately and run. If luck is on their side, the White Whale won't catch up, and they'll make it out of the fog."
Sure enough—no other dragon carriage was running alongside theirs.
The ones that had been following behind had apparently scattered in every direction, following the manual.
——Subaru ground his teeth at the bitter fact that they had just lost the mobility they had painstakingly secured.
The timing was abominable. Their plan to evacuate the villagers had crumbled yet again. Or if the fog hadn't descended, at least it could have served as a precaution against other threats.
"Kicking myself won't help. Just gotta get through this fog…"
Gingerly enduring the sensation of his organs being churned by the violent shaking, Subaru turned his thoughts to the problems that waited beyond their escape. If they were down to a single carriage, he would need to come up with a new strategy for evacuating the villagers after getting
With his focus thus shifted from the immediate crisis to something further ahead, the thing that loomed into view before Subaru—in other words, directly in the carriage's path— "——!!"
A maw lined with massive, millstone-like teeth, lunging at the carriage as though to swallow it whole.
A roar thundered, and the overwhelming wall of sound and the blast of wind made the earth dragon stumble. Its legs tangled, scraping the ground, the wheels lifted, and the carriage bed tilted hard. An oil pot burst through the canopy and went flying; Subaru, clinging to the edge, was nearly thrown out.
He clung desperately to the cargo bed, and in his field of vision—straight ahead—he could see, with horrifying clarity, only the grimy teeth inside the White Whale's mouth, illuminated against the darkness.
It was only at this moment that Subaru understood, far too late, just how naïve his awareness had been.
Being caught in the White Whale's presence and wandering through the thickest night fog—he no longer had the luxury of thinking about what came after they escaped the fog. The problem had already shifted entirely to how to survive this very instant.
"——GRRRRRR!!"
In the moment those jaws—wide enough to swallow the carriage whole—were about to close, an explosion of sound and the shockwave blew the planked floor of the cargo bed apart.
Rem was the one who kicked off it, launching herself forward like a bullet. Beneath her wind-whipped white primrose dress her horn gleamed exposed—she was in her demonic state. She swung a chain-weighted iron ball she had produced from somewhere and— "Run to the left—!!"
"Left left left left left!!"
The iron ball smashed down on the White Whale's upper jaw from directly above, sending up a plume of dark blood and forcing the gaping maw to clamp shut slightly. Even so, the enormous face ground forward, scouring the earth, its momentum undiminished—yet Otto's carriage, its driver spitting with the sheer effort of controlling the dragon, shot past the monster's side.
The right edge of the speeding carriage's bed couldn't clear the titanic body and caught in the crossfire, scraping against the hard rock-like hide with a grating shriek before crumpling and flying apart. The bed, now missing a wheel, groaned under the imbalance and nearly capsized.
Naturally, Subaru, who was on it, was about to be flung into the darkness with no way to stop himself— ——Am I going to die?
A fraction before the delayed situational judgment claimed its price and scattered him without mercy, amid the roaring he heard the bright, light clink of linked metal, and then the merciless pain of his torso being cinched tight—his body yanked up from below as though ripped free, dragged forward and slammed down.
And then— "Eaaat this—!!"
Rem held the iron ball in her right hand—the same one that had hauled Subaru upward. With her free left hand she had shattered the coupling between the driver's seat and the cargo bed, and now she seized the edge of the bed as it separated and drifted away. In that instant a load so heavy that the dragon pulling the carriage reared with effort surged through her, and with a battle cry and a flash of motion Rem flung the massive cargo car behind her.
A super-heavy projectile the size of a house slammed into the White Whale's flank as it passed. The crash of splintering wood echoed; the White Whale twisted its body, and its tail struck the earth with an explosion of soil and rock.
Whether it had sustained real damage, Subaru couldn't tell. What was certain was that the White Whale was still very much alive—alive, and wheeling its hovering body around to fix them with its glare.
"Did-did we do it—!?"
Otto clearly had no understanding of what had just happened, but he was aware that the bulk of his carriage was gone. Clinging to the hope that the sacrifice had been worth something, his voice was layered with a veneer of desperate, nothing-left-to-lose optimism.
A roar that shook the earth. The ceaseless rumbling. The pressure of despair pressing in from behind. All of this loomed before them, and even knowing that any hope was a futile fantasy— "Why is it so fixated on us!? There are other targets!"
Otto screamed, cursing his own misfortune.
There were eight other candidate groups, yet the White Whale was after them specifically—the sheer injustice of it all poured out of him. Subaru shared the sentiment, but watching Otto rage with such vulgarity, he found himself unable to voice it.
Sacrificial stones, or walls of flesh—and if it ever came to facing the
Besides, he didn't have the bandwidth to spare on that kind of thought.
The White Whale's threat was still bearing down from behind, and its speed through the sky exceeded the earth dragon's. Even if they discarded the heavy carriage, catching up was only a matter of time. And if they lost the earth dragon, there was zero chance of outrunning it on foot.
He had to think. Was there anything—anything at all?
But no idea came. He grasped at whatever stratagems he could, but in the enveloping night fog where he couldn't even see the ground, he couldn't find a single lead.
And while Subaru once again let time slip away without making a choice, the demon girl made the decision herself.
The carriage lurched violently. Subaru clung to the side as Rem approached with surprisingly steady steps, despite feeling the same shaking. She sidled up close to him and— "Subaru-kun. Please take this."
"What is it!? Can it fix this—"
Hope flickering in his eyes as he half-raised his face, Subaru felt a small, weighty pouch pressed into his hands. The heft made him grimace, and the feel of the outer material told him instantly it was a coin purse filled with gold and other hard currency.
What use was money in this situation?
A chill he could no longer suppress crept through him as Rem pressed the pouch on him. He plastered a grin onto his cheeks and said: "R-Rem…? I know throwing coins can break the game's power balance, but that's only… in games…"
"I will descend to the ground and hold it off. In the meantime, please leave the fog with this person."
Rem's voice was clear, laced with resolve.
Subaru, who had been trying to keep things light with a flippant remark, was struck silent. In that pause Rem turned her head only— "Otto-san, I am entrusting Subaru-kun to you. The promised payment is in his hands. —Once you've escaped the fog, please report the White Whale's appearance."
"Mo-money…!? This isn't the time for that—there's no point in money if we're dead!"
Otto, who hadn't been listening to the exchange behind him, answered automatically. Even so, Subaru could feel him driving the carriage with everything he had, and he saw Rem's lips relax in relief.
And Subaru hadn't missed what she'd said. Sending a report about the White Whale meant that he and Otto, who would be fleeing— "You… Rem, you don't plan on coming back alive, do you!?"
Rem's expression clouded with a solemn, tragic determination.
In this world of darkness, the gloom remained as deep as ever, yet her pale face seemed, for some reason, to stand out with unnatural clarity to Subaru.
"I'm not letting you go! I'm not letting you go! If you die, then I… I'll—!"
He let the coin purse drop at his feet and seized Rem's waist, pulling her toward him.
He wrapped his small frame in his arms, clinging to the presence that was already trying to drift away. If he let go of her, she would throw even her life away without hesitation.
He had to stop that. Because if he didn't— "Ah…"
Rem, held in his embrace, let out a soft, warm breath.
Beneath Subaru's arms, her voice carried a languid, enraptured tone utterly out of place with the situation, and when he lowered his gaze to it, Rem gazed up at him with a dreamy, blissful smile.
"Rem was born for this very moment, wasn't she?"
"What are you—"
He tried to continue, to say the words, but he couldn't.
Impact struck the back of his neck. A sensation as though the world had flipped over seized Subaru.
Rem had extended her arms as though embracing him back and struck the base of his skull with a knife-hand blow. All strength drained from his body; he slumped against her.
"R-Rem… what…"
His vision swaying, consciousness blurring, Subaru found even holding his head up difficult, yet he clawed at the girl with desperate tenacity.
Gazing down at his struggling form with tender, loving eyes, Rem leaned close to his ear—as though trying to catch up with his fading consciousness—and whispered.
It was— "It's all right. Rem will always be right behind Subaru-kun."
——You don't have to do anything. Just stay behind me, always.
He himself had told her that, before they set out—this very morning.
And so, true to those words, she would stand to guard what lay behind Subaru. She would stand, and stand.
"That's… not what I… always meant…"
His consciousness fell.
It receded. He couldn't hold on.
For an instant, he felt as though she had held him tightly.
Something soft and warm touched his forehead, gently, then withdrew.
That was the last thing he knew.