Subaru watched silently as Garfiel, the golden-maned great tiger, exploded.
The beast raised its claws and struck with enough force to blow away the
Garfiel had hurled one of the Ryuzu clones as a feint and gone all-out to seize victory by any means necessary. Just before his arm could reach the Witch, Subaru watched the wounds gouged unevenly by shadows squirm and writhe.
The squirming wounds—caused by black shadows that had crawled up from beneath the Witch's feet, winding around Garfiel's limbs. The shadows slipped their tips into the great tiger's gouged wounds, scattering formless destruction, carving into flesh and spraying blood.
And just like that, Garfiel's massive body, riddled with cuts, could no longer withstand the pressure of shadows swelling from within and burst apart.
No resistance to speak of. It was a cruelly methodical destruction of life.
In an instant, what had been Garfiel became a mountain of dark red flesh, scattered across every corner of the plaza. Only the golden fur clinging to the scattered fragments served as the faintest proof that he had existed in this world.
"——"
No words came.
Just moments ago, the plaza had held over twenty lives, including the doll-like Ryuzu clones. In mere dozens of seconds, only two remained.
No—once you started counting that way, this "
Blood began flowing through the parts of him that had gone numb from the shifting situation, the frustration, and the jumble of emotions—waking his body to an extremely natural response.
Namely, the primal emotional response toward the Witch standing before him—rage.
"—I love you."
"Shut up!"
"I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you!"
"I said shut—up, I'm telling you...!"
A formless black shadow with blurred outlines, its very height indistinguishable.
The voice was as muffled as ever, filtered through some kind of voice changer—impossible to distinguish as male or female.
And yet, despite that, the suffocating passion packed into those words came through with unmistakable, maddening clarity.
Unwavering love. After swallowing the people of the "Sanctuary," after brutally murdering Garfiel, her interest, her concern, her love was still directed solely at Subaru.
It was so twisted, so unsettling, so stomach-churning that it made him feel sick.
Just being face-to-face with the Witch felt like his sanity was being chipped away. Emotions close to madness surged up, and right now his heart was a chaotic mess of hatred and disgust.
"I love you, I love you, I love you—I love you, I love you, I love you!"
Without moving, standing perfectly still, the Witch continued murmuring her love for Subaru like a curse.
With a tenderness that seemed ready to melt. That tone-deafness, that inability to read the room, surpassed even Subaru's own.
Even with the object of her affection showing open revulsion on his face, she persisted in pushing her overbearing, self-centered love on him.
All of that love was abhorrent.
And above all, what truly enraged Subaru now was— "I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you!"
"............"
"I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you—Subaru-kun!"
"Don't—call me by that name!!"
To her sugary-sweet address, Subaru answered by roaring his fury.
That loving voice, those gestures, that way of calling his name—every last one of it struck at Subaru's deepest nerve.
"Who gave you permission to call me that? Don't mess with me! Don't you dare mess with me! Don't you dare!!"
The intimacy of being right beside her.
The affection packed into every address.
The fondness of standing within arm's reach.
The only person in this world Subaru permitted to address him that way was exactly one.
And that was emphatically not the Witch standing before him.
"You filthy Witch—this is no joke. That belongs to one person alone. I won't yield it to anyone else. No! As if I'd grant you even a single hair, a single cell, a flake of nail grime—don't flatter yourself—!"
"——"
Furious, Subaru spat out the emotions churning inside him with abandon.
Panting hard, shoulders heaving, he glared at the Witch standing before him.
There was no possible way he could win against this opponent.
A monster that could swallow half the world. The Witch of Witches, who had just obliterated a powerhouse like Garfiel without a shred of effort.
A supreme catastrophe that drowned all life in shadow, showed interest in nothing, and whispered obsessive love to only one.
It was incomprehensible that he could stare down such a monster head-on.
It could only mean he'd lost his mind, that he'd come undone at the seams.
If the Witch so desired, Subaru would be dragged into shadow more easily than sinking into a swamp—in the blink of an eye. Or his entire body would be skewered on the tips of those shadows, becoming a filthy firework like Garfiel, nothing but fertilizer for the forest.
And yet, knowing that, he still faced her without bending—because deep in his subconscious, Subaru held a certain conviction about the Witch.
That conviction was— "——"
"You... haven't moved?"
Having vented his emotions and calmed somewhat, Subaru grew suspicious at the Witch's complete lack of action.
He realized that the love words she'd been chanting like an incantation—words she hadn't even stopped reciting when she'd blown Garfiel apart—had gone silent. Cut off.
Looking around, the shadow erosion that had been spreading across the plaza floor had stalled—no, stopped entirely. Keeping the unpleasant sensation of shadows against his soles at bay, Subaru shifted his footing to patches of ground not yet submerged in the dark.
All the while, he kept his gaze fixed on the Witch for any sign of reaction. Nothing.
The Witch hung both arms limply at her sides, still wreathed in that impossibly dense shadow that warped light around her, standing stock-still with her expression hidden.
This was the opening—if he charged in now, he might just be able to destroy her outright.
"Why the sudden... Could it be my words actually got to her?"
Impossible, he thought—yet he couldn't entirely deny it, and that made him grimace.
It was hard to believe Subaru's words carried that much weight, but given the timing—her words and movements had stopped the moment he spoke—there was simply no other explanation.
But that brought with it an unbearable possibility.
"If just being rejected by me throws your actions into this much disarray..."
If only he'd spoken up sooner, Garfiel and the others would still be alive.
With
And it had come right after
That was why, when he'd offered himself as a decoy—or even suggested it—Garfiel's rejection had been enough to make him immediately back down.
He could already see that the Witch was fixated on him. He should have anticipated that if he took action from his end, she would react this way. He should have been able to predict it.
"I can't read your moves... but does my existence hit the Witch of Envy's sore spot...?"
Given that her obsession with Subaru hadn't let go and had produced this situation, the probability was high. The question was whether, even knowing that, the opportunity to exploit it would come.
After all, the loop centered on the "Sanctuary" had changed its configuration every single time. That was precisely why Subaru was perpetually scrambling to keep up, still unable to find even the slightest thread to unravel the situation—but even so, this time's changes were on a whole different level.
Elsa, Garfiel, and the
That was just how overwhelming the Witch's threat was—her very existence was repulsive beyond measure.
It even made strategizing to resist feel absurd. In terms of crushing one's will to fight before a battle even began, the Witch's diminutive frame was more terrifying than the
"——"
Even though the Witch wasn't moving, Subaru felt his mind being ground down.
The Witch showed no signs of movement either. She paid no attention to Subaru's frantic thinking. She was simply absorbed in her own interior world.
Time passed without either of them knowing what to do or how this should end.
The passage of time was made clear by his own ragged breathing, the loud pounding of his heartbeat, and the warm sweat trickling down his forehead.
This staring contest that wasn't even a staring contest would lead nowhere. Just as Subaru was about to make his move, drawing a slight breath— The flash of insight struck him in that instant, without warning. It was: "...Could it be Echidna's tea party?"
"——"
"While I was invited to her castle, I blabbed about things I'd been forbidden to talk about. I figured the reason I didn't get penalized was because that place made it permissible..."
—But what if that wasn't it?
What if the Witch had never granted Subaru permission to reveal "Return by Death" to others—not just at the tea party, but ever? What if she'd been trying to punish him, as always, in that frozen-in-time world, for having so carelessly spilled the secret?
What if the Witch, unable to manifest beside Subaru when he'd been summoned to the tea party, unable to interfere, had still attempted to deliver punishment?
—What if that was the true cause of the tragedy that had engulfed this "Sanctuary"?
"How selfish... can you be..."
Was this mass slaughter nothing more than spite for being unable to execute her penalty on Subaru?
Did she think she had the right to do this? Did she flaunt the power to do it—and to whom, and what was she trying to show?
"—I love you."
Perhaps because Subaru's train of thought had reached that point and touched upon a sliver of truth.
The Witch, who had been as still as a shadow puppet until now, resumed her horrifying activity. She turned the area that served as her head and eyes toward Subaru, and once again let slip her curse from that mouth.
The whispered love signaled the shadow's advance to resume, and the plaza floor began to be submerged once more. The sensation of his soles being swallowed by a bottomless bog—Subaru pushed off the ground and threw himself away.
"What's your deal...? The second I mention another woman's name, you suddenly bounce back like it's nothing—hey!"
"I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you!"
"No matter how many times you whisper you love me, I don't love you! The number one and number two spots in my heart are already taken and I won't give them up. There's no room for a Witch in there!"
Tit for tat—though the Witch's words were nothing but the same emotionless, monotone repetition of love, with not even a change in intonation.
But Subaru could still see a genuine emotional response in it, so he mustered every ounce of his provocative energy and twisted his cheeks into a vicious grin. Ruffling other people's nerves was something he excelled at—let's see if it worked on the Witch too.
"Don't just toss around 'I love you' like it's nothing—it's cheap!"
"I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you!"
"The first time I was told 'I love you' and meant it for real in this world... came from a worthless piece of trash who had enough power that he aimed to become a hero."
A broken, twisted, coward of a man who had wanted to escape—but who believed he could once more, again and again, challenge a future he'd nearly given up fighting against.
That was how powerful, how noble, how immense true love was.
"Your whispered love doesn't reach my ears. And someone who's jealous, petty, and causes catastrophes like you doesn't have a single quality that would make me feel fondness."
"I love you, I love you, I love you!"
"If it came down to liking a Witch like you..."
"I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you, I love y—"
What to say, what should he say, what would strike deepest at the Witch's most sensitive nerve—Subaru knew he had no equal when it came to getting under someone's skin.
So Subaru smiled cruelly, turning a contemptuous gaze upon the Witch: "Even among Witches, the likes of Echidna are more lovable—"
"——"
The instant he said it, the Witch's incantation stopped.
And then— "——o."
Subaru's vision, the entire world, was swallowed by shadow in a single instant.
※ ※ ※ ※ ※ ※ ※ ※ ※ ※ ※ Subaru could only watch helplessly as the shadow bore down on him with terrifying momentum, with weight.
The black shadow stretching from the Witch's feet bore a striking resemblance to the "Invisible Providence" that Petelgeuse had wielded. The differences were: the "Invisible Providence" had been invisible to everyone except Subaru, and once visible, it could be dodged—whereas this shadow attacked at speeds that made evasion virtually impossible.
So in this moment too, Subaru's eyes captured everything: being enveloped by shadow, hoisted high above the treeline by the wrapping darkness, plummeting at speeds exceeding freefall, and being dragged down to the Witch's very doorstep.
All of it came faster than Subaru's mind could process reality, and even as the impact jostled his strained organs and vomit spilled from the corner of his mouth— "Bwuh...!"
His vision spun and spun, and Subaru could not keep his consciousness oriented.
His feet weren't touching the ground. His entire body was gently squeezed by something soft, like cloth. The restraint wasn't tight, yet he couldn't move at all—there was no place he could apply strength to break free.
He thrashed and struggled, but only from the fingertips and toes upward. From the neck up was the only part that responded to his will; everything else was covered by a mantle of shadow.
Finally, as clarity returned to his blurred vision, Subaru froze at what he saw: a vast, hazy mass of shadow, looming impossibly close.
—Right before his eyes, closer than close, the Witch stood at a distance where he could feel her breath.
She examined Subaru, captured in her shadow mantle, from mere inches away, gazing into his eyes with those inscrutable eyes—staring so intently it seemed she might bore holes through them.
His neck was fixed in place; he couldn't avert his gaze. Closing his eyes might have freed him from the staring—but for some reason he couldn't even do that, as though it too had been forbidden, and so Subaru was forced to face the Witch of Envy at arm's length.
"I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you."
With each syllable, punctuated by deliberate pauses, the Witch continued to drip with the same unwavering love, even in this situation.
Subaru had been rendered speechless by the situation, but those words reignited an unbearable surge of defiance.
He tensed his immobilized body, widened his eyes to glare at the Witch, and opened his mouth to hurl cutting insults at the parrot repeating the same phrase— "It's not a matter of distance. I'm telling you, you don't reach my heart—"
"I love you. I love you. —I love you."
His words were cut off by the Witch's next utterance.
Subaru furrowed his brow and blinked, wondering if he'd misheard what he'd just heard. In response, the Witch tilted her head slightly and— "I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you—I love you—"
A chill ran down Subaru's spine. This time, for the first time, he genuinely felt fear toward the Witch.
The defiance, the stubbornness, the rising anger—he had used all of those emotions to mask his own inner self until now. And all of it was laid bare before this Witch's shifted approach.
No matter what was said, no matter what was done, he had held his head high, determined that his heart alone would not be broken.
He had believed that the reason for that defiance—its meaning—was something he'd found in facing the Witch of Envy.
That meager courage, that reckless conclusion—shattered to dust.
Aberrant. Abnormal. Lunatic. Crazy love. Savage. Monster. Witch.
She had kept whispering love, and when she learned that love would not be returned, she now demanded love in the most forceful way imaginable. It wasn't greed—it was a posture too wretched for words.
And he understood.
The Witch desired
The Witch wasn't looking at Subaru—she was looking at the vessel called Natsuki Subaru. She wanted the outer shell of Subaru, and she wanted to be loved by that outer shell. Whether that was her true heart or not was irrelevant to her, now that she'd lost all capacity for rational thought.
To love Natsuki Subaru. To be loved by Natsuki Subaru.
That was everything the Witch of Envy represented—and the meaning of destroying the world.
—I don't understand.
Even as he grasped that, the question that first surfaced in Subaru's mind circled back to the beginning.
Why was the Witch so obsessively fixated on Subaru?
They'd never met. Never spoken. This was their first encounter face-to-face.
How could someone like that love Subaru with such maddening intensity?
He understood nothing. Not a single thing was logical. It was easy to say that love couldn't be measured by common sense, but the Witch's love transcended that dimension entirely.
"—I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you!"
A Witch who wanted only the surface of his love, who wished to be deceived into believing it was real.
Surely, if Subaru offered even a single word of reciprocation, she would release him from these bindings in an instant.
The normal Subaru—the calculating, cleverly maneuvering Subaru—might have answered her advances with sickly sweet words.
But— "—I hate you."
"——"
"I will never, ever love you."
Following the refusal of his very soul, Subaru rejected the Witch of Envy's solicitation.
"——"
The Witch fell silent once more. How many times was this now?
There were few humans who had crushed the Witch of Envy's resolve even twice or three times over. Subaru felt a trivial sense of pride at that—and then felt his body slowly descending.
Still wrapped in the shadow mantle, hoisted in midair, Subaru's body was lowered to the ground. But that didn't mean he was being released.
With his body still restrained, Subaru was slowly swallowed from the feet up into the shadow that had begun to swirl at the Witch's feet.
Having failed to obtain his heart, the Witch had apparently decided to absorb Subaru. It was an exceedingly shortsighted, animalistic decision.
But even as the shadow crept past his knees and the terror of losing sensation began to gnaw at him, a sudden doubt crossed Subaru's mind.
If he was swallowed by shadow, he would certainly die.
In a sense, that was something he could accept. Meeting death had always been a half-accepted act of defiance against the Witch. So he could swallow that.
But— —What if all of his previous "deaths" had been redone through the Witch's power? Could he redo a scenario where the Witch herself killed him?
"——!"
The instant he realized it, Subaru's resistance came too late. With his lower half already submerged in shadow, any struggle was laughably insufficient. But he couldn't help trying anyway.
Thinking deeper, it wasn't even a matter of whether he could redo it—there was no guarantee that being swallowed by shadow would kill him cleanly. At worst, he might be absorbed into the shadow and fused with the Witch, forced to endure an eternity without even death's release.
Over the course of that endless time, would his current resolve, his determination, wear itself down until he eventually broke before the Witch? Subaru didn't trust himself enough to say it wouldn't happen. That was why he could not allow himself to be swallowed.
At the very worst, even if he had to bite through his tongue—that decision was interrupted before it could be made, by a sudden heat that bloomed in his chest.
"Whu—?"
A searing heat erupted in his left breast, and Subaru looked down. The heat was radiating light from within, spilling it out from the shadows that encased him.
And what startled him even more was that from the source of that light, the Witch's shadow that had been squeezing him began to dissolve and vanish, as if melting away.
"If I can use this—!"
Before his consciousness could catch up to the identity of the sudden burst of light, Subaru twisted his body and used the light's power to cut through the shadow mantle. He expanded the area he could move in, slashing through the darkness, confirmed that his arm was free, and immediately reached for the source of the light.
What his fingertips grasped, pulled from inside his shirt, was a handkerchief fluttering in the wind—embroidered with a gray cat. Petra's handkerchief.
"Petra's... handkerchief? Why is this... No!"
Thinking could wait. Subaru flashed the handkerchief in his palm. The soft fabric, obedient to his will, rapidly hardened to the sharpness of a knife—and with that edge, he slashed the shadow connecting the Witch to the ground.
"——"
"This is incredible! I can do this with this!"
Emboldened, Subaru drove the handkerchief's blade into the shadow engulfing his lower half.
The handkerchief's glowing tip sank into the shadow, which gathered toward the light for a single instant before bursting apart silently.
Where the shadow had been blown away, Subaru remained with both feet planted firmly on the ground.
He immediately rolled backward, confirmed both legs were intact, then held the handkerchief at the ready, his gaze sweeping over the still-glowing cloth.
Petra's embroidered handkerchief. It was hard to believe that her feelings for Subaru had produced a miracle of this magnitude. Almost immediately, however, a person came to mind who might have done something to this handkerchief.
"Echidna... you actually foresaw that this would happen, didn't you?"
An image of the white-haired Witch's face, looking as if she were about to say "It's just insurance, just insurance," flickered through his mind.
At the parting of the tea party, Echidna had taken the handkerchief from the dream world as her "compensation." He'd never had the time to consider how something handed over in a dream might interact with reality—but if even minor tampering was possible, then she must have been able to reach from the dream into the real world.
Regardless— "If this gives me a way to fight the Witch, I'll take it."
"——"
Faced with the reality that her own shadow had been destroyed, the Witch stood as if struck dumb. Subaru took a short breath, then swept sideways to exploit the opening— "Never let your guard down!"
From beside the frozen Witch, Subaru drove the handkerchief knife upward in a thrust. The Witch didn't move. But as if on autopilot, shadows erupted from her feet—the same defensive "shadow dress" that Garfiel had called it activated.
"—Graaah!"
But even that couldn't stop the light of the handkerchief Subaru wielded.
The handkerchief, honed to knife sharpness, pierced through the shadow dress as easily as tearing through a spiderweb, its tip hurtling toward the Witch's face—and struck home.
"Got you—!"
Exulting at the solid contact, Subaru swiftly reversed his momentum. He spun on the spot, bringing the blade around for another strike at the Witch's body—when— "...Eh?"
The sight before him stopped him cold.
Right before his eyes, the Witch stood frozen, staring at him. The blow of light he'd landed on her cheek had connected, peeling away the shadow mask that had obscured her features until now, exposing her face to the open air.
A familiar, well-known girl with silver hair gazed at Subaru with eyes devoid of all emotion.
"Emilia...?"
His call drew no response from her. But everything else was moving.
The shadow mantle, which had lost momentum, surged back to life. It had apparently been killed once, but now it surged up from beneath him and seized Subaru's body again—this time with a merciless constriction that tore a scream from his throat.
His right side became the anchor point, and his left half was clamped tight by the shadow mantle. The only thing he could still move was his right arm holding the handkerchief, but even that was so restricted in range that it was useless.
The sea of shadow, with no hesitation whatsoever, began dragging him under. Its speed far exceeded before.
His lower half, then his left side sank past his shoulders, until all that remained above the surface was his right half from the chest up—the barest sliver from the neck upward.
Straining to lift his head, Subaru fought against the sinking even as— "Emilia! Emilia!? Wh-why—what's going on!?"
When he'd seen her vanish from the tomb and the "Sanctuary" consumed by shadow, he'd assumed she too had been drowned in the shadow sea by the Witch's hand.
His resistance against the Witch of Envy to this point had carried no small measure of meaning as a fight for her sake.
—Why was she clad in shadow, attacking the "Sanctuary"?
He couldn't make sense of it. She wouldn't answer. She wasn't looking at him. Those cold violet eyes—eyes he'd never seen before—made him doubt whether her consciousness was even present.
And he had no time to verify that doubt.
"Guu—ah..."
Slipping deeper, his body dragged further into shadow.
The submerged parts had gone numb. More than numb—he'd lost all sensation, all awareness that those parts even existed. The risk of being swallowed entirely by shadow hit him afresh.
He confirmed the handkerchief still in his right hand, and the remaining sliver of himself that could still move, and steeled himself.
The white-haired Witch flashed through his mind once more.
He wanted to revise what he'd said earlier and address the Witch one more time.
"Echidna... you actually, seriously thought this would happen...?"
If so, that foresight nearly brought him to tears.
Tears of blood, though— —Subaru squeezed his eyes shut, and the instant he opened them, he drove the handkerchief in his right hand into his own throat.
He felt the sharp tip pierce flesh and puncture a vital point. Blood surged back, flooding his throat, seeping into his lungs, and his consciousness began to drown.
Suicide. The Witch of Greed had prepared this opportunity for Subaru.
It was no weapon against the Witch of Envy. Echidna had likely realized that the contents of their conversation at the castle would touch the Witch of Envy's deepest nerve. The price was to be paid thus.
"——!"
At Subaru's self-destruction, the Witch of Envy exploded with an emotion other than love for the very first time.
But Subaru, drowning in his own blood with consciousness already slipping away, didn't see it.
He only saw the familiar girl's face contort in anguish before him—and no matter what had been inside, seeing a girl make that pained expression made the fading ache in his chest no less sharp.
Blood overflowed, flooding his throat, making proper speech impossible, but still—Subaru addressed the girl before him. Not the vessel that had been filled with a counterfeit, but the girl herself.
"I will definitely—"
—I will save you.
In the next instant, Natsuki Subaru lost his life.