The sound of indigo stakes driving into flesh cascaded in a chain reaction, and the purple crystals that shattered upon impact filled the corridor with a chaotic rain of refracted light.
The countless stakes had aimed for Elsa's slender body from every direction, intending to turn her into a pincushion.
A sure-kill aura. Subaru's breath caught at
—Something. He was forgetting something. Something he absolutely could not have missed.
What that was—before he could drag it from memory, a dozen emotions got in his way.
What had Elsa's purpose been in coming to the mansion? Frederica's death, which he had questioned, filled him with shame toward her, and his mind was in shambles over the cause of her demise. He hadn't finished processing Petra either, and the depths of his heart were screaming at him to confirm
Not a single one of Subaru's entangling doubts had yielded an answer.
"————"
And so Subaru let a chance slip by that should have been avoidable, and would come to regret it.
"—Guh, huh?"
Something pierced through the radiance and embedded itself deep in Subaru's right shoulder.
His eyes darted to the pain, and when he saw the wound oozing blood, his thoughts turned white-hot. A scream that felt like his throat was being sawed apart erupted from him, and Subaru toppled backward onto the corridor floor, clutching the wound.
"Why...!? That should have been a direct hit!"
Seeing Subaru wounded, Beatrice cried out.
Even as pain scorched his thoughts, Subaru heard Beatrice's shout and realized. He realized—no. That wasn't right. It had been a direct hit. That much was certain. But— "Elsaaaaa!!"
"You don't have to call so enthusiastically. I can hear you just fine."
Hatred, stoked by the searing pain, spilled from Subaru's mouth in a roar distinct from his scream. The response came from the far end of the corridor, still awash with flickering light—in a languid voice, with an elegance that made it seem as though they weren't exchanging blows to the death.
"Unscathed? Impossible."
"If I'd been naked, that would have finished me off, though."
Elsa answered with a toss of her long braid, and Beatrice shook her head. Not a trace of Beatrice's magical direct hit marred her body. She looked exactly as she had a moment ago.
No—not entirely. The black cloak she had been wearing moments before was gone, tossed aside, and now she stood lightly in just the black outfit beneath.
"That coat—it nullifies magic!"
"You should have seen it twice by now, shouldn't you? And yet you were rather slow to teach that to the little girl, weren't you?"
"Damn it...!"
This was a blunder beyond the word "overlooked," and even as he shoved the pain aside, rage surged up.
Elsa's cloak nullified magic once. —Subaru had seen it and known it from the time he'd clashed with her in the capital.
Even accounting for the surprise attack and the fact that he hadn't coordinated with Beatrice, it was the kind of slip-up that simply should not have happened.
"If the trick's been exposed, I'm hardly surprised you'd try something like that."
"—Fine. That's perfectly fine. Strong, adorable... I think I'll enjoy something with a different warmth than what that sniffling little girl has."
As Beatrice gathered magical power once more, Elsa spun the kukri knife in her hand and smiled. That bloody smile and those words—Subaru understood instantly who "that sniffling little girl" referred to, and fury erupted.
"You got no right—no right at all to put down Petra—!!"
The small blade still embedded in his right shoulder—the tip was barbed, a type of throwing weapon designed to resist extraction. Gritting his back teeth, Subaru ripped it out in one motion.
The world went red with pain, and he felt his entire right arm suffer a critical blow. But ignoring every last bit of it, he hurled the extracted knife straight at Elsa.
A no-holds-barred throw, with no training whatsoever behind it—just a brutal fling.
That it flew straight toward Elsa was half a miracle. The speed was heavy. But against a serial killer with superhuman skill, it had no effect whatsoever.
"Stubborn, I'll give you that. But something like this—"
"I'll squeeze you dry! Shamac—!!"
"—!?"
Bracing herself to intercept, Elsa tensed as Subaru's throat convulsed with his third Shamac.
First time, second time—his body's mana had been nearly depleted. He scraped together what remained, and from an untrained gate, he released magic together with his own life force.
His eyes went bloodshot, a nosebleed dripped free. And the scream of his soul bore fruit.
Darkness spread through the center of the corridor, engulfing the space between Subaru and Elsa. The knife Subaru had thrown plunged into that void, pierced through the impenetrable dark, and emerged rocketing toward Elsa—and its trajectory was invisible to her.
"Hit—!"
"A little surprised. But if it won't shatter, all I have to do is dodge the line of fire."
With that, Elsa dropped low and slid sideways in a spin.
She had been able to evade because Subaru's Shamac hadn't reached far enough to affect her—leaving her the freedom to read the knife's trajectory and slip aside.
The knife burst from the pitch-black curtain and flew past, missing Elsa entirely, plunging down the corridor beyond. Subaru's attack appeared to have been wasted—until— "Beako!!"
"You're not actually calling me that in the heat of the moment—!"
Had Subaru been the only one here, the attack would have ended in failure.
But Elsa had two enemies—and the other girl had used the brief window Subaru had bought to finish her next incantation.
"I'll show you. —What true shadow magic really looks like."
"What are you—"
"going to do"—whether those words came from Subaru or Elsa, even that became unclear.
All of it was swallowed by Beatrice's next action.
Her small hands pressed together before her chest, Beatrice glared at Elsa and made her lips tremble. A single word—yet it rewrote the world.
"—Ul Shamac."
—Unlike the imitation shadow magic Subaru wielded, the genuine "darkness" that Beatrice unleashed engulfed the mansion.
※ ※ ※ ※ ※ ※ ※ ※ ※ When Subaru became aware, he was inside the dark.
"———??"
No—whether he had truly "become aware" at all, even that much his consciousness couldn't determine.
Where he was, whether he was standing or sitting—he knew nothing.
Up and down, left and right, front and back—all were ambiguous. Was he breathing in? Breathing out? Was blood circulating? Was his heartbeat continuing? Was he alive? Was he dead?
He didn't know anything. He couldn't answer anything. If it were Subaru's own Shamac, he could have at least felt the sensations through the soles of his feet, and the changes within his own body. Understanding external interference would have been impossible, but in exchange, his perception of the interior would have sharpened.
But even that was absent in this darkness.
It was as though he had dissolved into the shadow itself—he didn't even know where he was.
Whether he still had a human shape, he couldn't tell. He didn't know how to move his hands, so he couldn't even touch his body to check. He didn't know how to move his legs, so he couldn't walk to verify his location either. Walk? What was walking? Verify? What did that even mean?
—In the first place, who was he, really?
The boundary between himself and others was blurring.
The boundary between himself and the world was blurring.
The power to think was melting away. Disappearing. Vanishing.
Just like this, just like this, just like this—.
It would end.
End.
En.
※ ※ ※ ※ ※ ※ ※ ※ ※ "...Are you going to wake up any time now?"
A sharp crack as his cheek was slapped, and Subaru's consciousness was shaken back into existence.
He blinked, and the sudden return of his vision drew a groan. Hearing that, Beatrice's fist struck that same cheek once more to fully rouse him. Twice—from both sides.
"Don't—I didn't ask you to hit me twice!"
"I just wanted to help you clear your head. The second time was—I don't really know, it was reflexive, I suppose."
Subaru glared at Beatrice's deadpan expression, and belatedly realized he was lying flat on the corridor floor.
He pushed himself upright and confirmed that his body was intact, more or less. A sharp pain from his right shoulder. When he looked, the fresh wound was aggressively seeping blood.
"Ow... Can't you Shamac the wound or something? Just that part?"
"I could, but all that would do is make you forget the wound exists. The wound itself wouldn't heal. If you keep stumbling around without treatment, you'll just bleed to death normally."
Beatrice delivered that grim prognosis with a blank expression. While Subaru pressed his palm against the wound, his eyes narrowed as a thought returned to him.
"What about Elsa? The fact that you're taking it easy like this—did she retreat?"
"What are you talking about?"
"What do you mean, what am I saying? If she's still here, we don't have time for this. Okay, sure, the Shamac just now was nothing compared to mine, but even so—"
"By the time your little holes grow this big, they're just pathetic, I suppose."
At Beatrice's exasperated words, Subaru's brow furrowed with irritation.
Beatrice was being remarkably optimistic, but that was only because she didn't yet know the depth of Elsa's obsession and how terrifying she truly was. Once he made her understand the abnormality of that serial killer, she would understand his caution well enough.
Reading Subaru's inner thoughts right off his face, Beatrice finally let out a sigh so clearly fed up that there was no mistaking it.
Subaru didn't understand the meaning behind her reaction. Before him, Beatrice shifted sideways a slow step.
"If you don't understand, then use those eyes of yours and see for yourself, I suppose."
"—Ugh, oh."
Beatrice stepped aside, and the scene her body had been blocking came into Subaru's view. The moment he laid eyes on it, a groan escaped him unbidden.
"So where's the terrifying opponent, exactly?"
Beatrice's voice was almost smug.
Behind her—nailed to the corridor wall by indigo stakes through all four limbs, with a stake driven through the center of her chest as though to finish off a vampire, hung Elsa's corpse.
Corpse—yes, it had to be a corpse.
"She's... dead, right?"
"With a hole blown through her chest and wounds this numerous, if she were still alive... she wouldn't be human anymore. She'd be something else entirely."
Subaru shook his head, dragging his exhausted body to its feet. The instant he stood, a vicious wave of dizziness struck and his upper body swayed. A hand reached out from beside him to steady him.
"S-Sorry..."
"It's fine..."
Beatrice turned her face away, refusing to look at him. Leaning some of his weight on her palm, Subaru dragged himself toward Elsa.
Her head hung limp, one of the stakes having cut her long braid partway through. Her limbs had been pierced through at the elbows and knees—impaled in a way so gruesome it made you want to look away from the severity of the carnage. Still, Subaru closed the distance until he was practically breathing on her, wanting to confirm whether the faceless killer was truly not breathing.
No breath. He reached out and touched the motionless body. Still warm, but there was none of the reactive response of a living being. He pressed his fingers to her neck—no pulse.
Most of all, even in this state of total vulnerability on Subaru's part, she did not lunge.
"She's... really dead..."
"I've told you that several times now."
"On the side that knows her real strength, it was hard to just nod along. ...To think you actually... could do it..."
Before Elsa's corpse, Subaru was blank with the numbness of a victory that carried no sense of accomplishment.
He had known he would have to defeat her eventually, but he had never predicted that Beatrice alone would do it so cleanly. Without Garfiel, he hadn't even been able to picture a path to victory.
"Even the two of them together—Pack and
"...If Nii-chan had been serious, this woman wouldn't have been a match. Even for Betty, at full strength now, I refuse to be bested by something as lowly as a human."
Pack at full power—that would likely be that enormous lion-like state. In a form where his mere existence froze the world, even Elsa would not have been able to match him, Subaru imagined. Beatrice, then, was a spirit with power on a comparable level.
Four hundred years—the difference that lifetime of experience made.
"Right. Rem!"
After fully confirming Elsa's death, Subaru spun toward the room. Still there—the gruesome sight of Frederica's body leaning against the doorway.
Prying her stiffened body away from the door, Subaru placed his hands on the blood-soaked surface. He took a breath, steeled himself, and looked inside.
"—Rem."
No voice answered his call.
But Rem lay on the bed, breathing in a steady rhythm as she slept on—the carnage outside had not left the slightest trace upon her.
Elsa had not set foot inside this room.
That, in turn, was proof that Frederica's desperate stand at the doorway had outweighed the killer's ugliness.
"...I'm truly sorry for doubting you, Frederica."
Subaru ran his hand gently over the forehead of the sleeping girl he cherished, then apologized once more to the woman laid out in the corridor.
Her soul was no longer anywhere in this world. His words now would never reach her—but he said them anyway.
"So, what are we doing from here?"
"I can't leave Rem here. Not after what happened to Frederica and Petra... I'm going to leave her with the people from
"That's the right thing to do. That girl would probably be happier with that, too."
"If I could just take care of Rem, I'd do it in a heartbeat. But I can't. I have to... take you to the
Subaru turned from Rem to face Beatrice, who stood watching from the doorway. The girl gave a small sniff.
"You sure do say whatever you want. For starters, our conversation was only interrupted because we were attacked. The issue is still ongoing, you know."
"Yeah, I know. And my answer to that is this—I am absolutely never going to kill you, and I am going to drag you out of this mansion and take you to the Sanctuary. That's final."
"How selfish. You dismiss what Betty has to say and push through your own opinion instead. —Just who do you think you are, standing there spouting nonsense like that?"
"If your side of the story was really what you truly felt, I might think about it—but it's not, is it?"
"—What do you mean by that?"
Beatrice's voice dropped low, closing in on intimidation. Even as the sensation of goosebumps prickled his skin, Subaru gave a small shake of his head.
"I don't have all the details figured out either. But I think something's still missing before we can pull out what you really think—what's really at your root."
"...I don't want you to."
"Your relationship with the Sanctuary is still hanging by a thread.
"Don't pry."
"No. ...If not me, then who else is going to walk in there with their boots on? You've been locked away in that place for so long."
Beatrice choked, as though something had caught in her throat. She fell silent.
Having witnessed that much, Subaru turned back to the bed and lifted Rem into his arms. He would bring Rem to Arlam Village, entrust her to them, and then head for the Sanctuary with Beatrice.
If she would cooperate with the doorway transition, things would be easy, but he couldn't push her. It would probably take half a day on
"Even if you don't want to go to the Sanctuary, I'm going to question Roswaal and Ryuzu and the others about you. If I can, I'd like to hear it from the one at the very top of this whole thing."
When Subaru had truly, desperately "wanted to know," the
Right now, with more information and accompanying hypotheses than before, and with new mysteries in hand, he felt he might be invited back to that dream castle. And if so, he felt he might finally get someone to reveal the secret of the Sanctuary and the true circumstances of those involved—the things everyone had clammed up about.
"It's just a matter of sooner or later. I understand that you'd rather not have me take matters into my own hands—but—"
"How far are you going to go, mocking people...!!"
"Mocking you? That's not what I—"
"You waltz into places people don't want you to go, tear everything apart, and throw it into chaos—then you have the nerve to say something like that. If anyone's been dismissive, it's you. You've already moved on from the two who died like it was nothing."
"——!"
Beatrice's final words pierced Subaru's chest with a sharp, searing pain.
Seeing his expression, Beatrice—for just an instant—seemed to think she had gone too far, a flicker of hesitation crossing her face. But it was quickly hidden beneath her usual mask of cold indifference.
"Petra and Frederica... once I leave Rem with the village, I'll properly mourn them. I can't just stay silent about Petra either."
Realizing he was making excuses, Subaru began to walk—hiding his face from Beatrice's gaze as he did.
Beatrice's words had driven straight through his heart.
While he was shaken by the "deaths" of Petra and Frederica, Subaru had already steeled himself to restart this world. Even if defeating Elsa had been one objective achieved, the price paid had been far too great. This world simply held too much pain to continue.
And having told Beatrice "don't die," he was well aware of how hollow that sounded. You're no good, but I'm fine—the most selfish logic there was.
"We'll figure out the Sanctuary trip separately. First, I'm going to settle the mansion's problems. Our conversation will come after that."
He walked past Beatrice standing at the doorway and out into the corridor. She didn't speak, but seemed to follow in silence.
Since she was not permitted self-death, Beatrice could only reach "the end" with someone else's hand. She couldn't seek it out on her own—so regardless of her intentions, she had no choice but to stay within Subaru's reach.
Knowing that, and still behaving this way, Subaru thought with a self-mocking pang—he really had become a terrible person.
"—Oh?"
Just then, as Subaru grew disgusted with the squalor of his own thoughts, he let out a small sound.
The cause was a light push from behind. Something pressed against his back, and with Rem still in his arms, Subaru stumbled forward.
Planting his feet, he turned around—and it was Beatrice, standing behind him. Was this retaliation for what he'd said earlier? Subaru furrowed his brow, about to voice a complaint, and then— "—Ah."
A faint girl's voice, and he noticed a dull glow protruding from her chest.
"—Huh?"
A blade had entered from the back and emerged through her chest, and now it was slowly sliding downward—from the upper chest toward the lower abdomen.
Beatrice's small body trembled in time with the blade's movement.
Subaru could only stare, frozen in disbelief.
"...With this."
Softly, as if to herself, Beatrice's lips murmured.
Before Subaru, still rooted to the spot, Beatrice raised her head and looked at him.
Her expression, her eyes—the sheer magnitude of the emotion behind them was almost too vast to comprehend.
"Finally..."
"Wha—"
"——t."
What had she been about to say? Even Subaru didn't know.
But before that unformed thought could take shape, Beatrice's breath escaped in a ragged whisper.
And with that sound as her last, Beatrice's body dissolved into a cluster of faint light, and in the blink of an eye the glow scattered into yellow motes.
Her small frame, her cream-colored ringlets, her face—that annoying-yet-adorable face—her elegant, cumbersome-looking dress, all of it, everything, vanished.
"Oh my, how disappointing. It was my first time ever cutting open a spirit's belly, and it just disappears."
Where Beatrice had been standing, half a step behind, stood a woman holding the weapon that had pierced through her.
Subaru recognized the woman the instant he heard her voice—the voice of his quarry. He knew immediately, but the reason he hadn't grasped it sooner was that his brain had refused to accept the possibility. But even as the shock made his vision swim, his mind recovered in seconds, and Subaru clenched his back teeth.
They cracked. Blood filled his mouth. Eyes fixed forward, he screamed.
"——Elsaaaaaa!!"
"You can't do anything anymore, can you?"
His cheek was smashed sideways with the spine of the kukri knife.
The hard impact nearly split his skull, and unable to resist the force, Subaru's body was hurled against the wall. The only act of resistance he managed was not letting Rem slip from his arms.
Blood poured from his fractured skull, and the blow was so severe that his limbs refused to carry the will to fight. Still, Subaru fixed his flickering eyes on Elsa and spat his hatred at her even as she juggled the kukri knife deftly between both hands.
"Why... the hell... are you still alive... I saw you die, I'm sure of it...!"
"Yes, that's right. I was dead. If they'd burned me to ash like that, I wouldn't be standing here."
Elsa spoke with such casual nonchalance that Subaru shuddered.
The impaled Elsa had definitely ceased all vital activity. She had died. That was certain. So then—what was the Elsa standing before him now? Was this like Ryuzu—a nightmare where Elsa too possessed copies?
But the Elsa who had sent him flying was still dripping blood from all four limbs, and the ruined chest area had been reinforced with fabric she'd torn from the coat that had served its purpose and been shredded. Looking at her now, there was no doubt she was the same person from moments ago. The only question was the matter of life and death.
"Don't tell me... you're immortal or something..."
"That would be something. I'm just a bit harder to kill than most. More to the point—she really did a number on me. My body hasn't been destroyed like that more than a handful of times."
"...Funny. Same here. I've only died like that from you about as many times."
Subaru's words were earnest, not a joke. But Elsa seemed to take them as one—her smile deepened, and she gave a light twirl. She touched the severed end of her braid with a faintly melancholy finger, then looked quietly down at Subaru.
"That girl—you haven't heard what she said, have you?"
"...How about you just pretend you didn't notice and let me go?"
Even as he understood the implications of her words, Subaru made the proposal. He didn't expect it to be accepted, but his limbs were only just starting to listen to him again. He needed to buy time with idiotic conversation.
"That's fine with me—since it's unexpected on my end too... The spirit girl and the big maid. The little maid is added to the list, though."
Three targets. Beatrice, Frederica, and Petra added—was that it?
While his consciousness burned white-hot, he kept his ears sharp for the parts he couldn't afford to miss. Rem wasn't among the targets—presumably because Elsa's employer had forgotten Rem existed. He'd thought the same about Frederica, but with her death, that deduction was back to square one.
"Oh yeah—you lied to me too, didn't you?"
"A lie?"
"About Frederica. —In the Forbidden Library, you made it sound like you'd only killed Petra. But she ended up like that."
He gestured toward Frederica's body at the end of the corridor. Elsa glanced over and nodded with an "Oh, I see."
Then she looked back at Subaru and murmured: "That was no beautiful way to go."
A killer's aesthetic sensibility—Subaru had no way of understanding it. To take someone's life and then say something so flippant about it. Rage welled up inside him, but it dissipated the moment he saw Elsa readjust the kukri knife in her grip.
He wanted to strike back, but his body was in no condition to attempt a counterattack against Elsa.
To fall before Elsa's blade now—half of it was the expected outcome.
—Is this as far as it goes this time?
Consciousness of the approaching "death" hovering before him, what surfaced in Subaru's mind was the flood of information he'd gained this loop, the new unsolved mysteries, his exchange with Beatrice, and the expression he had seen on her face at the very end.
She had said "I want to die," "kill me," over and over—and in the end, she had pushed Subaru away. Why? What meaning had that action—shoving him away the moment she noticed Elsa's survival—held? He refused to be so dense that he couldn't figure it out.
"I don't like the look in your eyes."
"Huh? —Gah?!"
She tossed the words aside, and immediately struck his face again with the knife's spine.
His left cheekbone shattered, and broken teeth clattered to the floor. As he was about to collapse, another blow came from the other side. Searing pain shot through his right eye socket, and a flash of the blade sheared diagonally off his left ear.
After that, Elsa alternated between blade and spine, carving, crushing, and battering Subaru's body. The "death" he had expected to come quickly never arrived—only pain, repeated over and over and over. Subaru crawled on all fours, leaking blood and groans.
"To struggle until the very last moment of a life. That's the only way life has meaning."
"...Nobody asked for your philosophy on life and death."
A blow. A downward strike split his forehead open, and as he toppled with the sensation of his skull's contents spilling out, consciousness began to fade.
He felt his body being pulled into an increasingly cold world.
He was going to die like this.
Even if he merely lost consciousness—there was no way he didn't understand what losing consciousness before the "Stomach Hunter" would mean.
This was it. The end. This time, it was over.
Next time, he wouldn't fail. Next time, for certain.
Because he could never forget that expression he had seen at the last— "—Beatrice."
—that the girl who had said "kill me" had tears in her eyes at the very end.
Etched with that final image, Subaru's consciousness was slowly swallowed by the dark, and vanished.