For Subaru, a rough waking was something far removed from his usual experience.
The moment he opened his eyes, what flooded his vision was an artificial, white luminescence. An unfamiliar ceiling—and mounted upon it, crystals that emitted a faint glow, illuminating the room through some unknown principle.
Subaru was famously good at waking up. Once his eyes opened, consciousness returned almost instantly—it was simply his constitution.
"…The pillow feels different."
He rolled over and noticed the sensation beneath his head was unlike what he was used to.
The plush comfort was even more telltale. There was no way his perpetually worn futon on the floor could feel like this. The futon was so thin it had practically dyed the tatami underneath.
"On top of that, it smells amazing. Sniff, sniff… It smells like sunshine! Well, technically, 'sunshine smell' is really just the scent of mites that got baked to death by UV rays, but—"
That ranked somewhere in the top three facts about life he wished he'd never learned.
Savoring that particular brand of olfactory revulsion to the fullest, Subaru finally sat up. When he lifted his torso and surveyed his surroundings, the room was unmistakably that of the upper class.
The bed he'd been sleeping in could comfortably fit about five of him, and judging from it, the room itself had to be at least twenty tatami mats wide.
A twenty-mat studio apartment would be an outrageous waste of space. And yet, "If this follows the standard pattern of luxury mansions, that's just how it is."
His consciousness fully awake now, Subaru swung his legs off the bed and gave his body a light once-over.
He checked his shoulders, elbows, knees, and various other joints, then did leg raises and squats to test his cardiovascular endurance and stamina—already breathing raggedly—and pulled up his shirt to inspect— "The wound on my stomach… gone. Bruises, of course, are gone too, and no scar from the stabbing. Not even a stitch mark—this world's surgeons are impressive. If I'd been left with scars, it'd kill my marriage prospects."
Cooking, laundry, sewing—all household chores: thoroughly unacquired.
His selling points were durability and the fact that he'd eat just about anything. So, then—were there any noble lords out there willing to take Subaru as a bride?
"I definitely wouldn't want me. …Anyway, though…"
The room matched his earlier impression: aside from the bed, there was a potted plant by the window and a few pieces of wall art and furnishings—spare, but tasteful.
Whether this world had them or not, he couldn't spot anything resembling a clock, and there was no sign of a calendar either.
"The real question is how long I was out… Yeah, maybe about five hours?"
He touched his chin, gauging the rough elapsed time by the texture of his stubble.
It was a handy trick—estimating time with reasonable accuracy without a clock. Judging by the stubble, it had been roughly five or six hours since his last check. That meant the first full day since being summoned to another world was drawing to a close.
Having reached that thought, Subaru touched his stomach once more and, "In any case… this means I was able to avoid 'Return by Death' this time, right?"
He spoke aloud the conclusion he'd been holding back since waking up, and finally steeled himself to face a reality he could no longer turn away from.
※※ ※ ※ ※ ※ ※ ※ ※ ※ ※ ※ ※ Right before losing consciousness, he counted back through the chain of events.
"Died pathetically once, died bravely the second time, pulled off a pretty perfect dog's death the third time, and the fourth was a death-by-stray-bullet after watching a life-or-death battle—but hey, I survived, so that's great. If I die now, it's mob character straight to the grave for me."
All four causes of death having that sort of flavor was just his luck.
Anyway, in the bed that occupied this far-too-spacious room—Subaru crumpled the neatly made sheets and duvet into a mess, sat cross-legged atop them, and fell into deep thought.
Since he'd avoided 'Return by Death,' this was clearly not the same restart point as always. There was a one-in-a-ten-thousand chance it could be the hometown of that vegetable shop owner who kept restarting alongside him, but the most likely possibilities were, "Either Reinhard's place, or
Only those two gave off the impression of being friendly toward Subaru and owning a mansion like this.
He let his own wishes color his judgment as he leaned toward the latter.
The wound on his stomach had been healed—that was almost certainly the work of Emilia's magic. Without immediate treatment on the scene, a DEAD END would have been unavoidable, and more importantly, he wanted to believe in the romantic notion that a girl had healed him with her own hands.
"Though it'd be fine if that handsome guy could heal too… But a man's allowed to dream. This is another world, after all."
He poked the sheets with his fingertip and delivered his succinct opinion with an effeminate little gesture.
Then Subaru sprang off the bed, using its momentum to land on the floor. First things first—he wanted to confirm where exactly he was.
"So that means… a new adventure begins. …No, no, no! Getting excited before even feeling annoyed—that's you slipping back into that shut-in mindset! Going back to a life of just eating meals, playing games, watching anime, sleeping when you felt like it, lurking on forums and posting comments…"
He'd never really harbored a desire to be summoned to another world.
For that matter, he'd never been dissatisfied with shut-in life. The days were monotonous, sure, but he'd never felt they were wasted. Being able to sleep as much as you wanted—that was the NEET dream.
"Okay, I felt a little guilty toward my parents… but in a way, they were more or less permissive about it, even tacitly."
He exercised regularly, ate at the dinner table, went out without issue, and even asked for pocket money. His life was no different from anyone else's except that he didn't attend school. More accurately, Subaru wasn't a shut-in—he was a truant.
"What a shocking revelation. If I'd never had the chance to look back on myself like this in another world, I might have gone my entire life without realizing I wasn't really a shut-in… Could it be that I was summoned here for exactly this reason…?"
He resolved to be more careful with his self-labeling going forward. He didn't want to casually call himself a shut-in and then get chewed out by the "
"I bet all the members are shut-ins too… Wait, if so, how do they even coordinate with each other…?"
Thoughts spiraling into a vortex of self-contradiction. Subaru tilted his head, then tossed the whole tangled mess aside with a "whatever," and crept silently toward the door.
Ideally, while he was killing time, someone would come to check on him—an encounter that would lead to an explanation of the situation and a grasp of the current circumstances. That would have been ideal.
"Or at least, you know, when I woke up, a girl sitting by my bedside nursing me would say, 'You're awake?' That's the standard, right? If you're going to summon someone, at least have a beautiful girl waiting nearby when they wake up. This summoning is seriously lacking in basic provisions…"
The one thing he could commend was that, as far as otherworld fantasy tropes went, every person he'd met so far was gorgeous. That ticked the box.
Anyway, named characters he'd actually seen totaled exactly five. The random townsfolk were obviously mob characters, one of them was a shriveled old man, and— "
His conclusion: she was off the evaluation chart because she'd start building his trauma meter.
He'd admit she was beautiful on the surface, but with that murder addiction, there was no way he could reach the optimistic conclusion of "that gap is moe!" No, that was beyond even him.
"Alright then, let's seal the deal on that conclusion, bid farewell to the postpone-everything arc, and set off on the journey. Starting something new is so exciting!"
He muttered in a deliberately low voice, then cautiously turned the doorknob and opened the door.
Outside, a cool draft of air slipped into the room, and his bare feet involuntarily went "Fwaaah!" at the cold of the floor.
Stepping out, what spread before him was a long hallway unified by warm-toned paint. To both the left and right, corridors extended into the distance, dotted here and there with identical doors. Presumably every door led to a room like the one he'd just woken in—if there were that many twenty-mat suites, this was an even grander mansion than he'd imagined. The thought of its owner made Subaru swallow hard.
"Wow… 'wow' is about all I can say. Not just big—colossal. And yet, with all this vastness…"
His bare feet padded across the hallway—its surface polished to a mirror sheen, reminiscent of a school gymnasium floor—and Subaru furrowed his brow at the absolute silence.
"Life sounds"—a metaphor, but in this case, perhaps better described as ambient noise of any kind. Nothing of the sort reached him in this corridor.
"Same as that room, but… this is way too quiet. It's the kind of quiet that makes you feel guilty for even being loud."
Normally, Subaru's personality would have him shouting "Helloooo! Is anyone here?!" at the top of his lungs, but given the current situation, that felt inadvisable.
After all, Subaru had absolutely no grasp of his situation. Not a single fragment.
Earlier, he'd casually concluded this was the residence of someone friendly toward him, but what if, after he'd lost consciousness, Elsa had assembled an army of a hundred thousand and come back for round two? That possibility was not zero.
If that were the case, Subaru had been captured by Elsa's side, and the mansion had undergone a class change from "kindhearted billionaire's home" to "assassin guild hideout."
"Should've waited for them to make the first move, huh? I could still go back to the room, curl up in a ball, and shiver while praying to God…"
He strolled along the hallway, hummed to himself, and contemplated a full retreat.
The paintings on the walls of the hallway, unlike the landscapes in his room, were mostly eccentric abstract works. He gazed at the geometric patterns and pretended to be knowledgeable—"Hmm, this brush technique is really something"—while thinking, "But I can't run from flags with that kind of negative attitude. I decided to be more positive, didn't I? I swore it, didn't I? I don't actually remember making that decision or swearing to anyone, but I'll mentally correct for that."
Eliminating the option to go back, Subaru set off with the goal of finding someone.
Right or left? He chose right without much hesitation. He vaguely remembered a conversation from some manga that went something like, "Left is full of traps, heh heh."
Now that he thought about it calmly, which direction was correct depended entirely on which room you exited from—a fact he discreetly filed away after walking for a while.
"That said, all the doors look the same… and still nobody around."
He reached no dead end. After passing five doors, Subaru was starting to get confused.
No matter how big the place was, there had to be limits. People might say it had only been a minute or two, but he'd covered at least three hundred meters in that time.
Was it really plausible for a hallway to stretch three hundred meters without a visible end?
"This is weird, no matter how you slice it." He scratched his head, then turned around on a whim. His judgment—worst case, just go back to the original room—was interrupted by— "Huh?"
He let out an involuntary yelp, craning his neck in deeper confusion.
Behind him—the path he'd just walked. The hallway still showed no end, but the problem was: "Didn't I see this painting… right in front of the room I started in?"
He was certain, because he remembered joking about "this brush technique."
It was possible that the same artwork was simply displayed in multiple locations. But lining up similar rooms along a single corridor and decorating them with identical paintings—that was just terrible taste.
"In other words, to put it plainly… I'm in a loop."
Probably, after traveling a certain distance through the hallway, he was being seamlessly teleported to the opposite side of the map. Or, in defiance of every otherworld fantasy convention, a moving floor mechanism was operating so subtly he couldn't detect it.
"If it's a floor mechanism, the historical consistency goes out the window. …Still, between this and 'Return by Death,' I seem to have a real affinity for loop stories, don't I?"
He muttered that to no one, then opened the door of the nearest room. Inside was a simple chamber—the same twenty-mat layout with just a bed.
In other words, the very room where Subaru had first woken up.
"So basically… 'Don't bother moving around, just stay put'? Is that the message?"
Were they restricting his destination to keep him from wandering off on his own? It felt like a tremendous waste of effort and magical power, but perhaps the intent was to demonstrate the power gap and rob him of the will to resist.
"Well, yeah, most people would lose the will to resist. Having this kind of mysterious space created around you—of course you'd be shaken. By any rational measure."
"Unngh—" he stretched, doing a hamstring stretch against the wall. He made sure to warm up his Achilles tendons and get his muscles into shape.
"Normally, I'd be the type to crash back into bed like 'Nope, can't do this, wheee!'—just lazing around until someone shows up… but…"
He crouched in the middle of the hallway and assumed a sprinter's starting stance.
Get set, ready— "Let's face it, after sleeping for half a day, I'm not sleepy at all!!!"
He barked that thoroughly uncool battle cry and broke into an all-out sprint.
His speed was below Felt's. Frankly, below Old
His stamina was pitiful—he'd be gasping at the seventy-meter mark in a hundred-meter dash. But for dashing through this immediate stretch, it was more than enough.
He ran. Ran. Ran. — Relentlessly, endlessly, driving forward.
The end of the hallway remained invisible. No matter how far he ran, the same scenery looped back. It was futility given form, mocking his desperation.
But Subaru did not stop running.
Foolishly, doggedly, straight ahead—as if declaring through sheer action that continuing to do just that was the only thing an ordinary man could do.
He no longer cared that the hallway was deserted, that he was in a stranger's mansion, that he'd had his stomach slit half a day ago, that he was about to— "Oh wait, the last one's actually a big deal! This is bad! Oh crap, I just realized the urge to pee is hitting me like a freight train! Both the big kind and the small kind at the same time!"
The poor man's lower regions let out a pained groan, and all his previous cool composure evaporated into thin air. His sprinting form devolved into a hip-swaying, upper-body-rocking jog with a distinctly knock-kneed gait.
But even that—such a trivial difference in how he ran—could not make the world stop mocking his efforts.
That loop, malicious in its repetition, finally began to slow Subaru's legs.
He heaved his shoulders, gasping for breath. Sweat beaded on his forehead in this solitary battle that yielded nothing. Subaru's knees buckled.
And then— "I have no choice. I'll just… have to do it here."
He gave up everything and reached for the clothing shielding his lower abdomen.
He might lose his human dignity. Being unable to even relieve himself in a proper place—if that wasn't worse than the upbringing of a stray dog or cat, he didn't know what was.
But he would accept even that insult. It would not break his spirit.
"Besides, for someone who just discovered a brand-new fetish, maybe even that abuse could be pleasurable—"
With the first genuinely refreshed smile since being summoned to another world, Subaru declared that and lowered himself to the ground. The fact that he'd at least shuffled over to the edge of the hallway was the last faint trace of rational thought he had left.
—And then.
"
Just as he was about to bear down, a change occurred right before his eyes.
The corridor—which had looped endlessly no matter how far he ran—suddenly warped and distorted in Subaru's field of vision.
It was like watching a crumpled piece of paper being smoothed back out.
Blinking to confirm the scene after all the wrinkles had been ironed flat, Subaru stood up while suppressing the urge he'd momentarily managed to hold back.
"I don't really get what just happened, but… all's well that ends well?"
Before him, the hallway had a visible end.
Directly ahead stood the abstract painting he'd seen many times, and just beyond it—the room where he'd woken up.
He'd been returned to his starting position, no doubt about that. But the loop appeared to be broken. The conditions for breaking it were unclear, but— "Could it be… the key was the urge to pee? That's a complicated flag. No way you'd figure it out by just trying normally… The person who designed this must be a demon."
'Demon' being, of course, a different version of "demon-possessed"—a coined phrase of Subaru's own invention.
Well, more like something he'd just made up on the spot.
"Anyway, since I've escaped the loop, might as well go back to the room and sleep…"
Scratching his head, he glanced back at the first door. The air in the hallway seemed to carry a chill. Nothing was said outright, but the sentiment behind it was transmitted with startling clarity. He'd apparently offended someone.
"I was chanting 'go back, go back,' then blew past all their expectations and threw everything away. —I think so. …Fine, fine! I'm going!"
Subaru shouted at the invisible source of the loop and set off walking.
He'd considered the option of breaking their plan entirely, but that wouldn't advance the event, and besides, his bladder situation was still very much urgent.
"So, to preserve what's left of my dignity, I have no choice but to move forward. —That guy really has me figured out. He knows I can't back down!"
He declared it with a resolute expression. Yes—Subaru would fight. For the sake of his bladder.
The hallway had broken free of its loop, but in its place, an eerie atmosphere had settled over it. Subaru felt that the peculiar sensation was similar to what he'd sensed when Emilia had been preparing to cast her magic.
It was a layman's intuition, unreliable as it was—but the hallway was saturated with magical energy.
Unlike when the movement loop had been active, this time the caster wasn't even trying to hide it. The person behind this had to be supremely confident. The kind who could set a trap, announce "there's a trap right here," and still hold their head high.
"Charging in blindly would be dangerous. But then again, excessive caution is just cowardice in disguise. And above all… I'm on a time limit."
The tide was receding for now, but it would return—and when it did, it would come back as a massive wave. That was common knowledge.
Subaru swallowed hard, wiped the sweat from his forehead, and steeled himself to take the first step.
The door in front of him—he turned the knob, "A trap-laden hallway after looping yourself to death. You know, in the typical dungeon event, the first door is usually the goal, right?"
With that half-baked inspiration, he opened the door— "…Honestly, what an infuriating thing to say."
Inside an unfamiliar library, a girl with curly hair stared back at him, her expression dripping with resentment.