His throat trembled, and a primal scream echoed through the lightless forest.
It was a sound that was neither "ah" nor "oh"—a meaningless, purposeless explosion of noise.
Even though it came from his own throat, Subaru himself could find no reason or meaning behind the act.
Red points of light rushed toward him all at once.
As they drew closer, he could make out their taking shape—beasts sheathed in jet-black fur, baring their fangs as they lunged at him.
There was no time to register the trembling in his legs, the terror gripping his heart, or the scream tearing through his soul.
What dominated Subaru's mind in that instant was not the overwhelming embodiment of "death" bearing down on him, but only whether the girl lying just behind him was safe.
He widened his stance, threw out both arms, and made himself a shield so that the beasts' claws and fangs could not reach behind him. It was not a conscious choice. His body simply moved on its own in that one reactive instinct.
If only his opponent had been the sort to withdraw cleanly in deference to such resolve, he might have been saved. But the reality bearing down on him was merciless, and before the wild, beast-driven hunger before him, sentimentality meant nothing.
—It's ending. After coming this far, I finally saw the full picture. And once again, I don't have enough power. Once again, it's out of reach.
No matter how hard his heart fought against submission, sheer lack of strength tore away Subaru's options. Was this situation just the same old story?
"———————!!"
Refusing to accept defeat, he roared.
That much—just the force of his spirit—he would not yield to any of those points of light. It was pure bluff, a hollow charade in the most literal sense—until fangs sank into his throat, and— Before his eyes, the demon beast's head burst open like a piece of fruit.
Close-range butchery scattered blood in every direction, and Subaru, standing at the forefront, was drenched head to toe. In the next instant, the now-headless body still hurtled forward with its remaining momentum and slammed into him. He was sent flying backward, tumbling across the ground, and as he stood up shaking his head at the pain and the sickening feel of blood, he thought— What the—?
"I'm sorry I'm late—but I made it in time."
With an elegant flick of her skirt's hem, one hand lightly pinching the fabric of her white apron dress, and in the other hand a grotesque iron ball, the blue-haired girl descended into the abyss.
She pivoted, took a languid step, and let the chain's voice ring out as she spoke.
"You were supposed to be buying time, were you not?"
"I tried my best! I bought a ton of time! I went at them like I didn't care if I killed them! And this is the result—serene thanks a whole bunch!"
At Subaru's literally prostrate gratitude,
Her gaze flicking sideways at his reaction, Rem slowly turned her attention ahead—to the pack of demon beasts licking their chops and sizing them up at the entrance of a new kill.
The same ones that had been so aggressive against Subaru alone had switched to a cautious formation the instant a small girl joined their prey. They had no intention of underestimating the fact that one of their number had been dispatched in a single instant.
He had learned it in the exchange with the first one too, but despite their savage appearance, these creatures were remarkably cunning and calculating.
"Rem…"
He called out to her standing there like a statue and urged her to stay on guard.
Without turning around, Rem merely let out a breath at Subaru's deliberately lowered tone.
"I tracked Subaru-kun's awful body odor, and then rushed over in response to that unseemly scream he was making without a shred of self-consciousness—and this is what I find. You're not exactly in good shape."
"Awful body odor stings a little. Also, I don't really remember—what exactly was I screaming about?"
"If I feel like it. And if they allow it, I'd be happy to tell you in full detail."
With her iron handle pointed straight ahead, Rem fixated her eyes with a hostility that might as well have been a provocation. While Subaru felt his blood run cold, the demon beasts on the receiving end of that hostility seemed none too pleased either. There was a clear readiness to fight—and an eagerness for slaughter—visible in the eyes of those who had been silently surveying them.
"That doesn't seem likely—"
"Rem!"
Subaru couldn't hold back and called her name at a pitch close to a scream.
What suddenly materialized on her flanks was a simultaneous pincer attack from two demon beasts splitting to either side. They had closed the distance to within a few steps, and the pair that had been running in parallel broke apart at once.
Had Subaru been the one facing them, he would have been unable to decide which to focus on, and they would have torn him apart without a beat of hesitation.
But— "——Shh!"
Her right arm, gripping the iron handle, swung with the same casual ease as swatting a bug. The chain attached to the handle accompanied the rotation, and the iron ball at its end followed obediently.
The supposedly ponderous weapon of destruction spun with terrifying velocity, sweeping everything along its path before striking the torso of a demon beast in the middle of its arc, blasting it clean in two. Bones and innards splattered outward, and the creature was promptly turned into forest fertilizer.
And the surviving half, its partner slaughtered in an instant, packed all its fury into its fangs and lunged at the defenseless left side of Rem—only to have a left fist drive its snout straight down from above. The force of the punch caved in the skull, and with a blow powerful enough to bury its head in the ground, the beast died on the spot.
It was a dazzling display. But the grisliness behind it was anything but.
Praise was the furthest thing from Subaru's mind. Eyes wide, he could only stare in blank shock at the massacre unfolding before him.
He had thought he understood Rem's destructive power from firsthand experience. Now, beyond any shadow of a doubt—both in name and reality—that turned out to have been nothing more than a thought.
"Y-You're so strong!!"
"I don't think that's the most appropriate thing to say to a woman, Subaru-kun."
"Look, I'm vocabulary-poor, okay? There's nothing else in my arsenal to describe what just happened. Seriously, you're insane."
Rem's overwhelming reliability far beyond anything he had imagined sent Subaru springing to his feet and scrambling back to his original position.
Crawling back, Subaru checked on the girl lying unconscious. Despite being caught in mortal peril both a moment ago and right now, the sleeping girl was utterly oblivious and continued to slumber peacefully.
"Well, carefree and oblivious to the world—she'll grow up into a fine kid with lots of energy and grit!"
Praising that intrepid sleep with genuine admiration, he used his aching arms to lift her small body, adjusting his hold so as not to let her light weight slip.
"Rem, could you actually wipe out the whole pack by yourself?"
"They outnumber us, and the gap is only widening."
"Yeah, figured. In that case…"
With the girl still cradled in his arms, he moved to Rem's side.
The demon beasts, having lost two more from their pack, were sluggish. They crouched low as though watching for his next move, and though menacing glints flashed in their eyes, they lacked the initiative to act. If they had chosen to overwhelm through sheer numbers with an infiltration strategy, Subaru and Rem—outmatched as they were in force—would have been finished.
But they had confused caution with cowardice, and in doing so made the worst possible choice.
So Subaru and Rem, almost in the same instant, locked eyes on the same point.
"There!"
Subaru's shout and Rem's strike answered each other at once.
The iron ball roared as it tore through the air, a hymn to slaughter. Its aim was true—striking the ground just in front of the densely clustered demon beasts and shattering the earth. Clods of dirt and clouds of dust erupted skyward, and the avalanche of soil blocked the retreating beasts' vision for several critical seconds.
"Now—!"
At Rem's next cry, Subaru's body launched forward as if kicked.
He aimed for the single point of breach that the previous blast had forced open in their encirclement— As Subaru dove into the gap, the beast that had ceded the path let out a howl. It leaped, trying to bar his way once more— "——Ohhhhh, that's the trauma sound!!"
Past his racing ears, the light jingle of a chain brushed gently by.
The refrain of that familiar sound sent a shiver racing up his spine. Right beside him, the iron ball's greeting detonated, and a burst of crimson blossomed like a flower in the nighttime forest.
Leaving the blood behind, Subaru planted his feet on uncertain ground and plunged into the forest, exposed to a vast ocean of hostility. He leaped over tree roots and took branches across the cheek— "Rem, I don't know the way!"
"Straight ahead! Once we pass through the barrier, it's over! Until then, don't lose your sense of direction!"
Even told to go straight, that "straight ahead" was impossible to pin down.
He had not expected the darkness—visible only a hand's length in front of him—to scramble his sense of direction this badly. Trying to feel his way forward with his hands was out of the question; both were occupied with the girl's weight.
Forced to hunch his body into a ball to minimize the impact on the girl, Subaru ran on while trying to watch for obstacles ahead.
His breath ran short. Had he lost the path? Were they catching up? Would they get ahead and cut him off?
The fears were endless, and the dread welling up in his chest was steadily whittling away at his resolve.
His left arm had gone numb, the unceasing bloodloss dripping from the fabric of his jacket, and each drop falling into the puddles below gave the paranoid impression that he was leaving a trail for his pursuers.
He ran, he sprinted, he kept fleeing.
The scenery was an endless repetition, and the feeling crept over him that he was not moving forward at all—though he knew that was impossible, the sense of frustration only fed the fantasy.
And every time that weakness swelled in his chest and his knees threatened to give— From behind him, the sound of the chain ringing drove him forward.
Each time he heard it, Subaru clenched his molars and forced himself to look ahead.
The reason he could still run like this was Rem. She had been eliminating threats and guarding his back, and that was the only reason he could still show his face alive.
He had already shown enough of it. He might as well toss away his pride and scrape together one last pathetic effort to survive.
"Ugh, dammit—my side hurts—!"
He spurred himself forward with a petty scream of frustration.
Ahead, ahead—!
And then, without warning, the darkness before Subaru split open.
His field of vision widened, and in the sudden brightness he squinted. In the distance, he could make out an artificial light glowing.
"Rem! A light! There's a— We've reached the barrier!"
At the appearance of literal light at the end of the tunnel, Subaru turned his head back to share his elation.
But in the next instant, his eyes froze in horror.
Behind him, Rem—the one who had been fighting to guard his back—was in a truly harrowing state.
The starched, well-tailored maid outfit was riddled with lacerations from claws and fangs. Exposed white skin bore numerous wounds of no small depth, and her vivid blue hair was hopelessly matted and streaked with so much blood from above that its original color was unrecognizable.
"Rem—!"
"Keep running! …While Rem is still Rem!"
Her fierce words from behind cut off Subaru's voice of concern.
He couldn't accept it. But he severed his hesitation at her cry and ran for the barrier.
Sentiment could wait. Once he got through—if he could just get through— "What…?"
Just when he had steeled himself, an unexpected sight struck him down before he could even begin.
Subaru's gaze—blank and uncomprehending—was fixed on a point low to the ground, nearly level with the earth, close to the great tree into which the barrier-crystal was set. There, a tiny, tiny shadow was crouched.
As he drew closer and the outline became clearer, Subaru's eyes widened.
It was a small creature—small enough to be enveloped completely by a pair of arms, its fur as soft as cotton, nothing like the large beasts he had been facing.
It was the very whelp that had guided him to the village.
"There you are… But I can kick your ass easy!"
If this was meant to be a roadblock, it was laughably underweight.
If it had planted itself here as the last obstacle in this chase, that was a staggeringly shallow miscalculation.
And Subaru's train of thought was— "You've got to be kidding…"
Swallowed whole by an earth-and-stone torrent that filled his entire field of vision.
Whoever had been thinking so shallowly—Subaru was shown, in no uncertain terms, that it was himself.
The world slowed, drawing out. Subaru knew from experience that this sluggishness was the body's grace period when death was near.
In that decelerated world, belatedly, he realized something.
Before entering the forest, Rem had told him this: —Demon beasts are the enemies of mankind who possess magical power.
Not "can use curses"—she had said magical power. And did that not also mean they could use magic like this?
"Oooooooooh—!!"
He threw out one leg sideways, trying to brake against his momentum. Useless. His overbalanced body stumbled, and the torrent of earth and stone was already upon him. There was no evading it. If he was caught, the mad carnival of sand and rock would tear him to shreds in an instant.
It's over.
The thought had barely formed when Subaru braced to hurl the girl in his arms to one side at least—only to be struck from directly beside him and sent flying, trees and all.
"Gohahh!?"
The blow to his right flank felt hard enough to push his innards out, and he screamed as he was sent tumbling. Tumbling through a gravity-defying chaos of up, down, left, and right, he curled his body around the girl to shield her, then slammed back-first into a thick trunk, had the breath driven from him, and hit the ground.
"Ghah… ahf… aah… hurts…!"
Groaning in pain, he clutched his battered stomach and raised his head.
And there he saw Rem—directly in the path of the torrent's full force, sent flying over the trees.
Battered by the brutal welcome of rock and earth, Rem's small body danced as lightly as a leaf. The spray of blood was starkly different from the earlier coating of blood on her body—instantly recognizable to anyone as a seriously bad injury.
Her body, unable to brace, crashed hard against the ground. The one mercy was that the churned-up earth prevented her head from shattering on impact.
At this point, even Subaru's slow mind could grasp the situation.
Rem had sacrificed the time she needed to dodge and shoved Subaru aside before the torrent reached him. And she had taken the full force of the blast herself.
Of course, the impact Subaru would have taken would have been unsurvivable. But if Rem ended up as the sacrifice instead, it was all for nothing.
"Rem, you idiot! What are you— I— This can't—"
What are you doing? The words died in his throat as Subaru's spine went rigid.
He could feel it. Something—he was certain of it. The same sensation that gripped every demon beast in the pack, freezing them all in place at once. A dense, suffocating presence of "death" hung in the air.
—Slowly, the fallen Rem's body rose to its feet.
Despite taking that catastrophic blow, she showed no sign of injury as she stood. On the contrary, the wounds she should have sustained were closing before his eyes. A terrifying regenerative power was throwing off such intense heat that the blood evaporating from her wounds produced a faint red mist.
And Subaru saw.
Saw Rem's eyes, sweeping across her surroundings—eyes that had lost all reason.
Her blood-drenched face twisted into a grin of ecstasy, and most of all—from her head, now freed of its hair ornament, protruded a pair of white horns.
"Ahahahahaha—"
The laughter. It was the laugh of a girl-child overflowing with naked cruelty.
With a flick of her body, Rem rode the wind and charged straight into the pack. Before the beast at the forefront could react, its neck was crushed under her heel. The beast killed by having its throat pulverized from directly above—she kicked its body aside with full force to suppress the others waiting behind. One by one, she picked off every creature that moved, wielding the morningstar—chain retracted into the iron handle, now a mace—smashing it again and again, mass-producing blossoms of blood and piles of corpses.
"Beast, beast, beast—demon!"
What was most terrifying of all was that Rem, with her reason gone, had not lost her mind.
Even as she surrendered to the feral power pouring out of her, she had not lost sight of the situation. With that overwhelming force, she was expelling something—some karmic grudge—that had been smoldering deep inside her.
Blood burst. Skulls caved in. Intestines and brains were scattered through the forest in hideous profusion.
On his knees, Subaru stared—forgetting his own pain.
He did not have the courage to call out to her. If he did—if he drew her attention in that state—even though it was absurd, he felt certain she would kill him.
Or perhaps that was no delusion. Rem, in that moment, looked every bit as far beyond the pale as he imagined.
Her form—that blood-soaked apparition howling laughter into the forest— "—Oni."
No matter how much blood splattered her, those white horns could never be soiled.
At the very crown of her head, they blazed their sharp tips like a declaration of their existence.
Subaru was paralyzed by it all.
But unlike Subaru, who could not move, the demon beasts were not the type to sit still and await slaughter. Breaking free from their stupor one by one, they surrounded Rem. And though each blow added to the death toll, they gradually closed in, their claws and fangs reaching her body in increments.
They had always held the advantage in numbers. The beasts had been multiplying throughout their march through the forest, and the total was beyond reckoning. The original pack should have been whittled down by now, but the red points of light floating through the darkness of the night continued to well up without end.
"No matter how strong you are in full-power mode, you can't hold out forever against an infinite spawn…"
The situation shifted dizzyingly, but the bottom line never changed: Subaru and Rem were at a disadvantage.
Having grasped this objectively, Subaru cut himself off at the surge of magical power he sensed once more.
Mana was concentrating again—back at the whelp.
Every last wisp of mana in the atmosphere was being drawn there, and the air itself seemed to twist and warp. Rem must have sensed the maelstrom of magical power. She turned, raising a hand still slick with demon beast viscera, and braced to strike at the whelp—but— In that instant the pack exploited the opening. Every beast lunged simultaneously at her exposed back.
"————!"
A ripple of shock. Even Rem in her berserk state was shaken by a development that exceeded her understanding.
The emptiness in her eyes filled with emotion; the blood-soaked, savage grin collapsed, and beneath it appeared the face of a grief-stricken girl.
—Ah, so she can make that face too, a distant part of Subaru's mind observed— "——GAAAAAAAAAH!!!"
The searing agony of his crushed left arm sent a scream tearing from Subaru's throat that threatened to split it open.
In the same instant, teeth sank into his right foot, his left flank, and his back all at once. His vision flooded red. Pain had ceased to be distinguishable as pain. His ankle shattered. A huge chunk of flesh was torn from his side. Blood—his insides—spilling, leaking. Wasted. Flesh and blood.
"Subaru-kun—!!"
A scream of a voice.
He tried to turn toward it, but his body would no longer obey. His balance was gone. The ankle opposite the one already broken had been half torn away—between the two, his injuries were perfectly symmetrical. He collapsed. Right before his eyes, a fang-lined maw lunged at his throat. Teeth closing in—and then, between an iron ball and the ground, it was crushed. Blood sprayed. His blood, or…
Consciousness flickered. If it went out, he did not know what would happen.
His life was draining away. He knew it himself—what a stupid thing to have done. If he could no longer come back, then clinging to that as a safety net was putting the cart before the horse.
It hurt, it was agony, it was far away, he couldn't see, he couldn't hear, his life was being ground to nothing.
Through the hole in his side, his life poured out like sand through an hourglass.
Disappearing, ending, all of it— I— "Don't die, don't die, don't die—!"
A voice on the verge of tears.
A sobbing voice.
I—