“There is no need to reflect deeply upon it. All that is required for questions and answers is for two beings to be present.”
That instant, the air warped, and the landscape—the vast, blue sky and the grassland—suddenly began to fall apart. The sky cracked, the grassland melted, and the horizon of the world was smashed into tiny pieces.
As the world crumbled without a sound, Subaru touched the table, seemingly clinging to the one certain thing left. The table, too, crumbled into dust, and Subaru closed his eyes, seemingly girding himself against a nonexistent tremor.
“All we need are words. Your curiosity, your hunger to know—I acknowledge your greed.”
Then he realized it: All that remained of the castle of dreams was the hill, and chairs for the two of them.
Subaru gingerly opened his eyes and sat in the opposite chair as he gazed at the Witch. Aside from her and the white chair, the world had been stripped down to its barest essentials, with nothing but gloomy, stagnant darkness spread over where the grassland had been. The one thing he was certain of was if he fell into it, there would be no coming back.
That sent a chill running up Subaru’s spine as Echidna, in high spirits, joyfully clapped her hands toward him.
“Now, what do you wish to ask about? Daphne, the Witch of Gluttony, creator of beasts in defiance of the will of Heaven to save the world from starvation? Camilla, the Witch of Lust, filled with love for the world, granter of emotions to they that are inhuman? Minerva, the Witch of Wrath, who, lamenting a world filled with conflict, sets people straight through her fists? Sekhmet, the Witch of Sloth, who, wanting a moment’s peace, drove the dragons beyond the Great Waterfalls for that reason alone? Or Typhon, the Witch of Pride, the young, innocent, merciless one who continued to render judgment onto sinners?”
He’d never heard of these—no, these were lost vestiges of history unrecorded in the present world.
Hearing her speak the name of one Witch after another, Subaru was speechless. Echidna smiled all the more as she continued.
“Or perhaps Echidna, the Witch of Greed, the embodiment of craving for knowledge, whose search for any and all wisdom lingers even after unto the afterlife?”
Touching a hand to her own breast, Echidna said the words in a self-depreciating fashion. “Or perhaps,” she continued, “the Witch of Jealousy, the abominable woman who destroyed and consumed the other six, and made the whole world her enemy?”
6
Subaru Natsuki felt a powerful aura of death in the form of the girl seated before his eyes.
That was the desolate insight Subaru had gained about Echidna, proven by her own witchy ways.
She was a being nothing like him. It had nothing whatsoever to do with her enmity, or lack thereof.
In the face of truly inescapable terror, it was easy for a person’s emotional responses to go on lockdown.
“Awww. It seems I have intimidated you too greatly. It has always been thus; my lips grow too loose when I become interested in something. A Witch’s nature is truly a troublesome thing.”
With Subaru cowed into silence, Echidna remained seated as she voiced words of self-reflection. However, there was not a single trace of actual reflection. The wall separating the two remained absolute.
The true nature of the malaise he’d subconsciously ignored until he realized its presence was laid bare a second time.
“Knowing that makes me feel rather lonely. But you should begin to adjust to it soon. I hope that this circumstance, where you cannot even look directly at my face, changes somewhat…”
Echidna’s bizarre statement made Subaru grimace; the fear he tasted froze him stiff. But Echidna tilted her head, the black eyes she trained upon the uncomprehending Subaru indicating anticipation of some kind.
Her white, bleached, beautiful hair fell down onto her shoulders. As Subaru gazed at it, he felt as if the agonizing seconds would extend for all eternity—but this came to a sudden halt.
“Haaa—ah?”
“Mm, faster than I thought. That is a compatible person for you. It is helpful that you acclimated so quickly.”
“What…are you…talking about?”
As Echidna nodded and smiled in satisfaction, Subaru broke out in a cold sweat and restrained his chest with a hand. His heart was loud, as if it had forgotten how to beat for a while, and his painfully numb limbs pleaded for mercy.
However, he had escaped the fear that had held him in its grip until a moment before. It had vanished like magic.
“You drank my tea, yes? That activated your Witch Factor and strengthened your resistance. Now you and I can speak. My, my, a very good thing for both of us, is it not?”
“Wait, wait, wait… I’ve heard that term before… I can’t just let it go. What did those body fluids from before do? What did you to do my body?”
“Please do not misunderstand… I did not have you drink it with ill intent. If anything, I think rather fondly of you… That is a little embarrassing to say out loud.”
Echidna’s cheeks reddened a bit, and she looked shy at having spoken so affectionately of him. But at that point Subaru was well past reacting to her games. What he wanted was her true intent.
“You have killed someone possessing Witch Factor in the last several days, yes? Upon his death, the Witch Factor selected you as its new bearer. It is thanks to this that you were able to safely enter my tomb.”
“So you’re saying…the Witch Factor is the condition for being invited into this castle of dreams?”
“No, it is merely what qualified you to enter the tomb itself. You are an exception among exceptions. To begin with, you seem to have leaped quite a bit ahead of schedule—by rights, you should be aware of far more than you are…about me, about the tomb, and about the Sanctuary.”
“—! You know about the Sanctuary?!”
Pouncing on the term lobbed his way, Subaru closed the distance and grasped Echidna’s shoulders. When Subaru touched her slender shoulders and drew his face near, the beautiful Witch averted her gaze.
“…I have little experience in such matters, so I cannot decide if you are brave or simply brazen.”
“Don’t make light of this! If you know about the Sanctuary, that makes this simple! Is this…no, do you know about the forest outside of the ruin? Should I think of that as the Sanctuary?”
“You’re so cold. But you asked, so I shall answer: It is so. As you hoped, the area outside the ruin is the Sanctuary. Properly speaking, the Sanctuary is the name given to the place that protects this tomb.”
“Then…!”
If he got out of the castle of dreams, raced out of the ruin, and cut through the forest, he could rendezvous with Emilia and the others. Even if he didn’t meet Emilia, he ought to be able to meet those dwelling in the Sanctuary and get out of his predicament.
All that meant the elf who’d led him there was indeed a resident of the Sanctuary.
“All of a sudden, I wanna go outside even more. You said you’d send me there, right?”
“Eh? Ahh, I guarantee it… I guarantee it, but I would be very lonely if you simply rushed off like that. Um, is there nothing else you wish to ask me?”
“Sorry, but Emilia should be outside. I wanna link up with her more than I wanna talk with you. Besides…”
Echidna furled her brows in dismay, her words causing Subaru to scratch the tip of his nose as he carried on.
“You don’t know about things on the outside, right? It’s tough saying this after all that sound and fury, but to be honest, there’s not really anything I want to ask you…”
“…Eh? You’re kidding, right? That cannot be. I mean, I am the Witch of Greed, you know? People all over the world seek me to grasp at my knowledge: knights, people of privilege. You sit before me, permitted to ask anything to wish, and you say that?”
Taken back as she was by the unexpected reply, Echidna’s expression distinctly faltered for the first time. The Witch flailed about as she exhausted all the w
ords she could to prevent Subaru from leaving.
“Calm down, let us speak. Certainly, I am ill versed regarding the present era. But in turn, I possess vast knowledge about the older era, to the point I can boast there is nothing I do not know about it. I possess historical truth no one remembers, undiminished after four centuries…and you possess an opportunity to gain that knowledge.”
“But I’m not all that interested in Witches. Even if we talk about them, they’re all dead, and there’s a lot of other things besides that I need to think about…”
“Ehhh…!”
As he made his farewells in earnest, the unsatisfied Echidna’s eyes grew tearful. Their positions had been completely reversed, with Subaru shrugging off the Witch who had felt so oppressive before.
The image of the Witch of Greed had thus been ruined. Without malice, it seemed she was just an ordinary girl.
Certainly, there was no lack of information he wanted to know. He’d like to know about the Witch Factor she’d spoken of, or the Sanctuary there to protect her tomb. Or perhaps, perhaps, perhaps—
“For example, that. Do you know details about the Witch Cult’s Archbishops of the Seven Deadly Sins?”
“Archbishops of the Seven Deadly Sins? Hmm, unfortunately, I do not know the term. Could you tell me about them in more detail?”
“Our positions really are reversed, sheesh… Well, if you don’t know, that’s fine.”
A smile came over Subaru at the sight of Echidna being thrown off—it hid the pain in his chest.
“Yeah, it’s fine.”
He’d hoped. But those hopes had been easily dashed. So there was no point staying there any longer.
If she knew nothing of the archbishops, she knew nothing of their Authorities, the damage they did, or ways to repair it.
—Meaning she didn’t know how he could save Rem.
“Can you send me out already? I’ll come chat with you over tea another time, okay?”
“Is that really a promise you can easily make with a dead person, and a Witch at that…?”
With Subaru in a hurry to make his escape, his words made Echidna sigh, all poison seemingly drawn out of her. Then, in a resigned fashion, she waved an arm, and Subaru felt wind behind him.
When he looked back, a single door had appeared in the world of bottomless darkness and a broken sky.
“Pass through that door, and you shall awaken outside. Goodness, I have never had a tea party such as this.”
“Sorry for not indulging in your hospitality. Incidentally, about this ruin… Can I ask, when I leave the tomb, where should I go to head toward the residents of the Sanctuary?”
“I told you before. I know little about the outside. Quite naturally, I do not know the location of the settlement, either.”
“Man, for a calm, collected know-it-all character, you really come up short…”
He meant to needle her, but Subaru’s shoulders sank at how Echidna amply puffed out her quite average breasts. After that, he raised a hand toward her in lieu of words of departure, thus announcing he was taking his leave.
Though he had been fiercely on guard at the beginning, it was a surprisingly gentle way to end a tea party with a Wit—
“—Now then, since you are heading back from a tea party with a Witch, it is about time I take the compensation due.”
Most improperly, it was a demand tossed toward him at the very, very end.
Subaru, feeling horror as the echo of her words terribly clawed at his spirit, turned his head alone toward her.
Echidna, the Witch, said not in malice, but with nothing more than a quiet, gentle smile—
“…It bears mentioning that I’m a pauper up there with the best of ’em. A Witch’s compensation is not paid in coin. What I seek from you is a pact. My terms are that you are forbidden from speaking to others about what took place at this tea party. You are bound by a similar pact, so it is a simple matter for you, is it not?”
“A similar pact…”
What Echidna described—facts known to him that he was forbidden to divulge to others—it was almost as if she was talking about Return by Death.
“The invitation to the tea party, the Witch Factor taking root… Considering my good fortune in getting to know someone deeply interesting such as yourself, I too have gained greatly. That’s right, I shall grant you one final souvenir…”
Stroking her white hair, Echidna stood up and stretched a pale finger toward Subaru’s chest. For some reason, Subaru found himself gazing at her slow movement, unable to budge an inch.
To a bizarre extent, he could neither reject nor rebuff the finger that seemed to glide toward him.
“I grant thee the qualification to challenge the trial of this Sanctuary.”
“The trial of…the Sanctuary?”
“Even if you do not understand now, you will realize the value this place holds. I wonder what emotions you will bear toward me when that time comes… I very much look forward to finding out.”
Pulling back the finger touching his chest, Echidna gently licked its tip. The gesture was seductive enough to give Subaru a chill, reconfirming in his mind her witchy nature.
However amiable her behavior toward him, however teenage her smiling face, what was before his eyes was—
“You really are a Witch, huh?”
“Yes, it is so. I am a very bad magic user, you see?”
Along with those words, Echidna used that finger to give Subaru’s forehead a very light nudge.
Subaru seemed to fall back, tumbling downward; the next moment, the open door swallowed him whole.
“”
He fell into the darkness. Then the darkness vanished within the light.
Cast out of the dream, the being called Subaru Natsuki floated upward—and outside, his consciousness awakened.
7
The instant Subaru awoke, the first thing he felt was a hard sensation against his cheek.
“…aa, uu…”
Moaning with a half-asleep voice, Subaru became aware that he was lying prone. He blinked several times, and reality poured into his vision, awakening him over the course of several seconds.
Pressing his arms to the ground, he slowly lifted himself up—
“This, is… errr…?”
He brushed off the dirt on his cheek with his fingers and squinted into the darkness. When he looked, Subaru saw that he had fallen inside an old ruin—to be precise, several tens of meters into the corridor leading into it.
To his back was the entrance to the tomb, and it was from there that light entered into his eyes. Thanks to that, his escape route was plain to see, but it made for a pretty crummy ruin exploration.
“Anyway, I’d better get out and hook back up with Emilia and Otto…”
Shaking his heavy head, he placed a hand against the wall, wobbly as he rose to his feet. He had no business inside the ruin. The Sanctuary lay outside. Having gone astray, he needed to be outside to rendezvous with Emilia.
He couldn’t quite put his finger on why he was so certain of that, but—
“I feel like, someone said that to me…”
“Yo. Ya sure got some guts, comin’ straight out from a place like that, outsider.”
“Ah…?”
As he exited the ruin with fragmented thoughts, a voice called out to him the instant his eyes narrowed from the light.
His vision, accustomed to the dark, was hazy. As it gradually adjusted, Subaru found himself looking down at the surrounding landscape from the modestly elevated ruin.
In front of the ruin was a single dragon carriage, and a young male driver with a most pitiable look on his face.
“M-Mr. Natsuki…”
“Otto? What are you doing in a place like… No, before that, where’s Emilia?!”
“Inside the dragon carriage! I-it has been most terrible since that moment! I-I…!!”
When Subaru raised his voice at the unexpected reunion, Otto shouted back even louder. But thanks to
that, Subaru was able to confirm Emilia’s presence, and this made his shoulders sink in relief. Otto was pleading about something, but that concern could wait. The immediate problem was—
“Hey, forget the whiny guy. I come first here, damn it!”
The individual standing right beside the dragon carriage spoke to Subaru with a voice that issued seemingly through clenched teeth. Turning his face toward the speaker, Subaru shrugged.
“What a coincidence. I was just thinking the same thing.”
“Hah! That’s ‘ganglion before you think’ for ya!”
“Gangl… Ah?”
As Subaru knotted his brows at the mystery phrase mixed in with the reply, the other party took a step forward. With a coarse manner of speech and a hostile glint in his eyes, the speaker’s external appearance in no way betrayed Subaru’s first, ferocious impression of him.
He had short, combed-back blond hair and a highly visible white scar on his forehead. There was ferocity in his sharp green eyes, and he was dressed in crude clothing Subaru could only call that of a country bumpkin. For a man, he was fairly short, especially in a stooped posture, but the dense, ghastly aura coursing from his entire body made certain others would not underestimate him due to his small stature.
More than any of those things, the individual had one external feature that set him apart. And that was—
“Hey, are ya shakin’? Well, yer luck definitely ran out. Here ya are in a place ya shouldn’t be, and now I caught ya!”
As the man spoke, his eyes narrowed, and he laughed—with a mouth full of sharp, extremely distinctive fangs.
Subaru had déjà vu. He’d seen a smiling face just like that extremely recently.
“Well, if yer gonna curse yer bad luck, do like ‘Bazomazo swept away right and left’!”
“Wait! Hey, you, listen to us bef—”
“‘Tear and tear but Kalran’s skin’s still blue’… I ain’t listenin’!”
Lending no ear to the voice urging him to stop, the fanged man stepped forward; the next instant, he vanished from sight.
Re:ZERO -Starting Life in Another World-, Vol. 10 Page 10