—With that, Echidna smiled adorably.
Her fleeting, snow-like hair rustled, her cheeks faintly red from excitement, standing there with the look of a maiden at her most vulnerable, fresh from offering her confession, waiting with all her heart for Subaru’s reply.
With upturned eyes, she gazed toward him, Subaru’s face reflected clearly in her black eyes. Subaru slowly shifted his gaze from them, looking at the other Witches gathered around. The five Witches besides Echidna were each in various states, watching and awaiting the result of Echidna’s confession in their own way.
Sekhmet, languidly; Carmilla, disinterestedly; Daphne, with a repulsive smile; Typhon, tilting her head with a mystified look; for some reason, Minerva alone had a face ready to burst into tears.
It was funny. He was tempted to laugh. —Not that he actually did.
“Echidna.”
“What is it?”
“You’ll be…using me?”
She’d be using him. Such words were repeated over and over as Echidna had spoken.
Echidna nodded unreservedly in response.
“I will. You should simply use me back. That is the purpose of our pact. If you wish to rebuke me for using it as a means of not letting go of you, I shall gladly hear it. This is the truth, after all.”
“It’s not as if I didn’t think about it. That’s how relationships based on pros and cons work. I expected—I was resolved to your intentions not being a hundred percent benevolent. But.”
In front of Echidna, Subaru covered his face with his hands. He turned his face toward the sky in a simple…lament.
“But this is just too much…”
“”
Echidna had an aura of bewilderment at the tenor of Subaru’s trembling voice. That settled it.
Everything that had accumulated between their first chance encounter and that very moment lost its color and collapsed.
Across their introduction, the tea party upon their reunion, the false classroom in the Trial, and the obstructions in reality—her presence and her words had saved the brokenhearted Subaru many times over. It was those bonds that had brought him to the determination to form a pact.
—Cruelly, all those things had come back to mock the foolishness of Subaru Natsuki.
“I do not really understand what your problem is. If you are to arrive at the optimal result, you must resign yourself to a certain degree of injury. That is your decision to make, something I believe I have already acknowledged, so…”
“Me resigning to… Not that I’ve resigned to it, but that’s dancing to your tune, ain’t it?”
“Unsurprisingly, you find that hard to accept. In the end, it is you who must draw the conclusion. I am merely aiding you to do so. If you wish to place the responsibility for that with me, that would put me in a bind. That’s a horrible thing to do, don’t you think?”
Pursing her lips, Echidna made a pouty face as she protested. It seemed like a childish display of emotion, out of place enough to make one laugh, but it only served to deepen Subaru’s misgivings.
Those doubts had been there from the beginning. Now they had only grown stronger. She acted so unwitchy, and many times, the gap between the subjective and the objective had instilled ease rather than discomfort.
However, at the present, that foreboding he felt strengthened, enlarged, and took definable form—
“—There’s no sense of seriousness anywhere in your attitude. Everything you do and say feels…superficial.”
“”
“When you laugh, even when you’re angry, your attitude is frivolous and childish. Even right now, when it’s time to be angry, you’re just pouting… It’s not an issue of being open-minded or something. That attitude of yours…your attitude is strange. I…mistook that for you being someone easy to get along with, but…”
“”
“That’s not actually it. Echidna, you’re—someone who can’t understand other people’s emotions.”
His fleeting encounters with Echidna to that point, the words they had exchanged, all of them changed to the color of sepia.
He’d believed all those traits made her likable, but as a result of those shallow displays of emotion, he’d come to know better.
And faced with such disparaging words, Echidna’s expression still did not change. It was not the proper response.
“This is another place you should be getting angry, see.”
“…Is that so? I should have taken this moment to make my voice coarser and shower insults upon you, then? I see, I will make a note of that. If we should meet again, I shall put that knowledge to good use.”
When Echidna replied with those words, all emotion vanished from the Witch’s face.
All emotions worthy of the name vanished, and a Witch appeared in their stead. For the very first time, Subaru truly set eyes upon the Witch of Greed.
“”
In front of Subaru, cowed into silence, Echidna snapped her dry fingers. As she did so, the purportedly destroyed hill and plain were restored, and the chair and table smashed to pieces returned to their original form.
The tea party had seven chairs arranged. Having provided one for Subaru and each of the Witches, Echidna closed one eye.
“First, would you sit? I would like to speak a little more about pacts.”
“…In a situation like this, you’re still optimistic I’ll form a pact with you?”
“Don’t tell me you would reject me over such a minor difference in outlook? I cannot call being temporarily carried away by emotion a wise thing. You should make the realistic, rational choice.”
Echidna’s sound statement made Subaru close his eyes and breathe deeply over and over.
Echidna’s words rang true. Subaru was being emotional. He was being swallowed up by the course of events.
In the end, Echidna had done nothing more than conceal her true intentions. He could believe that all the other parts were sincere and that she would act in the manner she had claimed. Forming a pact here was a reliable key to the future.
The key was in the palm of his hand. All he had to do was to clench it—
“I just remembered that there was something I wanted to ask if I met you again.”
“…Mm, I wonder what?”
“I feel like if I hear the answer to this, I’ll be able to decide.”
Echidna was waiting for Subaru to present his question.
And so Subaru asked the Witch a question relating to Echidna that, during the loop that had begun with the Sanctuary, remained a mystery. Namely—
“—You know Beatrice, don’t you, Echidna?”
“Of course I know her. I am deeply related to that girl’s birth. What of it?”
There was nothing hidden in Echidna’s reply. She simply could not guess what Subaru’s question was getting at.
He closed his eyes. On the back of his eyelids, he traced his last glimpse of the girl as she vanished. There was nothing sadder than the thin expression of relief on her face.
Subaru had been unable to save Beatrice from the centuries she had spent in loneliness. When he’d shouted to the girl at the time, her final smile of relief was seared forever into his eyes. That was why—
“Beatrice, has been waiting all this time for That Person to arrive, according to the pact. That pact has to be one you made with her. You tied her to that mansion. That’s about right?”
“I did not specify the place, but it is indeed I who commanded her to protect the archive of forbidden books and wait until someone came.”
“Then…then who is this That Person? What has to be done to free her?”
For four centuries, Beatrice had continued to await That Person, alone in the archive of forbidden books.
A promise had made her do so. A pact had strengthened her isolation. Even Beatrice did not know who That Person was. Subaru hadn’t found any clue, either.
But Echidna, the Witch who had commanded her to wait for That Person, surely knew the ans
w—
“I wonder, just who might it be?”
“—H-uh?”
“Er, I am not making some kind of joke. I think that from the bottom of my heart. Who do you think That Person who Beatrice waits for might be?”
As Subaru gaped at her, Echidna shrugged her shoulders, appearing genuinely mystified. Subaru was aghast at her demeanor, but he immediately shook his head. He couldn’t accept this.
“Y-you’re telling me you don’t know who Beatrice is waiting for, either?”
“Mm, I do not. I know not who That Person Beatrice awaits might be.”
“Why n…? You’re the one who told her to wait, right? So how can you not…?”
Subaru was dumbfounded at the one thread he clung to having been snipped like it was nothing.
That Person Beatrice had been commanded to wait for had to exist. Was it even possible that Echidna did not know? Or was some third part going to suddenly pop up and—
“You are wrong, Subaru Natsuki. You misunderstand. It is most certainly I who made Beatrice promise to wait for That Person. But you have a fundamental misunderstanding about this.”
“‘Fundamental misunderstanding’…?”
“You misunderstand the reason behind the pact I formed with Beatrice. You believe I made Beatrice promise for the sake of handing the archive of forbidden books to That Person, I take it?”
He didn’t understand what Echidna’s assertion meant. It was natural, even obvious, to take it that way.
She’d been told to hold on to something and to wait for someone. Therefore, the objective was obviously for her to hand that thing over.
However, Echidna met Subaru’s thought process with a sideways shake of her head.
“That was not my objective. You see…I made Beatrice promise to wait for That Person because I want to know who that girl selects to be That Person.”
.
.
What?
“That girl, you see, was created for a particular purpose. But I decided to use her for a different purpose than that originally intended. That is why I sent that girl far from the Sanctuary. Since a substitute objective was required, I granted the archive of forbidden books to that girl and gave that empty girl a purpose for living: to administer my knowledge and to await That Person who would someday come. I did not set a time limit. After all, it is not an issue with one set answer to begin with. As arranged, that girl’s life was linked to it, enabling her to live outside of the Sanctuary. And I was able to engage in a new inquiry: that girl’s choice. Logical, isn’t it? Of course, spending four centuries without selecting anyone is one result in itself. Having been unable to comfortably select anyone she had met to date, continuing to obey the pact while full of worry, and desiring her own death is another result.”
“And what do you think about that?”
“—? I think that it is a marvelous thing?”
As if asked a question to which the answer was obvious, Echidna tilted her head without a single hint of shame.
Her reply, her demeanor, and the expression on the girl in the back of Subaru’s mind gave him his answer.
He’d decided. He understood. He grasped it, loud and clear.
—Then and there, he would confront her and make perfectly clear exactly who was mistaken.
“Echidna, you are…a Witch.”
“”
“You are a monster beyond human knowledge, beyond human understanding.”
He told her. He voiced the reply that had spawned within him.
He would reject the hand he had once decided to accept. This time, he would decide for himself who he would reach out to with his hand.
“I…I can’t take your hand. I’ve decided whose I will take.”
“”
“Your inquisitive mind, the words you spoke without malice have bound a girl for four hundred years. —I’ve decided. I’m choosing that girl’s hand. I can’t leave her with you.”
This was a farewell. He was brushing away the hand of the one who once surely would have become his partner, with whom he would have walked forward and drawn a future together.
He’d go wipe away that final expression off the girl traced on the back of his eyelids.
—She’d been afraid of death, her face ready to break into tears, but having protected Subaru, her expression was one of relief.
He would save Beatrice, who had grieved over Subaru’s death. He’d decided.
“”
That decision made Echidna narrow her eyes.
Countless thoughts ran through her black pupils; she was perhaps meaning to say something to Subaru that would make him change his decision. However, before she could, a change arrived.
A sudden change desired by none present had occurred.
“—So she’s come.”
“H-hey…this doesn’t…concern me anymore…so, ahhh…”
“At a troublesome time, a troublesome girl has come to make trouble, sigh.”
“Ahaaa. My stomach’s reaaally, reaaally throbbing. We really have the full lineup now, huhhh?”
The spectating Witches displayed various reactions to the change taking place.
One bit her lip; one clutched her head; one gave a sigh; one licked her lips.
The Witches’ gazes shifted behind Subaru—and from there, an overwhelming, impossible-to-ignore presence sprang forth.
As Subaru was facing her, Echidna caught sight of “it” straight in front of her. Her eyes widened slightly, and within them, Subaru saw a complex vortex of emotions—be it before or after her true nature had been exposed, this was the first time he saw hatred in them.
“”
Seeing that hatred made him belatedly turn around. For a second, he hesitated, and then matching breath and heartbeat, he moved.
Looking behind him, Subaru’s own eyes finally beheld the new arrival.
From her black dress, long hair, and white skin, he imagined she must have a most beautiful face—yet though he was certain of this, he saw not the Witch’s face but a veil of impenetrable darkness that covered it.
Greed, Wrath, Lust, Sloth, Gluttony, Pride—with each of these attending the tea party, the seventh Witch, Jealousy, had finally joined them.
“Ohhh! It’s Tela! Wow, it sure has been a while!”
Only one, the child Witch, greeted the Witch of Jealousy with a wave of her hand.
—The Witches’ Tea Party had only one invited guest. Having become a banquet, it hurtled toward its final act.
AFTERWORD
Hey, everyone! I, Tappei Nagatsuki, also known as the Mouse-Colored Cat, am deeply indebted to you all!
Thank you for purchasing and reading Re:ZERO, Volume 12! Sorry for delivering this greeting in smaller characters than usual. Er, those who have read the book should understand, but this time, we really, really packed every page, line, and sentence that we could!
Seriously, not a single line was wasted! This might have been my most nerve-racking work to date!
Now then, inside this twelfth volume, which was such a ferocious battle for the author, I must say that Subaru had a pretty hard time, too. Those of you who have been with me since the Web novel probably waited a long time for this, when unescapable consequences for Return by Death are finally touched upon.
Re:ZERO -Starting Life in Another World-, Vol. 12 Page 27