“The wind is astir… The scents of beasts approach, many of them.”
He looked that way, too, and saw multiple red points of light approaching from deeper in the forest. Based on the number of eyes, there were about five demon beasts running their way.
Ram made a small click of her tongue.
“And we haven’t even found Rem yet…!”
“Well, don’t worry about that. She’s not that far, so we’ll hook up soon enough.”
“How can you be certain of such a thing?”
Subaru shrugged in the face of Ram’s sharp gaze and rebuke.
“Rem’s goal is to wipe out the demon beasts here in the forest, right? As long as I’m here, they’re going to keep coming to try to eat me. That’ll bring Rem running straight to me in time.”
He’d been thinking of it from the beginning. And he’d also thought it strange from the beginning. Why did the demon beasts prefer Subaru as their target for the curse during every loop?
When Subaru repeated those four days, the demon beast always cursed Subaru when they’d met in the village. That wasn’t so much unavoidable fate as the operation of some other compulsion.
Subaru’s existence provoked a reaction from the demon beasts. Subaru had deduced the answer as to why from the exaggerated reactions he’d received from other sources.
“In other words—it’s the stench of the witch.”
Demon beasts were enemies of all mankind created by the witch. And they seemed to be intensely sensitive to Subaru, who carried the scent of the witch. That was no doubt why they’d gone after him and not Ram since they had entered the forest together.
If all it took was a whiff of the witch to compel the demon beasts to appear, he’d make full use of that. He’d lure every demon beast in the forest to put their curses into Subaru, a grand feast that would bring Rem running in after them.
He called it Operation: Subaru Chew Toy.
When he’d previously tried to tell Emilia about Return by Death, Beatrice had made an offhanded comment in the aftermath that gave him the clue he needed to draw up his plan. Apparently, the appearance of the dark cloud had thickened the stench of the witch hovering around him.
That haze was probably related to the witch in some way. Somehow, the scent of the witch around Subaru was related to the power behind Return by Death—but it was not the time to think about such things.
All he had was anguish he could not speak of to anyone, ferocious pain without anyone who could hear him complain.
In the face of fast-approaching danger, the sheer exhilaration of turning the tables on the hand Fate had dealt him made the corners of Subaru’s lips warp into a malevolent grin.
—Yeah, I’ve finally shot an arrow off at Fate for putting this loop together!
Cheering inside his mind, he re-gripped his one-handed sword, positioning himself to face the oncoming tide. And to Ram, who stood by his side, he stated in a high-pitched voice, “So, since you’re super reliable in a fight, please and thank you for that!”
“After this, when you look back objectively at what you said, please beg me to kill you.”
A sigh trailed behind Ram’s voice as she slammed a Blade of Wind into the throng approaching from the front.
—The cast had been changed for round two in the battle against the demon beasts.
5
He kicked off from the ground and leaped forward.
He trampled on the large, undulating root beneath him, slamming his feet into it as hard as he could.
He had been truly mistaken to think that there was no sure footing when moving through forests and mountains without any proper roads. All he had to do was run down the natural game trails and not hesitate in his judgment as to where his heels should touch down. Trusting the stoutness of his shoes as he stepped forward made a huge difference in progress.
His breath was ragged. The sweat on his brow was getting into his eyes, so he made painful blinks to give the sweat somewhere to go.
He was sprinting full force, tilting his body forward to reduce wind resistance even the tiniest bit. But the sounds of his pursuers’ footsteps did not diminish. They rang out right beside him, as if mocking Subaru’s attempt to escape. The chances of getting away were virtually nil.
His lungs hurt, and he gasped as if desperate for oxygen. Subaru’s mouth was open in an unsightly fashion. And to top it off—
“What a horrid face… I shall tell your home village on you.”
“I’ll remember that later, damn it!!”
Subaru immediately regretted his unnecessary use of oxygen as he continued to carry Ram in his arms as he ran.
About ten minutes had passed since he’d used the stench of the witch for Operation: Subaru Chew Toy. As Subaru had planned, the demon beast pack had gathered around them. Amid exceptionally harsh combat, the two of them finally…had no option but to run through the forest for their lives.
“And I believed you could fight them, geez!”
“I did fight them. My endurance simply didn’t hold up as well as I had hoped.”
“What about being ready to cross a dangerous bridge there?!”
“It was a bridge too far. We would have fallen before crossing it.”
Ram had a comeback for everything Subaru had to offer.
Her mana had been depleted from repeated combat; she wasn’t even in any state to properly move her limbs.
The demon beasts had treated Subaru’s release of the witch’s stench as a written invitation, arriving one after another, their numbers soon exceeding anything they could handle. The only word he could muster was regret.
Ram had used her wind magic to take out some seventeen fiends. Things had gone swimmingly until that point, but Ram suddenly lost her strength and collapsed. Subaru, scared witless right beside her, picked Ram up, carried her, and started running for the hills—
“Nothing changes with you… Still, I appreciate your inability to prepare.”
“You’re cheeky for a girl being carried around! And don’t talk too much! Looks like you bit your tongue…and my strength’s…not…gonna…hold…!”
Subaru could boast athletic ability that scored well above the norm, but that was all indoor stuff. Outdoors, his stamina issues were substantial. He’d never dreamed of running a marathon back in school.
Even with his pathetic stamina, he wrung out everything he could in that life-and-death situation. That said, it was only a matter of time until his endurance ran dry…
No doubt the demon beasts pursuing them were well aware that Subaru was at the end of his strength. They’d nipped at his heels as if they truly enjoyed preying on the weak, which further fueled his flight instincts.
“Looks like it’s finally time to unleash the power hidden within m—Ow!”
Subaru let out a painful yelp as demon beast fangs sank into his right shoulder.
One of the bastards toying with him had run ahead of them. The sharp pain buried deep in his shoulder and thrust into his brain, making his head feel like it was about to burst. He desperately twisted his body in an attempt to shake the beast off him—
“—Barusu!”
“Oh cra—!”
Right after Ram spoke from within his arms, the forest suddenly opened wide, and Subaru’s feet were slicing through the air.
His feet clawed at the sky as a floating feeling assaulted him, as if every internal organ were rising inside him. The next moment, his heels dug into the slope; Subaru and Ram lost their balance as they slid down together.
“Bastards tricked me…!”
He should never have underestimated them as mere beasts. Even though repeated contact with them had given Subaru an appreciation for their intelligence, when push came to shove, he’d been unable to shake his impression of them as just animals.
As a result, the seemingly viable path he’d followed had literally led him off a cliff.
“Damn it all!!”
Subaru’s yell made his throat trembl
e as they slid down at an even sharper angle. He held Ram tighter as he thrust the drawn sword in his left hand into the cliff.
“Owwww, ow, ow, ow!”
His left side scraped against the ground as the sword he’d thrust into the cliff twisted, stopping them from sliding farther. When he looked, the cliff ended a short distance below; had he been a single second slower, they would have surely met their deaths.
“Whoaa!”
When he looked up, several demon beasts pursuing them were rolling down beside them.
The beasts, moving with too much force to stop, yelped like domesticated dogs as they vanished off the edge of the precipice. Their bodies mercilessly smashed against the sharp, rocky ravine below; the sound of their bones breaking reached even Subaru’s eardrums.
“Ah, we came very close to needing condolences ourselves…”
“Arm…hurts…!”
Ram complained as Subaru’s arm tightened around her.
Her body was light, but when added to Subaru’s own weight, the burden on the sword thrust into the ground, and on Subaru as he gripped it, was more than two hundred pounds. His limit would not be long in coming.
“It will of course be dangerous if we fall down the cliff. Can you climb, Barusu?”
“I’d love to tough it out…but the demon beasts up there are still a problem,” he said as he put more strength into his left arm. He let the blade, thrust in at an angle, support their weight as he tried to somehow get in a more stable position, when…
“—Ah,” both said together.
The same moment, the high-pitched sound of steel breaking rang around the area.
The blade thrust into the cliff snapped, leaving the end of the sword stuck in the slope.
He hastily thrust the warped blade into the ground anew, but the dull edge didn’t penetrate very deep.
He clung to the slope with all his body, resigned to however scraped up he might become, but friction alone could not slow two people. His efforts proved fruitless as the blade popped out. They began to fall once more.
“Aaaaa! We’re done for—!!”
“—You owe me for this, Barusu!!”
Subaru fell headfirst, every hair on his body standing up as he recalled flinging himself over a cliff. Even so, he never abandoned his duty as a man, continuing to hold Ram in his arms to try to shield her from the fall.
Ram let him handle the physical work and twisted in his arms to aim her hands toward the ground.
“—El Fulla!”
Mana welled up in Ram as she chanted, causing a powerful gust of wind to erupt at their estimated landing point. As they fell straight down, Subaru’s body hit the ascending air current and rode on the pressure underneath them; he managed to get them upright again as their fall slowed further.
We can do this, he judged while the world spun all around them. He focused all his strength into his legs, biting down hard enough to split his teeth as he endured the impact of landing.
“Nguuuuuuh, aaaaaa—we made it!!”
—They had endured.
He labored to leap onto his numb, incredibly unhappy legs as he looked up at the cliff from which they had fallen. He was aghast at the height—over thirty feet, the rough equivalent of jumping out from the fourth floor of his high school. That, combined with the hardness of the ground, made their very survival quite a feat.
“You totally turned into my Buddha there, Ram. If it wasn’t for your wind magic there, we’d be—”
It was when Subaru tried to express his gratitude for Ram saving his life that he realized she wasn’t moving within his arms.
Ram’s head drooped as a thin line of blood trickled down from her nostril. Her eyes were closed, her breaths shallow, and the only sounds she made were painful moans.
“Ah, er, Ram? Uh, geez, this is bad.”
He gently rocked her body and called out to her, but Ram made no reply.
From the beginning, she’d been exhausted from using Clairvoyance and fighting the demon beasts. No doubt Ram had really overdone it with that spell, putting her mind in a precarious state.
“Ah, crap. My timing really is shitty…”
Subaru cursed his own impulsiveness as he re-embraced Ram more carefully. He laid her down beside him, awkwardly slid the broken blade into its sheath, and looked up.
Even the demon beasts couldn’t leap down the edge of a sheer precipice after them. Surely they’d circle around to resume their pursuit. He’d hoped that would give them the advantage in the meantime.
“Oh, come on, you’ve gotta be kidding me!”
The very moment Subaru looked above his head, a large number of rocks flowed down the slope that they’d barely survived falling from—and riding atop them was a pack of demon beasts, with a pup deploying its mana leading the way.
Subaru recognized the demon beast pup: He was absolutely certain it was the one that had first cursed him in the village, and the one that Rem had delivered a powerful blow to when it chased the children the night before.
Seeing the way the other demon beasts followed it, as if it led that whole pack in spite of its size, Subaru couldn’t keep a dry laugh away.
“I’m starting to hate you, Lady Witch—that perfume of yours is overkill.”
Duly lodging his complaint, Subaru checked on his numb legs as he prepared to flee once more. He prayed that the demon beasts would show them contempt and not pounce the instant they landed—
“Er, wha…?”
A moment before Subaru started running, he tilted his head, sensing that something was off.
The demon beasts sliding down the cliff looked wrong. They began to flinch while on the rolling rocks, and the instant they hit the ground under the cliff, they began to scatter in all directions.
“Huh? Uh, I’m over here, guys…?”
The sight of them scattering like little spiders was a bit much for him to take in.
The heck’s going on here…? The moment after he thought it, the explosion atop the cliff brought the answer.
“—Heh?”
When he looked up again, the change atop the cliff surprised Subaru, but he instantly understood.
—A human silhouette now stood on the precipice far above them.
It was a girl wearing a servant’s outfit, her blood-drenched ball and chain held low as she glared down the incline with eyes that had lost all trace of sanity.
The moment his eyes met that murderous gaze, Subaru broke out in a cold sweat as he experienced a bad feeling like no other.
In an instant, the demon leaped off the high cliff to land on the ground far below.
Subaru’s breath caught. Here he was, deep in the forest surrounded by demon beasts, face-to-face with a demon girl, one arm around a girl he had to protect at all costs—and he had arrived at the final stage wielding nothing but a broken sword.
“This is just…a tiny bit unfair, don’t you think?”
His plea died on the breeze blowing through the forest, unheard.
It was, as they say, a do-or-die situation—
6
Ram and Subaru had entered the forest of the demon beasts fully aware of the danger, but since they had cooperated together to take down the beasts, they had arrived deep in the forest without a scratch. The idea was to find Rem, who would be miraculously unharmed, and lecture her for being a loose cannon in a safe, peaceful, happy reunion. And, using Subaru’s knack for drawing the demon beasts to him, they’d use Ram’s and Rem’s sisterly powers to take down the demon beasts one after another, liberating Subaru from the curse. End of story.
“That’s how I imagined it, but, yeah…”
In a pathetic voice, Subaru mused about how his smooth-sailing scenario was now in tatters.
Subaru didn’t see a single shred of friendship in Rem’s eyes as she stood before him. All he sensed was pitch-black bloodlust.
Though he couldn’t be sure, she didn’t look like she was in any mental condition for them to talk things through.
—That very thought brought a strained smile to Subaru as he realized Rem viewed him as her enemy. What the hell am I doing all the way out here, then?
“Heya, Remrin, it’s your pal Subaru! Your buddy!”
Unaware that his face had gone stiff, Subaru nonetheless managed to call out with a cheerful voice. Perhaps he thought that calling to Rem might bring her back to her senses, but…
Rem turned her head toward him, locking on with a look so sharp that he could practically hear it.
“If you give me steamy looks like that, I’m gonna get singed…”
Subaru felt the entire weight of her attention on him. Perhaps he had failed. Rem’s dreadful appearance certainly warranted that thought.
The familiar servant’s outfit on her was fully covered in blood spatter. A coat of fresh blood dampened the dried blood below it in a gruesome two-tone pattern, sporting blackish red and vivid red.
Her nails were long and sharp enough to rival those of the demon beasts—perhaps an effect of her horned form. Under her right hand was her iron ball for “self-defense” and a pool of blood and little bits of flesh, an exceptionally ominous combination.
He’d somewhat expected to find Rem like this, so he was able to keep hold of his senses, but if Subaru had met this Rem in a dark alley, it was safe to say he’d be 100 percent certain to piss his pants.
That was how terrible Rem was in her ghoulish madness—and yet, in the midst of it all, the white horn protruding from her forehead had maintained its purity and beauty. To Subaru, even though the horn was the very symbol of Rem’s malevolent demon state, it was the only thing that seemed out of place in contrast to the rest.
But the circumstances did not permit Subaru such leisurely thoughts.
When he looked, he saw scattered demon beasts waiting behind the shadows of boulders and among the trees of the forest. No doubt the beasts were watching their every move.
He’d be lunch the instant he showed them the slightest opening.
Re:ZERO -Starting Life in Another World- Vol. 3 Page 16