“I was surely born for this very moment…”
“What are you sa…?”
Saying, but his mouth wouldn’t form the word.
Something hit the back of Subaru’s neck, and it seemed like the whole world had turned upside down. Rem had stretched out an arm, as if to hug him back, and delivered a chop to the back of his head. Strength drained from Subaru’s body, and he crumpled against Rem.
“Re…m… What did you…?”
Not only was the swaying of the dragon carriage affecting his vision, but it was swallowing his fading consciousness as well. Subaru desperately clung to Rem as it became difficult to even hold his head aloft.
Rem gazed affectionately at Subaru as he struggled. Then, she gently brought her lips to Subaru’s ear, whispering as if to reach the last remaining shred of his consciousness.
“It’s all right, Subaru. I will always be watching you from behind.”
You don’t need to do anything. Just always be right there behind me.
Those had been Subaru’s words to Rem on the morning of their departure.
Hence, just as he had said, she now stood behind him—as his rear guard.
“No…I never intended…”
“Subaru. I—”
His mind fell away.
It grew distant and went white.
For a moment, he felt like someone was embracing him strongly.
He felt something soft touch his forehead and then immediately depart.
And that was the last thing he knew.
7
—.
.
Ah.
He could feel the repeated rocking and jolting of the carriage, as well as something bumping into his head over and over. Gradually, it called to Subaru’s blanked-out mind, bringing him back to reality.
He tried to lift his head and sit up, but the rocking was fighting him. His hand was slippery, and he was about to fall onto the floor headfirst once more, but this was averted because something heavy was pressing down on his belly.
The pressure on his gut came from something hard. When his hand touched it, he knew from the texture that it was money of some sort, and the memories from just before his consciousness faded rushed from back of his mind.
“—Rem?!”
“Mr. Natsuki?! You’re awake?!”
Subaru cast aside the bag of traveling money on his stomach, remaining seated and leaning back on his hands as he looked around. The world was still mired in darkness, but the sound of violent shaking told him that he was still on the dragon carriage.
And noticing that Subaru was up, Otto turned his head to check on him. Subaru was trying to get up when Otto raised his voice, still looking back from the driver’s seat.
“Please do not move! You hit your head and the carriage’s blessing has been gone for some time. Even now, the land dragon is running with all its strength; I have no time to be concerned about you, Mr. Natsuki!”
“Never mind any of that! Rem, what happened to Rem?!”
Shouting back, Subaru searched every corner of the driver’s seat for the girl. Without the wagon, the dragon carriage was very cramped. Anyone would understand in an instant that there was no need to search.
Yet even so, until he checked for himself, he just couldn’t accept that she wasn’t there.
“Answer me, Otto. What happened to Rem…?!”
“That young lady…”
Realizing that Subaru’s voice was rough, agitated enough that he might pounce at any moment, Otto no doubt hesitated to reply because he knew how dangerous things were.
“…disembarked from our dragon carriage to engage the White Whale…so that we could have a chance to escape.”
This told Subaru that the exchange just before he’d lost consciousness was no dream or illusion but fact.
“—”
Having dragged the answer out of the man, Subaru sucked in his breath but once. Then, he said, “Turn back.”
“…Huh?”
“I said, turn back. Rem—we have to save her! Turn back right now!”
Subaru leaped into the narrow driver’s seat and grabbed Otto by his collar. Confused and still occupied with controlling the land dragon, Otto was unable to respond to Subaru’s act of violence. His face went pale as his collar was grabbed.
“A-are you serious?! Turn back… Turn back and do what?! Did you not see how terrifying that monster is?! It’s suicide!”
“I’m telling you to go back to where we saw the monster so we can save Rem, damn it!!”
When Otto refused his command, a vein bulged on Subaru’s forehead as he shouted in anger.
The menace of the White Whale had been burned into Subaru’s very eyes. The giant creature swam through the air faster than a land dragon could run; a single, casual slap of its tail could rend a carriage asunder. Even within the blinding mist, it unerringly located its prey; even Rem’s magic hadn’t inflicted any damage.
Without doubt, it was the largest and mightiest of all the foes he had seen since arriving in this other world. Compared to the menace it posed, dealing with Elsa, classified as a human being, and the pack of countless Urugarum was far easier to plan for.
But he couldn’t even dream of a way to defeat a monster on that scale.
“And Rem couldn’t, either… We can’t just leave her. If we do that…!”
Subaru was well aware of how strong Rem was in her Oni state. But his familiarity with her abilities meant he could plainly state that it meant nothing before the might of the White Whale.
If he left Rem behind, he would lose her for certain. Then everything would be pointless. Then there would be no meaning in Subaru surviving. Rem was an irreplaceable part of the future Subaru desired.
If she wasn’t there, Subaru would lose sight of even his own self. He would have no one to accept him. Subaru needed her to give him affirmation.
“I won’t let her sacrifice herself to buy time! Turn back right now, Otto! If you don’t…”
“Have you lost your mind?!”
However, Otto’s angry shout interrupted Subaru’s plea. Still grasping Otto’s collar, he felt a squeeze on the back of his wrist; in the next moment, he was slammed against the driver’s seat back first.
“Agah!”
“You think you can force a traveling merchant tearing down a highway without a blessing? You underestimate me!”
With Subaru facedown, Otto twisted the wrist in his hand, straining Subaru’s shoulder to its limit—still grasping the reins with his other hand all the while.
“At any rate, calm down! Look at yourself. What can you do in a state like this? Do you plan to put to waste the feelings that girl left behind?”
“Don’t you talk about Rem! You left her… You left Rem to die! You have no right to talk about her! Turn back! Save Rem right now…!”
“Ahh, goodness! You’re not listening! Please regain your composure!”
Subaru chewed Otto out as he writhed, struggling to get his pinned arm loose. Meanwhile, Otto gazed at the road ahead as the land dragon ran down the center.
“You still don’t understand how terrifying the White Whale is?! There are many tales of those who tried to kill it, ever since it descended upon the world centuries ago! Don’t you get it?!”
Misery clouded Otto’s face as he ranted at the obstinate Subaru.
“They couldn’t kill it, even with hundreds challenging it all at once! We don’t even have weapons or power to fight with, so what can we do?! Stand before it and rescue the girl?! We can’t do that! There’s no way!”
“Shut up already! I’ve heard all that bef—”
“Then it should be obvious! Even when the Kingdom of Lugunica assembled a great expeditionary force to quell it, the monster killed the last Sword Saint! We can’t beat it!”
Otto’s face trembled with bitter regret as he unwillingly confessed the truth. Otto, too, held great rage toward the White Whale that would never fade. But even so, the menace of the Whi
te Whale that stirred his anger was untouchable for man.
To teach the ignorant Subaru the error of his ways, Otto had to force himself to acknowledge the enormity of the White Whale, experiencing heartbreaking pain in the process.
“It killed…a Sword Saint…?”
As Otto bared his soul, a part of the story Subaru had never heard before took the wind from his sails. Sword Saint—that was the title granted to the most powerful human being Subaru had laid eyes upon since being summoned to that world. To Subaru, it was the very symbol of strength without equal.
It was not for certain that the previous Sword Saint could not boast the same strength as Reinhard, the epitome of “The Mightiest of All.” But if the person bearing a title equal to Reinhard was someone with comparable power, and the White Whale killed that person…
“It’s stronger than Reinhard…?”
A monster surpassing the mightiest of all beings could only be called the worst of all calamities.
In short order, Subaru lost the baseless feeling of urgency pressing against his spine. Without the thing pushing him forward, Subaru realized that he lacked the strength to even sit up.
“What am I doing…? This ain’t the time to be lying down on the j…”
He wanted to save Rem. He wanted to rescue her. If he didn’t turn back now, that wish could not be granted. Yet, even though his heart understood, none of the will to fight reached to his limbs. His soul was too weak.
Otto released Subaru from the hold, and with pity in his voice, he said, “I am weak, and so are you. That is why we cannot save her—we cannot hold a candle to her strength.”
—But deep down, Rem wasn’t strong, either.
Even though Subaru knew that, surely had always known that, he could say nothing.
He hung his head as the shaking dragon carriage jostled his body. The land dragon continued forging ahead straight through the night mist.
Rem remained behind them, abandoned as the dragon carriage grew distant, pulling Subaru farther and farther from her.
“—”
He stayed bent over like that as time passed—maybe five minutes, maybe ten.
“Mr. Natsuki, that’s…”
Otto, having made the land dragon run in silence until then, seemed to doubt his own eyes as he called out to Subaru. Subaru lifted his head and clawed his way to sit beside Otto on the driver’s seat, looking in the same direction—and found a light flickering amid the darkness.
“There is mist in the way, but…that is the light of a crystal lamp!”
“We made it…out of the mist…?”
“Even if we have, we are still on the highway at night, so any light is unnatural. It’s probably someone who was caught in the mist, just like we were…!”
As if to support Otto’s deduction, the other party seemed to have noticed them, too. About half a minute later, a dragon carriage, and the man driving it, emerged from the mist.
“F-finally someone…! Hey, this is just mist, right?! Don’t tell me this is the White Whale?!”
The man in his prime was frothing at the corners of his lips as he desperately shouted, falling into a state of terror. When he saw Subaru and Otto in the night mist, he must have clung to the hope that they were saviors of some sort. Tensely, he tried to deny the obvious, but Otto shook his head.
“I’m afraid that it is. We have already encountered the whale ourselves. Fortunately, we should have shaken it off by now, but until one leaves the mist, you never know where it will appear.”
“F-for real…?! Ahh, this is terrible. Why, why did this happen to me…?”
After a sidelong glance at the man clutching his head, lost in his personal lament, Subaru glared at Otto, seated beside him—his use of the word fortunately sounded like Otto had already shed his guilt at leaving Rem behind.
“Otto, watch what you say.”
“What is it, Mr. Natsuki?”
“I’m telling you not to make light of things. ‘Fortunately’…? That ain’t funny. What do you think Rem went through when she…?”
As far as leaving Rem was concerned, Subaru and Otto stood in the exact same place. Despite that, Subaru was angry when he thought about Rem—an effort to assuage his own feelings of guilt.
Subaru understood. He’d understood all along. The idea that Rem, left behind, would stand before the White Whale, exercising her wits, and survive—it was nothing but a fantasy, not even wishful thinking.
There, inside that mist on the third time around, Rem had died—again—to save him…
“Rem? Who is that?”
His thoughts of Rem’s tragic resolve were undermined with shocking ease.
“—Huh?”
“Er, I mean, who is this Rem? There was no one by that name among the traveling merchants who scattered… Of whom are you speaking?”
Otto tilted his head, not understanding what Subaru had meant.
To Subaru, that casual treatment toward her existence was like trampling mud all over her noble spirit.
—He swung his fist into the side of Otto’s face at full force.
Instantly, the reins communicated the chaos atop the vehicle to the land dragon, resulting in the dragon carriage swerving violently to the right. Having lost his footing, Subaru crashed backward onto the driver’s seat as the man he’d just struck hit the seat on his side.
“Wh-what was that for?!”
“Don’t mess with me!”
Unbelievable, said Otto’s wide-open eyes in response to Subaru’s act of violence, but Otto’s words and actions were just as unbelievable to Subaru.
“What the hell are you saying…?! Asking who Rem is? She’s the girl who stayed behind so we could get away! Don’t mess with me! Do you have a death wish…?!”
“I’m telling you, I don’t understand what you’re saying!! You’re just spouting strange things all of a sudden… Did seeing the White Whale drive you mad?!”
Even in the face of Subaru’s accusation, Otto proclaimed his own innocence.
Subaru’s field of vision was dyed crimson by fierce, irrepressible emotions. The passage of every second felt agonizingly slow as the bloodlust seething through him commanded him to snap the slender neck of the man before him. And just as his hands stretched out to wring the life out of the ingrate—
The man in the dragon carriage alongside them, in shock as he saw the angry quarrel on the verge of escalating to murder, shouted to try and stop them.
“What are you two doing?! This isn’t the time to argue! We have to get out of the m—”
But his voice did not reach the two and was lost in the heat of the moment.
It was man’s next action after he spoke that broke up the ugly dispute.
“Getting out of the mist and running from the White Whale comes first, doesn’t—?”
The man was continuing his realistic, heartfelt logic. Behind him, the dragon carriage was sucked into the giant mouth of the White Whale, vanishing from Subaru’s and Otto’s field of vision in the span of a single second.
The head of the White Whale turned upward, swallowing the dragon carriage and land dragon whole in a single, enormously weighty bite.
As wood and steel were crunched together, the land dragon let out a death cry as its flesh was ground between the millstone-like teeth. The great scream and the sound of its annihilation drowned out the voice of the man, no doubt similarly turned to mincemeat.
“Wh…y—?”
The silent approach of the enormous creature shocked both Subaru and Otto beyond words. Otto’s knees trembled as he beheld the awesome spectacle of the White Whale once more; Subaru’s eyes were wide, unblinking.
“Why are…you here…?”
The White Whale, still alive and well, did not pay the slightest attention to the two little people right beside it as it licked its lips, savoring the dinner spreading through its mouth.
“Your being here…means…”
What happened to the girl who had stayed behind to dr
aw away the monster? With the overwhelming creature before him, he couldn’t help but demand an answer.
Naturally, the White Whale offered none. Having finished its chewing, it moved its giant eye down to look at the dragon carriage beside it—and Subaru—as it assessed its next prey.
“Uaaaaaahhhhh—!!”
Otto shouted, cracking under the pressure before the creature even moved.
The land dragon, also panicking due to the White Whale’s presence, increased its pace to a gallop without a command from its master. The distance between them and the monster widened in the span of an instant, but then the White Whale swam faster.
“Why, why, why, why…? We should have shaken it off; why is it…?!”
On the driver’s seat of the accelerating dragon carriage, Subaru remained sunk in despondency. Otto, driven to the edge of his wits, wailed as they cut from the right of the head to the left.
“Why is it after only us this stubbornly…?! In all this darkness… Why…?! Do I have s-some sort of target painted on my back…?!”
Otto wailed as he took the crystal lamp attached to the dragon carriage and threw it away. Even if it was futile, he wanted to hide from the White Whale’s eye even if only for a tiny moment longer. But Otto’s shout suddenly called an image to the back of Subaru’s mind.
During his lament, Otto had wondered aloud if there was a bull’s-eye on the two of them that the White Whale was doggedly following. If there was any reason why it was so focused on them, then—
“It couldn’t be…”
Subaru pulled himself up to the driver’s seat, doubting his own eyes as he stared toward the White Whale swimming behind them. Within the night mists, the darkness all around obscured the creature’s giant frame. However, when Subaru strained his eyes, he could just make out something on the head of the White Whale facing them.
He saw a twisted, spiraling horn protruding from its head.
—With his own eyes, he’d also seen horns on the Urugarum, the wild demon beasts living in the forest around the mansion that resembled oversize dogs. And he’d learned from experience that those demon beasts, said to be born from the power of the Witch, were attracted to her scent, given off by Subaru. In other words…
Re:ZERO -Starting Life in Another World-, Vol. 6 Page 11