The sarcastic, superficially polite little sister.
Subaru thought fondly of the days he had spent with both girls.
They were precious memories to him, even though they had killed him more than once.
Enough that, if he had the choice to spend time with them once more, that was a choice he would make.
Subaru’s shout made Ram open her eyes wide, freezing in shock.
Of course it did.
From Ram’s point of view, Subaru’s declaration was meaningless, empty nonsense.
Furthermore, he’d already abandoned them in an instant.
Ram’s thought process froze for only a moment. In the next instant, her body thawed and leapt into action.
But a momentary opening was an opening nonetheless.
“—!”
Subaru’s sprint was just a moment faster than Ram’s switch to anger-filled attacking.
Turning his back to Ram, Subaru rushed past Beatrice, his body moving like the wind—making a beeline toward the cliff.
“Wait—!”
Behind him, a girl’s high-pitched wail reached out.
Subaru’s mind never caught up to which girl’s voice it was.
He’d meant to be determined, but now his thought process was in tatters, like someone had clawed it apart.
His heart beat hard, but his body creaked all over, as if to betray his mind. His limbs felt like leaden weights.
He was running with all his might, but the world seemed to move in slow motion. It was as if Subaru’s mind were putting off the results of his change of heart as long as it possibly could.
—So stupid. He was conflicted even then.
He knew why. He’d tenaciously clung to living without shame to that point.
Even when he’d wanted to die, he’d chickened out in the end, able only to fall to his knees.
But Subaru could do it now.
“It’s rude to Beatrice, huh…”
With those words, Subaru voiced his final regret and left everything behind.
He raced to the cliff. A few steps more. He was too scared to count them. Pathetic. Insane. He had the urge to laugh. But he didn’t laugh. He couldn’t laugh.
All that he was leaving behind was a life of living death. To Subaru, giving up on a future in that place meant he’d already died inside.
If he could live as a dead man walking, he could do “something” with that life.
And that decision, to do something instead of doing nothing, was one only Subaru could make.
“—I’m the only one who can do it.”
His feet left the ground. He clawed at the air. He could touch nothing. He could reach nothing.
So fast. The wind was strong. His eyes hurt. His head hurt. The ringing in his ears was distant. He felt like he’d left behind his beating heart. He couldn’t hear the ringing. The ringing inside his skull was like a broken record.
If it ended with his death, that was that.
But if, if only he could go back, then…
For she had cried out, “I’ll kill you.”
If he could go back—
“—I’ll save you, I swear!”
The moment after he voiced his determination, his head smashed into the hard ground.
He heard the echo of something spectacularly breaking apart, and then nothing.
The hate-filled voice could not chase him any longer. Nothing could, not anymore—
—All that was there was “nothingness.”
Absentmindedly, he looked around the nothingness of his mind.
Perhaps looked around was not the proper phrase.
Eyes did not exist within his mind. Nor did hands, nor feet, nor any pieces of his body. All that remained was his incorporeal, floating mind.
Knowing nothing, aware of nothing, he looked about.
Darkness. A room with nothing.
A room that was a world without a floor or a ceiling, covered in pitch-blackness so great that it defied thought.
Suddenly, in the world of everlasting darkness, there was meaning.
A silhouette abruptly emerged in “front” of his mind.
The contours of the silhouette were slender and as pitch-black as the rest, the upper body more of a fog, rejecting his mind’s recognition.
With the emergence of the human shape, the mind gained its first strong desire.
He felt a breach in the cold as the shadow gently moved, as if to convey something to his mind.
He didn’t understand. He was aware of nothing.
But for some reason, his mind could not avert itself from the shadow—
“—I cannot meet you. Not yet.”
With that faint whisper, the dark world abruptly vanished, and in so doing, the shadow, and his mind, went with it.
<END>