Chapter 145: Confession of Death (Wrath line, end)

Ram... has lost her mind!

That was the first thought to surface in Natsuki Subaru's head once his brain finished processing everything that had just happened in front of him.

The way the pink-haired girl was behaving shook him far harder than any betrayal ever could.

Most of what she said made no sense to him at all...

But he could read her eyes, and the naked dependence and love in them.

Which left him nothing but confusion.

What on earth had turned Ram into this?

Had she simply worked out that Rem's death had nothing to do with him, and now, brimming with guilt, decided to make it up to him?

His bewilderment was hardly unreasonable, because—

no matter how far Natsuki Subaru's imagination stretched at that moment, he could never have known that the Ram in front of him had learned of the existence of Return by Death.

Or that, through the viewing, she had watched him pull her out of the snow and then die over and over again, trading his life for information and for the mana crystals that kept her breathing. She knew every ounce of effort he had spent, every price he had paid.

That unbroken tide of guilt had filled her until there was no room left, until the string in her head called reason snapped—and only then had she thrown herself at him with such reckless abandon.

But to Subaru, who knew none of it, the change in her had no foundation whatsoever. It was baffling. It was cheap.

And that inexplicable shift in her manner struck him as funny in the worst way—funny, and sickening.

After all, if there was one thing Natsuki Subaru had hated his entire life, it was an apology that came too late.

"And where were you before?" Frost settled over his face, and his gaze turned knife-sharp as he bore down on her with the question.

"Who exactly is this little act supposed to be for?"

He shoved her off him, and then, with her standing there in flustered dismay, he backed away. One step. Then another.

Fury. Disgust. A restlessness that clawed at him.

Countless dark emotions swallowed Natsuki Subaru again, and he went under.

Now, of all times, she chose to be gentle with him? Wasn't that just absurd?

Then she should never have looked at him that way from the start—wary, guarded, revolted!

A droning noise started up in his skull, and he was back in that evening in the forest, back in Rem's hands, tortured and interrogated.

Rem's face was flecked with the blood her morningstar had knocked out of his body. She looked down at him with loathing.

"That stench of the Witch on you, and you still want to play innocent? How thick can a person's skin possibly get?"

Subaru still remembered how he had screamed then, the question torn straight out of him.

"Why do you people hate me so much?!"

And now...?

He lifted his head blankly toward the ceiling, lost.

What was Ram telling him? That she loved him?

Impossible.

Was this really the same Ram who had turned the Witch's stench on him into a grudge, who had dumped her sister's death and all her hatred onto his shoulders in one heap?

How could she love him? How could she forgive him?

"If you're going to hate me, then keep on hating me forever!"

"Ram!"

His eyes were bloodshot, his face a demon's as he roared at her.

And in the next instant, in his field of vision—

the color drained out of Ram, standing there wavering and wounded, and bled away into the black-and-white world around her...

Why? Why do you lose your color too?

With a despair he could never find release from, Subaru clamped a hand over the wound in his stomach and staggered out of the sealed chamber.

Behind him Ram sobbed and begged him to stay, but the chains held her fast. In the end all she could do was watch him go, drowning in despair and regret.

He ran all the way out of his own bedroom. There was one place left that might still grant him release.

The wound in his belly was slowly stopping its bleeding, and yet his mind only grew murkier.

Strange, garish hallucinations flickered past his eyes until he could barely tell what was real.

He lurched along with one hand on the wall until he reached a corner—and then he collided with something soft, silver-white, and sweetly fragrant, and a little clarity came back to him.

He raised his head and realized it wasn't cotton he had walked into at all, but the very person he had been going to find—

the spotless princess of his heart. Emilia.

But why was she here, of all times?

And Puck, who would burn this world down for his daughter's sake, was nowhere beside her.

"Subaru, are you tired already?"

"Have you finally... started wanting to die?"

Subaru sagged half against her without a word, and only managed a weak nod.

His eyes said everything: he was spent, so far gone that even speech had left him.

His lids hung half-closed, but her words dragged a scrap of alertness out of him, and through a field of vision reduced to half its usual size he looked at her.

There was a strange smile on Emilia's face, and something like pale blue flame danced in those violet eyes.

And the pure-white Emilia he had always seen was stained now, at some point, with a wash of dark purple—a color he knew intimately, a color he was fated to see every time he died and came back.

"But Subaru, if you wanted to die, why didn't you come to me first? Why did you go to Ram instead?"

How do you know—?

His eyes widened a fraction. He wanted to ask, and couldn't.

But Emilia read the question he never voiced as easily as if she could see into him, and she leaned her face a little closer to explain.

"Because I saw all of it. You went to Ram, you let her pour all that love into your ear, and then you ran right back out."

"Geez, you really are being naughty, Subaru!" she scolded playfully, and the corners of her mouth curved up.

"So I have to punish you!"

Punish...?

Subaru's near-frozen mind worked like an engine run dry of oil, grinding out the confusion.

"That's right. Punish you!"

Her tone was bright and merry, and like a child in a sulk she announced the sentence at once.

"Your punishment is... to die in agony, while believing that I love you."

Love me...?

He studied her face for a moment, and found very little love anywhere in those eyes.

It looked more like a child throwing a tantrum after someone stole her toy.

"I learned this from Ram, you know. Lean in close to your ear... and then say I love you. That's how it goes, isn't it?"

Giggling, Emilia leaned in and closed her hands around Subaru's throat, tightening them bit by bit, honoring her promise to kill him.

And at the same time, as though it were all a game, she pressed closer and repeated those three words over and over. I love you. I love you.

As the grip crushed shut and suffocation began to spread through his brain, Subaru confirmed it: her intent to kill him was entirely real.

Which also meant that the "I love you" she kept repeating in his face was nothing more than a child's spiteful words.

"Is it... finally over?"

Already gravely wounded, already dragged through every height and depth a heart could survive, Subaru could no longer bear the murderous pressure of those hands on his throat. He shut his eyes in peace and prepared to die like this.

But his lids had barely closed when a warm, fragrant breath rushed toward him.

It was Emilia. For some reason she had moved from in front of him to right beside his ear.

It should have meant nothing at all, yet a shiver ran through him on pure instinct, dragging up a familiarity he couldn't name.

A damp exhalation brushed his ear.

And then a sighing murmur rang out beside it, magnified a thousandfold:

"Ai... shi... te... ru!"

That confession of death came like thick, grasping hands of shadow, snatching at Natsuki Subaru's soul and hauling it down into the dark.

[Author's Note: The reason I wrote this stretch of plot is honestly that I wanted to torment Ram hard—to swap Ram's and Emilia's experiences around, to let Ram taste despair, to let her feel exactly what kind of being the Purge King she created really is. Even if you offer up your sincere heart, you get nothing back; you just get shoved away.

Also, about Emilia. Now that the anime's Tower of Sages arc has made it pretty clear that Natsuki Subaru is most likely Flugel, the sage from four hundred years ago, there's nothing wrong with me saying Emilia is Satella, right? This book is about how the Witch of Envy came to be.

According to the unofficial histories, Emilia came to be called the Witch of Envy because the Great Sage Natsuki Subaru had far too big a harem and she couldn't keep his love to herself, so envy swallowed her whole and she became a world-ending calamity. And in order to find a way to save the world, the Great Sage Natsuki Subaru set out on the road to reclaim his main account, "Great Sage."]

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