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The crackling of the flames devouring the twisted metal was the only sound in the darkness of the forest.
Link lay on his back in the damp ditch, his chest rising and falling erratically. His eyes were wide open, fixed on the night sky, but his mind was trapped in an abyss of terror.
Slowly, with his pulse pounding in his ears, he lowered his left hand toward his stomach. His fingers trembled violently as they brushed the torn fabric of his shirt. He expected to feel hot, viscous wetness, the grotesque texture of his own intestines spilling out.
But there was nothing. Only intact skin and the cold sweat of his own body.
With a choked gasp, he raised his right hand in front of his face. He opened and closed it. The joints responded. It was firmly attached to his wrist. There was no blood, no severed stump.
"It was... it was a dream," he murmured, his voice hoarse and broken. "A hallucination. A fucking nightmare."
He forced himself to sit up, feeling the damp soil beneath his palms. He looked at the van engulfed in flames a few meters away. The impact, the adrenaline, the smoke... all of that must have caused a short circuit in his brain. Yes, that had to be it. He had hit his head when he jumped, and his mind had created a feverish delirium to deal with the trauma of the crash.
A medieval city. Humans with animal ears. A noisy otaku. A blonde thief. A bald giant. And that woman... the psychopath dressed in black.
Link squeezed his eyes shut, gritting his teeth as a lash of phantom pain ran through his abdomen and right wrist. It was too real. The sound of the blade cutting through the air, the cold steel splitting him open, the sick smile of the assassin as she praised the color of his entrails.
"It was only a dream," he repeated, almost like a prayer, clumsily getting to his feet.
He began to walk, moving away from the fire. He needed to get out of that forest. He needed to find a road, a patrol, anything that made sense. His steps were unsteady over the undergrowth and thick roots.
But the more he walked, the more the confusion suffocated him. He remembered the voice in his head, the spectral shadow begging him for "her beloved" before the initial crash. He did not remember her face, nor what exactly that entity was, only the overwhelming pressure that had erased his memory as if someone had ripped the pages out of his brain. What had they done to him? Why was he in this forest of gigantic trees that looked like nothing he had ever seen in his life?
Frustration began to boil in his chest, drowning out the fear. Everything was chaos. His boss had sold him out, his bank account was empty, he was stranded in the middle of nowhere, and his mind was torturing him with visions of mutilation and death that his body swore it had lived through.
"Shit!"
The scream tore through the silence of the forest. Blinded by helplessness and rage, Link clenched his right fist, turned on his heels, and threw a punch with all his strength against the thick trunk of the nearest tree. He wanted to feel pain. He wanted the physical impact in his knuckles to anchor him to reality and wake him up once and for all.
CRAAACK!
The sound was deafening, like the blast of a cannon.
Link's eyes opened wide. The massive trunk, which in his world would have required an industrial chainsaw to fell, exploded in a shower of splinters toward the opposite side. The immense crown of the tree swayed and, with a groan of splintering wood, the entire structure gave way and collapsed heavily onto the forest floor, raising a cloud of dust and dry leaves.
Link froze, staring at his intact fist. Not a scratch. Not a single broken bone.
"What the hell..." he stammered, feeling the air leave his lungs. His breathing became shallow. "What the hell is happening to me..."
Before he could try to process the absurd strength he had just displayed, the world stopped.
It was not a sound, nor an attack. It was an absolute and unnatural cold that materialized directly in the center of his chest. His heart violently lurched. A dizzying vertigo struck him like a wave of lead, blurring his vision in an instant.
"Ugh...?"
He brought his hands to his chest, clawing at his own clothes as his knees gave out. The cold spread through his veins, freezing his blood. There was no physical pain from a weapon, no visible wound, but life was draining from his body at a terrifying speed. It was as if the source of energy for his existence had been cut off.
What... what is this? Why? There's no one here...
He tried to gasp, to search for air, but his lungs did not respond. He fell sideways onto the earth, his glassy eyes pointing toward the darkness of the undergrowth. The cold consumed him completely. Consciousness vanished quickly, submerging him in a black and unfathomable abyss, without answers, without escape.
The darkness swallowed him.
THUNCH!
The crunch of crumpling metal and the shattering of glass drilled into his eardrums.
Link's eyes snapped open, gasping violently as if he had emerged from the depths of the ocean. His hands were gripping the worn leather steering wheel. Through the cracked windshield, the dark forest rushed past at dizzying speed. The roar of the engine flooded the cabin.
The immense tree was right in front of him, milliseconds away, threatening to crush him.
"What the fuck...?!" he shouted, understanding absolutely nothing of what was happening as panic completely overtook him.
Animal panic tried to take control again. His muscles tensed, ready to kick the door open and leap into the darkness. However, a flash of lucidity cut through the hysteria. I've lived this already. Again.
To anchor his mind to reality and drown out the paralyzing terror, Link sank his teeth into his own lower lip. He bit so hard that the warm metallic taste of blood flooded his mouth instantly. The sharp pain was like a bucket of ice water over his hyperactive brain.
"Calm down!" he roared at himself, spitting a red drop onto his lap.
Remembering the absurd strength that had destroyed the steering wheel the first time, he forced his hands to loosen their grip. He held the leather rim gently, but with absolute firmness. He could not panic. He could not rip the pedals off with his foot.
He stepped on the brake with extreme care, controlling the pressure millimeter by millimeter. The tires screeched desperately against the loose forest dirt, raising a cloud of dust and dead leaves. The vehicle skidded, shaking violently, but Link kept the steering wheel steady, correcting the direction with the pure tension of his arms.
The car stopped dead with one final sharp screech.
The silence that followed was deafening, broken only by the unstable purring of the engine and Link's agitated breathing. The van's hood had stopped only a few centimeters from the enormous tree bark.
He leaned back against the seat, releasing the air he had been holding in a long, trembling sigh. He brought the back of his hand to his lips, staining it with blood, and stared into the darkness beyond the windshield.
"What the fuck is happening..." he whispered.
His mind began working at full speed, trying to arrange the pieces of a puzzle that defied all logic and physics. He had crashed, had walked to a medieval city, had been massacred by a sadistic assassin. He had awakened in this car, had survived the crash, and then... an unnatural cold had stolen his life in the middle of the undergrowth.
And now he was here. Again. Exactly at the same starting point.
It was as if time were rewinding repeatedly.
That was when a face crossed his memory. Subaru Natsuki.
Link frowned, the pain in his lip completely forgotten. His mind flew toward the strange Japanese teenager in tracksuit clothes. From the moment they crossed paths, Subaru's actions made no sense for someone who claimed to be lost.
"Let's get this straight," he remembered telling him. "You were already running in this direction... I saw you asking about a specific place... none of that fits with someone who just arrived."
And then, the crucial moment. In front of the immense Loot House, right before knocking on the door. Link clearly remembered the deathly pallor on Subaru's face. The way his eyes seemed to be looking at a ghost. The pure terror radiating from him before forcing himself to enter.
"He knew," Link murmured, opening his eyes wide. "That bastard knew."
The pieces fit together with terrifying precision. Subaru knew exactly what to look for, where to go, and who had the insignia. But most disturbing of all: Subaru seemed to sense what awaited them inside that shack.
Did he know about the woman in black? Was that why he had been so terrified in front of old Rom's door? Why didn't he warn him? Or why, knowing danger lurked inside, did he decide to enter anyway, looking for a ridiculous "negotiation"?
"Could he also...?" Link left the question hanging in the air. The very idea that Subaru was trapped in the same macabre cycle gave him chills, or perhaps the boy had some kind of clairvoyance.
Whatever it was, if Subaru had prior knowledge of the events, then that noisy otaku was his only key to understanding this hell. He could not stay hidden in the forest. If the assassin was loose in that city, and if Felt was going to cross his path again, Link needed to find Subaru before the story repeated itself.
With new determination hardening his features, Link wiped the blood from his chin. He shifted the vehicle into reverse. He drove backward slowly, moving away from the tree, and turned the steering wheel carefully to align the van with the dirt trail that seemed to lead toward the distant lights shining above the tree line.
He pressed the accelerator, feeling the machinery respond beneath the hood. The headlights illuminated the dirt path as the car advanced, leaving behind the darkness of the forest and heading straight toward civilization.
He was going to find Subaru Natsuki, and this time, he would force him to talk.
...
The dirt road finally gave way to solid cobblestone as the immense city wall rose before the windshield. The main gates were open, but his passage was blocked almost immediately.
Two knights in full armor crossed into his path, pointing their trembling spears toward the van's grille. Their eyes were bulging, staring at the machine as if it were a metal dragon about to devour them.
Link stopped the vehicle with a screech of tires that made the guards step back. He lowered the remaining window and rested his arm on the frame, forcing the calmest and most bored expression he could manage.
"H-Halt there!" one of the knights stammered, not daring to come within more than two meters. "Declare the nature of this... this magical artifact and your purpose in the capital!"
Link had no time for medieval bureaucracy. Sighing, he unfastened the silver wristwatch he wore on his left wrist—a stainless-steel model that had cost him a good part of his first paycheck—and tossed it with a smooth motion.
The guard caught it in the air by pure reflex. He stared at the glass, the hands moving mechanically, and the gleam of polished metal, completely hypnotized. It was craftsmanship beyond anything any jeweler in Lugnica could produce.
"Consider that an entrance toll and a tax for the rarity of my carriage," Link said firmly, without taking his eyes off the front. "I came to trade. Problems?"
The guards exchanged a look of astonishment. Greed overcame caution. They lowered their spears and hurriedly stepped aside.
As soon as they gave him passage, Link pressed the accelerator, entering the streets of Lugnica.
If his objective was to keep a low profile, he failed spectacularly in the first second. The engine's purr echoed against the stone walls. Citizens—humans, demi-humans with animal ears, and merchants—jerked aside, pressing themselves against the alley walls. Children pointed in wonder at the "black beast without a ground dragon," while adults murmured between curiosity and fear.
Link ignored the dozens of eyes fixed on him and stopped the van near a busy intersection. He kept the engine running, drumming his fingers on the leather steering wheel.
"Damn it..." he muttered, observing the hundreds of heads and dozens of streets branching out before him. "How am I supposed to find that idiot here?"
Reality struck him. His previous encounter with Subaru had been pure coincidence. Stumbling upon one specific teenager in a city the size of a medieval metropolis, without knowing the street layout or anyone who could help him, was mathematically impossible. And time was running out. If Felt had already stolen the insignia, the wheel of fate toward the Loot House was already turning.
Link struck the steering wheel in frustration. He needed a clue. A thread to pull.
That was when a gust of wind slipped into the cabin through the gap where the torn-off door used to be.
Link wrinkled his nose almost by reflex. It was a dense, suffocating, dark stench. It felt as if someone had uncovered a pit of rotten mud mixed with rancid spices. It was not simple street grime or alley garbage; it was something unnatural, something that turned his stomach in an almost instinctive way.
His eyes opened wide.
"...I smell something strange on you, though I can't tell if it's dirt or something like that." The words he had said to Subaru in the previous timeline crossed his mind like lightning. His sense of smell, apparently intensified by the same mysterious rules that had hardened his body, was tracking the exact signature. Of all the creatures, animals, and people in this city, there was only one being who reeked with that intensity.
And the fresh trail floated clearly in the air, leading toward the eastern commercial districts.
"Got you," Link whispered.
He grabbed the gearshift, pressed the accelerator, and the van roared, leaving the crowd of curious onlookers behind as it launched through the stone streets.