"Don't squirm around!"
Felix gave Subaru a slightly forceful pat on the back.
"...Sorry." Subaru bowed his head, a little red in the face.
During the examination, Felix had all but seen every inch of him...
Straining his Gate against Gluttony had left it damaged—which, for Felix, wasn't really much of a challenge to fix.
The trouble was that Subaru kept slipping into a frozen state, so the treatment was constantly getting interrupted.
Because of the mana-heat, Yimi hadn't attuned closely enough to this world's mana to feel it out in detail, so setting Subaru up with a controllable fixed state wasn't very practical either; for control you needed at least a 'switch,' and the best switch would of course be this world's own systematic power.
Subaru looked down glumly at his hands. "Mr. Wilhelm said Emilia and the others should already be back."
He hadn't forgotten—there was a Diego lurking as a threat at the manor, and even now the trigger for that death still couldn't be pinned down completely.
"If you're looking to pour your heart out, I'm really not the best choice, you know." Felix's cat ears gave a couple of twitches. He looked awfully cute.
Reckless as Subaru's crashing of the hall and his argument with Emilia had been, the people there hadn't actually understood the whole story; everyone's attention had been stolen by the child who'd made Reinhard draw the Dragon Sword and traded blows with him head-on.
"With that child at her side, Emilia-sama's camp isn't as simple as it looks."
"Eh? You know who Yimi is?" Subaru was still curious about the one child he'd met who remembered the loops.
"No idea at all—but she went toe-to-toe with Reinhard." Felix frowned and bent Subaru's fingers back and forth, and sure enough felt a certain stiffness.
Subaru didn't follow. "Is Reinhard that strong?"
"Asking that is like asking whether the sun will rise tomorrow. Barring some catastrophe, Reinhard is probably the strongest person in this world—and most of the time he can't even draw that sword."
Felix stepped away from him. "For someone to make Reinhard draw the Dragon Sword and still stand against him for a few seconds—I don't think that child could beat him, but she's already surpassed ninety-nine percent of the people in this world."
"Come call me once your hardening wears off. When I agreed to Emilia-sama's request, I honestly had no idea it'd be this much of a hassle."
"..."
If Yimi, this powerful, still has someone she fears—just how terrifying must Diego be?
After Felix left, Subaru lay on the bed and stared blankly at the ceiling, as if he'd slipped back into the dead-fish existence of his old world, idly letting his youth trickle away second by second.
When he closed his eyes, what surfaced in his mind was his fight with Emilia, and the words Old Man Wilhelm had said while sparring with him—troubles that seemed to be lecturing him without pause, every waking moment.
He sat up again and idly pulled a book down from the shelf to leaf through.
"Can't read it."
His grasp of this world's writing still lagged behind Yimi's—though while cleaning up Witchbeast corpses, Ram had taught him a few characters in her spare time, so with some simple sentence patterns he could just about piece together the meaning from the words he knew.
Come to think of it...
Subaru set down the book in his hands and dug out from his luggage the book Yimi had given him.
This book occasionally showed fragments of intermittent text; at the time, Betty had been annoyed that Yimi had handed it off to him so carelessly.
He opened it. Even after passing through Yimi's hands, the book still displayed text for him—though in Subaru's hands it had blurred to about the level of a Gospel.
"Earth dragon... some kind of street, an apple stall? That fruit vendor's place? It really feels like one of those sinister mind-tricking artifacts."
Spotting a familiar figure, Subaru tucked the Book of Wisdom away and headed outside.
"Off to clear your head?" Wilhelm, sipping his tea, glanced at him.
"Yeah—going to give a friend's business a little support." Subaru looked down at the meager wages in his hand.
They hadn't changed since he'd last given Yimi some money; the cost of that date had been Emilia's to bear, and when he'd tried to unload his feelings on Yimi, what he'd been thinking was that without him Emilia couldn't cope—convinced he was the one making the sacrifices. Looking back now, it really was pretty pathetic.
He and the fruit-stall vendor could probably count as friends, even if helping the man's daughter had been an event from the very first timeline.
However lovely a memory was, once a rollback happened, all of it was left as nothing but his own one-sided recollection.
No one had explained to him what the Book of Wisdom was for, and there was more than one fruit stall in the Royal Capital—but the only vendor he knew was that one.
Carrying some feeling he couldn't quite name, he followed the shifting text in the book to the fruit vendor's stall.
Same old face on the man, like the whole world owed him money.
He'd just opened his mouth to say hello when he saw an earth dragon fling the man it had been carrying on its back straight to the ground.
"Dori, didn't you go off to deliver some passengers? How'd you lose the whole carriage?" A man who seemed to be his friend hurried to prop him up. "Draft earth dragons aren't used to being ridden—what happened?"
"There, there were Witchbeasts, so many Witchbeasts..." Dori's gaze wandered, his voice ragged and threaded with guilt.
"I don't get it—you idiot, don't tell me you left the 'safe route'? I remember you were headed for the Margrave's manor... so you left the others out there?"
"What did you say?" Catching the key words, Subaru rushed over in a panic and grabbed the man by his clothes. "These passengers you mentioned—who were they?"
Subaru didn't fully understand it—but it seemed the book Yimi had given him had led him to this very spot.
Felix had said that Yimi, child though she was, might already be stronger than ninety-nine percent of this world; with her at Emilia's side, it was all but impossible for Emilia to come to any harm. If it was something even Yimi couldn't handle, then his going would be utterly meaningless.
And that was true enough. Having taken part in clearing out Witchbeasts himself, he had the most direct sense of what it meant for that child to string up over a hundred giant monsters and beat them one by one.
But when a person is worried, they can't help dragging every possibility toward the worst. Like how the moment Roswaal left, everything started going wrong—could that be connected to him somehow?
Diego was someone even Yimi feared.
And besides—if he really served no purpose at all, why would this book have led him here to catch wind of all this?
The crux of it was: how had that carriage driver made it back alone? By all rights, so long as Yimi was there, no number of Witchbeasts should be able to break through, right?
The save points of Return by Death followed no pattern at all; he had to go make sure. However deep his terror of death ran, if his save point had already been set after something happened to Emilia and the others, then everything would be over. Better to be wrong than to do nothing.
"Mr. Subaru, I know you're in a hurry, but not taking the 'safe route' really doesn't seem wise. Honestly, the safe route's origins aren't as terrifying as the rumors make out. Word even came in today about that village being full of Witchbeasts..."
As luck would have it, the carriage Subaru had boarded belonged to Otto—the same man who'd once brought Yimi to the Royal Capital.
Being a merchant, Otto didn't usually carry passengers, and his cart wasn't comfortable; but as it happened Subaru didn't have a single coin in his pocket, and Otto was fretting over a load of goods he couldn't sell.
So Subaru put his position as steward of Roswaal's manor to good use, commissioning a ride in exchange for a promise to help move the goods—even if Roswaal had by now turned almost completely black-hearted in his eyes.
"No—take that very route. When we reach the village I'll get off myself. I won't drag you into it."
"You're really putting me in a spot here. Your destination is that village, isn't it? Feels like you're wading into something dreadful!"
By the time all this back-and-forth had run its course, the sky had gradually darkened—but a patch of firelight lit Subaru's face, and he leaned his head out the window, baffled.
"Hey—that village over there, is that the one? It looks kind of bright. Are they holding some kind of festival?"
"The village you're looking for isn't that one... Festival, nothing! That's obviously a fire!"
Otto stared in horror in that direction. "A blaze that size—the whole village must be burning down. Should we go save them? We have to go save them, right—"
"Your cart's loaded with oil! You want to just drive straight in—" Before Subaru could finish, he felt the force of the earth dragon slamming to a halt and cracked his head against the wooden carriage.
"What is it?"
"There's—there's someone."
At Otto's words, Subaru scrambled up from the back of the cart and held up the oil lamp Otto used for light.
There stood a white-haired man in white robes, a smile on his face, gripping a girl whose eyes had gone vacant, the tracks of her tears still plainly visible on her face.
One look at his bearing and you knew—this guy was a hundred percent bad news.
Subaru swallowed. "Who are you?"
"Sin Archbishop of Greed, of the Witch Cult. Regulus Corneas."
He actually answered Subaru's question dutifully, and studied with some interest this fellow who reeked, for no clear reason, so strongly of the Witch's scent.