13.2.2

Having received encouragement from Otto and Patlash, Subaru gained a moment of mental respite.

To be blunt, he still couldn't entirely digest what had happened in the castle of dreams. Even so, he chewed it over bit by bit, using it as fuel to drive himself onward.

"I shall take Patlash back… Goodness, this is really throwing me off my stride."

Otto had continued to let out little grumbles as he departed, with Patlash somehow looking like a girl dragged off by her hair as they left the tomb. Seeing off the two people (or rather, one person and one steed), Subaru, left behind after claiming to want to feel the nighttime breeze, slowly turned back toward the tomb.

—Same as before, the tomb of the Witch of Greed stood there, illuminated by the pale moonlight.

Parting ways with the Witch who he'd sought to rely on was a deeply painful matter to Subaru. The words serious blow did not quite suffice. But cutting ties with the Witch had been necessary, however heavy a blow. He couldn't pigeonhole her as an "evil" being. However, she was someone with whom he could not see eye to eye.

The same went for Minerva and the other Witches, and so, too, for Satella, aka Jealousy—

"It's fine that she told me to love myself more, but…"

Subaru recalled what she'd told him just before the parting promise he'd made to her, but the words left him at a loss.

"How the heck should I go about relying on the people precious to me…?"

He wondered if that was asking him to be honest with them. Yet, it was none other than Satella herself who had forbidden him from doing this—or rather, if he went by what he had learned in the conversations within the dream, it was the Witch personality that had forbidden Subaru from speaking of Return by Death.

Everyone there had asserted there was a discrepancy between Satella and the Witch of Jealousy. If that was so, then the promise at the very end had been with—

"—I've gotta put that on the back burner for now, damn it."

It was then that Subaru slammed the brakes, keeping his thoughts from coursing in Satella's direction. What he needed was a way to break through this stalemate of a situation, or at the very least, he needed to grab hold of a single strand that would lead him to a way out.

"The trigger at the mansion is based on when I return…in which case, I have to get a handle on the issues in the Sanctuary first. That means the Trial, Garfiel, and Roswaal's book of knowledge, huh…"

Each of the individual issues raised before him were troublesome in and of themselves, but the greatest difficulty was in how closely each related to the others. In particular, he still couldn't forget his shock at how Roswaal's grandiose plans factored in even death.

Roswaal knew of Subaru's Return by Death—or more precisely, he knew Subaru could loop. Knowing that Subaru had the power to turn time back, he sought to employ that for his own objective.

His goal was to make what was written in his book of knowledge a reality. For that, Roswaal made snow fall on the Sanctuary, turning the place into a feeding ground for the demon beast known as the Great Rabbit.

Beyond that, there was the barrier that would not be lifted until the Trial was overcome, preventing the residents of the Sanctuary from evacuating; and Garfiel, whose thinking grew more obstinate with each repetition.

Every time Subaru had looped, he found Garfiel standing in a different position. Once, he had pressed Subaru to take the Trial, displaying a cooperative stance toward resolving the Sanctuary's issues. In hindsight, that had all been an act so as not to convey that he himself was opposed to resolving those problems.

The more Subaru pursued the Sanctuary's liberation, the sterner Garfiel's measures became. It was difficult for Subaru to forget his anger from when Garfiel had bared his fangs toward Otto, Ram, and the people of Earlham Village. But Garfiel had also saved Subaru's life. Accordingly, the discordant sense he felt toward Garfiel's true thoughts had deepened with each new start of the loop.

Having received Echidna's final words of advice, those feelings had grown stronger, and deeply barbed.

"Foolish, pitiable Garfiel fears the outside world…was it?"

It was already clear to him that Garfiel must have taken the Trial at some point in the past. As a result, Garfiel had become an Apostle of Greed, gaining command rights over Ryuzu and the other replicas.

If it was his past that made Garfiel fearful of the outside world…if that was the curse that bound him to the Sanctuary—it was an issue that Subaru had thought of once, only to discard it.

He'd told himself it was not necessary to delve too deeply into who Garfiel was as a person. In so doing, he had once again averted his eyes from a pressing issue in front of him.

"In the end, it really is important to learn, huh? But knowing nothing but that still gets me a failing grade."

It was not possible to overcome the wall that was Garfiel without knowing his true intent. But even if he could do so, the problems of the Sanctuary's barrier and Roswaal still remained. And to break through that worst of all combinations—

"—In the end, clearing the tomb to secure our line of retreat is the most pressing business, huh?"

When he put everything in order, he inevitably wound up back at the very beginning. Clearing the tomb was an indispensable condition for resolving the issues of the Sanctuary—the real problem being the number of remaining Trials.

"With the horrible time I had in it, did I end up clearing the second Trial or not…?"

Under the rubric of the event he'd come to know as behold the unknowable present, Subaru arrived at the worlds where he had chosen differently—experiencing what one might call a series of parallel worlds.

—These were glimpses into worlds beyond hell, impaling Subaru with particular cruelty.

After driving Subaru to lamentation with various second guesses and countless regrets, how exactly had the Trial graded him?

"_______"

Audibly cracking the bones of his neck, Subaru powerfully exhaled as his footsteps echoed through the corridor in the tomb.

His largest reason for sending Otto and Patlash back ahead of him was so he could do this and check for himself which Trial the tomb would guide him to: the second or the third.

In other words, he was challenging the possibility he might have to behold the unknowable presents once more. The scenes frightened Subaru more than anything in this world, and his mind shuddered at the possibility of seeing them again.

Even so, he could not ignore them. Forgetting them, or running from them, was out of the question.

He had no choice but to face them. He bore a duty to do so. And to fulfill that duty—

"_______Uugh?"

He stepped strongly, his movements in line with his resolve. —But the very next moment, his vision swayed.

"Agh, guh!"

Losing his balance from the sudden dizziness, Subaru bumped into a wall and fell right to the floor. An intense wave of nausea hit him, stirring his brain. Unable to resist it, he got on all fours and vomited onto the floor.

—Alarm bells kept ringing. Ringing. Ringing. Ringing.

"Ugeh…hah, ach, ugh…!"

His thoughts were all tangled. He felt as if a hole had opened in his skull, and an electrode had been thrust into it, frying his brain. No matter how much he vomited, he didn't feel any better; instinctively, Subaru rushed outside, tumbling through the corridor as he did so.

"Wh-what was that just now…?"

Wiping tears from his eyes, Subaru looked back up at the tomb in a daze.

The tomb was unchanged, as was the tranquility in the air. —Aside from the fact that it seemed oddly malevolent.

When he tried to crawl closer to approach the tomb once more, Subaru's limbs were constrained by a painful sense of aversion.

—He was being rejected. That sensation brought him to a different realization, linking the two like a bolt of lightning.

It was a simple explanation. This was what had happened to Patlash's body but a brief time earlier. It simply meant the same rejection that had hurt Roswaal was now hitting Subaru.

A simple thing, but it demonstrated a most crucial fact. Namely that—

"—I've…lost the qualification to challenge the tomb? You're kidding me, that can't…"

Standing up, Subaru gazed upon the tomb as if trying to reject that conclusion. However, his feet would not take the single step that would lead him inside. He instinctively understood both the tomb's rejection and his loss of qualification.

—From the back of his mind arose the image of a white-haired Witch clad in a black dress for a funeral.

"Why that malicious little…!"

Certainly, the Witch had posed the question to Subaru on their parting.

She asked him to choose which hand he would take: hers or Satella's?

And Subaru had chosen Satella. If this was payback for his choice—

"Damn you! Just how much of a rotten personality do you have, Echidna the crappy Witch—!!"

Subaru wrung out an angry shout into the night sky, howling at a Witch who could surely could not hear him.

But however much he yelled, wailed, or raged, it would not change what had happened.

—Subaru Natsuki had lost his qualification to challenge the Trial, and thus, could no longer liberate the Sanctuary.