V11 - CHAPTER 6 : LOVELOVELOVELOVELOVELOVEYOU

"Uegh! Geho! Gehh!"

The instant he awoke, Subaru spat out the bitter taste of dirt inside his mouth in spectacular fashion.

Kneeling on the cold floor, he desperately retched until there were tears in his eyes. He earnestly spat out saliva reeking of mud and gravel.

"This gonna happen every time…?!!"

When he finished spitting out the foreign substances, Subaru cursed as he shook his head, urging his waking mind to fully awaken.

Slowly, he reflected on what had happened while he slept, and a fog seemed to lift as his memories came back to life—

"The Great Rabbit got me… I came back and got invited to the tea party…"

Tea party and Witch—when those keywords floated up, a rich variety of memories about the Witches played on the back of his eyelids. The fact that he remembered made Subaru comprehend that Echidna had fulfilled her part of the vow.

Without thinking, he touched his wrist with his hand. He felt cloth; Petra's handkerchief was there too, safe and sound.

"…So Echidna kept her promise, huh? For a Witch, she really doesn't seem that bad."

Subaru made a little sigh. Perhaps it was a sigh of lament; perhaps a sigh of praise.

Echidna, not as witchy as her title suggested, was one of his precious few allies for that loop. She had both intellect and wisdom. The tea parties and the Trial provided limited opportunities to rely on either, but—

"—The flip side is, they bring the biggest advantage. That's a big deal."

Touching a hand to his chest, Subaru mentally trembled anew that he'd been able to confess Return by Death.

The conditions had been limited to that place, where it was only him, Echidna, and the other Witches. But being able to reveal Return by Death to someone and talk to her about it was something he didn't dare wish for by that point.

Thanks to that, he'd gained information on the Great Rabbit and hypotheses about Return by Death's characteristics.

Perhaps the most disturbing piece of information he'd returned with was that the Witch of Envy was the cause of the Authority dwelling in Subaru and that, one day, he would most certainly come to face the Witch.

"But right now, I'll rely on that power of yours. I'll use the lives you give me as many times as I need to."

If this put him closer to the answers, he was all the gladder for it. It was a small price to pay for the sake of the future.

Subaru crudely wiped his lips with his sleeve and stood up then and there. He wore a strong expression full of determination, but then it flipped; an ill feeling changed it to apprehension.

"Emilia had to have been the one who…woke me up, but…"

Properly speaking, Subaru's mind had been called awake through external interference. But in this case, it was a slight and trivial difference…one that evaporated in light of the larger current issue.

Namely, there in the tomb's stone room where the first Trial took place—Emilia was nowhere to be found.

"…No way, right?"

Murmuring in astonishment, Subaru looked all around the dimly lit stonework room.

However, there was no sight of Emilia anywhere within the Trial room. Emilia, who should have been in anguish from the nightmare she was having until the moment Subaru touched and awakened her, was gone.

"So she woke up before me, then tried to wake me up, and then…and then?"

—And then, with Subaru not awakening, she just left, leaving him there?

That would not have been a very Emilia-like act. It was more likely that Emilia would carry the unconscious Subaru out of the tomb than go outside to call for aid.

Or perhaps her mental state was so much at odds with its normal condition that she'd commit such an un-Emilia-like act.

"—!!"

It was then that Subaru realized he had come far too late.

As he repeated events, it was the fourth time he had awakened in that place. But until then, never once had Emilia awoken before him; this was the first time.

Now, he was unable to console the brokenhearted Emilia, a hole bored in her heart by nightmares from the past.

"Don't tell me she ran outside all in a panic…!"

Thinking back to how much Emilia was flustered by the past, he couldn't say with any certainty that it was impossible.

Ram and Otto were outside of the tomb. Even if Emilia did leave in tears, they ought to have been able to skillfully calm her back down. Besides, outside were—

"—Garfiel and Ryuzu are there."

When he turned around, about to make a run for the tomb's exit, his legs came to a halt. Right after Return by Death, Subaru's miasma had probably increased in density again. He still hadn't been able to work out countermeasures for that.

If his miasma was thicker than the previous time around, there was no telling when Garfiel and company would come after him. It wasn't certain they wouldn't attack him right after he left the tomb.

"…Nah, I have to go."

He was concerned for Emilia's safety. There was no way he could put that on the back burner.

Besides, if his miasma thickened the more he repeated, every error in judgment made the situation worse. Subaru's excuses might only pass muster while the count was still low. That time might have been his last for that.

Subaru's emotional state also made the short-tempered Garfiel difficult to persuade. But he might get somewhere with Ryuzu by pleading that the miasma business was a misunderstanding.

"This time gotta bet on that conversation—!"

Betting everything on a possibility limited to that time around, he forced his once-stopped legs to move. After the first step came down, there was no more hesitation. He ran across the hard floor full-force.

The sounds of his shoes echoed throughout the cold tomb, mixing with Subaru's breathing as he hurried outside. A lukewarm breeze blew in from the entrance, rubbing Subaru the wrong way, something he brushed aside as he ran.

As Subaru clenched his teeth tightly, the moonlight filtering in straight in front of him brought the entrance into view. Subaru leaped over the vines covering the corridor's floor and walls, determined to move even if he could see nothing on his way outside.

When he raced out of the tomb, he wondered if it would be Emilia, or perhaps Garfiel, first entering his eyes.

"—Huh?"

Instantly, he hit the emergency brakes, crudely bringing his body to a halt. He pitched forward, then righted himself.

However, his heart, struck by surprise at the unexpected, could not be righted so easily.

"_______"

In his mind, he traced two scenes—Emilia in tears, Garfiel turning with enmity as Subaru raced out of the tomb—that represented his worst-case scenarios. But the result was neither of the two.

There was neither Emilia nor Garfiel nor, for that matter, Ram or Otto or Ryuzu either.

What was there was—

"—A shadow."

Haltingly, without thinking, Subaru let the murmur trickle out, bluntly describing the scene.

Outside the tomb, the Sanctuary, surrounded by both forest and barrier, was entirely engulfed in pitch-black shadow.