Chapter Text
He blinks, and the dim street is gone. Incandescent buzzing vanishes. The ground beneath his feet goes missing, along with any sense of what’s in front of him. His breath catches, his stomach lurches forward, his eyes widen, but none of it prepares him for the fall. Splashing into the mud is the least of his concerns; as a brat, he played in worse, day after day until that earthy aroma cemented itself as nostalgic. What really gets to him—stops him from thinking—is the clashing of iron that rings through his ears and its taste that coats the back of his throat. The air’s thick, humid, hard to breathe, heavy with the sounds of battle and the smell of death.
Subaru can’t parse any of the cacophony, with his clothes soaked and his skin caked in mud. He walked one step out of that store, and tripped face-first into hell. It takes all his strength to pick himself back up, like the weight of the screams he hears echoing in from every direction are holding him down. Both hands plant against the muddy terrain, teeth grit hard enough to crack, breaths choke down because the stink of iron is stabbing at his nose. Just a bit more. Gotta get up. Can’t stay down. He has a cup to clean when he gets back home, and tracking dirt onto the floor will upset Mom.
He manages it, heaving, with bleary vision and sluggish movements. Everything around him is a blur of browns and greys and the sky above bathes it all in reddish-purple. He strains to make out anything even a meter away from him, and that’s when he sees them: in the distance, men clad in plate armor and brown uniforms—or are they white, stained by the grime? Subaru can’t tell, can barely hold himself upright, breathes slowly even as his heart races. They’re carrying swords at their sides, moving in his direction with faces twisted in exertion as though they’re running, yet they’re so slow moving that that can’t be the case. He watches them, baffled. They must be soldiers of some kind. Are they cosplayers? But a convention wouldn’t be in the middle of town, at this time of night, and Subaru doesn’t need to turn around to know the supermarket isn’t behind him anymore. Yet, his thoughts are unable to catch up with anything that’s going on, until he looks at what the soldiers are running towards.
A line of creatures, beasts, scaly and furry and terrifying. Hulking masses, armed with blades and clubs, screaming and roaring and snarling, charging right in Subaru’s direction at full speed. His skin crawls. There’s no way to escape them. He’s between two armies about to clash, and how he’s arrived here is something he can’t consider for even a moment. Before anything else, he understands himself to be in danger. But that first instinct of his is too slow to push him to action. He just stands there like an idiot as the soldiers run right past him.
The first wave of men are cut down, their armor caved in and blades hacking at the gaps between the plates. They’re slow, sluggish, like the creatures are many times faster than the humans. They stand no chance, they have no opportunity to defend themselves, they’re slaughtered en masse before his eyes. Red joins the brown and the grey. None of it disappears no matter how many times he blinks. It just gets closer, the beasts draw near, soldiers reduced to corpses fall one after another. A leopard-like creature with auburn fur bares its claws directly in front of Subaru, and all he can do is stare. Its eyes are narrowed, fixed on him, and its roar deafens him. It swipes for his chest.
Deprived of the ability to hear, too slow to look down and see what’s become of him, his nose clogged with the stench of blood, and his mouth filled with the taste of the heavy air—Subaru can only feel, recoil at the surge of pain that courses through him unimpeded. It hits him all at once. He tries to exhale, wheeze, groan. He hacks up his own blood, watches it land on the creature’s fur and fail to change the color at all. Can’t breathe. Can’t scream. Can only feel the rush of snapping, tearing, pulsing absence. He’s going to die. The creature raises its other claw, aimed at his neck. This is it. There’s no time to accept death in the space of a few sluggish heartbeats. Maybe that’s a mercy?
Another scream sounds out from beside Subaru, rejecting that notion. A soldier with short green hair pushes his way past Subaru, between him and the leopard creature, blade drawn to catch its claw. Except, the soldier isn’t fast enough, and his throat blocks it instead.
The world turns red. Subaru’s been denied a quick death, that decisive fate forcing itself onto another. His legs give out on him. He falls. It hurts. Everything hurts. The soldier’s body drops on top of him, limp. If Subaru’s heart weren’t beating against his chest like it were trying to escape, ringing in his ears louder than the screams, he could close his eyes and listen for the soldier’s final moments. But even that sign of respect is a pipe dream. The leopard slashes at them both, like it’s digging through the soldier to reach Subaru. He bites his lip to stop from screaming. He can’t breathe, under the weight of another man’s death. Subaru stares up at the beast, unable to look past it to the sky, but he reaches a hand towards that reddish-purple expanse anyway. There are no streetlamps or stars, no home to return to, just rage he can’t understand the source of. The creature’s fur is matted, unruly, scraggly, laden with crusted remains of prior battles. It’s too short to pull on, to drag away from him. If only this thing had a ponytail. Or better yet, a twintail. If there were a pair of twintails in his reach, he could tug and resist and—
A click sounds out, a mechanical sound from his wrist.
He didn’t notice until just now, but there’s something there. A bracelet he never put on, glowing with an orange gem at its center spinning to life, a light blooming in desperate defiance that consumes him. And though the sting that stabs through every part of him remains—the pain and rage and death pinning him to the ground weighing on him still—the heaviness and slowness that impeded the soldiers and emboldened the creatures lifts. His hand reaching out to the heavens curls around the creature’s fur and forms a fist that holds it in place. It grinds to a halt, stares back at him, and then aims its next swipe for his exposed eyes.
Subaru lets go of it and pulls his fist back. He won’t die. He can’t let it hurt him anymore. The soldier can’t have died for nothing. He needs to save himself. So, he punches the leopard with all the strength he can force into his arm. When it makes contact with the leopard creature’s head, it doesn’t stop. It keeps going, pushing through its skull and clean through the other side.
He blinks and retracts his hand. The leopard creature falls too, and before it stacks its corpse upon the soldier's, Subaru crawls his way out from under the bodies. He stumbles backwards, looking around to find nothing blurry. Every detail, every contour of the battlefield in all directions—it’s clear, too clear, so much information drilling into every corner of his mind. He counts the numbers on both sides, the amount of individual melees happening, the several glowing magic-looking circles fading on the ground with their broken symbols, the pitch of all the screams and the volume of the death rattles and—he closes his eyes, and covers his face with his bloodied hands. Bits of brain smudge onto his cheeks.
This isn’t real. This can’t be happening. But the pain is real; he feels it still. The death is real; it stains him down to the soul. He reaches for his hair and tugs and realizes it’s longer now. None of this makes sense. Tears flow from his eyes as the fighting continues all around him. He hurts, everyone’s hurting, and he can’t just sit here doing nothing. He can’t just look away, and when he opens his eyes again, he watches as a man with a monocle gets cut open in the distance, sliced clean through by a lizard wielding a massive double-ended blade.
Subaru tries to stand tall, to move to help, but he collapses. He finally looks down and sees the gaping flesh wounds where his shirt used to be—a strange wispy light intermingled with his blood. Something happened to his outfit too but he can’t spare it a thought, because just breathing takes every bit of focus he can muster. The man with a monocle. The boy he stood in front of to protect. The thousands of soldiers. He has to do something. He has to make their deaths worth something. He can’t let this be the end, yet his weakness drags him to the mud once more.
He falls flat on the ground, and the sludgy soil fills his wounds. It stops stinging though, because all his sensations grow distant. The blurriness returns. He squints to keep track of the fight in the distance, and watches as the lizard cuts through a purple-haired man’s throat. He and that man will share a final breath, yet he can’t shake the feeling that he has to save them. At least save himself. If nothing else, make all this death worth something.
But he can’t. Amidst the carnage of a battlefield in another world, Natsuki Subaru loses his life.
And then, Natsuki Subaru opens his eyes. He breathes again, upright as though he’d never fallen, and his leg is raised to take that first step once more—the one that caused him to trip face-first into the mud to begin with. Instead, though, he freezes, his foot held in place, gravity failing to drag it to the ground. He’s… floating?
His first instinct is to pinch his cheeks, but as he does so he stops. His hands are gloved, sleek black, with some kind of metallic wrist guard built into the bracelet and fading into strange fabric that covers him. He follows the path of it with his eyes, past the plated forearm piece and his now exposed shoulder. Instead of his cheek, he pulls at the fabric, and it feels nothing like any material he’s familiar with—not cotton or polyester—and it’s so tightly adhered to him that pinching it pulls his skin along with it. It doesn’t hurt, though. Nothing… hurts? After several blinks, his eyes snap to look down at his chest. His hand presses there on instinct as well and he feels—not just a lack of a cavity, but more flesh than should be there. “Ah.” Subaru blushes, and he exhales with a squeaking voice that’s higher pitch than it should be.
Subaru shakes his head and looks up. Gotta focus. Up ahead, the line of beasts are charging again, but when did they fall back? How did he heal? Why is a girl? Where in the world is he? There’s no time to speculate about any of it, because with a glance behind him, Subaru sees the green-haired soldier who died so that he may live. A second chance to save him—the how and why he’s been given one shouldn’t be questioned when it needs to be seized.
The leopard creature leads the charging line, and Subaru advances to meet it. He tears through the air, his metallic greave-like boots barely touching the ground; he’s faster, lighter, unencumbered and powerful. In his periphery, he sees feathers at his hips, attached to his outfit, fluttering like wings. His hair—longer than it had been, even as a child—whips behind him in twin arcs of black tipped with fiery orange, like twin comets caught in his wake. He got the twintails he asked for, just not in the way he’d wanted them. But he’ll make the most of them.
Drawing glowing orange lines with his movement, a glimmering cape billowing out behind him, his graceful legs usher him to his opponent in a blur of orange-tinged black and confusion. He runs, runs, runs and tackles the creature at full speed before it can kill anyone. Its momentum is entirely reversed, the pair fly past the back of the advancing line, and they crash into the high ground the beast army had charged down from. When they finally come to a stop, the leopard creature stares at him, dumbfounded, and Subaru looks back with the same feeling.
The beast’s eyes—emptied of fury, regarding him with utter bafflement—reflect Subaru’s visage for him to see at last. Softer. Rounder. Still him, but with smoothed edges. He’s even smaller next to the creature than before, shorter than normal. A young woman in a black bodysuit, with a pair of twintails, and strength so inhuman that his thoughts can’t keep up with how fast he went. How bizarre things have gotten. But more than his clothes or his powers or this circumstance, Subaru focuses on the expression of the leopard creature. Its face, and the movement of its mouth to speak. “What the hell are you?” it—she, judging by the pitch of her voice—says. Subaru can’t answer. He doesn’t know what he’s become himself, after all.
Arriving at this impasse, the leopard person raises her claws. A pit forms in Subaru’s stomach at the way his orange glow reflects off the auburn fur. He doesn’t want to see red again. He doesn’t want to hurt or be hurt. He steps back, kicks off the ground with all his strength and it sends him flying away. Subaru is flung into the air, higher yet higher, past the reddish-purple haze, until he arrives above the few clouds that pass over the battlefield. He floats yet again, still out of reach of the stars in the heavens beyond.
For the first time since he walked out of that store, he breathes the cold night air, feels the breeze on his skin, and the storm of thoughts in his mind settles. Subaru surveys the battle from above, looks down at himself again, evaluates his appearance, and struggles to make sense of any of this. In the high pitched tone of a young woman, he mutters to himself, “So I’ve been summoned into another world, dropped into the middle of a war between demihumans and humans, can die and go back in time, and to top it all off as if that wasn’t ridiculous enough, I’m also a twintailed magical girl who can fly? This is too eventful of an isekai. It can’t even keep the genres straight.” He sighs, heavy. Part of him hopes this is just some oddly vivid lucid dream, so he slaps his cheeks and centers himself. It doesn’t wake him up, so he has to assume this is somehow real, and do the best he can. Lives hang in the balance—not just his own, not just the leopard person or the soldier, but everyone he can see fighting down there.
His gaze lands on the monocled man again, and Subaru watches as he jumps to defend his comrade like before. His senses, his vision in particular—it’s so sharpened that he can see what’s going on down below as though he was right there alongside them. Subaru knows what comes next, knows the lizard person will kill them all. He has time to move still, to fly down, to save the man and his friends.
Subaru grabs the not-fabric of his chest instead. The pain, the bleeding, the cold gnawing of death crawls through his nerves as though it had never left. He stares, watches as the lizard person acts as a reaper, taking lives in single strokes, inflicting that same terrifying fate on everyone below. Subaru hates it. Hates watching, hates knowing, hates that he’s doing nothing while people die instead of him, hates that he did that himself with a careless punch. Save them? How could he do that when he couldn’t save himself? But that one man… Subaru’s eyes flick to the other side of the battlefield, watch as the soldier struggles to hold his own. Struggles, yet manages, because the leopard person still hasn’t caught up to the line. Does that mean Subaru’s done enough?
Bodies continue to fall all across the swamp. Each croaked out death rattle is like the tick of a clock. The purple-haired man is sliced across the throat, and all his comrades follow suit, until the boy that they were defending picks himself up to fight the lizard person. Each clash of their blades sound out like the notes of a song, each movement a step in their dance of swords. That boy is Subaru’s age, he’s the hope of his comrades, and he’s brave in the face of death at every turn. Slowed by whatever is weighing every human in the battle down—that reddish-purple color that covers the battlefield in the shape of a dome—he pushes through anyway. Until the boy can’t anymore, until he’s on the ground like Subaru was, staring up at his soon-to-be killer with a grimace, with the death of other men weighing upon his powerless self. No magical boost of power is coming to save the boy. No miraculous isekai abilities will defy fate in his favor. He’s going to die, alone, and Subaru will be the only witness besides his killer.
Subaru has to do something. Anything. The one thing he’s been able to. With his curled fist held to his side, because he refuses for any more lives to be lost on his watch, Subaru dives right towards the lizard person. As Subaru plummets to the earth below, cutting through the reddish-purple haze, there’s a flash of white that he ignores—his orange glow is brighter, must be to outshine even the light at the end of the tunnel—and he tackles the lizard person as he did the leopard person, pushing the reaper away from the boy.
The white light arrives as he intervenes, and collides with Subaru’s body, shattering through some kind of thin shield around him, and piercing straight through his shoulder. Snapping, tearing, pulsing absence—it won’t kill him this time, he can move faster than the pain can catch up. Quick, until the lizard person’s legs slam into the ground and cancel all their momentum.
“A girl falling from the sky?” it says—no, she? He? Subaru can’t tell. Their green scales are cold to the touch, their tail is long but their body is unnaturally skinny. Their yellow eyes are sharp, even less human than the leopard person, but there’s a gentleness to them. Unlike the leopard person, this lizard person regards him with an open curiosity rather than outright confusion or hostility. “Yours is not the dress of a soldier, and your expression contains not the mettle of a warrior. Where’d you fall down from, lass?” They speak with a long tongue, in a tone that reminds him of Mom. Then, they train their eyes on the hole in Subaru’s shoulder. “Accursed Witch…” they mutter.
Rising from the ground, using their tail to push against the mud, they pick Subaru up with them from under his arms as they go, and set him to stand. “Human whelp, I don’t know why you’re here, who you are, or what moved you to act as you have, but if you wish to survive the battlefield, you must stand on your own two feet.” They look away from Subaru, up into the air, and Subaru follows to see what they see. There’s… a little girl? Subaru blinks a few times. Well, it’s no more crazy than the lizard, leopard, and his own appearance.
The little girl, with flowing pink hair, wearing a loose black coat, holds some kind of staff in her hand as she meets the lizard person’s gaze. With an utterly neutral tone, she speaks, “Libre Fermi. You still live, against my expectations.” Her eyes drift to Subaru. “I see. An unforeseen interference has resulted in this outcome. Further study is required.”
“Sphinx…” the lizard person—Libre—seethes. “I told Valga from the start that you were not to be trusted. Finally cared to show your true colors, have you, Witch?” Libre raises their two-sided blade, and points it at the little girl, who must be Sphinx.
“A duel on equal ground? Unacceptable conditions,” Sphinx says, and extends one finger out. “Adjustment is required.” A beam of light shoots out again. He flinches, but the spot it lands is far away from Subaru and Libre. Subaru looks to where she’s pointing.
“No…” Subaru mutters. He falls to his knees, holds his face with his hands. The boy, the hero of his comrades, the hope for which they all sacrificed themselves, is struck clean through by the light. There’s no sound, no scream, no reaction. Just a twitch and it’s done and his face falls into the mud. That absence of sensation, that distance from everything—it’s a cold kind of comfort for the boy, surely. Subaru knows that well now. The terror is so brief and fleeting before it’s over and then nothing. Except Subaru got to come back afterwards. Live on, having subjected others to the same fate he’s so scared to experience again that he’ll do nothing to save them, with all the power in the world. No, even when he does something, even when he has acted, he’s still failed. Natsuki Subaru has always been and will always be a failure, even dressed up all pretty, even in another world.
“I understood you to be shameless and insane, but the disgrace of this act…” Libre says, and Subaru watches between his fingers as the boy slowly picks himself up off the ground. He’s… alive? “I had swallowed my disdain for the slaughter of immobilized knights, for the sake of stamping out humanity’s will to hurt our kind, but to dishonor the Sword Demon yet further, even in death…”
Not alive. Not breathing. Not grimacing. Just a passive expression, with yellow pupils floating limp in black eyes. Cracked, grey skin clings to what was once a youthful face. Holding a sword and being nothing more than the echo of a person, the boy’s corpse lunges at Libre. The clash of metal on metal resumes, and all Subaru does is watch. A dry chuckle crawls out of his throat, and heat beats at his eyelids.
Sphinx floats down and looks at Subaru. “Inquiry. What is the nature of your existence?”
Biting his lip again, taking in a sharp inhale, and forcing out a seething exhale, Subaru turns to Sphinx. “How am I supposed to know? I didn’t ask to come here!” He gestures at everything around them. “I didn’t ask to be dressed up this way!” He waves at himself. “I didn’t walk out of the store knowing I’d watch hundreds die, including myse—”
His hands freeze in place, the tears streaming down his cheeks halt, and the reddish-purple gives way to a world of grey. There is no breathing, there is no moving, there is only colorless stillness, and whispers nipping at his ears. Shadows creep around the edge of his vision, long hand-like tendrils crawling around him, all over him, pushing right through his chest as though it still had gaping slashes carved into it. Grasping his heart and squeezing.
When color snaps back into the world, Subaru drops forward, and his hands barely catch him from falling into the mud. “A sudden influx of miasma? Fascinating. Further study is required.” Sphinx turns away from Subaru, looks at the clashing of metal. He heaves, but no matter how many breaths he takes it’s not enough to catch up. “Despite a lifting of the burden from my undead warrior, it remains inferior to Libre Fermi. Vexing. Recalibration is required.”
Sphinx raises an arm directly upwards, and the sky’s color drains. The haze clears—no, collects, all into one point directly overhead. With a flick of her wrist, the condensed essence of the magic shoots down from above, and lands on Libre alone. They grit their teeth, as their green scales are discolored by red and purple. The boy’s corpse attacks without pause, yet Libre dodges and delivers parry after parry. For a brief moment, Subaru remembers his kendo training, with the fighting slow enough to be almost human.
“Remainder is unsustainable; retreat is in order,” Sphinx says, and all but one of her fingers curl. The arm that’s still pointed upwards lights up at her fingertip, and from nothing a small ball of fire emerges and soars into the air. It reaches the sky and explodes in something akin to fireworks. It must be her signal for the retreat, but Subaru doesn’t let it distract him. He sees her lowering that arm to point at Libre. With the haze gone, with the only thing holding him back being his own cowardice, all it takes is a moment of courage to—”You are inexplicable,” Sphinx says, looking down at Subaru’s hold of her wrist. He moved without thinking, faster than he realized he could. “I will study you further, and should you contain a witch factor, it will be excised from your corpse.”
Sphinx pulls her arm out from Subaru’s hold, and flies off into the sky. The boy’s corpse sheaths its blade and runs after her. Yet, Subaru is not left alone, because the human armies are approaching, swords drawn. The man with purple hair, hand clutching his still-bleeding throat, is closest, and drags himself forward, propelled by the spite, rage, and grief that his glare carries. His target is Libre, who is collapsed on the ground, writhing from the burden of Sphinx’s magic, defenseless. It would be a fitting revenge, for the reaper to be slaughtered just the same as all their victims, wouldn’t it?
Subaru’s body once again acts before he realizes he’s decided. He’s at Libre’s side; he picks them up the same as they did for him without a second thought earlier. No more death can be allowed. The battle is over. Subaru carries Libre’s large but light body in his arms as the purple-haired man redirects his disdain at Subaru. It doesn’t sting, because nothing is as painful as that absence he’s felt, that he’s inflicted through action and inaction. It doesn’t hurt, because Subaru deserves it.
And though he has no right to escape, he must get away, from this army, from this battlefield, from this swamp. He runs, and flies, and moves faster than the wind. The landscape twists all around him, the world seems to fold in on itself, until suddenly his legs stop listening. His bracelet blinks at him, like the low battery light on a game console. “Ah,” Subaru says, and his voice sounds masculine again.
Libre tumbles out of his grasp, and Subaru falls onto them once more. There’s no weight of twintails on his head. There’s no strength in his body. There’s just yellow eyes looking down at him, and strained words that speak in a tone he can’t appreciate before passing out. “A boy, huh? Lad, if you think yourself some kind of mistress of war, you’re way in over your head.”
“Wilhelm Trias is dead,” Carol says, no louder than a whisper, muffled by the door between them. She’s out there, with her palm against the wood, having given up turning the rigid handle. The door’s locked, and though Carol could smash through it, she won’t. Not as long as she’s ordered to stay away. Not as long as she has no reason to break from her role as a servant and force herself in as a friend.
“Please leave me, Carol,” Theresia replies, her voice steady. It too is a blade, wielded with precision, to stab at Carol’s heart in just the right way.
“Lady Theresia…” Carol chokes out. “Yes, understood.” She lingers at the door for a long moment, before her echoing steps usher her down the hall.
Alone, Theresia moves from the door and sits at the vanity across from her bed. The mirror stares back at her, passive, makeup supplies strewn across its surface. Theresia has always been disorganized, and Carol leaving for days to go off to battle has left her room a mess. Theresia chuckles, sobs, and breaks down into tears. She knew this would happen; she knew from the moment Carol didn’t come right back home to her; she knew farther back still, from her first meeting with him. She had asked why he wielded a sword, and he could only answer that it was all he had. A sword to the very end, fighting in the name of his flower girl.
When she had first become the Sword Saint and beaten her elder brother in a duel, she dropped to her knees and tore at her hair and screamed in grief. She was a death god who had taken the form of a child, and her days of impersonating a young girl had come to an end. All these years later, all the blood that’s been spilled to keep her from staining her own hands, and that hasn’t changed one bit.
This is her punishment. Just as fate ushered the kingdom into civil war because she weighed her own desire onto others, escaping from her liabilities by expecting anyone but herself to take the path fate had laid out for her, it gave Wilhelm to her just so it could take him away, laugh at her, show her that there is nothing in this life worth hoping for. The flowers in that field may as well wither their petals away. They don’t need her. They never have. She’s only ever been a killer, destined to be one from the day she was born.
And now, she understands these tears are worthless. This grief, this loss, it’s all just a waste, isn’t it? A futile thrashing against a future entirely outside her control. Well, so be it.
Theresia takes a brush in hand and snaps it in half. The jagged wood is mostly dull, only sharp in a few places, but she can see at a glance how exactly it could be wielded to take a life, the right angle to strike at to cut. She doesn’t need to see to do it. She’s a killer, can never be anything more than a killer. The Sword Saint, Theresia van Astrea, jabs the broken brush toward her wrist, intending to open a wound that’ll never heal.
It… snaps?
She looks down, and finds a bracelet that she never put on. This has to be some kind of cruel joke. For Theresia to finally summon the courage to do something, anything, about her worthless existence, and the Sword God mocks even this effort. “It’ll never end, will it?” she says. “This was supposed to be the conclusion of my tale. On and on—”
A bright light shines from her wrist. It silences her, cradles her, and when she looks up to the mirror, she finds her reflection has changed.
Twintails aside, Carol wouldn’t approve of this outfit.