Chapter Text
When darkness swallowed him, he felt as though existence itself was being crushed into dust by an invisible, merciless hand of cosmic proportions. The blood-curdling screams of his friends echoing through the icy, ancient stone corridors of the Pleiades Observatory, the massive green wave of mana that shook the tower to its foundations, and above all else...
The familiar life slipping through his fingers like water — the helplessness of the people he had sworn to protect through countless sleepless nights.
*“Beatrice! Emilia!”*
His mind screamed those names with all its might, but no sound, not even a whisper, escaped his lips. The darkness twisted and bent Natsuki Subaru like a cheap piece of cloth, grinding him mercilessly between the incomprehensible gears of space and time.
He couldn’t breathe. His body experienced indescribable agony — as if it were being torn apart into atoms, thousands of tiny pieces, digested in the belly of darkness, and then forcibly reassembled by an alien will.
And then... as if he were worthless trash that the universe had grown sick of and vomited out, he was hurled violently onto a hard surface.
*Thud.*
The ground he landed on was nothing like the familiar soft grass of Lugnica, the dirt roads he had walked, or the warm wooden floors of Roswaal’s mansion. It was hard.
So unnaturally smooth and lifeless that it felt like the cold skin of a corpse rather than earth. His lungs heaved like a blacksmith’s bellows, desperately gasping for air. The first breath he drew burned his throat like a rusty razor blade.
The air was so heavy, so toxic and stale that every inhale filled his throat with rust, ozone, and the stench of millennia-old decay. His eyes watered as he coughed violently, as if trying to expel his own lungs.
With every cough, the taste of blood and metal filled his mouth. Subaru forced his tear-filled eyes open, his lashes trembling.
His mind was still in survival mode; he still hoped to see Lugnica’s familiar blue sky, the blinding sun, or the peaceful stars beyond the barrier. But when he lifted his head and looked up, the sight before him shattered the last fragments of hope in his soul like fragile glass.
The sky... was dead.
It was painted in pitch black and sickly purple by some enormous, diseased brush. The clouds didn’t move — they simply hung there like scabs over a poisoned wound.
And when he looked toward the horizon, what he saw was horrifying enough to drive him insane. A colossal void, like a shattered mirror fragment ripped into the fabric of the universe, surrounded by a swirling vortex of ominous purple and black energy.
A black hole. An absolute, all-consuming darkness that even light could not escape, devouring the sky itself.
Just looking at it for a single second emptied his mind and sucked away every last bit of joy and memory like a leech. That void was not alive; it was the exact opposite of existence.
*“Where... am I?
What happened to me?”*
His hoarse, cracked voice was instantly swallowed by the absolute silence of this dead land. Even his own voice sounded foreign to him.
Slowly, every muscle and nerve protesting in pain, he tried to stand. The cosmic trauma of the dimensional rupture had left microscopic cracks in every bone in his body.
When he pressed his palms against the ground, he felt cold, blackened earth covered in metallic debris. He struggled onto his knees and looked around.
An endless battlefield... No, it was a graveyard.
Massive sword hilts the size of skyscrapers, half-rusted and melted, protruded from the ground all the way to the horizon. Ruins of advanced technology intertwined with organic matter formed a grotesque skeletal web.
And right beside his knee, completely out of place in this metallic hell, lay pale, nearly colorless, almost white-pink leaves.
*Sakura.*
*“Sakura?
Did I return to Earth? To Japan?”* His heart pounded with such wild hope that he thought it would break his ribcage.
The thought of returning home — to his room, his mother’s voice from the kitchen, his father’s reassuring smile — nearly suffocated him. Even though he had seen himself as a useless shut-in in that world, that house had been his only sanctuary.
But as he looked more carefully, that fragile spark of hope was mercilessly extinguished. This was not the modern, noisy, peaceful Japan he remembered.
This was a dying world built upon the ashes of a cosmic apocalypse. The trees were twisted, leafless, and pitch black. The few remaining sakura petals drifted slowly to the ground even without wind, as if they had given up on existing.
Subaru looked at his hands. They were shaking uncontrollably, as if he were freezing.
He stared at the small, insignificant cuts and dirt on them.
*“Did you ruin everything again?”* whispered that dark, mocking, self-loathing voice inside him.
*“You thought you’d broken the tower’s curse, that you could protect your friends, that all those endless death loops and unimaginable pain had been worth something. You thought you were a hero. But look… you’re alone again. Where’s Emilia? Where’s Rem? You couldn’t save them. And this time, you’re in the middle of hell itself, where no one will ever find you. Even Return by Death can’t save you here.”*
“No…” Subaru whispered, burying his trembling hands in his hair and pulling hard. Tears had already begun streaming down his face.
He fought against the rising panic attack, the invisible hand choking his throat. “No, calm down…
Calm down, Natsuki Subaru. Think.
Even if this isn’t Japan… these sakura petals, these strange ruins… maybe the key to going home is here. I was already stuck in Lugnica anyway. I never belonged there. That fantasy world wasn’t my real home.
Maybe… maybe the damn exit door, the path back to my mom and dad, is right here.”
He had to believe his own lies, or he would lose his mind in that very second.
He stood up. His legs could barely support him, wobbling like jelly.
The traumatic memories from Lugnica — Elsa’s knives gutting him, the Great Rabbit devouring him alive, Betelgeuse’s invisible hands snapping his neck — still weighed on his shoulders. His mind was already in pieces.
But *Return by Death* hadn’t activated. So he was still alive.
Blood still flowed through his veins. Yet he was completely alone in a foreign hell where even breathing felt like acid pouring into his lungs.
He had to keep standing. He had to take a step.
Dragging his feet through the poisonous mist and rust-filled air, he staggered forward a few hundred meters. Visibility was extremely low; the purple haze turned everything into a ghost city.
Then, a silhouette emerged from the thick fog ahead. A woman with long, jet-black hair that swayed faintly in the pale purple light.
Subaru froze in place, as if nailed to the ground by invisible stakes. Two sharp, blood-red horns rose from the sides of her head, tearing through the darkness.
An Oni. Just like Rem and Ram…
But the aura this woman radiated was so overwhelming that even Rem’s demon form would seem like a child’s toy beside it. However, what truly froze Subaru wasn’t her horns or the long, deadly katana at her waist.
It was the absolute, bottomless, devastating *indifference* on her face. Her porcelain-pale, flawlessly sculpted features held not a single trace of emotion — no anger, no sadness, no fear… nothing.
When her lilac eyes slowly turned toward him, they didn’t see him as an enemy, prey, or even an interesting stranger. They looked at him as if he were a speck of ash drifting in the wind, a meaningless pebble whose existence or non-existence made no difference on a cosmic scale.
This gaze didn’t come from a god’s arrogance or a monster’s bloodlust. It came from pure emptiness — from the very center of nothingness.
Her soul had sunk even deeper into that black hole than her canon self; her identity, memories, and desires had been almost completely erased, leaving behind only a beautiful but hollow shell.
Her right hand moved slowly and mechanically toward the katana at her waist. With her thumb, she pushed the blade a few inches out of its sheath. A pale, eerie purple light that bent space itself reflected on the smooth steel.
Yet there was no defensive instinct or battle lust on her face. It was as if she didn’t even know *why* she was drawing the sword — merely a millennia-old muscle memory, a meaningless reflex from a forgotten past.
After pulling the blade halfway, she stopped. Her lilac eyes remained fixed on Subaru, yet focused somewhere far beyond him.
Subaru’s heart pounded wildly, threatening to burst from his chest. His knees had gone completely weak; he was barely staying upright.
He had faced unimaginable horrors in Lugnica — Puck’s world-freezing form, the Shadow of the Witch of Envy. He knew the scent of absolute power and overwhelming danger well.
The horned woman before him possessed a cosmic weight that could erase him from existence with a single finger movement or sword swing. Trembling, cold sweat pouring down his body, he quickly raised his hands in surrender.
Palms facing her. “P-please wait!” His voice was hoarse, cracked, and filled with raw terror.
The words tumbled out. “I-I have no weapon!
Please, I’m not here to fight. I swear I won’t hurt you — I *can’t* hurt you!
I… I just lost my way.
The sky, this place, these giant rusted swords… I don’t recognize anything.
I don’t even know where I came from or how I got here. I just…
I just want to go home… back to my mom and dad.”
Subaru couldn’t stop his voice from cracking or his desperate, childlike begging.
But the woman listening to his plea didn’t even blink. Her porcelain mask didn’t move a millimeter.
She only tilted her head slightly, at a microscopic angle. Her lilac eyes looked as if they were trying to retrieve the meaning of the word *“home”* from a vast, dark, dusty, and long-burned library deep within her mind.
Her mind was so empty, her memories so devoured by the black hole in the sky, that even forming words was difficult. Her lips parted slowly.
Her voice was so slow, so devoid of emotion, vibration, or life energy that it sounded like the distant moan of a dead wind inside a cave. She seemed barely capable of forming full sentences.
The words fell from her lips one by one, like broken pieces of glass.
“Home…” the woman whispered.
Her eyes weren’t looking at Subaru’s face, but at an invisible emptiness behind him. A long, suffocating silence stretched on, feeling like centuries.
“…I forgot.”
Her hand slowly slipped from the katana’s hilt. She could no longer find a reason to hold it.
With her pale, slender fingers, she gestured toward the rusted piles and dead earth around them.
“…Only…
emptiness. A grave.”
Subaru swallowed hard.
His throat felt like sandpaper. The fear in his eyes slowly gave way to a deeper horror.
The horned woman before him didn’t want to hurt him. She had no desire to kill.
She was simply a breathing nothingness. A lonely soul who had forgotten her own name and purpose, now part of the meaninglessness of this dying world.
She was less a person and more like a monument to the dead nature of this world. Her lilac eyes turned away from Subaru and fixed on the massive black hole in the sky — on IX.
“That shadow…” she said. The words came out broken, as if each one caused her physical pain.
“…Swallows. Everything.
Meaning… Path.”
Subaru froze at her fragmented sentences.
This wasn’t just physical loneliness; this was the slow, second-by-second erasure of a consciousness, of a soul.
“You…” Subaru began, the selfish terror of death in his voice gradually replaced by a crushing sadness.
He slowly lowered his trembling hands. “Are you alone here?
How long have you been in this hell?”
The woman slowly turned her lilac eyes back to him with heavy effort. A tiny spark of focus appeared in her pupils.
“Time…” she murmured. She closed her eyes slowly, as if even thinking about the concept of time stabbed her mind like broken glass.
“…Doesn’t exist. Lost.
In the black.”
At that moment, as if the massive anomaly in the sky could no longer tolerate their hopeless whispers, the purple darkness deepened. The distant void pulsed ominously and a heavy, pitch-black droplet fell from the air.
*Hiss.*
The moment the black raindrop touched the back of Subaru’s exposed right hand, thin, foul-smelling smoke rose from his skin. After a split-second of shock, an excruciating pain — as if a red-hot iron rod had been pressed into his flesh and pure acid injected into his veins — spread through his entire arm.
“Ah! Damn it!
Ahh!”
Subaru yanked his hand to his chest with a desperate cry, collapsing to his knees in agony. A deep, black burn mark that ate into his flesh all the way to the bone had already formed where the drop had landed.
The pain was so sudden and intense that tears burst from his eyes. The rain began to fall faster.
*Plip, plip, plip…* Every drop that hit the ground caused smoke, toxic gas, and hissing sounds to rise from the rusted metal and dead sakura branches. This was no ordinary rain that nourished the earth — it was acid rain, the tears of a planet destroying itself, melting everything organic.
Driven by primal survival instinct, Subaru gritted his teeth and forced himself up. About fifty meters behind him stood the ruins of an old temple with black stone pillars still standing.
He started running toward it for shelter. But after only one step, he stopped.
Breathing heavily, writhing in pain, he looked back at the woman. The horned woman simply stood beneath the fading sakura leaves.
The acid rain fell on her too — black drops that burned and melted flesh. They streamed from her jet-black hair and crimson horns onto her porcelain skin.
But the woman… didn’t move at all.
She must have felt the same pain that had brought Subaru to his knees. Yet she didn’t flinch.
She didn’t squint. She didn’t wrap her arms around herself or try to find cover.
She was so deep in nothingness, so utterly detached, that the physical pain this world inflicted — the acid burning her skin — was completely meaningless compared to the vast darkness inside her soul. As the rain ran down her body in black streaks, she simply stared into the void, silently accepting her dissolution without resistance.
She was like a blind prisoner watching her own execution. Subaru’s heart clenched so hard it overpowered his physical pain.
The cowardly, weak part of him that wanted to survive at all costs screamed:
*“Run! Save yourself, you idiot!
Leave her! You’re not a hero!
You can barely save your own life! She doesn’t even seem to be getting burned — maybe she’s already dead, a ghost!
Just run!”*
But Subaru couldn’t move forward. He couldn’t take that step.
He couldn’t stand by and watch a living, breathing being simply fade away and surrender to death so easily. Setting aside his helplessness, his cowardice, his inability to wield a sword, and his physical weakness — this was the one thing that went against everything Natsuki Subaru was.
He couldn’t leave anyone behind. He hadn’t left Rem.
He hadn’t left Emilia.
He wouldn’t leave this girl who had forgotten who she was either.
“What are you doing?!” Subaru screamed at the top of his lungs, his throat tearing. He tried to be heard over the hissing rain and howling wind.
“You can’t just stand there! You’ll melt!
You’ll die!”
He didn’t think. Clutching his burning right arm to his chest, legs trembling with fear of death, he ran back toward her, straight into the acid rain.
Each drop that hit his shoulders, back, and neck burned through his thin clothes and seared his skin. Every acid droplet felt like a thousand hot needles piercing his nerves.
Tears streamed uncontrollably from his eyes, he bit his lips until they bled, his breath caught — but he didn’t stop. He reached her and grabbed her ice-cold, rigid right hand with his uninjured left hand, squeezing with all his strength.
For the first time in millennia, the woman’s lilac eyes widened slightly at the touch. A tiny wave of shock appeared in her pupils.
Someone was touching her. In the middle of acid rain, at the cost of burning his own flesh, a warm, trembling, suffering, bleeding, mortal, weak human hand was holding hers.
That touch was like a small, warm spark exploding in the middle of an endless, freezing void. The massive black hole in her mind paused for a millisecond at that warmth.
“You understand me, right?!” Subaru said, his face twisted in pain, desperately pulling her along with all his might. “Come with me!
Please! Run!”
Subaru began dragging her with him.
The woman didn’t resist. She didn’t draw her sword or push him away.
She simply followed the pull of his warm, weak but incredibly stubborn and desperate grip, walking slowly like a leaf carried by the wind whose strings had momentarily been taken by a mortal. For Subaru, that short sprint of a few dozen meters to the temple ruins felt like centuries as the acid burned his flesh and scorched his back.
His lungs burned, his eyes watered from the acid fumes. Finally, they threw themselves into the relatively sheltered area beneath the collapsed black stone building with a mostly intact roof.
The moment they reached the dry safety, Subaru released her hand. Gasping for breath, chest heaving like a bellows, he leaned against one of the black pillars.
His right arm, shoulder, neck, and back were covered in black, bleeding burns. The pain reminded him with every heartbeat how weak, how fragile, how easily killable he was — a mere mortal of flesh and blood.
His legs gave out completely and he collapsed to the floor. Gritting his teeth and biting his lips, he groaned to suppress the screams.
Sweat and rainwater mixed on his face and dripped from his chin. The woman simply stood where he had left her, in the shadow of the pillars.
Acid droplets streamed off her onto the stone floor, but there wasn’t a single burn on her porcelain skin, hair, or clothes. As if this physical world and its acid could not harm her.
Or perhaps she had already detached so completely from this dimension that she had become an untouchable illusion, a silhouette. She hadn’t actually needed Subaru to save her or pull her out of the rain.
Her body wouldn’t have melted even if she stood there for another thousand years. Yet the woman looked with her dull lilac eyes at Subaru’s burning, scorched arm and back, at his weak, fragile body writhing in pain on the ground.
Her mind, amidst the black hole’s whispers that rendered everything meaningless, could not comprehend it. Why would a human choose to suffer, to accelerate his own melting and pain, for a stranger who offered him no benefit and didn’t even need saving?
It made no logical sense.
“Why…” the woman said.
Her voice was an extremely quiet whisper, almost inaudible, like a breath of wind. She struggled even to complete the sentence, to find the words through the dark fog in her mind.
“…did you suffer?” She tilted her head slightly. “I…
have no meaning left to save.
I am disappearing.”
Subaru slowly raised his head, his eyes bloodshot and tear-filled, his body trembling. He looked at that cold, porcelain beauty and that hopeless loneliness.
A tired, pained, yet completely honest and unmasked smile appeared on his cracked lips. “I don’t know…” he said between ragged, wheezing breaths.
His throat was dry. “I just…
couldn’t stand watching someone stand alone under that rain, waiting to disappear into nothingness. I couldn’t allow it.
I… I’m very weak.
As you can see… I don’t have any special power.
I could have died back there, and I might still die from the pain. I’m not a hero…
I’m just selfish. But…
if I had left you there… I would hate myself.
All my life, I would remember that moment and feel disgusted with myself for watching you die in silence.”
He took another deep, shaky breath. “Suffering physically…
at least burning while trying to do something… feels better than doing nothing and turning my back to run.”
The woman showed no reaction to his words.
She turned her gaze away from Subaru and back to the purple darkness outside, to the never-ending black rain. However, the ghostly warmth left by Subaru’s grip still tingled in her palm, beating like a heart trying to wake from a thousand-year sleep.
Outside, the black acid rain continued mercilessly beating the dead earth, rusted metal, and the ruins of Izumo civilization with its hissing. Inside the temple shelter, the only sound breaking the silence was Subaru’s pained, trembling, rhythmic breathing.
Subaru slowly slid down the cold, massive stone pillar until he was fully seated on the floor.
The burns on his right arm and shoulder sent waves of fire with every heartbeat, bringing him to the edge of fainting.
*“This pain… this pain is too real,”* he thought, squeezing his eyes shut and resting his sweat-soaked head against the cold stone. *“I don’t even know if Return by Death works here in this foreign dimension.*
Maybe the tower’s curse cut all my ties by throwing me here. Maybe this is my final breath.
If I die… it ends.
If I die here at the base of this dark pillar… I’ll never see my mother’s smiling face in the kitchen again, or my father.
The promises I made to Emilia and Rem — ‘I will save you’ — will become a huge lie. I should have left her there and hidden.
Why? Why do I always act with this stupid guilty conscience?”*
To distract himself from the pain, he slowly raised his head and looked at the woman standing a few steps away.
The horned woman stood with her face turned toward the black rain and the hopeless scenery outside. She had lightly raised the left hand Subaru had gripped earlier to chest level, staring blankly into her palm as if a new, warm organ had just been transplanted there.
This silence, this grave-like silence, was suffocating Subaru. Silence meant the relentless fear inside him growing, his thoughts devouring him.
He had to speak. He had to say something to forget the pain.
“In the place I came from…” Subaru began, stuttering. His voice echoed weakly off the wide stone walls of the shelter.
“…when it rained, the earth smelled beautiful. It smelled of wet, fresh grass.
It didn’t smell of acid and rust. My mom…
would always scold me on rainy days for going outside and catching a cold. My dad would sit in his old armchair in the living room reading the newspaper, then tease me.
That place… Japan…
that was my real home.” His eyes filled with tears, a hard lump forming in his throat.
After a long, unbearable silence, the woman slowly turned her head toward Subaru, as if her neck were rusted. Her porcelain face still held no expression.
“You can…” she whispered after the long silence.
She searched for the words, struggling to find them in the pitch-black depths of her mind. “…call me Mei.
Acheron.
It doesn’t matter… Both are the same to me.
Mei… feels like a forgotten dream that doesn’t belong to me.”
“Mei,” Subaru murmured.
Calling her by a real name made them both feel a little more human. “Then Mei…
why is this place like this? These giant swords, this destruction…
The sky… why is it shattered?
What is that black hole up there?”
Mei’s lilac eyes drifted back to the swirling purple-black hole in the sky — to IX. Explaining was difficult for her; it required physical effort.
Every time she tried to remember a word, it felt like another piece of ash was torn from her mind and pulled toward that hole. “Izumo…” she said, then remained silent for a long time.
“…was blue. It was alive.
Then the Kami… those monstrous beings descended from the sky.
We fought. We humans fought.
We forged colossal crowned swords. While we cut and destroyed each other in that savage war…
that shadow…” She pointed at IX, the absolute darkness above. “…watched.
It just watched.”
Her voice grew quieter, like a sorrowful wind. “The war ended.
We thought we had destroyed the enemy, that we had won with our swords. But…
the shadow swallowed Izumo. Everything…
was erased. Not just matter…
It swallowed meaning. It swallowed memories.
I tried to forge one final sword, the ultimate blade, to resist that nothingness. But…
it broke. I…
am among those fragments, that failure. The Self-Annihilator…
My memories… are shattered.
I am disappearing. I have no home…
I am simply… disappearing.”
Subaru was shaken to his core by what he heard.
His eyes widened in horror and he momentarily forgot his pain. This wasn’t a simple monster attack or Witch invasion like in Lugnica.
It wasn’t a dragon or an army. This was the erasure of a concept — the erasure of existence itself.
He felt his own helplessness in its rawest form, down to his bones. He was just a human.
A human who couldn’t even use magic. How could he defeat a black hole that swallowed existence?
He could do nothing. He was so powerless that beside this woman, he was worth less than an insect.
When the black rain gradually weakened and the drops became sparse, the hissing outside lessened. At that exact moment, the air suddenly turned razor-sharp cold.
It wasn’t just a drop in temperature. It was an absolute sense of danger that froze the soul directly, paralyzing the primal survival instinct.
The hairs on Subaru’s arms stood on end. From the mist and purple haze, from among the ruins and rusted swords, grotesque, mind-bending monstrous shadows began to rise.
*Kami* creatures — with bodies like massive rotten tree trunks, white glowing masks instead of faces, and dozens of twitching blood-red eyes — crawled toward the shelter like insects. Behind them appeared other abominations with bone wings, spreading the stench of rotting flesh and sulfur.
They were the parasites of this dead world’s remains. Mei slowly and gracefully moved her right hand to her katana’s hilt.
There was no fear, excitement, or battle lust in her lilac eyes. She simply took a measured, mechanical step forward as if performing a routine task.
But what froze Subaru’s blood and made his heart leap into his throat was something bizarre and absurd. Those massive, monstrous creatures completely ignored the horned woman standing before them — this divine being radiating an overwhelming nothingness that crushed the world.
They didn’t even look at her. Their hundreds of glowing, hate-filled, and savagely hungry eyes locked onto the defenseless, living “human” cowering in pain at the base of the dark pillar — the one breathing, sweating, heart beating, trembling with fear.
Subaru’s intense life energy, his desperation, and the disgusting *Witch’s Scent* he emitted were like a bright, irresistible feast beacon for these parasites.
“You’ve got to be kidding me…” Subaru groaned, frantically pulling his legs back and pressing harder against the cold stone pillar.
His eyes were about to pop out of their sockets, his breath caught. “Why do I have to be the favorite prey in every world?!
Why always me?! In Lugnica it was because of the Witch, fine, but why here?!
There’s no Witch here! I’m just a weak human, my meat probably tastes terrible!”
One of the bone-winged monsters let out a piercing, ear-splitting shriek that tore through the sky and dove straight at Subaru.
Its razor-sharp, rotten bone claws sliced through the air like a whip, descending toward his defenseless chest. There was no time to run, no place to hide.
Subaru squeezed his eyes shut in terror. He desperately raised his uninjured left hand in front of his face as if it could stop the massive claws.
He clenched his teeth.
*“I’m going to die…
Here in this rusty dump, torn apart with no one knowing! If Return by Death doesn’t work, I’m completely finished!”*
*Shing—!*
A vertical flash of purple-black light, faster than human perception could register, passed before his eyes. There was no sound — only the sensation of space being torn.
Then, after the deafening clang of steel, the monster diving toward him froze in mid-air, split perfectly in half vertically just millimeters before its claws reached Subaru’s face.
The creature left behind neither blood nor flesh; it simply turned into black, fine ash and scattered across Subaru’s face. Mei stood directly in front of him, acting as a shield of flesh.
Her katana was fully drawn. The silver blade didn’t just gleam — it rippled with pitch-black energy that bent space, time, and light, devouring the air around it.
The woman didn’t turn back to Subaru on the ground. Her voice was that same empty, echo-less whisper:
“You are weak…” Mei said, preparing to swing her sword slowly toward the other monsters.
Her eyes were fixed only on her targets. “…Very fragile.
Stay behind me.”
The battle ended in seconds at a speed Subaru’s brain couldn’t process. Mei didn’t run — she simply stepped forward.
Every time the katana’s purple-black light sliced the air, the tip of the blade folded and bent space and time like paper. The massive, terrifying monsters were torn apart like wet tissues before the thin blade, offering no resistance.
Piercing, agonized screams echoed briefly through the ruined temple square before vanishing. The creatures’ black, tar-like thick, rotten blood sprayed like waterfalls.
When everything was over, only a few seconds had passed. Mei stood in the middle of the square, shrouded in mist.
She slowly and respectfully sheathed her katana with a deliberate rhythm.
*Click.* But she wasn’t flawless. The black, sticky fluids and blood of the monsters had splattered onto her face, long black hair, pale horns, and the hands holding the sword.
Black stains remained on her porcelain skin. Yet she didn’t move at all.
She didn’t raise a hand to wipe the blood from her face, to clean herself, or to show disgust. She didn’t care about the filth on her body in the slightest.
Her body was worthless to her — an empty shell already waiting to be swallowed. Whether it was bloody or clean meant nothing.
She simply stood there. Subaru took a deep, trembling breath.
Air barely reached his lungs. His legs were still shaking uncontrollably.
He had nearly died for real. The power of the woman before him was so immense, so terrifying and godlike that Subaru once again harshly confronted his own weakness and insignificance — like an insect.
*“If she hadn’t been here, I would have been torn into a thousand pieces right now. My flesh would be scattered everywhere.
I’m just a helpless, defenseless mortal who needs protection.”*
But seeing her standing there covered in blood, like a soulless statue that had given up even on her own cleanliness, filled him with a familiar, heart-wrenching pity and anger. This attitude of completely disregarding her own body and accepting nothingness was unbearable to Subaru, who was desperately clinging to life.
He hated those who gave up. Especially when it was such a beautiful soul giving up.
Wincing from the pain of his acid burns, he gritted his teeth and stood up. With trembling but determined steps, he walked out of the shelter toward her.
A voice in his head screamed: *“Don’t approach her! She’s a monster, she’ll erase you into nothingness with one move like those creatures!
She didn’t even turn around!”* But Subaru didn’t stop. He tore off a large piece of clean fabric from the inner lining of his jacket.
He stopped right in front of Mei. She was slightly taller than him, her blood-red horns looking down at him threateningly from above.
Subaru raised his trembling, sweat-soaked hand and gently extended the cloth toward her face. “Don’t move…” he said.
His voice was low and shaky from fear, adrenaline crash, and pain. “Please…
don’t draw your sword.”
Mei didn’t stop him. She didn’t pull away.
She didn’t defend herself. She simply looked into Subaru’s eyes with a small, uncomprehending expression — as if she couldn’t understand what this weak human was trying to do.
Subaru carefully wiped the black, sticky blood from her pale cheek with the cloth, terrified of hurting or breaking her. His hands trembled, his breath held.
He didn’t care that she was a goddess, an Emanator, a being capable of destroying everything; right now, before him stood only a lonely, shattered girl who had forgotten her own pain. He carefully cleaned the tar-like stains from her hair and forehead.
“You can’t stay like this,” Subaru said, taking her ice-cold fingers — stained with blood — into his own warm hands to clean them. He didn’t look up, focusing only on cleaning.
There was no hero’s confidence or savior’s arrogance in his voice — only the helpless reproach of a weak, heartbroken human. “No matter how strong you are…
no matter how much you can cut… you can’t walk around covered in the blood of these disgusting things.
I don’t want to allow you to do this to yourself, to treat yourself like trash, to give up on your own existence. Even if there’s no one left in this world, in this hell, to remind you that you’re human, that you’re valuable…
at least I’m here right now. Even if I’m a cowardly, weak, useless, and mortal stranger…
I’m here.”
Mei looked at her now-clean pale hands. Then at Subaru’s determined but tearful eyes.
The way this boy treated her not as an object, weapon, or dangerous being — but as a fragile living creature that could get dirty and needed care and affection — created a small tremor in the massive, impenetrable wall of nothingness inside her mind.
“You…” the woman whispered.
This time her voice sounded more like a human’s whisper than wind. “…Why?
You are very weak. You are suffering.
All this effort… is meaningless.
I am already disappearing.”
Subaru smiled painfully, eyes glistening with tears, despite his injured arm. That smile was the only light shining through all the despair.
“Because I’m an idiot, Mei. And…
instead of driving myself crazy thinking about how pathetic and helpless I am, cleaning you and helping you… hurts my soul less.”
The thick fog around them, mixed with the smell of black blood, had become unbearable.
“We need to find a safer, more enclosed place,” Subaru said, reaching out with his left hand to take Mei’s marble-smooth but corpse-cold hand again. “The rain has stopped but this air…
this mist is rotting my lungs. We need somewhere more closed and secure.”
Mei’s fingers gave no reaction inside his palm.
She neither pulled away nor made any movement to return his warmth. She simply stood there.
When Subaru gently pulled her, she followed with mechanical obedience. She was like a puppet whose will had completely dissolved; wherever Subaru pulled, her steps followed.
They began walking together. The journey was literal torture.
The acid burns on Subaru’s right arm and shoulder burned like molten fire with every step, squeezing his chest and cutting off his breath. The dust and decay in every breath triggered coughing fits, which made his wounds throb even more.
The ground was slippery; giant rusted sword fragments and sharp technological debris threatened to shred his feet at any moment. Subaru stumbled several times, nearly falling to his knees, and had to grab onto Mei with his left hand.
Mei, however, was as unshakable as a mountain. She didn’t budge under Subaru’s weight, but she also showed no reflex to support him or prevent him from falling. She simply watched with her dull lilac eyes as he regained his balance.
Eventually, they found an underground shelter beneath the black stone ruins, protected by a thick steel hatch. Subaru’s weak arms could never have opened it, but Mei moved it aside with a single finger as if it were a sheet of paper.
When they descended, they realized it was a shelter that had miraculously survived the apocalypse above, with filtered air and generators still running at low power. The acid and decay smell gave way to old, dusty but clean air.
The lights were dim and yellow. As they explored, they found an old living area and a working cleaning unit (shower).
After roughly bandaging his own wounds with cloths from a first aid kit he found, gritting his teeth, Subaru turned to Mei with exhausted eyes. “Um…
the water works,” he said, pointing to the shower cabin. He spoke hesitantly.
“Cleaning up always makes a person feel better. You can wash away the last remnants on your body.
You… go ahead.
I’ll stay outside.”
Mei simply looked at him with a blank, obedient expression. She nodded silently and entered the room with the cabin.
While Subaru waited outside in the kitchen-like area, he heard the sound of water turning on. However, what happened inside was far more tragic than Subaru could have imagined.
When Mei turned on the water, she didn’t remove her heavy purple and black battle attire, metal shoulder guards, cloak, or even her sword. She simply stood under the ice-cold water fully equipped, as if serving a punishment.
She felt neither the heat nor the cold of the water. She was simply carrying out the command to wash away bodily filth.
Her eyes were fixed on the drain. As the water carried away the last bloodstains, dust, and ashes, she simply watched the water swirl and disappear down the hole.
Just like her memories, just like Izumo flowing into nothingness… She felt no different from those water droplets.
She was simply flowing away, disappearing.
Meanwhile, Subaru had found vacuum-sealed, old but still preserved rations in the shelter’s pantry (dried grains and packaged vegetables) and started cooking in the kitchen unit. He had found a working old heater.
Fresh blood was still seeping through the bandages on his right arm. The pain was terrible, and his legs trembled from exhaustion and fever. He could only stand by leaning on the counter.
*“She told me she only consumes tasteless synthetic fluids to prevent cellular decay and avoid death. That’s no way to live. That’s not living — that’s just delaying death… A human cannot survive on just ‘existing’ without eating a warm meal, without sitting around a table and breathing in that aroma.”*
In his mind, his mother’s kitchen suddenly appeared. His mother humming while standing at the stove, the smell of hot miso soup and grilled fish filling the house in the mornings. Those smells made him feel safe.
His eyes filled with tears, his vision blurred. He silently wiped them away with the back of his left arm and continued stirring the food.
No matter the cost, he would remind this woman of that warmth.
Fifteen minutes later, when Mei returned to the kitchen — her clothes and hair still dripping wet, leaving wet footprints behind, moving silently like a ghost — she caught the warm, steamy, rich, and incredibly *alive* scent of the food bubbling on the stove.
Her steps suddenly halted, as if she had hit an invisible, massive wall.
Her lilac eyes widened noticeably for the first time in millennia, then narrowed slightly. That scent…
The mixed aroma of spices, hot water, and grains… It was like a whisper leaking from the most locked, darkest chests in her memories — chests she thought had long turned to ash. Familiar, yet painfully so.
It carried the laughter of a lost friend, a fallen comrade. The frozen dark corner of her heart, which hadn’t beaten for millennia, suddenly throbbed with excruciating pain, as if pierced by a long, thin needle.
The pain wasn’t physical; it was spiritual. It was the pain of remembering.
“Oh, you’re out!” Subaru said, turning from the stove with sweat on his face, tired but incredibly warm and sincere smile despite all his despair. “This place is seriously amazing — I found a working stove!
Tonight there will be no tasteless synthetic fluids. We’re having a real, warm meal.”
Mei looked at Subaru’s bandaged, injured arm, the sweat on his forehead, his trembling legs, and his smile. Then at the steaming pot on the stove…
“This…” Mei said. Her voice was flat, but the absolute, wall-like indifference in her words had clearly cracked for the first time. Her voice trembled.
“…Why did you do it? Why are you putting in so much effort?
My… sense of taste has already faded into that nothingness, into that black hole.
I can’t taste anything anymore. This effort…
this waste of energy… is meaningless for me.
I can’t eat.”
“It’s okay,” Subaru said, shrugging carelessly as he set two old porcelain plates and spoons on the table. “Even if it’s meaningless, even if you can’t taste anything…
I hate eating alone. My mom always said a meal eaten alone doesn’t fill you up.
Maybe the spices will taste like water to you, but… at least you can feel its warmth.
And right now, that warmth is what both of us need most.”
He served the food onto the plates. When they sat across from each other, Mei stared at the spoon in her hand for a long time.
It was as if she had forgotten how to hold it. Then she slowly scooped the hot, steaming food and brought it to her mouth.
From the outside, there was no major change in her expression. She didn’t even chew — she simply held the hot liquid in her mouth.
She really couldn’t taste anything. She couldn’t detect salt or spices.
But she slowly swallowed, gently closed her lilac eyes, and allowed that *warmth* — that burning, human warmth — to flow down her throat, into her stomach that had been frozen for millennia and sustained only by synthetic fluids, and spread throughout her body like a wave.
At that moment, a single warm, brand-new teardrop silently slid from her lilac eyes, mixing with the cold water droplets still falling from the tips of her black hair.
She didn’t sob. Her voice didn’t tremble.
Her face didn’t contort. Her chest didn’t shake.
She simply… after millennia, that tiny, simple, ordinary human warmth had seeped into the massive iceberg of nothingness in her soul from the very bottom and made her cry.
This was not a tear of pain, but a tear of remembering that she existed.
Subaru, while eating, looked up and saw her silently crying, that single teardrop. His eyes widened in horror.
“Oh no! Wait, wait!” he shouted at the top of his lungs, completely forgetting his pain and jumping up from his chair. He clutched his hair with both hands.
“Did it poison you?! Was the food that bad?!
Damn it, did I feed you expired stuff from the pantry?! Is your stomach upset?
Are you going to throw up? Ah, my stupid brain, I poisoned someone!”
Subaru began panicking, circling the table frantically, not knowing what to do.
His exaggerated, terrified, incredibly high-energy and human panic caused a small, very faint breath to escape Mei amid her silent tears. The corner of her lips curved upward by a fraction of a millimeter.
It wasn’t quite a smile, but it was a sign of relief, a sign of “I am here.”
“I’m not poisoned…” she whispered simply. “It’s just…
very warm.”
Subaru let out a deep breath and collapsed back into his chair.
“God… You scared the hell out of me.”
Subaru pushed the empty plates on the table aside and fixed his eyes on Mei’s soaking wet clothes. Water was still dripping from her, wetting the chair.
“This won’t do,” Subaru said, standing up. “If you keep sitting in these wet, bloody, and cold clothes, even if the acid doesn’t kill you, pneumonia will. Wait here.”
He ran to the pantry. After rummaging through the cabinets, he found vacuum-packed, clean, unused underground uniforms in black and deep purple — likely belonging to the shelter’s former staff. He also grabbed a sealed, clean towel.
He quickly returned to the kitchen, tore open the package, and handed the clothes to Mei. “Take these,” Subaru said, his voice carrying that gentle but firm tone a mother uses with her child.
“Dry yourself properly and put on these dry clothes. Take off that wet battle armor already. Change in the next room — I’ll stay here.”
Mei stared blankly at the clean, dry fabrics Subaru held out, as if they were alien objects. She slowly took the clothes and towel, then walked with heavy, robotic steps into the adjacent room.
While Subaru cleaned the table by the stove, he smiled to himself.
*“At least she’s starting to look a bit more human. She can still feel things. I can pull her out of that nothingness.”*
About ten minutes later, the sound of rustling fabric came from the next room. Mei returned to the kitchen with slow steps.
Subaru put down the cloth he was holding and turned toward her.
“Did you chan—”
The moment he lifted his head, the sight before him made the words catch in his throat. He blinked several times, his mouth hanging open in shock. He even rubbed his eyes, wondering if he was seeing things wrong.
Mei had taken off her soaking wet clothes and put on the new uniform. She had towel-dried her hair a little, but… she had put the shirt on completely **backwards**. The seams and rough lines that should have been inside were on the outside. Moreover, she had worn the pants backwards too, so the two large pockets meant for the back were now comically bunched up in front, right above her knees.
The collar had shifted backward and seemed to be slightly choking her neck. Despite this completely absurd, childish, and ridiculous way of dressing…
Mei’s face still held that extremely serious, stoic, cool, and universe-shaking expression. She stood with her arms slightly spread, as if ready for an epic battle to save the world, with great solemnity.
“This clothing…” Mei said, her voice carrying that absolute, philosophical seriousness. “…has a rather restrictive and illogical design.
It hinders my movement.”
Subaru stared at her for several seconds, holding his breath. The universe-shaking woman, the being who could turn colossal monsters into ash with one swing of her sword by bending space itself — the embodiment of death and nothingness…
…couldn’t put on a simple t-shirt and pants correctly. The vast emptiness in her mind remembered the secrets of the universe but had made her forget the most basic human habits.
All the overwhelming fear of death, pain, exhaustion, and survival tension inside Subaru burst like a balloon pricked by a needle. He couldn’t hold it in and burst into loud laughter that echoed off the cold steel walls of the shelter, laughing so hard tears came to his eyes.
“Haaahahahaha! Are you serious?!
Backwards! You put it on backwards!” Subaru was doubled over, slamming his good hand on the kitchen counter.
His wound hurt, but he couldn’t stop laughing, releasing all that built-up tension. “Oh my god…
You look like some kind of god, cutting down armies in one move, but you forgot how to wear clothes! The pockets are in front!”
Mei looked at his genuine, loud, disrespectful, and completely unfiltered laughter with slight bewilderment. Her face still held that blank expression, but deep in her lilac eyes, a tiny, very adorable softening appeared in response to this weak boy’s contagious cheerfulness and the warmth of his laughter. She looked down at the pockets on herself.
“Backwards…?” she murmured, seriously inspecting her own clothes. “Meaningless.”
“Come here, come,” Subaru said, still trying to calm his laughter and catch his breath as he approached her.
Like a father helping his confused little child, he helped Mei fix her clothes, turning the front and back the right way. Mei silently allowed it without any objection, simply watching Subaru’s smiling face with her lilac eyes.
After fixing her clothes, Subaru poured hot tea — brewed from dried leaves he found in the pantry — into two cups. They sat across from each other at the table.
However, the brief relief brought by the laughter and human contact quickly faded. As silence fell again, the isolated atmosphere of the shelter reminded them of the apocalypse outside.
The dark fear inside Subaru rose to the surface once more. He felt his own weakness and the immense helplessness of not knowing how to get out of here all the way to his bones.
He was so very far from home, from Lugnica, from Emilia. He was stuck here.
To break the suffocating silence and escape the dark thoughts in his mind, he asked Mei again about the black hole in the sky and that nothingness. He needed to understand.
He needed to know his enemy — or at least fully understand the situation they were in. Mei looked at the warm tea cup in her hands and spoke with a sorrowful ripple in her lilac eyes.
She told Subaru the truth about IX, the Existence of Absolute Nothingness. In broken words, each one causing her more pain, she explained how it swallowed not only matter and planets, but “meaning,” “memories,” “love,” and “the purpose of existence.”
She whispered about the Naught sword, the moment their final hopes were shattered, and how Izumo was silently erased. “It is not an enemy…” Mei said, her voice echoing inside the shelter.
“It cannot be fought. Swords don’t work.
It simply… exists.
And because it exists, everything beneath it loses meaning.”
Subaru’s hands trembled. His fingers holding the tea cup turned bone-white, his teeth chattering.
What he heard was more terrifying than all the deaths in Lugnica, even more than the horrifying shadow of the Witch of Envy. At least the Witch had anger and a purpose.
But this thing called IX… was a pure, emotionless eraser.
*“What can I even do?”* he thought desperately. His heart tightened.
*“I can’t use magic. I can’t swing a sword.
I’m not Reinhard. How can I close a black hole, the nothingness itself?
How can I defeat it? I can’t.
I’m just a weak, cowardly high school student who can barely protect his own life.”*
He stared at the cup on the table and bit his lip until it bled, tasting iron. Slowly raising his head, he focused on the absolute resignation on Mei’s face — the empty gaze that said *“I am already disappearing, being erased.”*
Despite the overwhelming fear and the slap of his own powerlessness, he tried to keep his voice steady, swallowing hard as he spoke:
“I…
I can’t make big promises to you, Mei,” Subaru said. His voice trembled, but this time he didn’t look away.
He gazed straight into those lilac eyes, into the dark depths of her soul. “I’m not a hero.
I can’t close that cursed hole in the sky. I can’t save worlds or planets.
I’m not a sword master. In fact…
right now my heart is pounding so hard it feels like it’s going to jump out, my knees are shaking, and I’m terrified I might die here and never wake up again. I’m just a weak, fragile, mortal human.
I don’t know how long I’ll live. Maybe I’ll melt in the acid rain tomorrow, maybe a monster will tear me apart. I can’t even promise ‘I’ll be with you forever, I’ll always protect you.’ I don’t have that kind of power.”
Mei slowly raised her lilac eyes toward Subaru with quiet surprise. In her dull gaze, there was a deep, silent curiosity about why this boy continued speaking even though he was so weak and so afraid.
*What kept him going? What stopped him from giving up?*
“But…” Subaru continued. He reached across the table and took Mei’s ice-cold, calloused hand — hardened from holding a sword — firmly between his own trembling, burn-covered, painful but warm hands.
“…as long as I’m alive. Even if I live just one more day in this damned place, even if it’s only one more week…
Even if you forget yourself, I won’t forget your name.”
Mei’s eyes widened slightly. “Every time that nothingness in the sky, that cursed IX steals your memories and your past…
I will stand before you and say, ‘Your name is Raiden Bosenmori Mei.’ That’s all my power is enough for.
It’s only enough for speaking, for reminding, for being stubborn, and for enduring pain. I can’t do anything else.
But… as long as I breathe and my heart beats, I will do this.
I won’t let you face that darkness alone.”
Mei’s breath grew heavy in her chest for the first time in millennia; a lump formed in her throat. The boy before her wasn’t telling her empty, arrogant hero’s lies like “I will save you, I will fix everything.”
He knew his own weakness and helplessness very well. He was simply promising that he would stay by her side, facing her, and remind her who she was — for as long as his small, weak, temporary human life allowed.
This was a small but incredibly honest light of humanity shining in the middle of nothingness and absolute darkness. Subaru pushed the cup aside and slowly stood up.
He closed the distance between them and stood directly beside Mei’s chair. With his weak, trembling arms, he wrapped them around her shoulders and hugged her.
Even though the acid burns on his right arm screamed in protest, he squeezed his eyes shut and refused to let go. He wanted her to feel his weak, fast heartbeat and the warmth of life against her frozen chest.
Mei’s body stiffened at the sudden contact. Her hands, hanging in the air, trembled, not knowing what to do.
“Subaru…” she whispered. Her voice was broken and fragmented.
Logic told her this was meaningless. “…It’s pointless.
The void… swallows everything.
I will be erased. You too…
will be dragged into that emptiness with my curse. You will burn.”
“It’s okay,” Subaru said, burying his face in her black hair that smelled of yasmin. Hot tears fell from his eyes, wetting the shoulder of her uniform. “Even if it’s meaningless, I’m here right now.
I’m scared but… I won’t leave you alone.
I can’t leave you alone.”
Mei’s pale, trembling hands that had been hanging in the air slowly, hesitantly descended like a child afraid of fire and tightly grasped the back of Subaru’s jacket. She didn’t push him away.
She didn’t draw her sword. Instead, she pressed her face into Subaru’s shoulder, into the warm curve of his neck, against that human-scented skin.
The sorrow of millennia, the weight of a world’s destruction, the deaths of her comrades — all of it poured out onto the weak human boy’s shoulder in silent, sobless tears. Subaru felt her shoulders shaking and hugged her even tighter.
Later that night, when the lights in the shelter switched to night mode and dimmed, Mei’s eyelids began to close. Crying had exhausted her more than anything had in millennia and loosened the taut string in her soul.
But she was terrified of falling asleep, of closing her consciousness and sinking into that dreamless darkness, so she kept jolting awake, forcing her eyes open. Her breathing became ragged and her hands trembled.
Despite his own unbearable exhaustion and the throbbing in his arm, Subaru gently carried her in his arms to the clean bed in the shelter. He covered her with a blanket and sat on the small steel chair beside her.
“Sleep, Mei,” he said in a soft, tired but reassuring voice. “I’m here.
I’m not going anywhere. I’ll keep watch.
I won’t even blink until you wake up.”
Mei’s lilac eyes slowly closed, surrendering to the strange sense of security Subaru’s words gave her. But in the deepest part of her sleep, in the dark dreams where the emptiness of IX tried to devour her, she panicked.
Her breathing quickened, cold sweat beaded on her forehead. Before Subaru could even understand what was happening, Mei — in her sleep — grabbed his shirt with uncontrollable strength and desperate force, pulling him down onto the bed beside her.
Her arms wrapped tightly around his neck and waist, clinging to him like a shipwreck survivor in a stormy sea desperately holding onto the last piece of driftwood. Subaru fell onto the bed in shock, turning bright red from pain and embarrassment.
His heart was pounding in his mouth; he couldn’t breathe. He was in the bed of a powerful Emanator, in her arms.
He tried to move, to gently pull away, but Mei murmured in her sleep:
“Darkness… cold…”
All the panic, shame, and confusion inside Subaru instantly evaporated.
The woman before him wasn’t a goddess, a weapon of destruction, or something to fear. She was simply a girl lost in the darkness, cold and afraid.
Setting aside his own weakness, his acid burns, and the fact that he might die tomorrow, Subaru slowly wrapped his uninjured left arm around her shoulders and waist. Careful not to hurt her, he gave her that ordinary human warmth, his body heat.
“I’m here,” he whispered into the dark silence of the shelter, hoping the darkness would hear and retreat. “Even if I’m just a cowardly, useless stranger… I’m here.
You’re safe.”
And so, in that small, isolated shelter beneath the surface of a dying world slowly merging with nothingness, two broken souls found a tiny bit of comfort and an anchor in each other’s weakness, and fell asleep.
Subaru didn’t know what tomorrow would bring, whether he would survive, or how he would return home — but at least for this night…
he wouldn’t have to face the nothingness alone. The immense weight of loneliness on his shoulders had, even if just for one night, disappeared with the warmth of the woman in his arms.