Chapter Text
Subaru decided, not for the first time, that this alley was the worst possible place to die.
"Hand it over," the fat one said, cracking his knuckles like he'd practiced the move in a mirror. "The shiny thing. And whatever's in your pockets."
"Guys, guys." Subaru put his hands up, palms out, grinning wide enough that his cheeks hurt. "I really wish I could tell you I've got treasure on me. Truth is I'm broke. Broker than broke. I'm the concept of broke given human form."
The skinny one lunged first. He always did.
Subaru didn't bother dodging. He took the first punch square in the ribs, a second across the jaw that snapped his head sideways, a third to the gut that folded him clean in half, and a fourth that put him flat on the cobblestones with his ears ringing and blood filling his mouth. He knew exactly how many hits this cost him by now, so he stopped fighting the math and just curled up small, spat red onto the stone, and waited for his luck to turn.
It turned right on cue, the way it always did, footsteps rounding the corner fast and a voice cutting clean through the noise of fists.
"That's enough, villains."
Cold air cut through the alley's stink a heartbeat later, blue light gathering over an open palm, frost climbing the brick like it was in a hurry.
"It's good to see you're so gracious," she said, gaze fixed on the thugs. "It's not too late. Return what you stole."
"O-our bad, but... what we stole?" the fat one stammered, hands raised.
"Please. It's important to me. I'll let go of anything else, but not that. Return it now and I'll spare your lives."
They looked at each other, genuinely lost, and then one of them pointed a shaking finger at Subaru, still crumpled on the ground.
"W-wait, you're not here for him, are you? We didn't take anything off him, he's got nothing worth taking."
"There was a girl," another added quickly. "Blonde, ran off that way, up the wall. Whatever's missing, it was probably her."
Her eyes flicked to Subaru, silently asking if that was true. He nodded, unable to lie even now, and something in her expression eased, just slightly, like she believed them.
"I see. Then I won't waste any more time here." She turned to leave, already dismissing the three of them from her mind, but stopped after a step. "Even so, I can't overlook what I saw when I walked in."
A small gray cat unfolded itself out of thin air at her shoulder, grinning like the whole thing amused him, and the sight of a spirit user standing right in front of them finally broke whatever nerve the men had left. They scrambled backward over each other, tripping and cursing, and bolted from the alley without another word.
The thugs ran. They always ran. Subaru had watched this exact retreat, this exact yelp of terror from the fat one, more times than he could count anymore, and there was something almost soothing in it, like a song he knew every note of.
She crouched next to him, silver hair falling forward, violet eyes searching his face for damage. Up close she was unfairly beautiful, the kind of beautiful that made his chest hurt on principle.
"Are you hurt? Can you stand?"
"I'll live," Subaru said, and meant it in a way she couldn't possibly understand. He pushed himself up, brushing grime off his jacket with theatrical care. "Thanks for the rescue. Very cool. Very dramatic. Ten out of ten entrance, I'd give it a standing ovation if my ribs weren't currently filing a complaint."
Puck drifted down from her shoulder to get a better look at him, tail curling.
"Lia, you really do attract the strays," it said, in a voice too smooth and too amused to belong to something so small.
"Puck," she said, half a warning, half a sigh.
Subaru looked at her properly then. Really looked, the way you look at something familiar wearing an unfamiliar face. "So," he said, "who am I thanking? My knight in shining ice magic."
She hesitated, studying Subaru with a small frown, like she couldn't quite work out why a boy who'd just seen she was a half-elf with silver hair wasn't backing away from her. Most people did, at least a little. He wasn't.
"Satella," she said again, after the pause, as if repeating it might make it stick.
There it was.
Subaru didn't flinch, not really, but he let his eyebrows knot up like he had, frowning hard and taking a slow, deliberate step back with his hand pressed to his chest. "S-Satella? As in, the Satella? Oh man. Oh no. Please don't curse me. I take it back, I take everything back, I never even met you..." He held the pose a beat too long, then let one eye crack open toward her, checking if it had landed, so plainly fake that even a stranger could have called it in an instant.
"It's fine, it's just a name," she said quickly, cheeks going red, not at the joke but at how easily she'd caught him faking it. "You don't need to react like that."
"Yeah," Subaru said, and let the frown drop off his face like it had never been there at all. "It's just a name. Because it's not yours."
He said it lightly. Almost bored. And then, before she could answer, before Puck could do more than flick an ear toward him in confusion, Subaru turned his head half an inch toward his own shadow, pooled long and black across the alley stones, and said the real word.
"Satella."
The shadow rippled like water struck by a stone.
She rose out of it without sound, without wind, without the courtesy of an announcement, the same silver hair, the same amethyst eyes, dressed in black and purple where Emilia wore white and purple, like a photo negative of the girl standing across from her. The temperature in the alley did not drop. It simply stopped existing, replaced by something that had no temperature at all, a stillness so complete it made the girl in front of him, the one wearing her name like a borrowed coat, take an instinctive step back.
Puck's fur stood on end. He started forming icicles along his claws, three, four of them, jagged and blue and half-shaped, and then they simply failed, unraveling back into nothing before they'd finished growing. His mana was fading out of him even as he reached for it, draining faster than he could pull it in, and the low growl in his throat cracked halfway through into something closer to a whine.
"Don't," Subaru said, not to Puck, not really, more to the air. "Seriously. Don't cast anything right now."
Puck didn't listen. Of course he didn't. He lunged.
The mana simply left him.
Not blocked. Not deflected. It was as if something reached into the spirit's chest and yanked the thread out by its root, and Puck's shape stuttered, flickered, shrank two sizes in the space it took Subaru to exhale, an ugly strangled sound tearing out of him that was not his usual velvet purr at all.
"Puck!" Emilia's voice cracked.
"I told you not to," Subaru said, and crouched down slightly so he was closer to Puck's shrinking, gasping shape. "Hey. Breathe. It stops the second you stop reaching for mana. I mean it. Stop."
Puck stopped. Barely. He hung in the air, ragged, staring at Subaru with an expression that had no business being on a cat's face, something between fury and a very old, very tired fear.
"That's a Yin spell," Subaru said, before anyone could get much further, before this could turn into some second lecture about magic they didn't have time for. "Absolute negation. No mana allowed in it, not a drop, and if you try pulling any through anyway it starts sucking straight out of your Od instead, and it doesn't stop until there's nothing left to take. That's what nearly finished you off just now, cat. So quit reaching."
Subaru straightened up, turning to face the girl who was not Satella square on.
"So," he said. "Who's this? Because I know for a fact the real Satella's standing right there, so you want to explain why you're wearing her face and answering to her name like it's yours to use?"
"I can't read him," Puck cut in, before she could even try to answer, his slitted eyes locked on Subaru instead. "Lia, be careful with him. Whatever's happened to that boy's head, I can't find the bottom of it."
Subaru's mouth curled, half amused despite everything. "Oh, he thinks he can read emotion. That's cute. Nobody's told him yet."
He let the moment sit a second longer, then tried the question again, patient about it. "So. Who is she? The copy."
"I don't know," Satella said slowly, eyes still on Puck. "That spirit is artificial. I'd guess Echidna made him, the Witch of Greed didn't build things without a reason. So maybe she was an experiment of hers too, some attempt at a vessel meant to carry my soul. But Echidna died before i got sealed, so whatever she was trying to make, it never got completed the way she wanted. This vessel must have been born naturally after that, a decade later, a century later, I can only guess."
At the name "Echidna," Puck went completely silent, his gaze sharpening.
Satella's gaze shifted to the spiritual contract strung taut between Puck and Emilia, a thread visible to no one else in the alley. Not the binding itself, just its shape, the terms of it written into the air between spirit and girl.
"There are clauses hidden in your contract," she said to Emilia, plainly, like she was reading them off a page only she could see. "Things he never told you."
Puck flinched.
"There," she murmured, eyes tracing something in the air none of the others could follow. "A hidden clause. He's sealed her memory, her past, all of it, so she doesn't remember. I think he's doing it to protect her, in his own way."
"That's not..." Puck started.
"There's another clause too," Satella went on, not raising her voice, not needing to. "With someone else. Echidna, maybe. If she dies, he drops the act, goes back to his real form, and starts freezing the world."
For a moment nobody in the alley breathed.
Subaru let his eyes widen, let his jaw drop half an inch, let every muscle in his face perform the shock he was supposed to be feeling for the first time. It wasn't hard. He'd had practice pretending things were new.
"That's..." Emilia's voice shook. "Puck, tell me that's not real. Tell me she's lying."
Puck opened his mouth. Closed it. Opened it again, and what came out was thin and unconvincing even to his own ears. "Lia, listen, it isn't as simple as she's making it sound, there's context, there's..."
"He can't even lie properly," Satella said, almost gently, almost sad about it. "That's the tell. He's not built to be clever about it, only devoted."
"I think," Subaru said slowly, working through it like he hadn't already worked through it eleven other times in eleven other alleys, "Echidna built it that way on purpose. She'd have known someone exists who can turn back the clock when things go wrong. So she made sure that if the worst happened, if this girl died, the whole world would freeze right along with her. No quiet failure. No small tragedy nobody notices. A disaster loud enough that whoever's out there with the power to undo it would have no choice but to come running and fix it."
Satella's mouth curved, thin and humorless. "Clever."
"She was the Witch of Greed," Subaru said. "Knowledge is the one thing greed never gets tired of collecting."
"Is this real," Emilia asked again, quieter this time, looking at Puck instead of Satella, hoping maybe he'd finally deny it if she just asked one more time.
He didn't.
"Okay." Subaru rubbed the back of his neck, exhaling like a man laying out terms he wished he didn't have to lay out. "Here's where we are. Contract like that doesn't get to keep existing, not around a person who deserves to make her own choices. So you've got two ways out of this. One, you break it yourself, clean, no funny business. Two, I break it for you, which means I put him down, which also breaks it, just messier." He looked at Puck. "You're not going to win that fight. I promise you that much."
"You'd kill him," Emilia said, horrified.
"I'd rather not," Subaru said, and this part, at least, wasn't performance. "He's a spirit, you're a half-elf, you're both looking at lifespans in the thousands of years. Break it yourself and he manifests again after a few years, a decade, whatever it takes, and you get to see him again, sit down, and make a proper contract this time. One you actually agreed to." He turned back to Puck. "Twenty-four hours. Break it yourself before then, so you get to see your Lia again someday instead of ending up a stain on this alley. That's the deal."
Puck stared at him for a long moment, something unreadable moving behind those slitted eyes, and then, very softly: "You're not what you look like, are you."
"Nobody ever is," Subaru said. "Anyway."
Satella sank back into his shadow without a word, gone as quietly as she'd come, and the alley's stillness broke with her, the ordinary noise of the street bleeding back in from somewhere beyond the walls.
He clapped his hands together, snapping the mood like a rubber band, and the sudden shift from grim to breezy nearly gave Emilia whiplash.
"Introductions, since apparently Satella's taken. What's your actual name?"
"Emilia," she said, a little wary of the question after everything else. "Just Emilia."
"Alright, Emilia. You mentioned something got stolen from you, before all this. What was it?"
"An insignia," she said, and her hand went briefly to her chest, to where it should have been. "Small enough to fit in a palm, a dragon crest worked into the metal, with a red jewel set in the center. It matters more than it probably looks like it should."
"Blonde girl, right? Quick hands, ran past while those three were still working me over. I clocked her heading that way." Subaru pointed with total confidence down the street. "Red eyes, moved like she'd done it a hundred times before. That's your thief. I can take you to her. Free of charge, no strings, purely out of the goodness of my heart, well, mostly out of boredom, if I'm honest."
Emilia's eyes had gone flat and a little cold, and Subaru realized, half a beat too late, that he'd skipped several steps she hadn't gotten to walk through yet.
"You said you'd kill him," she said. "You just offered to kill Puck, who's practically my father, like it was nothing. Like you were offering to carry my bags."
"I offered him a way to not die," Subaru said. "He's the one who has to choose which door he walks through."
She didn't answer that. She just looked at him a moment longer, something wary now sitting where the gratitude had been a minute ago, and Subaru let it sit there, because he didn't have a version of this conversation where she didn't end up looking at him like that, not yet, not this early.
"You can come out now," Subaru called, tilting his head toward the mouth of the alley. "I know you've been standing there a while."
Nothing moved. Then, unhurried, a young man stepped out of the shadow of the eaves like he'd simply decided the moment had arrived, red hair catching the last of the daylight, sword at his hip, an expression of polite and total composure on his face that didn't so much as flicker at having been caught eavesdropping.
"Forgive me," he said, bowing his head fractionally. "I felt far too much miasma pooling in this direction, so I came to investigate."
"Reinhard," Subaru said, like greeting an old friend rather than a stranger. Emilia's head snapped toward him, then toward Reinhard, then back again, trying and failing to make the pieces fit.
"You know each other?" she asked.
"Not yet," Subaru said. "But we're about to." He walked straight up to Reinhard, close enough that it should have been unnerving. Reinhard's Divine Protection of Judgement stirred the instant Subaru got within arm's reach, laying bare whatever protections the boy carried, and his Divine Protection of Anti-Malignance read no corruption in him, no curse, no ill will riding under the surface. Whatever he was, he wasn't a threat, and Reinhard let his hand fall away from the sword.
He stepped in and pressed his palm to the side of Reinhard's head.
What passed between them had no shape, no light, no sound, just Reinhard's eyes going wide and then very still, his breath catching once, sharply, like a man struck somewhere no blade could reach. It should have staggered him, should have dropped him to his knees, but his Divine Protection of Nightmares closed around the flood the instant it hit, keeping his mind from buckling under the weight of it, sorting through years of borrowed memory without ever losing its footing. When Subaru finally stepped back, Reinhard was already nodding, slow and grim.
"I understand," he said, and nothing more.
"See you this evening, then," Subaru said, already turning away.
The main street was as loud and crowded as ever, lizard-drawn carriages rattling through the dust while the evening crowd thickened around the stalls, and Subaru led the way through it like a man who'd walked these roads a hundred times, because by now he had. Emilia kept a half step behind him the whole way, arms crossed, her eyes flicking to every stranger who got too close, still not fully willing to hand over her trust after what he'd said about Puck.
That changed when a small, dirt-streaked girl came barreling around a corner and slammed into Subaru's legs, sobbing too hard to speak.
"Hey, hey. Easy." Subaru crouched to her level, and instead of questions she couldn't answer through tears, he pulled a jagged ridged 10-yen coin from his pocket and rolled it slow across his knuckles. "See this?" he said, voice low. "Press it." He closed his fist around it, then snapped his hand open empty. The girl's hiccups stalled, eyes wide. With his other hand, he slid the same coin from behind her ear, letting it fall into her palm. She stared at it, then at him, and her crying cut off into a shaky breath.
"There we go. You're Plum, right? Kamadom's girl, from the appa stall?" He'd seen the resemblance in her scowl even through the tear streaks. "Bet he's looking for you right about now."
She nodded, wiping her nose on her sleeve, and let him take her hand without any more fuss.
It didn't take long to find the stall, and the shopkeeper's whole body sagged with relief the moment he spotted her. Subaru waved off his thanks and steered Emilia back toward the street before the man could even finish them.
Emilia didn't say anything about it. But the arms she'd kept crossed the whole walk over loosened, just slightly, and when she fell back into step beside him this time, it was a little closer than before.
The loot house sat at the end of a crooked lane, a squat building patched together out of scavenged lumber, its one small door looking far too modest for the size of the place behind it.
Subaru knocked twice, waited, then leaned close to the wood.
"To the giant rats," he said.
There was a pause on the other side, long enough that he wondered if he'd have to repeat himself, and then a gruff voice answered through the door.
"...Poison."
"To the skeletons."
"A pitfall."
"To the noble dragon we are."
"We are shitbags."
A longer pause this time, like the man on the other side had to sit with that answer before deciding what to do with it.
"...The hell? Who taught ya the password?"
The door opened anyway, and the giant filling the frame looked Subaru up and down with a deep frown creasing his bald head, more confused than hostile.
"Rom," Subaru said, raising a hand in greeting like they were old drinking buddies, which, as far as Subaru was concerned, they practically were. "I'm here to buy something. There's a girl bringing in a haul today, insignia with a jewel in it. I want it."
Rom's gray eyes narrowed, flicking between Subaru and the three people behind him, lingering longest on Reinhard.
"Ya know an awful lot for someone who ain't never been here." He stepped aside anyway, waving them all in with obvious reluctance. "Whatever. Come in. Wait if ya want, she ain't back yet."
They waited. Emilia stood near the counter with her arms loosely crossed, Reinhard silent and watchful by the door, and Subaru counted down the minutes in his head like he was checking a clock only he could see.
It didn't take long. There were two sharp knocks, and Rom lumbered over to answer them without bothering to ask for the password back.
The door swung open, and the evening air came in with her.
"Sorry to keep ya waitin', old man. Took a while to shake her off."
Felt strode in with the easy confidence of someone who owned the place, then stopped dead the instant she saw who was standing by the counter.
"...You've gotta be kidding me."
Her eyes went from Emilia to Rom, narrowing with something close to betrayal.
"Old man, what the hell is this? You sold me out?"
"Wasn't him," Subaru said, stepping forward before Rom could even open his mouth. "I want to buy the insignia off you. Straight trade, no funny business. I'll match whatever your other buyer's offering."
Felt's hand had already drifted toward her chest, toward wherever she'd tucked the thing away, but her eyes stayed hard and suspicious.
"And how do you even know I've got an insignia to sell in the first place."
"There's a woman coming after this," Subaru said, before Felt could push further, keeping his voice low enough that it stayed between the four of them. "Black coat, kukri knife, calls herself a mercenary. Bowel Hunter, some people call her. She's going to want that insignia too, and she's not going to care whose hands it's in when she takes it. She'll kill everyone in this room to tie off the loose ends if it comes to that, so whatever you decide about the trade, decide it fast."
Felt's suspicion flickered toward something closer to alarm, but before she could answer, the shadows near the door twitched.
"Emilia, look out..."
He didn't get any further before the attack came, a shape peeling itself off the wall with a knife already swinging for her throat.
There was a crack of steel on glass, not flesh, a pale blue circle flaring to life behind Emilia's neck and catching the blade dead in its path.
"Puck…"
"That truly was by a hair's breadth."
Puck's small shape drifted out from her hair, already growing, already bristling, and the woman whose knife had just been stopped stepped back into what little light the loot house offered, smiling like she'd expected exactly this.
"A spirit. Wonderful. I've never killed one before."
"Elsa!" Felt's voice cracked with fury as she yanked the insignia free and brandished it like proof of a broken deal. "You said you wanted to buy it! Turning this place into a slaughterhouse wasn't part of the job!"
"Buying it is indeed my job," Elsa said, almost apologetic. "But negotiating stopped being an option the moment you brought the owner along with you. So I've decided to change my plans. I'll simply take it from whatever's left in the room."
"That's enough."
The word cut through the room before Elsa could take another step. Reinhard was already moving, stepping out from the doorway he'd been leaning against and placing himself squarely between her and everyone else.
"You're the Bowel Hunter, then," he said, calm as ever. "I'd recommend surrendering."
"You think a starving predator could resist a steak dripping blood?" Elsa's tongue traced her lip, delighted rather than afraid. "Reinhard, of the sword saints. My employer will owe me a great deal of thanks for this."
Subaru didn't wait to see how the standoff would resolve itself. He grabbed the nearest thing that looked remotely like a weapon, a plain, unremarkable sword half-buried under a pile of Rom's stolen goods, and pressed the hilt into Reinhard's free hand.
"Here. Use this instead of your own, just in case."
Reinhard accepted it without looking away from Elsa, testing its balance with a light swing.
"Will you not use the sword at your hip?" Elsa asked, eyeing the untouched hilt at his waist. "I would love to feel its edge."
"This one only leaves its sheath when it's necessary," Reinhard said. "I'll make do with this."
"Not at all dissatisfying. Do entertain me."
What followed was less a fight than a demonstration of two different kinds of impossible. Elsa threw knives that should have found their mark and didn't, their paths bending away from Reinhard's body like the air itself refused to let them land. She ran along walls, off the ceiling, anywhere gravity had no claim on her, and none of it mattered, because every attack she manufactured met a blade that was somehow already there to meet it.
Rom stood his ground near the counter with his club in hand, tense but untouched, and Felt pressed herself against his side, both of them watching the exchange with wide eyes rather than joining it. There was nothing for them to do here. This fight had never been theirs to have.
"What will you show me?" Elsa asked, mid-leap.
"The swordplay of the Astrea family."
The air folded.
Subaru barely had time to pull Emilia back against the wall before the light tore through the room, white and total, swallowing the loot house's far end in a single stroke that left frost climbing every surface it touched. When it faded, there was nothing where Elsa had stood. No blood. No body. Just an empty, smoking scar in the floor.
"There isn't even a piece of her left," Subaru said, hollow.
"I pushed you too hard," Reinhard said quietly to the sword in his hand, and it crumbled at the words, its craftsmanship never meant to survive that kind of violence.
Felt appeared in the wrecked doorway a moment later, hovering at the edge of the light like she wasn't sure she was welcome, and it was her face, not the destruction, that Subaru found himself watching. She'd gone still, her earlier fury drained out of her, replaced by something closer to shame.
"I..." She swallowed, glancing between Rom and Emilia and the insignia still clutched in her fist. "I'm sorry. You saved me. I can't just keep this like nothing happened."
She crossed the ruined floor and held it out, the dragon crest catching the last of the daylight through the broken roof, its red jewel glowing steadily brighter the closer it came to Emilia's hand.
Reinhard's gaze sharpened the instant he saw it.
"Wait." He caught Felt's wrist before the insignia could change hands, gentle but immovable, and every trace of his earlier warmth had gone out of his voice. "Lady Felt. Old man Rom. Both of you will need to come with me to the Astrea estate."
"The hell for?!" Felt wrenched against his grip, uselessly.
Emilia stepped in at once, alarmed. "Reinhard, whatever this is about, she didn't know the insignia's worth, and I'm not looking to press charges..."
"That isn't it, Lady Emilia," Reinhard said, eyes still fixed on Felt. "This has nothing to do with punishment."
Subaru crouched down in front of Felt before she could work herself into a full panic, meeting her eyes at her own level.
"That insignia you just tried to hand back isn't just some rich girl's trinket," he said, quiet enough that it was only for her. "You're a candidate for the throne, Felt. You could be queen. Fix the slums, tear down the nobles who let people like you starve, all of it, if that's what you want. And if it isn't, if you'd rather walk away from the whole thing, you can do that too, nobody's going to force a crown on you. But right now, today, you need to go with Reinhard. It's the only way you're safe."
Felt's jaw worked, something calculating flickering behind the anger, and for the first time she didn't have a retort ready.
"...And Rom? If I go, does he come too?"
"No problem with that, Lady Felt."
The easy certainty in Reinhard's voice landed wrong, and Felt's brow furrowed along with Rom's and Emilia's, all three of them catching the same thing at once: nobody in that room had ever given him her name.
Nobody had time to ask about it. Before Felt could answer, the ruined doorway darkened again. A shape hauled itself up from beneath a collapsed shelf, streaked black with blood and dust.
"Subaru!" Reinhard's warning came a half-second too late.
Elsa surged forward with her crushed knife still in hand, betting everything on one final strike, and her eyes found Emilia first.
Subaru already knew where the blade would land before it moved. He shoved Emilia clear and threw himself into its path instead, the club he'd grabbed off the counter raised in a clumsy guard that turned a killing blow into a bone-deep bruise and sent him crashing into the wall regardless.
"This kid again," Elsa muttered, more irritated than impressed.
"That's enough, Elsa." Reinhard was already between her and the others, sword raised.
She threw the ruined knife at him anyway, a parting gesture more than an attack, and it missed him by a wide margin as his gift turned it aside without effort.
"Someday I shall slice open the bellies of everyone in this room," she said, already retreating up and over the broken wreckage toward the rooftops. "Do take good care of your bowels until then."
And then she was gone, vaulting away too fast to chase, and Reinhard let her go, watching the space where she'd disappeared with an unreadable expression before turning back to the wreck of the loot house.
Emilia knelt by Subaru first, checking the spreading bruise along his side with quick, practiced hands, relief and worry tangled together on her face.
Felt, still held loosely by the wrist, watched all of it happen with her earlier defiance gone quiet.
"...Fine," she finally said, to no one and everyone. "I'll go. Wasn't like there was ever really a choice."
Reinhard released her wrist and inclined his head, grave and sincere. "Thank you. I promise you won't regret it."
Outside, what remained of the afternoon had bled into evening, and through the hole torn in the loot house's roof, the moon was already rising, faint and full against a sky still holding onto the last of its light.
Reinhard tipped his face up toward it, something quiet and tired passing behind his eyes.
"This might be my last chance," he murmured, mostly to himself, "to look up at the moon so calmly."
Nobody but the moon heard him say it.