“Ah… Gaaaah!
EL—SA!!!”
“No need to be so loud, I can hear you just fine!
Su-ba-ru Na-tsu-ki~~”
Elsa brushed the hair from her ear and leaned in, listening intently to Subaru.
“Are you angry?
How wonderful~”
“That half-elf’s bowels just now—”
BOOM!!!
—In a single fraction of a second, the world lost all sound.
The surface of the street was violently peeled back, and the surrounding buildings collapsed layer upon layer.
Like a rubber ball stretched to its absolute breaking point, Elsa’s body was sent flying backward at an unimaginable speed.
One building, two buildings… Blasting through an uncountable number of abandoned row houses, Elsa vanished completely from Subaru’s line of sight.
Subaru’s eyes were bloodshot, his face contorted.
His breathing was clumsy and ragged, like some ancient animal ancestor crawling onto land for the very first time.
Something was caught in his throat, choking off his words.
His mind was a chaotic mess, the fist he had thrown still hanging frozen in mid-air.
Thud.
“Aaaaaah!”
Lacking support, Emilia’s corpse fell straight down, the impact with the ground leaving a dark purple bruise on her skin.
Subaru swallowed a mouthful of coppery saliva, his teeth biting hard enough into his lower lip to draw blood.
Uncontrollable tremors wracked his entire body.
With shaking hands, he gently lifted the girl and pulled her into his arms.
The girl he had met in the morning sun had perished beneath the moonlight.
The warm body in his arms was growing cold.
Subaru tried to hold on, but it felt like he was grasping at nothing.
Not entirely nothing, actually.
His hands were covered in his own blood, Elsa’s blood, Emilia’s blood…
Disgusting.
Subaru forced his heavy eyelids open, forcing himself to look at Emilia’s face.
Her expression was neither pained nor peaceful; it was just filled with confusion.
Subaru tremblingly raised a hand, wanting to wipe the blood from the girl’s face, but the instant his fingers brushed her ice-cold skin, he recoiled as if he’d been electrocuted.
“I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m so, so sorry…”
As he looked down at Emilia’s face, tears fell onto her gradually stiffening cheeks.
Tears mixed with blood, soaking the collar of Emilia’s white dress.
The emerald pendant at her chest, having reached the end of its life alongside the girl, had shattered at some unseen moment.
Why hadn’t he killed Elsa right then and there?
Was he scared?
Was he terrified of killing someone?
Was he afraid of holding the end of a life in his own hands?
“But,” Subaru’s entire body convulsed uncontrollably, “I’m already a murderer!!!
I killed Emilia!!!”
If only he had killed Elsa.
If only he had been more careful and hadn’t given Elsa the chance to launch a sneak attack.
Emilia hadn’t been killed by Elsa; she had been killed by his arrogance.
Just because he got powers, he thought he could play superhero like his dad.
He thought he could handle everything perfectly.
“With great power… comes great responsibility…” Subaru pressed his hands tightly against his face, his fingers dragging bloody scratches across his own cheeks.
“But I don’t actually have any power at all!”
So disgusting.
“Hrk… Bleurgh!!!”
An overwhelming sense of self-loathing turned into stomach acid that rushed up his nasal cavity and flooded his windpipe.
Sour, foul-smelling bile mixed with undigested chunks of apple spilled endlessly from the corners of his mouth.
Subaru felt like he could hear voices—voices condemning him.
Everyone he had ever met was cursing him out with cold, furious anger.
“You don’t deserve to be Omni-Man’s son, much less Kenichi Natsuki’s son.”
His dad drove a heavy punch right into Subaru’s stomach.
“I’ll just pretend I never gave birth to you!”
His mom’s slap landed squarely on Subaru’s cheek.
“Oh my~ You still went easy on me, boy.
I told you, this isn’t a fight, it’s a massacre~”
Elsa pressed tight against Subaru’s back, her long tongue licking the shell of his ear.
“…I really wish I had never met you.”
Emilia looked down at Subaru from above as he knelt on the ground, then turned and walked away without hesitation.
So disgusting.
…
“Subaru, I explicitly left Lia in your care…”
Puck’s bone-chilling voice rang out.
No, this wasn’t a hallucination in Subaru’s head.
It was a sound existing in reality.
It was snowing.
Heavy snow pressed down on Subaru’s shoulders, burying him so deeply he couldn’t stand up.
It’s so cold.
It was incredibly strange.
His dad had explicitly told him that Viltrumites could cross the vacuum of space with their bare bodies; simple temperature changes shouldn’t be able to affect them at all.
And yet, right now, Subaru was feeling a biting, agonizing cold.
The breath he exhaled was white, and inhaling the air felt like drawing a blizzard into his lungs, freezing them solid.
Something was approaching.
Subaru strained to lift his eyes.
A giant beast, hundreds of meters tall, stood at the very edge of the horizon.
It was a divine beast covered entirely in gray fur, its pupils shining with a golden brilliance.
It stood on all fours, swaying its massive body, its face resembling a predatory feline.
From a maw lined with razor-sharp teeth, it casually exhaled a breath that looked like a white blizzard.
“Subaru, I am truly disappointed,” Puck’s voice echoed from the giant beast’s mouth.
“You made two mistakes.”
“First, you broke our promise.
I explicitly asked you to take good care of Lia, but you got her killed.”
What was the giant beast saying?
Subaru couldn’t even hear clearly anymore.
It’s so cold.
Cold cold cold cold cold cold cold cold cold cold cold cold cold cold cold cold cold cold cold cold cold cold.
A bone-deep, absolute zero cold was gnawing away at Subaru’s sanity.
His survival instincts forced him to take flight, to escape, to get away from here, to live.
Crash!
Barely a dozen meters in the air, Subaru plummeted to the ground, his body plowing a trench through the snow from the momentum.
White frost clung to Subaru’s eyelashes; the howling blizzard plugged his ears.
“Second, and most severe of all, you let Lia die.”
The giant beast moved its colossal mouth, lined with rows of jagged teeth.
Its voice was piercingly cold, enough to freeze the world itself.
“—In accordance with my contract, I will now destroy the world.”
The snow falling around him grew heavier and heavier, gradually burying the entire slums.
“I will bury everything beneath ice and snow, as a parting gift for Lia.”
“Wh-y…?”
“—Because Lia, Emilia, was the only reason I lived.”
Puck answered Subaru’s question.
The wind grew even colder, piercing his skin like needles.
The extreme freeze turned his blood to ice.
It felt like he was going to die.
Subaru couldn’t see anything anymore.
Aside from the cold, he couldn’t perceive a single thing.
“A world without that child has no meaning to me.
Having lost that child, I will not permit this world to continue existing either—my everything ended the moment she died.”
The freezing erosion slowly rotted away his flesh, and his heart began to shut down.
I’m sorry, Mom, Dad, I can’t come home.
I’m sorry, Emilia, I couldn’t protect you.
In the center of the Royal Capital, a towering blue pillar of light erupted into the sky.
It felt like something was rushing toward them at breakneck speed.
What is that?
Just as the thought crossed Subaru’s mind, his breathing stopped completely.
Without realizing it, the agonizing, freezing cold faded away.
Not only was the cold gone, but Subaru actually felt very warm.
He wanted to surrender everything to that warmth.
Sleep, sleep, go somewhere warm.
“Sleep—alongside my daughter.”
Subaru Natsuki froze, and died.
Sorry for the delayed update, I schedule it for tmrw by mistake lol