7
Feet pounding against the hard floor, Subaru sprinted at full speed down the hallway.
Though not quite running like the wind, his body moved faster than expected. Reaching the end of the hallway, he put his hand against the wall, and after a moment’s pause, he let out a shout—
“Hah!!!”
Twisting his whole body, he focused his strength and visualized energy erupting from his palm. The intense feeling running through his right hand told him everything he needed to know. Letting out a deep breath, Subaru nodded.
“Yeah, I haven’t been given anything at all…”
In front of him, there was no change at all in the wall where his hand had been, and nothing was different about his hand except that it had gone numb.
He had tried all sorts of patterns of running, leaping, and attacking the wall, but he hadn’t noticed any sort of nonsensical power. At best, he had a bit more endurance than he remembered. And his hips seemed more flexible. That was about it.
Like the scars all over his body, those small changes were proof of the year he had forgotten.
He was just a mediocrity who couldn’t live up to his parents’ expectations, but what he did possess was a strength he’d managed to achieve through some amount of effort on his part.
But it’s not the sort of special strength that could be called a divine blessing.
“I even tried those transformation poses.”
He had gone through the iconic poses of various ultra-warriors, masked riders, and sailor uniform guardians. At one point, he even tried “pretty-pretty, cure-cure.” In the end, he had nothing to show for it.
It was the bog-standard trope of summoned-to-an-alternate-world and rebirth stories, but unfortunately, Subaru hadn’t been granted any special cheat abilities by a god.
“And Emilia-chan just gave me a blank look when I said ‘open status’…”
It also seemed like the classic game-world status overlay and level concept didn’t exist here, so all his experiment achieved was making Emilia and the others stare at him in confusion.
If there was no room for growth in terms of physical power, then he would have liked to pin his hopes on something magical, but…
“If you mean magic, then you can never use it again,” Beatrice told him in no unclear terms.
“Never?! Why?! Did I mess around with some taboo spell or something?!”
“You used the base-level magic spell too many times despite countless warnings and destroyed your gate. After that, I suppose you can never use magic again.”
“Wait, that happened just using the base-level spell?! How lame is that?!”
…But his partner Beatrice declared he was fundamentally incapable of using magic.
It would have been one thing if he’d traded his future as a mage to cast some grand spell. Hearing that he had effectively destroyed the cork of his magic bottle while casting the lowest-level spell just made him furious at past Subaru.
Memory or not, isn’t this the worst possible start for Subaru Natsuki’s big otherworldly adventure?
“Blessed with people is I guess the one redeeming quality?”
While going back and forth with the body he’d been born with, he focused on the unease that was filling his mind.
He had put on a tough face in front of the others, but with things settling down, Subaru took stock of the situation and sensed the unstable footing beneath him.
He had lost his memories. There was no doubting that anymore.
There were just too many pieces of evidence that couldn’t be ignored, and honestly, he’d started wanting to believe it, too. If he couldn’t trust that, how else could he stay there?
This was where he wanted to be. This moment right now and this place right here were all that he had. So he wanted the strength that would allow him to remain.
“In the end, all I can do is rely on bonds that I don’t remember. I want to cry.”
Subaru Natsuki, always receiving, always consuming. Even when he was in another world.
The clearer it became how seriously Emilia and the others were worried about him, the more he hated himself for taking up a place he hadn’t earned.
“ ”
He stood alone in the hallway. Everyone else was currently at the party’s base on the fourth floor, the room where they’d eaten, in the middle of a discussion. The topic was what to do about Subaru and how to go about taking on the tower’s remaining challenges. The focus was whether they should prioritize recovering Subaru’s memories or not.
Of course he wanted to get his memories back in the end, but…
“They are my memories after all. But there’s also the chance that this is connected to the tower’s trial.”
It was unclear whether the books of the dead were connected to the memory loss, but it seemed obvious that something had disrupted his memories while he was in the tower. In which case, the most likely explanation was one of the books of the dead, and a second possibility of interest was the clearing of the third floor itself. Since it had been Subaru who solved the puzzle, maybe the memory loss was a reaction to that.
“Those sorts of gimmicks are used a lot to create a one-shot, one-kill setting. Having a single overpowered character blow past multiple challenges isn’t very interesting, so maybe this is to prevent that…?”
He was deep in manga logic at that point, which was pathetic in a way, but that was the only explanation he could come up with.
Either way, that was why he’d run away from the party’s discussion and was by himself putting his hopes in maybe awakening some kind of unknown power.
“The second-floor guardian…”
After clearing the third floor, the party had immediately encountered the fiendish guardian waiting for them on the second floor. The enemy had challenged them to a basic test of strength, but he was apparently some crazy powerful opponent.
Subaru had done kendo in middle school, so he was not exactly a complete amateur at martial arts. But that was a far cry from actual combat. He at least had enough common sense not to mix that up.
“Tch. In which case…”
Frowning, Subaru reached to the back of his hip, pulling out the whip hanging there, and flicked the tip of it against the wall. Then he pulled it back. It cracked violently against his leg.
“Guhhhh! Isn’t this the kind of thing your body is supposed to remember even if you don’t?! Or was the whip just for show and I never actually knew how to use it all along…?”
Rubbing his shin, Subaru glared tearfully at the whip.
Why is a whip my main weapon anyway? Picking a whip instead of a sword or a gun reeks of a dweeb trying to stand out and look cool.
“But the fact that I can’t use it at all… Does that mean I haven’t just lost my memories, but experience, too?”
Subaru had heard before that even if someone lost their memory, they would still know how to ride a bike. If that was true, then why did Subaru’s body not remember how to use his whip?
Forgetting his memories, making the people he was supposed to be together with worry, losing everything he had built up, and turning into useless baggage was not enough; the scars etched into his body were all that remained of his history, leaving only a faint outline.
It’s like I’m a papier-mâché fake.
“Haaah.”
Subaru stood up with a sigh.
That word was silly enough to make him burst out laughing.
It’s a bit late to realize that. Since when have I ever not been a sham?
“Argh, stop it! Quit being stupid. What’s the point of killing my own motivation…”
Giving his cheek a little punch, Subaru sighed and rolled up the whip. He didn’t really know how to put it away properly, so it was a massive pain and turned into a mess, but he eventually managed to stow it away at his hip.
I guess the calluses on my palm are from all the work I did learning how to use this whip?
“Moments like this are why you should leave a journal of what you did, dumbass.”
Unfairly blaming his past self’s lack of planning, Subaru slowly started walking.
I didn’t manage to confirm any sort of cheat ability, but that’s its own discovery. Now I don’t have to rely on something that doesn’t exist. Though that way of thinking might be a little too positive.
“Whoops, not this way.”
Subaru figured the group had probably about finished up their discussion and started heading back to base but took a wrong turn along the way.
In front of him lay the big staircase leading to the tower’s lower floor. It was apparently a six-floor tower, and the fifth and fourth floors were connected by a spiral staircase that was dozens of meters high. The stairs in front of him certainly looked tall enough.
“A spiral staircase means spinning all around, though, so it’s a lot more complicated than just pure height might imply. Still, though, that’s a weird construction…or maybe not? This is a different universe.”
The green room was a mysterious place that healed people just by staying inside it. So for a world with that kind of fantasy setting, nitpicking architectural styles didn’t make much sense.
Besides, I could say the same for the pyramids in my world.
“I wonder if I tried to do stuff like find common points with my home world before, too?”
That was the start of a maddening line of thought, though.
It almost felt like the gears in his mind got jammed when he lost his memory. Ordinarily, there was no before or after for your own self. Past and present, your sense of self remained relatively constant.
So even here, Subaru Natsuki is…
“…Hm?”
Shaking his head to clear away that feeling, Subaru made a noise. It was just an exhalation without any special meaning. Sensing something unexpected, he unconsciously made a noise.
It was nothing more and nothing less.
“ ”
With that simple breath—the world turned upside down.
“Ah?”
His foot left the ground. No, not just his foot. His whole body.
He shot out into open space. He completely lost track of up and down. The sensation of falling filled him.
“Wha—”
The deafening roar of air rushing past filled his ears.
Not comprehending, not understanding, Subaru Natsuki fell. Was falling. Spinning through space and falling down.
“Wai…wait, wait, wait—”
His world spun and he clawed at the air around him. The flow of time distorted after he left the floor, but finally he realized what had happened to his body.
He was falling. Plummeting. Where? From some place very high to some place very low.
After tumbling off the spiral stairs, he was swallowed up by the yawning darkness filling the tower. He desperately looked around, but the tower’s monotonous walls just flew by at high speed.
It almost seemed like the scenery was skipping past him. In reality, he was falling fast, and his vision was instinctively following everything that seemed to be racing upward. Then the nausea hit him. The contents of his stomach spilled out into the air.
“ Ngh.”
He couldn’t breathe properly, and some vomit lodged in his throat, causing a jolt of pain in the back of his nose accompanied by what felt like all his internal organs shifting around as Subaru lost track of himself.
After his memory, the next thing to go was himself. It was almost funny.
“Gheh.”
With a sour, bitter chuckle, Subaru Natsuki lost consciousness.
Lost consciousness, and—
—hit an unmoving object.
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