4
Shaula’s corpse was in such a grisly state, it made him want to cover his eyes.
The tie holding long black hair was undone and her hair spread out as if covering the floor. Her limbs were splayed limply. Her arms were cut off at the elbows and wrists, the ends nowhere to be found.
There were cuts all over her pale, healthy-looking skin and a tremendous amount of blood had splattered all over the passage. Tracks of blood continued down the hallway, showing the gruesome battle had been long and covered a large amount of ground.
And the most brutal of all, the wound to her head that had been the fatal blow—though it couldn’t really even be described as a wound. Her head had been shattered in one shot and her face couldn’t be made out anymore.
The smile she’d flashed at Subaru so many times filled his head—
“—Ugh.”
He knelt down and voided everything in his stomach. It was basically empty except for bile, which burned his throat and filled the back of his nose with a bitter taste. How many times had he tasted it over the past half a day?
How many times would he have to go through this torture?
“Uegh! Ughh, gah, bgh…”
It wasn’t just nausea. Tears welled in his eyes. He didn’t have the capacity to pity Shaula as vomit fell on her body. But her death seared itself into his brain.
—It was his first time…seeing someone actually dead.
“Haah, haah, haah…”
He had never seen a real corpse in his life.
In most cases, the first dead person someone might see would be an older family member. But Subaru’s grandparents on both sides of the family were still healthy, and he’d never been to a funeral.
And outside of that, there’d been no occasion when he had seen anyone else’s corpse—so Shaula’s dead body was his first exposure to death.
The shock was staggering. It burned into his soul, and he couldn’t get it out.
The fact that people could have their lives so brutally stolen from them.
“Me…too…”
His breathing was ragged as he finally controlled the nausea.
He’d been pushed off the spiral stairs and fallen to the ground far below. His corpse should have been a grisly mass of flesh, too. He couldn’t see his own dead body, and he felt genuine relief at that.
If I somehow could see my own dead body, there is no way I could stay sane.
Not when simply realizing he’d died was enough to tear his heart in two and make it feel like his mind was going to shatter.
“Any…anyway…”
Averting his eyes from the headless corpse, Subaru mourned Shaula’s death. But at the same time, he was sure that some terrifying discord was skulking in the tower.
Shaula had been killed. By the same person responsible for murdering him.
“So Shaula wasn’t the killer…”
Before, Subaru had no way of narrowing down the suspects, but this naturally removed one person from the list. That left six: Emilia, Beatrice, Ram, Echidna, Julius, and Meili. One of them was the killer. And that made things easier.
The relief he could only secure by killing seven people could now be his for the price of merely six lives.
If he just killed the murderer trying to kill him, and killed all the suspects who might have tried to kill him, then he would be left alone in the tower, and he could indulge in a solitude where no one threatened him.
“In that sense, Ram and Echidna are obstacles… Julius too. It would be better if they could just go and get themselves killed without me.”
Beatrice and Meili are little girls, so killing them shouldn’t be too hard. Emilia will be easy to get the drop on since she lets her guard down so much around me. Same for Shaula, though she’s already dead now. But Ram is defiant, and Echidna is crafty. Getting the drop on them probably won’t be easy. And Julius is even worse: he’s a guy and he’s packing a sword.
I’ve done kendo, though, so if I could steal that sword, I might be able to turn the table on him.
All that was left was—
“That bastard upstairs.”
His body shuddered at the thought of the red-haired test master waiting at the top of those long stairs. The thought of even trying to kill that man made his soul scream that it was impossible.
He’s an exception, out of bounds, a superhuman removed from all worldly logic and not to be tested.
The one saving grace was that it was hard to imagine him being the one who pushed Subaru over the edge. Subaru had a twisted faith that that man would never have picked such a boring method to kill him.
“ ”
Subaru wiped his mouth, got up, and stepped over Shaula’s body.
There was no time to bury her, and he didn’t have any words to say over her grave. But he didn’t have any reason to humiliate her, either. She was dead. Anyone dead was not an enemy anymore. The dead posed no threat to him. They were his only allies. The death he’d feared so much was now his savior.
Pushing forward, there were heavy signs of fighting in the passage. There were marks on the floor and walls, and blood that was probably Shaula’s splattered here and there. He followed the path while lowering his breath and walking quietly, to not be noticed by whatever waited ahead.
From the moment he reached the fourth floor, he’d focused his senses that were already sharpened by the killer curse he’d been weaving. Moving in a silence that hurt his ears, he strained to hear even the slightest change.
He had seen Shaula’s dead body, but his need to kill was unquelled.
He had the resolve to grab the first person he found, to tear into them, to steal their life.
And yet—
“ ”
—When he rounded the corner and found Echidna’s corpse, Subaru was left wondering what worth his resolve was in the hell he’d stumbled into.
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