4
Meili was dead, sprawled across the middle of the stone floor in an unremarkable room.
“ ”
Looking down at her corpse, Subaru’s mind was chaos.
The wounds on his hands and wrists, an empty room, and his heart racing. He tried to remember what happened, but nothing came. His mind was blank, and he couldn’t understand anything.
The only thing he could say for sure was that girl lying in front of him was dead—
“No…way…no way! This can’t be happening!”
He ran over to her body, as if to deny the reality before his eyes.
His knees quivered and he tripped pathetically before frantically peering into her face. Her expression was twisted in pain and her lifeless eyes were looking somewhere in the distance.
She’d always been a hard-to-read girl, but now she would forever be incomprehensible—
“N-not yet…Meili! C’mon, Meili!”
Hoping against all hope, he called out to her. There was no response. He slapped her face. Still no reaction.
He called on all the memory he had of CPR. Trusting the vague recollections of the heart’s location, he put two fingers below her sternum and then placed both hands on her small chest, beginning a series of forceful chest compressions in order to revive her.
“Hah…hah…! Meili! C’mon, Meili! Damn it…!”
There was no response. Her pale face and limp body shuddered beneath him.
He tilted her head backward and started rescue breathing. He continued alternating compressions with rescue breathing.
“What was next? What next? Is there anything else? Shit, shit, shit, shit!”
Subaru’s mind raced as he tried to remember anything else.
But all he could remember was half-assed stuff from TV shows, just bits and pieces of vague outlines. The more desperate he got, the more futile it felt.
He kept blindly cycling between compressions and rescue breathing, cycling and cycling and cycling…
“—Goddamn it…”
Sweaty and breathing raggedly, Subaru fell backward onto the floor. Mortified, he covered his teary eyes with his hand and cursed everything.
He hadn’t been able to resuscitate Meili. The fire of life wouldn’t be lit again.
All that “her life was brutally stolen by a merciless fate” crap isn’t going to fly here.
It wasn’t fate that had killed her. There was a more direct and targeted danger that was responsible. As proof, there were still dark-blue bruises circling her neck from where she was strangled, and also…
“ ”
There were lots of scratches on his hands and wrists from Meili struggling.
“—Ugh…”
The moment he realized that, Subaru looked away, vomiting up everything he had eaten at breakfast. That he managed to look away and not get it on Meili was thanks to the last fragments of his conscience.
“All I’m doing is blowing chunks everywhere…”
He wiped his mouth with his sleeve.
I don’t even remember how many times I’ve thrown up anymore. Have I properly digested something even once? I’m sorry to all the farmers who made this food.
If he hadn’t distracted himself a little with that pointless internal banter, his heart might well have broken right then and there.
“ ”
There was too much circumstantial evidence. And he couldn’t imagine someone framing him with such an elaborate setup, either.
The ghastly bruises on her neck perfectly matched where his hands would sit. There was no other weapon used than those two hands—it was undoubtedly Subaru who had killed her.
The problem was he couldn’t remember anything like that happening.
“What happened? Try to remember. Focus. Focus, focus, focus…”
Standing up, he started walking in circles around the room as he delved into memories.
I went through the same morning for the fourth time, lied to everyone at the breakfast table, called out Julius but found out my theory was wrong, messed around some with Shaula, and then talked to Meili. And then…
“She said something…about last night…?”
She mentioned needing me for something, and then brought up something about last night, I think. But right after she said that, everything went blank.
His memory stopped there, and then she was dead, as if a second act had started without any logical connection to the first.
Even though the subject she’d brought up—what had happened the night before—might have had some connection with Subaru’s lost memory.
“She’s dead. And I wrung her neck…? Why would I…?”
Looking down at his hands, he experienced a vivid feeling in them that he couldn’t remember.
The two hands that had forcefully wrung the breath out of that little girl’s neck. The scratches on his hands were the proof that she’d struggled to live. The arms that had committed such a brutal murder…
“—Huh?”
Looking at the bloody wounds on his arms, he had a strange felling.
The reason was not the wounds, but his fingers. For some reason, there was blood and flesh in his nails, just like Meili’s, indicating he had scratched hard at something, too.
“ ”
Looking at Meili’s body again, he saw no wounds other than the bruises on her neck. He didn’t strip her to check everywhere, but he couldn’t see any obvious scratch marks.
In which case, this is from…
“—No way…”
A chill ran down his spine as he rolled up his own sleeve.
His left arm was aching, and when he pushed the sleeve up to his shoulder, he heard the sticky sound of dried blood peeling away and the new pain of an open wound exposed to air.
But the pain was erased by the shock of the sight he found.
“ ”
As he imagined, there was a wound that seemed to have been clawed into his arm by himself. There was a painful wound scratched into his arm from the inner elbow and up the upper arm. But it wasn’t just any scratch.
They were letters. A twisted writing carved into his body.
—And it said, “Subaru Natsuki was here.”
“Huh?”
He couldn’t help making a baffled sound when he saw it.
Wiping the wound with his right hand, he wondered if it was just his mind playing tricks on him that he read it that way. But even after rubbing at it enough to cause the blood to start oozing out again, the fact did not change.
No matter how many times he looked at it, the words “Subaru Natsuki was here” were written there in a grisly Japanese.
It was easy to understand. Just a simple self-assertion. Some criminals liked to leave messages at the scenes of their crimes. To claim the crime, say who had committed it.
It was a gift, ambition, self-gratification…
“What are you?!”
Face-to-face with a difficult-to-accept reality, Subaru’s voice cracked. He couldn’t cut off his own left arm, so he flung it out to keep it as far from himself as possible, but his feet got tangled and he fell backward. Sitting on the ground, he slammed his arm into the ground over and over and over again.
But none of that changed the facts. Meili was dead and the wounds on his arm did not disappear.
“I didn’t have this before! I definitely didn’t have this before! I know I didn’t!”
The aching scratches were new, something he absolutely hadn’t had before Meili’s death. Someone strangled Meili and then did this to his arm…
No, that’s not it. That’s wrong and you know it. Just accept it already. Wrap your head around it. You already know there isn’t anyone else here.
This wasn’t anything other than Subaru Natsuki’s crime. The Subaru Natsuki who wasn’t him had killed Meili and carved the evidence into his arm.
“What’s going on…?”
I’m going crazy. I have to be.
Is Subaru Natsuki the name of some incomprehensible elder god-like monster?
“ ”
This wasn’t the first time he had felt suspicious of Subaru Natsuki.
The actions he’d seemingly taken the night he had lost his memories, the secret with Echidna that had been kept from Julius, and the number of things he’d apparently done in order to earn people’s trust would have been impossible for the Subaru Natsuki who’d just been on his way home from the convenience store.
If someone told him that someone was passing themselves off as Subaru Natsuki and had taken over his body to do the deed, it would almost sound more believable.
“But that isn’t it…”
The wound carved in his left arm argued against that theory.
Even if it wasn’t made with a pen, there were still quirks to the writing style. The strokes of the letters, where they started and ended—it all matched the quirks of his handwriting.
Meaning it was unmistakably a Subaru Natsuki with the same roots as him who had written the message.
In which case, while he was leaving this note…
“—I was unconscious, and the other Subaru Natsuki switched places with me?”
And that Subaru Natsuki killed Meili for some reason, then left his signature on Subaru’s arm before slipping back beneath the surface.
It might at least work as a theory, but he couldn’t understand what the motive could possibly be.
“If he has his own body, then why…no, what am I? If you’re Subaru Natsuki, then what am I…? Who are you…?”
Clutching his face, Subaru’s voice quivered as he sank into a morass of questions and doubt.
Thrown into another world with no one to rely on, no way of knowing who was friend and who was foe, now he could no longer even trust himself unconditionally.
“ ”
He couldn’t stay calm. His legs trembled and he almost collapsed on the spot.
But I’m not gonna let it end like this. I’m not just gonna let myself be manipulated by Subaru Natsuki’s plans.
So…
“—Who…are you?”
Bristling with malice as he addressed someone he couldn’t see without a mirror, Subaru raised his right arm, covered in a grotesque pattern and fleshed out from a year’s time he couldn’t remember, and put his fingernails against it.
The dark flesh tore, and a drop of red blood welled up like a teardrop.
—The stabbing pain and the color of fresh blood were proof that he was himself.
No Comments Yet
Post a new comment
Register or Login