Chapter 107: Theresia? This Time It's Real! (Patreon)

"Don't even think about it! You... you think Betty doesn't know what you're up to?!"

Beatrice refused without a second's thought. She kicked both little legs and wriggled out of Natsuki Subaru's arms, then whirled around to glare at him. He was still smiling. Her voice was so sharp it cracked:

"You've had this in mind since the very beginning, since you first wanted to learn Yin magic! You're planning to wipe yourself and her off this continent together, for good, when the mother dragon inside you can't be held down anymore and is about to tear this world apart! Isn't that right?!"

The smile on Natsuki Subaru's face stiffened slightly. He didn't answer right away.

He had to admit it: his contracted spirit really was a master of Yin magic. With his meager abilities, hiding anything from her was basically impossible. Miscalculation, huh...

"Answer Betty! You hopeless, hopeless idiot!!"

When he stayed silent, Beatrice's eyes went red at once. Huge tears welled up and rolled around in them. She lifted her foot and drove her toe hard into Natsuki Subaru's shin.

"What exactly do you take Betty for?! Some carpenter who'll build your coffin?! Four hundred years... Betty waited four hundred whole years in that Forbidden Library with no daylight, and she finally took your hand and walked out of it... And now you want Betty to teach you, with her own hands, how to send yourself to the grave?!"

"Jerk! Big jerk!"

"Ow, ow, ow! Lady Betty, have mercy on my shins!"

With Beatrice's strength, there was no way she could really make Subaru wince. Still, he cooperated nicely and pulled an exaggerated face. Then he bent his arm and, firmly but gently, pulled her back into his embrace, pressing her tight against his chest.

"Let go of Betty! You lying scum of a contractor! Betty hates you! She hates you the most!!"

Beatrice struggled violently in his arms. Her scalding tears quickly soaked through the thin fabric of his shirt.

"Listen to me, Betty."

Subaru held her small body with one arm. With the other hand he rested lightly on top of her head, on the two trembling cream-colored curls, and spoke calmly:

"I don't have any plan to end my own life. First of all, I'm still young. I haven't even had a proper romance yet... Okay, that part's debatable. But second, I'm famous for treasuring my life. You have no idea how many plans and backup plans I make before every move. I've been fighting bad luck my whole life, practically, all so I can walk away in one piece."

"Liar! Are you trying to tell Betty it's just a backup plan?" Beatrice sobbed out the question, her little head jammed hard against his chin. "Betty won't believe your nonsense! Nothing you say will work!"

"Aw... you finished my lines for me. So what am I supposed to say now?"

Subaru shrugged helplessly, then bared his teeth in a thoroughly shameless grin. He cupped Beatrice's tear-streaked little face in both hands so she could see the "confident" smile on his.

"You know I always factor in every possibility. Some are very unlikely, but that doesn't make them zero. Oh, and speaking of which, you're definitely not going to believe this. The Sin Archbishop of Sloth, the one who plagued the kingdom for over a hundred years, turns out to be Emilia's foster father. He used to be called Geuse, and now he's not crazy anymore. He's gotten better. If something that absurd can happen, don't you think fate keeps dealing you the most unbelievable turns?"

Beatrice was struck dumb.

Of course she knew the man who had once been her etiquette teacher. No, it was more accurate to say that he wasn't human at all. He was an earth-attribute lesser spirit who had existed since the days of Satella, the Witch of Envy.

To Beatrice, Geuse was one of the few old friends still left in the world. She had heard what happened to him afterward and had grieved deeply over it. She never imagined he could return to normal one day.

The news was so explosive that she forgot to wipe her tears. She simply stared blankly at the black-haired young man who could work such impossible miracles. There was a little less grief and anger in her eyes now, and a little more bewilderment.

Could she really trust his words completely?

Like she had trusted her mother, Echidna...

Beatrice's small hands clenched into fists.

"Come on, Beako, just believe me this once, okay?"

Subaru gently wiped the tears from her face with his thumb.

"Even setting aside the fact that I'd definitely use that spell to banish myself, wouldn't it be nice if I learned a few tricks to use on enemies? And listen, suppose, just suppose, in the worst-case scenario, that the day really comes when I have to banish myself... I, Natsuki Subaru, will find a way back to you all, no matter what."

After he said it, Subaru couldn't help sighing inwardly. To this day he still hadn't found a way back across the starsea. His promise to return to his companions among the Stellaron Hunters remained unfulfilled, and as the bonds he formed in this world kept growing, he had no choice but to make yet another promise like it.

He only hoped he could really make good on it...

"And what do you have to guarantee that?!" Beatrice glared at him, her voice choked. "That's another dimension... a place beyond space and time that nobody knows anything about! Nobody has ever heard of someone returning to this world after being banished by Al Shamak!"

"Because I'm your contractor, that's why."

Subaru grinned. Whether he meant it to comfort her or himself, he gave his answer:

"Look, I'm not even from this world to begin with, and I still crossed the starsea to get to you, didn't I? For a regular like me, who comes with transmigration built in, dimensional exile is at best a long business trip."

"As long as you're still tied to me by our contract, and as long as this coordinate is still here... I'll crawl back to your side along the network cable if I have to."

"...Idiot!"

Beatrice's nose, red and twitching, quivered. She looked at the man in front of her through blurry eyes.

She knew perfectly well that Subaru was probably spouting nonsense again. His mouth was full of "network cable" and "business trip" and other gibberish she couldn't make sense of. And yet, somehow, she couldn't stop herself from persuading herself to try believing in this man.

At the very least, from the day they met, Subaru had never told her a single lie. He wouldn't even speak the harmless little lie that would have done him nothing but good, that he was "the one she'd been waiting for." Instead he had freed her from that four-hundred-year cage using words alone.

How could a contractor like that possibly lie to her about something this critical, a matter of life and death?

After a long silence, Beatrice finally wiped the tear tracks from her face and gave a rather tsundere huff:

"I really can't stand you... Betty will only teach you the basic construction theory! Satisfied? Whether you can understand it depends on how much talent you have. If you can't learn it, then blame Subaru for being too dumb. Betty isn't responsible for teaching magic to fools with a hundred percent success, understand?"

"Yes, ma'am, Beako!"

Subaru let out a long breath, as if a weight had been lifted.

*

At the same time, in Priestella's Third District, along a remote waterway corridor leading to the control tower in the city center, Reinhard, Julius and Geuse were hurrying along the embankment.

Until they could work out how to break Sirius's Authority, these two upright knights, neither of them schemers, had no great ideas. Leaving her alone already seemed to be the best response available. They could hardly send Old Man Geuse up to appeal to her with reason and emotion and talk her into going straight.

Geuse did want to try, of course. Even if there was only the faintest chance, he hoped Fortuna could return to normal as he had. But he knew better than anyone that the Fortuna of today, or rather Sirius Romanée-Conti, was a madwoman fanatically in love with Petelgeuse Romanée-Conti. And what she loved was the mad version of him, not necessarily the sane one.

What if he walked up to her and she took him for a fake because he was too sane? That shouldn't happen. At the very least she could sense the Witch Factor inside him. But even as the genuine article, if he wasn't mad enough to match her perception of him, she might give him a memory-refreshing therapy session to forcibly "restore him to the original state." He'd really rather not have that.

He found himself missing the days when Mister Flugel was still around. Back then, whatever problem seemed unsolvable, Flugel always solved it in a way nobody expected. And now...

"Lord Subaru... surely has a way, doesn't he?" Geuse thought.

The black-haired young man not only bore some resemblance to the Flugel of his memories, but also had the power to create miracles. Geuse thought of Natsuki Subaru almost by instinct, and his thoughts happened to match Reinhard's and Julius's.

But just as the three of them, all preoccupied, passed directly beneath an arched stone bridge spanning the waterway, without any warning the family treasure at Reinhard's waist, the "Dragon Sword" Reid, began to tremble violently inside its scabbard!

"Watch out!!"

Reinhard's voice lagged half a beat behind his own movement.

A fierce flash of swordlight fell from the shadows above the bridge like lightning tearing through the night. It made no sound and stirred no pressure wave in the air. There was only a chill killing intent, with the concept of "death" condensed to its extreme.

The blade's target was the throat of Geuse, the weakest of the party, standing in the middle!

At the critical moment, Reinhard's figure appeared before Geuse as if he had teleported. The Dragon Sword Reid, still sheathed, swept out together with its plain scabbard and struck the vicious blade with pinpoint precision, by the narrowest of margins.

"CLANG—!!"

The ear-splitting crash of metal on metal exploded through the narrow waterway corridor. The flagstones underfoot shattered into countless cobweb cracks, and the surging shockwave cut the water on both sides of the channel for half a second!

Using the recoil, the ambusher spun gracefully through the air and landed on the stone railing of a sluice gate ten paces away.

A light breeze blew the rising stone dust away.

What appeared before the three of them was a figure that left the whole space breathless.

It was a woman in the pure white uniform of the Royal Guard. Her long hair, a blaze of crimson as dazzling as wildfire, danced in the wind. She was tall and slender. But on that exquisite face once hailed as a treasure of the kingdom, her eyes were unfocused, with a lifeless, murky pallor deep in the pupils.

The previous Sword Saint, Theresia van Astrea.

"...Grandmother?!"

Reinhard sucked in a sharp breath and cried out before he could think.

Even so, he held himself far more steadily than anyone would have expected. Seeing the legendary martyr who had died in the White Whale subjugation fifteen years ago had shaken him to the core. But Subaru had once used the authority of the Lust Witch Factor to briefly take Theresia's form, and that had given him no small measure of preparation for facing his grandmother.

Of course, Subaru hadn't done it on purpose. It was only the result of adjusting Reinhard's appearance in a feminine direction, a gender-swapped version, simply put. That it looked almost exactly like Reinhard's grandmother was pure coincidence.

The problem was that the being before them had none of the familiar presence that belonged to Subaru. Her vacant eyes made her lack of consciousness plain. She was probably only...

"A corpse soldier of the previous Sword Saint, Theresia van Astrea..." Geuse could hardly bear to meet Reinhard's gaze. "I'm sorry, Mister Reinhard. This is without a doubt the Witch Cult's handiwork. They used some forbidden art to drive the corpse of the fallen previous Sword Saint. I'm truly sorry!"

He hadn't been the first to defile Theresia's corpse, but within the Witch Cult's schemes he had been something of an accomplice. That left him deeply guilty before Reinhard. He clenched his hands, and his lowered eyes were full of anger and remorse.

"There's no need to apologize, Mister Geuse."

Reinhard stepped forward, not a trace of wavering in his eyes.

In the original world line, facing a close relative who had returned from the dead after fifteen years of torment by hatred and guilt, a storm of pain and turmoil would surely have surged inside Reinhard.

He would only have hidden it perfectly behind a calm expression.

But...

This was not that despairing world where the Astrea family had fallen apart.

Just two days ago, beneath the great tree of Flugel, his grandfather Wilhelm had struck off the White Whale's head and fulfilled a fifteen-year wish. His father Heinkel had made up for his old regrets and even earned a sword name. Three generations had long since put their grievances behind them!

The three generations had sworn together that they would never again let even a speck of dust fall on Theresia's honor!

In other words, whichever of the three generations stood here, there was only one decision they would make when facing this resurrected Theresia:

To give her a dignified funeral!

"Grandmother... no, corpse soldier manipulated by the Witch Cult."

In that instant Reinhard's gaze turned more resolute and clear than ever before. His spine was ramrod straight. With impeccable knightly courtesy, he leveled the drawn Dragon Sword at the red-haired woman ahead:

"The previous Sword Saint, Theresia van Astrea, died gloriously in battle. Today, I, the current Sword Saint, Reinhard van Astrea, will gather your remains with my own hands and grant you true rest!!"

Before his words had faded, a dazzling golden radiance pierced the void like a shooting star!

But facing a strike resolute enough to level a mountain, the "Theresia" opposite did not meet it head-on with the fearless abandon of an ordinary death soldier.

A fraction of a second before Reinhard's sword intent fully locked on, a faint, dim glimmer flashed, very subtly, in the depths of the swordswoman's murky gray-white eyes.

It was as though whoever was pulling the strings had long foreseen the current Sword Saint's resolve and known he couldn't be matched. The swordswoman didn't even swing a second blow. Her body twisted sharply in midair, her toe lightly tapped the stone pillar of the sluice gate, and like a drifting red leaf she flew backward without hesitation, riding the rebound of the current!

"BOOM!!"

The golden sword qi tore the stone bridge apart, throwing up a sky full of mist and flying rock. Behind that hazy curtain of water, the red-haired swordswoman had already slipped like a ghost into the tangled underground drainage tunnels. In the blink of an eye she severed every trace of her presence and vanished without a trace.

"...She ran?"

Julius brushed the dust from his face and stared in bewilderment at the empty end of the waterway.

Reinhard slowly lowered his stance but did not loosen his grip on the Dragon Sword. His young, handsome face was grave. He sheathed the blade and, looking at the ruins before him, let out a soft sigh:

"That was a misstep. We caused this much destruction. It seems the enemy's aim wasn't to attack us, but to probe our strength and our position. Whoever is manipulating everything from behind the scenes must have guessed we were coming. We don't have much time...

"Right now, more than ever, we need Subaru's wisdom and strategy."

He spoke with firm certainty.

"Let's go, everyone. We have to reach the rendezvous point as quickly as we can!"