Chapter 170: Rem, Ah, and Tia want to go to...!

Who… am I again?

Oh, right — Zarestia!

The freest, most carefree Great Spirit in all the world!

And also a creature whose head is stuffed full of frenzied slaughter.

The wind picks up — kill! The sun goes down — kill! The meaning of life is killing, and the only way to settle anything is killing!

But as the years wore on… I got tired of myself, of hurting people without end, so I chose to sleep in a canyon the world calls [Zarestia's Sleeping Nest].

Winds of death blow through that place all year long, a natural barrier of protection, so as a rule nobody can disturb my slumber!

Then one day I woke up — and there was a whole stretch of experience sitting in my head that had never happened!

No… it did happen. It was absolutely not a lie!

Those memories of my days with Subaru and Rem, that warmth, that feeling of being steeped in a love so deep it could melt a person down entirely — that was real, no question about it!

And yet, for all her insistence, Zarestia kept fretting over it.

Precisely because she couldn't confirm it on the spot, that warm love inside her head seemed to be drifting quietly further away, near enough to see and impossible to touch.

That was the one thing she absolutely could not endure!

So: she wanted to see Subaru, she wanted to see Rem… And if the two of them didn't know her yet, then she would simply meet them all over again and build the trust and the bonds up from nothing.

After all… when the three of them first met, that had started with stumbling misunderstandings too!

No sooner thought than done. Zarestia left her sleeping nest at once, headed for the place Subaru had told her about in those memories — where they had lived before they fled here.

But she had barely stepped outside when she spotted an oni girl arriving at the foot of the canyon, gasping for breath. Reize.

"Come to steal my light orb again? I'll kill you!"

Faced with the thief who had once robbed her, Zarestia was oddly mild, threatening her in words alone.

"No. I won't do anything that stupid again."

The oni girl Reize shook her head calmly. She was one of those who carried the memories of that "Sloth" world as well, and she had come to understand that her life in that past existence had been nothing but a joke.

Even with the light orb stolen and most of Zarestia's power in her hands, all she had killed were a few low-ranking flunkies of the Witch Cult she despised. To the ones truly responsible for the annihilation of the oni, she had never posed the slightest threat.

Worse than that… at the very end of her life she had misjudged the husband of another surviving oni sister and brought her own death down on herself.

And harder still to accept, harder still to face —

On the brink of death, she had confessed, ugly and shameless, that she envied that oni sister whose name she had never even learned.

Why did she get to set her hatred down?

Why did she get to live the ordinary life of a wife, the very thing Reize had dreamed of?

How ugly it was.

In the end, it came down to this: she had nothing left. Every person she loved had been slaughtered by the Witch Cult, and the hollow shell that remained could only turn to revenge against them.

But she had no head on her shoulders, she was far too stupid, and in the end she never managed any revenge or resistance worth the name.

And so —

"You're going to go and find them, aren't you, Lady Zarestia? In that case… would you take me along?" Reize looked straight into the eyes of the most beautiful reaper in the world — eyes fixed on her and brimming with the killing intent that was simply her nature — and spoke plainly.

"In my last life it was stupidity that made me swallow that kind of misunderstanding, and it made me attack the two people who might have become my friends!"

"So in this life, I want to find that man. Anyone who could work out a way to kill me has to be a being of surpassing wisdom, and someone like that could make me stronger — could help me finish my revenge!"

Seeing Zarestia's gaze waver, Reize hurried on.

"And I'm an oni. That man's wife may be the only sister I have left in this world. The same blood runs in us — she must want to see me too."

It was that last line that won Zarestia over completely, striking both of her soft spots with perfect accuracy — Subaru and Rem.

"If you might come in handy, then come along with me," Zarestia said, giving her cheerful consent.

"Um — if you don't mind, take me along while you're at it, Tia?"

"After all, I may be Kararagi's strongest warrior, but when it comes to covering ground I'm still no match for the Great Spirit of Wind. Heh heh."

The gentle voice rose without warning out of the shadow at the oni girl Reize's feet.

The figure that stood up out of that shadow suited the voice poorly: a rugged, burly canine demi-human, his mouth drawn out into a long wolf's muzzle.

"Hal! You could have said something sooner!" Zarestia cried in delight, a flash of it running through her crimson eyes — and in the same motion she raised a hand and sent countless wind blades scything toward Halibel.

It was precisely because Halibel delighted her, because she liked him, that she wanted to kill him.

That was her essence as a [Reaper]. Something joyful — she wanted to kill it. Something sorrowful — she wanted to kill it. Something that angered her — she wanted to kill it. Something that mattered to her — she wanted to kill it.

Kill, kill, kill, kill…!

Bang!

On the other side of it, Halibel met the sudden attack with a perfectly calm face.

He only drew his blade and lifted it, batting the attack down — or rather, deflecting every strike that would have caught him and Reize into the rock wall behind them.

"As welcoming ceremonies go, that was quite the grand one."

"The you from before the light orb is lost still has far too much bloodlust in her. I'm genuinely afraid you'd kill Subaru and Rem the instant you laid eyes on them — that's exactly why I insisted on tagging along…" Halibel glanced back at the wreckage of the rock wall behind him and let out a wry laugh.

"Doesn't matter, Hal. You're fine, aren't you? Be generous and forgive me."

"As for Subaru and Rem, of course I won't kill them. Because — I love them!"

"Her attack's coming!"

Betty watched Zarestia hanging in the air in the distance. Wind arrows circled her body now, dozens of them, gathering force — and then they came shrieking toward them at a speed the naked eye could barely catch.

"Use it, Betty!"

The moment Natsuki Subaru saw Zarestia aiming those wind arrows at the Betty beside him, he seized her hand and, through the contract binding the two of them, invoked the original spell they had created together.

"E.M.T!"

"I suppose!" Natsuki Subaru and Betty shouted one after the other, and in that instant a dark-attribute barrier unfurled, settling firmly over them both.

Zarestia's attack, blindingly fast a heartbeat before, lost almost all its speed the moment it crossed into the field.

The field drew off the Mana held in every one of those strikes, drinking it steadily down, until at last they broke apart completely into scattering motes of light.

____

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