Chapter 173: My name is...■■■!

When Natsuki Subaru heard this, he frowned slightly. Elsa's words sounded reasonable enough, easygoing even, but the voice she'd unconsciously dropped low gave her away.

The realization left him a little startled.

So Elsa had a side like this too?

Watching Ram and Meili both get a pat on the head as a reward, she'd gotten nothing—yet she wouldn't ask for one either, only stealing glances at the scene from the side. What kind of pitiful, sulking act was this?

And was that because she felt she hadn't proven useful in the fight just now, so she was stewing over it, eating herself up inside?

Elsa—surprisingly, she was quite the serious one!

Still, she was a good woman, all things considered.

Subaru didn't want to play favorites, so he was just about to call Elsa over.

But at that moment, a voice calling out from the sky cut him off.

"Subaru—!"

Emilia touched down on the ground, then dashed forward two quick steps, smoothly wedging herself between Ram and Meili, and threw herself into Subaru's arms, embracing him fully.

"Emilia-tan! What are you doing here?"

Surprise crossed Subaru's face, but a second later he smacked his own forehead, silently calling himself an idiot.

With an enemy this powerful invading, of course Emilia would come to help—wasn't that just obvious?

Well... except maybe not entirely?

Because Subaru remembered the manor arc's viewing he'd watched not long ago.

Back when the village faced the crisis of a possible Mabeast invasion, Emilia had stayed behind at the manor, kept safe and protected—which was why some part of him still instinctively thought of her as that fragile person who needed protecting.

Still, he firmly believed that the Emilia of the future would grow into someone who could stand on her own, hold her own ground as an adult.

"My, isn't Lady Emilia just full of authority. Didn't lift a finger this whole fight, and still has the nerve to come shove her way into the spotlight... how very high and mighty of her."

Ram, who'd just been jostled aside, crossed her arms once she'd collected herself and shot the remark at Emilia, dripping with sarcasm.

Hearing this, Emilia kept the happy smile on her face from when she'd first spotted Subaru, but where he couldn't see, her fists were clenched so tight they creaked.

As the saying goes, when rivals in love cross paths, their eyes go red with jealousy.

In the Wrath line, the two of them had an irreconcilable conflict: only one could stay by Subaru's side to the very end, while the other was doomed to be cast aside without mercy.

Emilia, thanks to reliving a stretch of the Wrath line through the viewing space, had managed to more or less draw even with Ram.

But precisely because of that, the friction between the two of them had carried over even into reality.

"If Ram hadn't refused to bring me along, I wouldn't have had to go beg Roswaal to cast a flight spell on me so I could get here on my own!"

Emilia explained anxiously to Subaru, wearing a wounded expression.

"The situation was urgent at the time. Ram had to prioritize bringing Rem."

"Besides, Ram's abilities have their limits—she didn't have the Mana to spare carrying along someone who wasn't even relevant."

Ram pursed her lips, not even bothering to come up with a halfway decent excuse—clearly she was aiming the jab squarely at Emilia.

Toward Subaru, of course, Ram only ever showed her obedient side.

But toward anyone else—so long as they weren't her little sister Rem—

Ram reverted right back to her sharp-tongued self, looking down on everyone equally, and Emilia was no exception.

So when Emilia glared over with her teeth gritted, Ram didn't back down for a second, glaring right back with equal force.

The two of them faced off like that, each radiating a fearsome, invisible pressure that ground against the other, colliding in silence.

"Now that's truly—terrifying. Lord Subaru, you really are—a sinful man indeed."

Roswaal, who'd been flying some distance behind Emilia and, seeing no fight underway, had drifted down at his leisure to plant himself somewhere unnoticed, couldn't help but chuckle at the sight and remark to Subaru.

Even as he laughed, Roswaal's deep-set eyes slid toward Ram, now locked in argument with Emilia.

With his memories of the Greed line intact, his view of Ram amounted to nothing more than a tool—powerful, and reasonably clever besides.

One he could sacrifice at any moment, paving the way for his plan to revive Teacher...

Except now, that tool had slipped free of his control.

No matter.

With that thought, Roswaal's gaze drifted to Subaru, who stood caught in the crossfire between Emilia and Ram, looking thoroughly harried—and Roswaal smiled.

Once Lord Subaru grew enough to become a vessel capable of holding Teacher's soul, none of this would matter anymore.

Lord Subaru, bound by contract to Teacher, would surely lead him—lead their whole faction—to seize the throne.

And from there, slay the Divine Dragon, claim its blood, and let Teacher... truly return to life!

Roswaal drifted into a rapturous daydream of that future.

But the very next instant, his expression changed.

In a heartbeat he turned grave and alert, as though sensing something had suddenly gone wrong.

And indeed it had—within Roswaal's perception—

Just now,

something seemed to have shifted, silently, without a trace.

The sensation was like a breeze brushing past his cheek—he could feel with certainty that wind had passed through, yet he had no way to intervene.

And all of this, including Roswaal's entire train of thought just now, had unfolded within the span of a single second.

When everyone present blinked and opened their eyes again, they were stunned to find, at the very center of the open field—

—that at some point, unnoticed, a girl had appeared, her back turned to them, her figure slender and slight.

She'd appeared with no warning whatsoever, no sign at all.

It was as if the time it should have taken her to reach them had been silently compressed, erased entirely.

There was no sense of wrongness to it at all—as if she'd simply always been standing there, right in the middle of the circle everyone now formed around her, as if she'd never moved from that spot.

"And you would be...?"

Roswaal was the first among them to react, seeing as he'd been the first to sense something was off in the first place.

He raised his palm, and four orbs of light—red, yellow, blue, and green—bloomed above it.

They looked unremarkable, but in truth they were killing techniques drawn from all four elemental schools: fire, earth, water, and wind.

Even as he asked her identity, Roswaal didn't hesitate for a moment—he loosed the spells he'd already charged, unleashing them at this clearly hostile presence before him.

"Wait, Roswaal!"

Amid the commotion, Subaru—who'd been momentarily stunned—caught sight of what Roswaal was doing.

For some reason he couldn't quite name, he shouted, trying to stop Roswaal's attack.

But a spell already loosed from the hand wouldn't simply return just because Roswaal wished it back.

"No good—too late."

Betty, whom Subaru had asked moments earlier to stop Roswaal, raised her hand, meaning to intercept the spells.

But she narrowed her eyes, and in the blink of an eye had already worked out that it couldn't be stopped.

Facing a strike loaded with hostile intent, even she—with four hundred years of stored Mana behind her—would have to step clear of its edge.

That girl... was very likely in danger.

But the very instant Betty passed her silent verdict of death on the girl before them, under the gaze of everyone present—

Roswaal's four devastating spells, released and flying toward their target, hadn't even come close to reaching the girl before they began to dim, growing fainter and fainter mid-flight.

Until at last, with a faint hiss, they scattered into nothing right in front of the girl—a girl with long brown hair and a striking bow perched atop her head.

As if drawn by this trivial, failed attack, the girl who'd had her back to them all turned her head slightly, revealing a pair of cool, detached green eyes.

And a face untouched by any rouge, yet already a beauty beyond compare in this world—cold, aloof, exquisite.

"I am... [REDACTED]."

The girl's lips parted slightly as she murmured the words.

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