This part, like the previous one, covers a small portion of the sixth volume of the original Re:Zero series, but this part finishes covering that volume.
This entry continues the protagonist’s downward spiral as he’s attempting to integrate his horrifying past failures, as well as all the hurt that’s going around. I thought this was going to become a hard one to write, but I ended up having a tremendous amount of fun, and in the end it’s one of my favorite parts of this strange AI-fueled roleplaying/retelling thing.
GPT-3 is a cutting-edge language processing algorithm used in the premium version of the online site AI Dungeon.
You know at what moment of that first morning Rem comes. And you’ve learned that for the two days you can avoid meeting her, even when someone from Crusch’s camp attempts to send a message for you because the demon servant keeps asking. If you wanted, you could keep repeating these two days indefinitely and never have to face her again.
How could you face Rem, someone who truly matters to you? You feel locked inside yourself, detached from the course of your emotions as if the nerves that kept you connected to some vital core had been severed. You aren’t a person anymore. How could you face Rem, when you failed, when you have failed every day of your life? How could you feel like you deserve to be looked at by someone who loves you, who gave her life for you? She should forget you. In truth, she should have never met you. She should find someone else who could measure up to her.
And yet, you are sick of asphyxiating that part of yourself. Even if you don’t deserve Rem for a second, you want little else than to grab her in your arms and keep her tightly attached to you forever.
You’ve been standing outside of Crusch’s mansion, next to the path to the front gate, for so long, and looking so shady and nervous, that Ferris has attempted to interrogate you twice about what the hell you were doing. And then, Rem appears. She asks the guard to open the gate, and begins to walk up towards the entrance. She has locked her gaze on you from the moment she saw you. She’s her usual pretty faced, blue-haired maid self, wielding a sweet smile that in truth hides how little she cares for her own self, how eager she is to find meaning in sacrificing her existence for someone she cares about.
“Wha-?”
Her voice quivers in surprise when she finds that she is suddenly pulled into a tight embrace by you. She’s taken aback by this sudden act of aggression, but soon she returns your hug.
You feel excited and joyous like a little kid in Christmas. For a second you fear hugging her too tightly, but then again she’s far stronger than you.
“You are needed and wanted,” you say, almost breathless, “and there’s nobody who can occupy your space. I’m glad you exist.”
She stares at you with her mouth open, her eyes moistening. You smooch her all over, which makes her shiver. She makes a show of touching you lightly in the back as if to tell you that’s enough, but without any effort.
“N-N-Natsuki Subaru, did you wake up that warm? Not that I’m complaining”, Rem says.
“I couldn’t wait anymore to see you.”
“Oh.” Rem’s face turns very red. “… For some special reason?”
You nod. Then you take her head in your hands and kiss her deeply. Her tongue reacts to yours before the rest of her body does. Her eyes widen, and she plunges her hands into your hair. After a moment you break the kiss, leaving her mouth slightly open and her head tilted upwards.
“Rem, let’s make love right here, now, in front of Crusch’s mansion. I’ll kiss and lick all over that beautiful body of yours, I’ll eat you out until you come in my mouth, and then I’ll get into that pussy of yours and shoot so far inside of you that it will come out of your mouth and into my own.”
Rem’s face is so red you can barely tell her original skin color. She’s trembling, breathing heavy, her eyes are sparkling, and from her wavering lips escapes something like ‘ooouoooouoh’.
“Hey!”, a female voice shouts from the door. Must be Ferris. “Don’t sully our lady’s yard with your animalistic impulses!”
You move your head to the side so the cat girl can hear you properly.
“I’ll sully anywhere I damn well please. You can stay and look, Ferris, while you play with yourself. And Crusch can oversee our performance while she sips on her wine.”
Crusch’s voice sounds from right beside Ferris.
“I don’t drink wine this early in the morning. Besides, you do have a bedroom assigned. Go inside, then. The neighbors shouldn’t pry into affairs like these.”
You grab Rem’s warm hand and guide her inside. As Ferris and the duchess move aside, you thank the lady of the house.
“H-Hey!”, Ferris complains.
Crusch shakes her head slightly, with an amused smile on her lips.
“I’ll tell the staff not to approach that area of the mansion for a while.”
“You are the queen of this kingdom, as far as I’m concerned”, you say.
Ferris is hunched over, clenching her fists at her sides and glaring at you with indignation as her fur bristles.
“But lady, this is too much!”
Crusch shrugs, and then she moves towards another room.
“It’s nice to see people in a good mood these days.”
“Alright, cat girl, I expect you to pay attention”, you state as you lead Rem to your bedroom.
Once you’ve entered and closed the door behind you both, you move to the space in front of the foot of the bed and turn to Rem. The demon servant is hunched over, her eyes are glazed, she’s grinning and breathing hard through her mouth. You open your mouth to speak and step forward only for Rem to leap onto you, which makes you lose the air in your lungs, and you land on your back in the bed with the demon servant over you. One of the bed’s legs has broken. Rem rips your shirt apart while her warm tongue invades your mouth. You wrap your arms around her, pulling her into you, then you try to tear her maid outfit off, but find that the demon servant’s clothing has magically sealed itself back together. Must be part of the bullshit that makes it so she can hide a gigantic flail in some pocket. You groan and continue to kiss Rem, as she begins to fondle you with passionate desperation and rubs her crotch against your painful erection. You grab her ass under the skirt of her maid outfit. You find out that you can lower her panties. She doesn’t take her tongue out of your mouth as she maneuvers quickly so she gets a leg out of her underwear. When her pussy hair presses against the head of your dick, you feel as if you are going to come right then and there.
Along with the sound of Rem breathing hard, you realize that the weird mouth noises escape from yourself.
Someone knocks on a wall close to your room.
“Hey!”, the irate tone of the resident cat-girl reaches you muffled. “At least keep it down!”
Rem separates her mouth from yours as she sits on your crotch, drenching it with her juices. You keep her in place holding her tight ass. In Rem’s eyes flashes a hunger, a need to possess you whole, and in her open mouth, from her glistening Oni fangs hang growing drops of something like saliva.
Your dick gets even harder.
“Oh, man… Fuck yeah, Rem! Suck me dry! Turn my veins inside out!”
Rem embraces you tight and licks your neck up and down with most of the surface of her warm tongue. You tremble.
“Tell me what you want and I’ll do it”, you think it’s what she murmurs.
She embraces you harder, she slides your dick inside of her drenched pussy, and almost at the same time her jaw tightens around your throat and her fangs punch through. After the initial shiver of pain, you taste your own blood and you feel that whatever amount of it hasn’t gone down to your dick is surging to the holes in your neck due to Rem’s rhythmic sucking. Along with the feeling of her vaginal muscles milking you, a whiteness overwhelms your vision. You drive the tip of your nails into Rem’s ass cheeks. This must be heaven. The angels are coming.
Your throat hurts more and more as Rem’s jaw closes tighter, like a vice. Something creaks for a few seconds, and then, with a sharp pain, it cracks. Blood rushes down your throat and into your lungs. The area behind your nose burns, and you cough and cough. Rem sucks deeper, and then everything goes white and you cum so hard inside of Rem that you feel as if your entire self has burst through your dick. When you finish you can only see white, and you can’t feel anything under your waist.
“Oh no! No, no, no!”, Rem’s voice comes as if you were submerged in water.
Her weight shifts over you. You feel her palms and her fingers touching your throat and pushing against areas that produce a burning pain. Something warm is dripping on your face. Her weight leaves the bed and you hear her fast steps towards the door, then the door opening. Rem’s distant voice calls out for Ferris.
Your body is tingling all over. Your lungs are full of blood, and you don’t try to breathe anymore. You move your fingers in the blinding whiteness as if your beloved Rem had remained in the room, to calm her and tell her, if you could still speak, to stay with you in the happiest moment of your life.
After Satella pushes you out of her warm oven, you return to the same bed, where you were lying on your back almost in the same position you had been around three or four minutes ago. The moonlight bathes you from the half-closed window, and the mansion is quiet. Hell, you actually fucking died.
You breathe deeply while your body keeps tingling. You need Rem’s everything in and on and around you. You just lay there as the echoes of what you’ve just experienced swirl in you. Before you know it, your erection is pulsating, and you feel as if the skin of your dick is going to rip open. As you slide your right hand under the sheets, you figure that technically in this lifetime you haven’t taken care of yourself in a while.
You are staring at how the few clouds drift in the wide open sky, and you enjoy the lightness that both the alcohol and the water provide for you. As you take another gulp of wine, forcing it to pass through your mostly horizontal digestive system, someone’s head appears upside down in your field of view. It’s Wilhelm’s old, white-haired and mustachioed face.
“What’s up, man?”, you say.
He takes a couple of seconds to open his mouth.
“The lady asked me to speak to you. She fears that we are witnessing a mental break of some sort.”
“Oh, c’mon.”
Wilhelm looks you over. He arches an eyebrow, which wrinkles half of his forehead.
“Mr. Natsuki, you have stolen one of the most valuable wine bottles in the duchess’ personal wine cellar, and while fully dressed you are lying up to your chest in filthy pond water. A duck keeps biting the soles of your shoes. I hope that verbalizing your current actions and situation contributes to bringing you back to your senses.”
“This is fine. Sir Wilhelm, what would you say is the quickest and most painless way to kill oneself?”
Wilhelm narrows his eyes, and his voice gets stern.
“That’s a… troubling line of questioning, Mr. Natsuki.”
“Some time ago I found a public building a few streets from here. They built the fence that surrounds it with a fancy design on top added to its anti-tresspass measures. It makes it so when you jump from the roof as if you were falling onto a bed, with your arms at your sides, it’s easy to pass your head through a part of the fence’s design, which locks your head in place as if going on rails. Then the anti-tresspass measure, sharp metallic stuff, along with the wonderful power of gravity, slices your head clean off. And turns out your consciousness survives for some seconds! You can play at how far you land, or if you even hit someone. But you gotta do it right, you know? You don’t want to end up a vegetable, that’d fuck everything up.”
You rest on your elbow while with your free hand you slide your fingers over the toned abdomen, beaded with sweat, of the demon servant lying next to you in bed. She’s been out for a couple of minutes. You listen to her soft breathing until she comes to her senses.
“I think I passed out, I…” When she notices you are lying next to her, the recent memories must have come in a flood, because she smiles warmly and then she hugs you tight, pressing her sweet demon breasts against your torso.
“Subaru, that was my first time, you know that?”
“Hmm.”
Technically yes. And she has never failed once to say a variation of the same fact.
“Everywhere and everywhen you touched me, Subaru,” she says with a soft, warm voice, “you knew how to make me shiver and twist from pleasure to pleasure. I had no idea my body could produce such happiness. How is it possible that anyone else has this control over me?”
“It’s rarely like that, though. Don’t go thinking that all the other men out there would perform that well.”
“You don’t have to worry about that.” She stares into your eyes as if she dared not to blink while doing so. “You’re so kind to me. You make me feel safe. You make me feel happy. It’s like… I don’t know… It’s like we’re one person rather than two.”
Pretty generic stuff, but it still makes a fire burn in your heart. You understand what you never had before. When you are with Rem, the rest of the world doesn’t matter. You might as well travel to the uncharted wilderness on the hunt for some fantasy world monster or some similar garbage; as long as Rem is right next to you, you are always home. It’s like a turtle, you have transformed into a turtle.
Rem is making purring sounds while she smears your own liquids on your thigh with her wet pussy hair.
“It makes me so happy…”, she keeps saying. “But in turn I felt clumsy when touching you. I wasn’t quite sure what to do.”
“Doesn’t matter, Rem. I came really hard as usual, and now we are cuddling in bed. I have all I need in this world, or in any other.”
“As usual…?”, she asks.
“Ah… From the many times I’ve thought about cuddling this way with you, ever since we met in the mansion.”
Your clumsy lie satisfies her, because she caresses your chest and you feel her warm breath in your ear. She licks it as in a trance.
One of the things you love the most about Rem’s contact it’s that it erases your brain. It prevents you from having to think, having to remember. Alcohol helps too. And yet some images you don’t want to see now intrude in your thoughts, as if your brain is insisting that you pay attention to them.
“Rem… Do you know what I used to dread the most in my previous world?”
“You can tell me anything and I’ll do it”, Rem whispers.
“It was something as insignificant as a clock. In particular the clock that hung back at my parent’s place, in my room, on the wall opposite to my bed. One of those classical round clocks, the cheap ones probably made in China. Every morning I used to wake up at seven in the morning. I was supposed to take a shower, dress myself, grab my backpack and leave for school. But every morning, every morning of my entire life as it felt back then, I sat on the floor near my bed and stared at the hands of the clock move from seven and a half forwards, second by second, minute by minute, as it approached eight, the moment I needed to be in class. My heart beat so loud, I felt it in my throat. Got dizzy at times. Every day I thought, is today going to be it? Would I find the strength that morning to leave the house, walk for fifteen minutes to my high school, and face the retribution and shame and the mockery that awaited me because I had failed at life for so long? The churning in my stomach, the nausea, the pain… It killed me. But I let it pass. I witnessed the hands move until I only had around ten minutes to grab my stuff and run like a madman to the school grounds. I could still make it if I had the strength. But every day I witnessed the hands move past eight. Then came relief. I could no longer appear in class after a long absence. Coming late on your first day back? That’s ridiculous. So it couldn’t be helped! Then I dressed myself and walked slowly down the steps with my head down. I sat down to eat breakfast in front of my parents, who did their best effort to pretend they weren’t disappointed. I guess they expected me to come back to my senses and live like a normal human being. They weren’t in my head… They didn’t know how impossible that was for me. I couldn’t face it. There was a whole world out there I wasn’t born to face. These days I’ve thought of that clock a whole lot.”
You hadn’t realized that Rem was no longer lying with her mouth on your ear. She was resting on an elbow while looking at you with understanding eyes. You feel your heart beat louder, and you swallow to clear your throat.
“That’s… a whole lot”, Rem says.
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to confuse you.”
Your heart pounds louder and louder against your ribcage. Sweat drips down your back as Rem looks at you with those glistening eyes.
“After I ate breakfast, I hurried up to my room, locked myself up, and then read manga, listened to music, watched videos. I can’t think of any day when I didn’t entertain myself the same way. There was no end to those days, they seemed as if they were going to continue for the rest of my life. But they would have continued up to a point when I wouldn’t be prepared to deal with what life would throw at me. And if these two days had continued, each of those times, the least troublesome thing that would have happened is that I would have ended up siring a classroom full of children. A few, really. It’s so comfortable lying like this with you, Rem. I don’t have to go to school, I don’t have to work. I can enjoy myself during the same two days forever. What do the few seconds of excruciating pain at the end of the period matter, when I realize again, and again, that I have failed one more time to reach the mansion and do what I was not born to do?”
Your breathing gets dense, and something burns behind your eyes. Rem looks at you as if she’s trying to understand but she doesn’t know how to, and when you avert your gaze, she rests her forehead on yours. Her light blue hair smells good.
“Why do I need to keep thinking about that? What am I to do? I am useless. I can’t make anyone understand. Nobody wants to listen to me. It was a mistake for me to come here… Or to even have existed at all.”
“I am glad that you exist, Subaru.”
You sniffle, and make your best effort to prevent your voice from breaking.
“When I close my eyes I keep seeing her… face. The shock, the regret, the disappointment of having given her trust to someone who had never deserved it. For her entire life she had closed herself off to a world that would never accept her, but she had opened up to me. She had believed that I was the one who would stay by her side, even if nobody else would in this whole wide world. She believed I was worth it, but I-…”
Your voice breaks into sobbing, and although you force your throat to close, you keep letting sounds out while your chest convulses. You cross your forearm over your eyes.
“There’s nothing out there but pain”, you say as you fight to keep your breath in. “Everything hurts, everything bleeds, all the time. But her pain… That’s my fault.”
You wait for Rem in front of Crusch’s mansion’s gate. You never found out where she comes from that morning, but it doesn’t matter when you know that she arrives when you expect her to. As she approaches you, wearing the same maid outfit and the same warm smile you’ve stared at so many times, this time she doesn’t cross the mansion’s ground’s threshold.
“Good morning, Natsuki Subaru!”, Rem says. “You have a curious fire in your eyes. I gather the treatment is going well?”
You grab her hand, which surprises her and makes it harder for her to hold your gaze.
“Rem, we are going to take a walk and speak about something important. I’m sorry this comes out of nowhere for you.”
She doesn’t answer. You start to drag her along with you, and she follows. You both march in silence for a while, but after almost ten minutes of this, Rem speaks with some concern.
“Subaru, were you thinking of some particular place? I don’t have issues talking with you in private anywhere.”
“Gotta be the right place.”
“Was it some place you’ve been in before? You’ll probably have a hard time finding it, given that you can’t read directions…”
“It needs to be some place new. I’ll know it when I see it.”
Maybe thirty five minutes after you left Crusch’s place, you both follow some stairs up to an elevated plaza near the ruins of some old important looking building made out of stone, maybe belonging to a past civilization. It offers a beautiful view of the surrounding streets of Lugunica, including a panorama of the nearby mountain, which is also half covered in streets. You had thought that maybe there would be some citizens walking their dogs on this quiet plaza, but you recall that you now live in a world where if you attempted to put a leash on a dog, he or she would yell at you, beat you up and then call the authorities.
You turn to Rem and take a deep breath of the morning’s fresh air.
“This looks pretty good.”
“Sure! What was it that you wanted to talk to me about?”
You step forward and put your hands on her shoulders. She looks up at you and blushes.
“Rem, I’ve called myself useless for my entire life. And you know what? It was true.”
“It was…?”
“Yes. But then I thought… I helped someone recover their medallion, a medallion so important that they’d have to be retarded not to guard it with their lives. I befriended some of the coolest people in this fantasy world. I found out that a puppy was a demon. I broke into the royal summons and insulted a bunch of idiots. I met an awesome duchess. I got hit by an old man to the extent that I needed to be cured of serious internal bleeding. I froze to death in a rocky corridor. I called a magical flying cat a cunt a bunch of times. I got my brains crushed in by an invisible hand. I lost my oral virginity to a slave.”
“What was that? What did you say…?”
“I sucked on a terrifying baroness’ toes. I almost got blown up by a tiny cat girl who loves hamburgers. I avoided getting eaten by a flying whale. I stabbed an Archbishop in the heart, which technically killed him. I died in an Apocalypse. I drank through a whole wine cellar’s worth of wine several times. I made love to the loveliest girl in the world like a hundred times.”
“What!? Who is that!?”
“My point is that I’ve developed into, like, a cool dude, you know?”
Rem snaps out of her confusion. As she nods a few times, she grins and pumps her fists.
“Yes! The best!”
You grab Rem by her waist and lower your head to kiss her lips. Her eyes go all sparkly.
“Rem, I love you. Let’s get married some day.”
Her mouth produces an adorable noise.
“Aaah!?”
“I want to have your… I mean, you’ll have my babies. Wait, can we even procreate to begin with?”
“We’ll have half-demons!”
“Great! I’ve thought about everything. You’ll abandon your job as a servant, and with my pay as someone who doesn’t have any skills nor wants to work really, we’ll rent some small cabin to pass our days, where you’ll spend your fertile years barefoot and pregnant, pumping out half-demon babies like an assembly line, in a succession of getting your abdomen hideously deformed and then your vagina distended to such an excruciatingly painful, horrifying extent that it proves without a doubt that the nature that spat us out despises us and wants us to suffer. We’ll have so many children that they’ll literally need to sleep standing up, and everyone who knows us will think we are deranged and will work behind our backs for the authorities to take away our progeny and distribute them to numerous orphanages.”
“Yes!”
As hot tears run down your cheeks, you hug Rem tightly.
“Oh, Rem… Don’t ever leave me, nor slip into a magically induced coma forever.”
“Never!”
You don’t know for how long you both kiss while you feel on top of the world. After you both separate, you remain tethered by a viscous catenary of saliva to each other’s lips.
“Rem! Let’s just fu-… Nevermind, we gotta get back to Crusch’s place.”
Some observations on this deranged part. In the original novels, Rem is described as an Oni, which roughly translates as demon. It’s a Japanese thing. As far back as the second part of this thing I’m writing, the artificial intelligence started explaining that she had fangs. As far as I recall she doesn’t in the original Re:Zero. That sounded cool, so I made it canon. If it weren’t for the AI, the above scene wouldn’t have happened, so I have to thank the cold, unfeeling corresponding neural network for giving me that opportunity.
Most of the general idea of the protagonist’s regrets about his high school years comes from the fantastic fourth arc of the original novels, which corresponds to the second season of the anime adaptation. I’d like to have come up with that, given how well it ties to the protagonist’s current situation, stuck in an “Endless Eight”-like (that’s an obscure reference) loop of his own choice.
Initially I had intended the protagonist to go from his failure at the mansion to what’s going to begin happening in the following part. However, it didn’t feel psychologically right for him. A main deal for Re:Zero has always been that despite him having the power to return back in time, he remains a guy who has to deal with the emotional and mental consequences of failing and dying so many times, and of being unable to fully communicate to others (if at all) the pains he’s going through and what’s to come. Close to absolute isolation. So many things have already gone a different way in this strange retelling that the protagonist’s “Dark Night of the Soul” moment is completely different. In the original it’s a huge deal for his development, and happens in a virtually identical setting as that last scene above (which was part of the point), and it ran in the eighteenth episode of the first season. Also, no “I love Emilia”. No way I’m doing that.
The Domains of the Emperor Owl 