Bathed in the fading glow of sunset, Subaru sat injured against the bed, head lowered, while Emilia walked out the door without saying another word. That image alone was enough to make Souhei's chest tighten.
What made Re:Zero so much better than so many other isekai stories was how brutally easy it was to slip into Subaru's shoes. The people watching it were ordinary people, after all. And if they were suddenly thrown into another world, most of them probably wouldn't do any better than he did. That was exactly why it felt so real.
At that moment, Subaru and Emilia's parting didn't feel like a simple anime scene. It felt like watching the girl you had truly poured your heart into walk away from you. And when it came down to it, the feelings an otaku invested in his two-dimensional "wife" were sincere, heavy, and painfully real.
If Re:Zero had aired that night in its usual twenty-something-minute format, fans would have turned off the TV and rushed straight onto NatsuYume to roast Sora alive. But because it was an extended special, the story kept going.
Sora had trimmed down much of Subaru's most humiliating and embarrassing material, so the narrative quickly moved into the period where he and Rem were recovering in the royal capital. From there, the story began rearranging the audience's emotions with almost frightening precision.
Julius, the man who had utterly beaten Subaru down, was given even more weight as the embodiment of true knightly virtue. Reinhard even went so far as to personally apologize for not stopping the duel between his close friend and Subaru, offering to mediate between them.
To everyone around him, Subaru was nothing more than a pathetic fool - an incapable ordinary man who talked big and accomplished little. But there was one exception. Only one.
No matter what Subaru did, Rem would always sit beside him with impossible gentleness, let him rest his head on her lap, and listen to him - really listen. She listened to how he felt about Emilia. She listened to his fear, his frustration, his anxiety, his confusion. And with that soft, calm expression of hers, she soothed the restlessness tearing him apart from the inside.
Even if Emilia, in anger, had already left the capital. Even if she had already left Subaru behind.
Rem would stay.
Because she wanted to.
Souhei stared blankly at the blue-haired maid on the television, a milk straw hanging from his mouth.
"Ah... I really love Rem..."
The words slipped out in a breathless murmur. Then, half resentful and half completely defeated, he muttered,
"Kantoku Sora should just make Rem the main heroine already. No matter how you look at it, she's obviously the cuter one."
As Subaru remained in the capital to recover, the story brought him into contact with the other royal candidates. Crusch, with her green hair and commanding presence. Felt, the blonde girl of humble origins who had appeared from the very beginning. Priscilla, dazzling and arrogant, with all the confidence of an untouchable noblewoman. Anastasia, small, sharp-tongued, and impossible to ignore.
Thinking about it, the whole thing really was strange.
"Is this some weird fetish of Kantoku Sora's? In an entire kingdom, there isn't a single man among the royal candidates?"
With the story easing off for a moment, Souhei finally had room to let his mind wander to pointless details like that. But the calm did not last.
The turn came quickly.
Rem and Ram, as twin sisters, shared a strange ability. No matter how far apart they were, they could vaguely sense each other's condition. And at that very moment, Rem could feel that something was wrong with Ram.
Which meant only one thing: if Ram was in danger, Emilia might be in danger too.
Subaru immediately decided he had to go back and help them.
But Rem refused.
He was still too badly injured. He needed to keep recovering.
Even so, Subaru insisted.
This section of the story introduced the white fog that appeared on the road back, along with information about the demonic beast known as the White Whale. Then, in the quiet of an inn at night, came the conversation between the two of them. Soft, gentle music filled the air as Rem leaned against Subaru's back and treated his wounds. It was such a tender scene that it almost hurt to watch.
And then, the next morning, when Subaru opened his eyes, Rem was already gone.
If the mansion really was in danger, then Subaru returning there would only mean he, too, would be swallowed by that danger. Rem couldn't accept that. So she chose to go back first, alone, resolve everything herself, and let Subaru follow later without having to step directly into disaster.
In that instant, Souhei felt tears sting his eyes.
Rem was too kind.
Kind to the point of breaking your heart.
Because as much as it was an act of love, the message underneath was painfully clear: in his current state, Subaru simply wasn't strong enough. Faced with a real crisis, there was a genuine chance he would only become a burden.
As expected, Subaru's mentality took another hard hit. He nearly crumbled again. But somehow, he forced himself back together and kept moving forward.
With help from the newly acquainted Otto, who pushed their journey forward through the night, Subaru chased after Rem's trail and finally returned to the mansion.
And then came the scene that made Souhei's pupils shrink as his heart twisted all over again.
Subaru stepped into the mansion he knew so well.
And found a massacre.
Everyone in Roswaal's domain had been slaughtered.
Rem...
She lay in the mansion garden.
Her body pierced through by countless swords.
It was obvious that Sora had poured a significant budget into this sequence. The visual impact was so overwhelming it made Souhei feel sick on the spot. Rem's lifeless body, the blood soaking the ground, the severed limbs, the raw brutality of it all - it slammed directly into his still-young heart.
"W-What is this...?"
His voice trembled with disbelief.
"You damned writer, get out here! What the hell is wrong with your head? You sent Rem back alone for what? So she could die like this?"
On the television, the ending theme of Re:Zero began to play, soft and distant, almost cruel in its calmness.
The show had not only handed one of its most beloved characters a death scene - it had cut the episode right there.
No human being should be allowed to do something like that.
The fans had waited two whole weeks, convinced that after the mansion arc, the story would finally enter a more uplifting phase, one where Subaru could breathe and deepen his relationships with the other characters without yet another catastrophe crashing down on him.
What fools they had been.
If there was no crisis, then the writer would simply create one.
Before, it had already felt cruel enough when a single person in the mansion died from the curse.
But now?
Now it was the entire mansion.
And the nearby village too.
Everyone dead.
Not a single one left alive.
That wasn't just cruel anymore. It was deranged.
And what made it even worse was that, in previous loops, Rem's death - though still tragic - had come through the curse, almost like a quiet sleep. There hadn't seemed to be much suffering. Besides, at the time, part of the audience still held resentment toward her for killing Subaru in the third loop, so the backlash hadn't exploded in the same way.
But this episode...
This was completely different.
The moment episode thirteen finished airing, Sora's verified NatsuYume account was flooded by tens of thousands, then hundreds of thousands of fans.
Who could possibly measure the weight of an otaku's feelings for his beloved two-dimensional girl?
Yes, everyone knew Sora was the creator of the work, the writer, the Kantoku, and yes, within the logic of Re:Zero, Subaru could return by death and turn Rem's death into the past so that, in the next loop, he could try to save her.
But there was one thing that couldn't simply be erased.
In the minds of those fans, the Rem of the first loop still existed.
She was the girl who stayed by Subaru's side even after Emilia, hurt and angry, had left him behind.
She was the girl who, in the quiet of an inn at night, smiled as she leaned against his back, speaking to him gently while tending his wounds.
And that was the very girl the script had sent back to the mansion alone, only to be butchered by some unknown enemy, skewered through the heart by a storm of blades, with no one there beside her.
The pain Rem suffered in that first loop had also been real.
And now the audience had seen it with their own eyes.
The comments began piling up at a terrifying speed.
"Kantoku Sora, I curse you. Starting tomorrow, may you wake up with a rat biting your toes."
"Kantoku Sora, have you lost your mind? You know Rem is the most popular female character in Re:Zero right now, and you still pull this?"
"I didn't break when I watched Subaru act immature all episode long. But when I saw how horribly Rem died at the end... I broke. I've watched anime for years, and this is the first time I've ever felt actual pain in my chest."
"Everyone, calm down a little. Kantoku Sora is the creator of this work. If he arranged the story this way, he must have his reasons."
"Reasons my ass. He's just the writer and Kantoku. What the hell does he understand about Re:Zero? What the hell does he understand about Rem?"
"Exactly. No sane person would ever let Rem go through something like this. Kantoku Sora destroyed the industry's unspoken rule of not killing off a top-tier heroine. He's a criminal."
"Once the second loop starts and Rem comes back, it'll be fine. Everybody calm down."
"That's easy for you to say. What if Kantoku Sora has completely snapped and intends to keep her dead? All he has to do is set Subaru's save point after Rem dies. If that happens, Subaru will never be able to save her."
"..."
"Wait. Is that actually possible?"
"Holy hell... does that mean Rem might really die for good in this anime?"
"Don't say that. Don't say that, for the love of God. I've been wondering this whole time why Rem got so much screen time, why her popularity shot up so high... Could it be that Kantoku Sora realized she'd already surpassed Emilia and, not knowing how to deal with it, decided to write her out of the story altogether?"
"If he actually does that, I'm going straight to Yume Animation's headquarters tomorrow morning and waiting outside the front gate."
"No way... Sora isn't really going to let Rem die, right? If he does, this anime's ratings will absolutely collapse."
Ironically, the wave of abuse in the comments only pushed Re:Zero even higher in popularity. The anime had started at eight o'clock, and by eleven, "Rem's tragic death" had already climbed to the number-one trending topic on the site.
That much was only natural. This was a monster hit with ratings already above five percent. The moment it produced a major plot twist, the entire internet was bound to explode.
Every week, millions of people sat waiting in front of their televisions for the next episode. Everyone had believed that, with the first week of the autumn cour, Re:Zero would finally give them a little comfort.
Instead, it dropped a bomb on them.