"The Witch Cult..."
These lunatics again—cultists straight out of some other-worldly doomsday sect. With the memory of last time's fight against Gluttony behind him, Subaru had already tentatively filed them all under 'not right in the head.'
Regulus wasn't acting on any instruction from a Gospel; he'd attacked the village simply to expand his own 'harem.'
Because there was a woman in this village he'd taken a fancy to, he'd carried her off—and killed her entire family and the whole village besides, so that a woman like that wouldn't so much as feel the urge to run.
"Hey... what are you doing? Did... did you do this?"
"Mr. Subaru..."
Following Otto's trembling voice and the direction he faced, Subaru saw, in the village beside them, a man whose lower body had been utterly shattered... a grown man, most likely, though the massive burns across his face made his original features impossible to make out.
Maybe he was some lucky soul with a Divine Protection—or maybe it was the opposite of luck—but in that state he still clung to a thread of life, reaching a hand toward Regulus.
And it was that very gesture that stirred some faint flicker of feeling in the girl Regulus held; she, too, reached out toward the man.
The next instant, with a wave of Regulus's hand, the man—already no more than a candle guttering in the wind—burst apart in a heartbeat.
That done, Regulus looked down at the woman in his grip, displeased. "Listen, you—didn't I tell you you're going to be my wife? You're a woman about to be married, and there you are, in front of your husband-to-be, thinking about another man. Are you carrying on an affair behind my back, is that it? A woman like you..."
He raised his hand again.
"Stop it!"
Sickened by the man's cruelty, Subaru cried out to stop him almost on reflex—and to his surprise, Regulus actually stayed his hand.
But along with it, that irritated expression of his swung toward Subaru. "Telling me to stop—are you giving me an order? What right does an outsider like you have to butt into matters between an engaged couple? Interrupting me as you please—are you trampling on my rights?!"
He swung his hand toward the pair again. A single simple motion—yet the wind pressure it flung out split Subaru's carriage clean in two lengthwise from several meters away.
"Gaaah—"
Caught in the blast, Otto clutched at his severed, gushing hand and howled in agony—but Subaru, the actual target, tumbled off the cart without a scratch. This time, at last, that uncontrollable fixed-state force had come through for him.
"Otto!"
The shout was followed by a violent wave of nausea, nearly making him vomit up the entire lunch he'd eaten at Karsten Manor. Luckily his earlier exposure to all manner of gruesomely killed Witchbeasts at the manor had given him a little tolerance for gore—though a horror on this scale, befalling a human being right before his eyes, still left his legs weak.
"What's the matter with you? I just landed a clean hit on you head-on, didn't I? By rights you should already be dead!"
Regulus flung a fistful of sand at Subaru. Subaru swept a hand up to block it, feeling that the force behind the grains was several times greater than it should be—and indeed, the carriage wreckage beside him was shredded to pieces in an instant.
He couldn't make sense of it. Gluttony last time had been the same—a few exchanges of words and then, out of nowhere, this kind of lethal assault.
Why was it that the exact moment Emilia was attacked, he'd also, on his way to reach her, run into this guy? Getting inexplicably furious out of nowhere and then trying to kill him.
"Urgh!"
If he didn't fight back he'd die—and not only him, but that girl in the man's grip, and Otto, an innocent he'd only just met.
And what's more—
"You reeking manic freak..."
Shoving down, as best he could, his revulsion at the horrific scene and his dread of not knowing when the 'fixed state' would fade—
Subaru channeled the whole heap of pent-up negativity into an inexplicable but perfectly targeted fury at the man before him, charged straight in, and drove a fist into Regulus's face.
"Don't you go acting all high and mighty here!"
Never mind that his own hand would take the recoil damage—Subaru, who back in his own world had always worked out at home, threw every ounce of strength in his body into it, and didn't bother to spare his stamina either; in the fixed state, after all, his stamina was inexhaustible.
It looked like nothing more than an utterly ordinary punch to the face, but packed into it was every bit of the misery he'd choked down these past two days.
The blow landed on Regulus and, remarkably, knocked him back nearly two meters. If the fixed state had suddenly vanished in that instant, the toll on Subaru would surely have been enormous—but for once, his luck wasn't quite that bad.
Still, the feel of it was clearly off. In the moment his fist met Regulus, Subaru registered a strangely familiar sensation.
And Regulus, knocked to the ground, went briefly blank himself. Even in his stilled state he could still be blown back, true—but with a small adjustment he ought to have been able to stand utterly immovable; and beyond that, this man's fist truly hadn't managed to injure him.
"Why is it, on my way to find Emilia, I run into someone like you? The Witch Cult! Last time and this time both—a huge horde of monsters suddenly showing up, that's your doing too, isn't it?! What did you do to Emilia?!"
Subaru clambered atop Regulus, face contorted, seizing him by the collar and roaring the questions in his face. In the terror born of tension and the sight of that mangled man, two days' worth of accumulated pressure finally erupted all at once.
Twice now he'd fought with Emilia; every time, acting out of pure goodwill, he'd only made a mess of things, and had nearly dragged Emilia down in front of everyone.
Emilia's professed incomprehension had made him see it clearly too: in her eyes he was probably nothing but a strange guy deliberately worming his way close to her.
However much she said she didn't understand, deep down he ought to have known these things were all his own fault—which was exactly why he'd bottled up a gut full of pressure with nowhere to vent it.
"Going on about violating your rights—it's because of people like you that I'm this furious in the first place! You Witch Cultists are Diego's accomplices, aren't you?! Quit looking down on me!"
Face twisted, and with those ferocious eyes inherited from his mother, Subaru looked for all the world like a thug bullying a classmate as he rained fist after fist down on Regulus's face.
But Regulus, equally locked in that time-frozen state, took not the slightest injury either—only the fury on his face kept mounting all the while.
"Listen here, you. Again and again you violate my rights—my patience has a limit. This has nothing to do with me, and you'd force it onto my head? Give you a bit of a break and you actually think you're something!"
He shoved Subaru hard, invoking his Authority.
Both the wind pressure he'd flung out and the sand he'd scattered were part of that Authority: keeping an object locked at its unchanging initial velocity as it moved. In that state, even the most ordinary gust of air or grain of sand became an all but undefendable, murderous weapon.
Applied directly to a target, it would send them flying an incalculable distance—yet used on this particular Subaru, it produced no effect whatsoever.
"You beast!"
The next fist followed, cracking the back of Regulus's skull against the ground; realizing that this wasn't killing him, Subaru clamped both hands around his throat as well.
Right—this guy deserves to die. A creature of pure malice like this ought to die, ought to be throttled to death just like this!
"Mr. Subaru..."
Otto, staunching his bleeding with his clothes in agony, watched a Subaru even more Super Macho than Regulus, and his brain simply blue-screened for a few seconds.
So who exactly was the one with the manic disorder here?