Re:Zero: Wrath Route Yandere Emilia Watches the Projection

”Reinhard? What exactly are you doing?”

A clear, slightly bewildered voice rang out.

Emilia stepped into Reinhard’s line of sight, positioning herself so he could see her face — and, whether intentionally or not, blocking his view of Natsuki Subaru.

”Lady Emilia, my apologies. My visit here today is… something of a personal matter.”

Reinhard had no choice but to halt his advance. He pressed one hand to his chest and bowed. In the same motion, his eyes swept the floor with practiced quickness — and he scooped up the royal selection badge that had fallen there.

He straightened, then pressed the badge into Emilia’s hands with a manner that brooked no argument.

”Things may become dangerous here shortly. Please leave with the guards.”

The words left his mouth, and Reinhard stepped past Emilia without sparing her another glance.

Whether it was his own subconscious or the memories granted by his blessings — both told him the same thing as a matter of course: a woman of Emilia’s noble standing could not possibly have any connection to a Witch’s Cult Sin Archbishop like Natsuki Subaru.

In those inherited memories, Emilia had never so much as met Natsuki Subaru, not even at the very end.

But then a question from Emilia behind him cut through his thoughts.

”Um — excuse me, Reinhard, but what are you planning to do to Subaru?”

Reinhard couldn’t see her expression from where he was. He was about to say something dismissive — and then heard her add, with sudden urgency:

”I know him, you see. Subaru isn’t a bad person!”

Reinhard shook his head inwardly. He had no way to explain himself to her right now. So he offered a few vague words of reassurance without breaking stride.

”Please don’t worry, Lady Emilia. I’ll handle this properly.”

”…I see.”

Emilia’s reply from behind him was quiet, flat — and then nothing more.

The last sliver of the setting sun slipped below the horizon.

Thick dusk poured down like spilled ink, swallowing the Loot House whole in an instant.

Emilia stood with her head slightly bowed. The dim light settled over her face like a veil of black gauze, hiding her expression from the world.

Beneath that veil was anguish — raw, aching grief.

Why? Why was Reinhard going to kill Subaru?

She had come back to the past. And still — still — she couldn’t change this.

Ah… this was…

The light slowly drained from Emilia’s eyes. Deep inside her, something stirred — a cold so profound it reached the marrow of her bones, a tremor rising from somewhere far beneath the surface of herself.

Like ice ten thousand years old melting in the depths of her soul.

A faint, uncanny radiance began to seep through her skin.

It was dim — barely there — yet it carried a depth that made the heart clench. It crept silently along every fine vein, every taut inch of skin, spreading without a sound.

Even the darkness pooled around her began to warp and twist in strange ways.

As though the night itself was shrinking back from her in fear.

Emilia’s silver hair stirred without any wind, strands drifting loose and apart — and then an aura that was entirely inhuman, suffocating, began to bleed into the air around her.

That aura felt like malice given form. It carried a cold that could freeze a soul solid — a denial and erosion of life itself, of what it meant to exist.

But in this moment, Emilia noticed none of it.

Only one thought echoed, over and over, through her mind —

Reinhard was about to kill Subaru, and Subaru had no way to fight back.

She couldn’t — she couldn’t lose Subaru. She absolutely could not let him be killed.

That desperate fixation surged through her like a tsunami, and in an instant it swept away every last thread of rational thought.

Pure instinct seized control of her body.

Emilia raised her head.

Deep within her eyes — those violet eyes that had once been so clear — a dark gleam ignited, quiet and bottomless as an abyss. Cold. Distant. As though every last trace of warmth had been cut away from the world.

She extended her right hand, fingers spread wide, lifting it slowly — commanding all before her like a queen descending upon her domain.

And then —

Inky shadow, dense as pitch, came surging from her fingertips, drowning everything ahead of her.

This was no ordinary darkness. It was something else entirely — a strange, freezing shadow that seemed to devour light itself, as though it were alive.

It made no sound. It moved impossibly fast.

By the time Reinhard registered something wrong behind him, the roiling shadow had already coiled around his limbs, his torso — it had already swallowed him whole.

Reinhard’s body locked up with a violent jerk. He felt an indescribable cold rampaging through him, trying to freeze his blood, to numb his nerves into silence.

His vision was stripped away. His senses were twisted. His body was bound.

What shook him most was this: every one of his blessings — the gifts he was so proud of, the ones that let him sense danger before it arrived — had gone silent. Not a single alarm. As if they had all plunged to the bottom of a deep, dark sea.

Perhaps it was because this sudden force carried no clear killing intent. It felt less like a targeted attack and more like… an instinctive, uncontrolled power, unleashing itself without distinction on everything around it.

What stunned Reinhard even further was the sensation of this power — this aura. Taken together, they were achingly, unmistakably familiar.

”The Witch of Envy —!”

The cry rang through his mind as he stared, disbelieving, toward where Emilia stood.

Her silver hair billowed and churned. Around her, every scrap of light, every mote of dust was being greedily swallowed by the shadow bleeding off her body.

The face. The power. Every detail matched.

Could it truly be — could the one standing before him really be her? The being sealed away four hundred years ago?

The one who had drunk the world dry. The queen of the city of shadow. The most terrible calamity of all — the Witch of Envy?!

No. Impossible.

Reinhard forced himself to be calm, and without hesitation poured his full strength into the proof of his world’s favor — his blessings.

In the space of a single heartbeat, a blessing specifically suited to analyzing the nature of an enemy’s power was conjured into existence from nothing.

An invisible torrent of information crashed into the depths of his consciousness, dissecting with surgical precision the source of the force binding him, eroding him.

Like knowledge driven into his mind by force — every detail about that shadow was seared into his thoughts, clear and absolute.

— Its name. Its properties. Its origin. Not a single detail was hidden.

[Shadow of ”Wrath”!]

That was the true name of the shadow that could suppress even his blessed power.

And the critical intelligence his blessings fed back to him struck Reinhard like a thunderbolt:

One of the most fundamental properties of this shadow — the one now trapping him — was the forced nullification of every blessing held by anyone it touched.

The instant that knowledge reached him —

He felt it. Clearly and undeniably. His countless blessings, one by one, beginning to fail.

As though falling into a deep slumber — every connection between them and him severing, one after another.

Emilia gave Reinhard no chance to act further.

Magical energy coiled around her fingertips.

Not shaped by killing intent — it felt more like a reflex, an urgent, unconscious need to protect.

A blade of ice took form at her fingertips without a sound.

Then — with pinpoint precision — it drove straight into Reinhard’s unguarded chest.

”Phft——”

A dull, distinct sound — flesh punctured, run through — rang out crisp and awful in the sudden quiet of the Loot House.

Reinhard’s sapphire eyes contracted to pinpoints. Disbelief spread across his face, slow and staggered, as though he couldn’t process what had just happened.

Agony like a frozen serpent erupted from the center of his chest and tore outward in every direction.

Slowly — stiffly — he lowered his head.

The crystalline tip of an ice blade, glimmering with a pale, frostbitten light, jutted from the center of his chest. It had passed straight through.

Bright red blood clung to the ice and ran slowly down its length.

One drop. Two drops. They struck the dust-covered floor and bloomed into small, vivid stains of crimson.

The greatest Sword Saint in all recorded history — Reinhard — had his heart run through by a blade of ice, just like that.

”Ugh… cough… Witch of Envy… I still… I can’t…”

A cough wrenched itself from deep in Reinhard’s throat — wet, rattling, flecked with blood.

Aggressive cold was spreading through him. His organs were failing. His body was being frozen from within —

The longsword in his hand — the one that had been leveled at Natsuki Subaru just moments before, radiating terrifying power — now felt as though it weighed a thousand kilograms. It slipped from fingers that had suddenly lost all their strength.

”Clang!”

The sword struck the cold floor, and the sharp, jarring cry it let out rang through the stillness like a death knell.

And with that —

Reinhard was dead.

”Rein… hard?”

After killing Reinhard, Emilia stared blankly at her own hands — still cloaked in shadow — while a faint ringing filled her ears.

”I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I didn’t want this either…”

The scene in front of her was horribly familiar. For a disorienting moment it felt like she had been thrown back into the past.

Back to the ”Pandaemonium” — built on the orders of Purge King Natsuki Subaru, constructed specifically to counter the Sword Saint Reinhard’s blessings.

Back then too, she had done exactly this — driven a blade of ice through Reinhard’s chest from behind.

Just as she had said: she’d had no intention of killing him.

Only the sudden realization that he might harm Natsuki Subaru — that he would stand in Subaru’s way.

Nothing more than that.

”Emilia! Why?!”

Natsuki Subaru — who had witnessed everything — stared at Emilia with eyes stretched wide open, unable to believe what he had seen.

”No… you’re not Emilia. You’re — the Witch of Envy?!”

Subaru’s teeth ground together so hard his lip was nearly bleeding.

He glared at Emilia — shrouded in shadow from head to toe, looking almost identical to the Satella he had encountered in the Sanctuary arc — and the words tore out of him.

”So it was you from the very beginning? Wearing Emilia’s face, spending all this time with me — what the hell were you after?!”

Subaru’s back was drenched in cold sweat. From where he stood, it made a horrible kind of sense.

Emilia had felt slightly off to him from the very first moment in the alley. How could someone like that suddenly transform into the Witch of Envy right in front of him?

There was only one explanation: the person he’d been with from the start was never Emilia. It had always been the Witch of Envy.

That wrongness — that surreal, absurd horror of it — made Subaru’s mind flash instantly back to the memory of his first Return by Death, when the Witch of Envy had whispered ”I love you” into his ear and every hair on his body had stood on end.

”No — no, Subaru, it’s me. I’m Emilia. Just Emilia, only Emilia.”

Emilia heard Subaru’s roar and her heart lurched into panic. She stumbled over her words, desperate to explain.

”I don’t know how this power worked, I swear — I only thought about protecting you, and it just… came out on its own!”

”Please believe me, Subaru!”

The last words came out in a voice cracked with tears.

Subaru looked at the Emilia in front of him — weeping — and his mind went cold and clear for just a moment.

He… made Emilia cry?

No — no, no, no. That was Satella, the Witch of Envy, disguised as Emilia to deceive him, wasn’t it?

Subaru forced himself to breathe — in, out, in again — and lowered his head to think.

Actually, if he thought about it carefully… exhale…

Satella couldn’t maintain a coherent disguise for this long. She wasn’t in a state of mind that would allow it.

And besides — why would Satella even need to disguise herself as Emilia to trick him? There was no reason.

Subaru’s thoughts grew sharper and clearer. He kept talking himself through it.

Probably — the reason he’d leapt to that conclusion was because every time he came back through Return by Death, he’d hear Satella whispering ”I love you” in his ear. He’d assumed that meant Satella was deeply in love with him.

So when Emilia treated him with such unusual warmth, he’d automatically filed it away as the sort of thing Satella would naturally do.

And another thing — in his memories, how could Emilia possibly have Satella’s power to manipulate shadows?

”I’m sorry, Emilia! It’s all my fault, I…”

Subaru stepped forward quickly, ready to apologize — and then moved to wrap her in a comforting embrace.

But with every step he took toward Emilia, his feet grew heavier and heavier, as though his legs had been filled with lead.

”Huh… that’s strange…”

Subaru frowned instinctively, and then it hit him.

It wasn’t his muscles aching, stopping his legs from moving. It was fear. His heart was afraid.

In the Sanctuary arc, he had been trapped inside the shadow Satella controlled — that shadow that kept murmuring ”I love you” to him over and over — and it was something he never wanted to feel again for the rest of his life.

But… but even so, he couldn’t let Emilia grieve like this.

Subaru snapped his head up and looked at Emilia — not far away, tears streaming down her face — and something in his gaze hardened into a resolve he hadn’t felt before.

What kind of knight dedicated exclusively to Emilia would he be, if he couldn’t even manage this?

Slowly, the feet that had almost ground to a halt began to move again. Step by step. And faster.

Within a few breaths, Subaru reached her side.

He ignored the dark, ominous shadow swirling around her and pulled her into his arms.

”I’m sorry, Emilia. It was all my fault.”

The two of them held each other tightly. Emilia cried and shook her head, saying nothing — only gently, softly stroking Subaru’s hair.

”It’s alright, Subaru. It’s alright. As long as you still want me…”

”Heh… heh heh heh…”

A few soft, blood-tinged laughs — cold and amused — drifted out from a corner of the room, shattering the moment between them.

Elsa rose slowly from the pile of collapsed clutter she’d been buried under. Her signature dark violet dress was coated in dust.

But her crimson eyes were alight — startlingly bright — and as her gaze swept the room, she looked as though she had just discovered something immensely entertaining.

She brushed the dust from the hem of her skirt, her stare fixed squarely on Emilia.

A smile spread across her face — surprise, admiration, and something twisted and deeply satisfied all folded into one.

”Well done, little girl…”

Elsa’s voice came out with a breathless edge.

”Witch of Envy or whatever else you might be — to unleash power like that for the sake of protecting Subaru… I think I’m starting to understand why he was so utterly obsessed with you, once upon a time.”

She tilted her head, the tip of her tongue sliding slowly along the corner of her lips, her eyes glittering with a feverish sort of excitement.

”But Subaru — you actually like this type?”

”I always thought I was plenty twisted myself. Never imagined even that wasn’t enough for you, and you’d go and find a witch instead…”

Elsa gave a light, airy laugh — then her voice dropped lower.

She began moving toward the two of them, tilting her head in Reinhard’s direction as she went.

”But don’t get too comfortable. Reinhard isn’t the type to stay down so easily — though he does look pretty finished, I’ll give you that.”