Re:Zero: Wrath Route Yandere Emilia Watches the Projection

Reinhard stepped forward, and the gravel beneath his feet silently crumbled to dust.

Those all-seeing eyes of his fixed on Natsuki Subaru with a razor-sharp scrutiny.

True — on the surface, the boy’s face still wore an expression of shock and confusion.

As though he genuinely didn’t know he was the Sin Archbishop of Pride.

But in Reinhard’s eyes, it was nothing but a clumsy act.

The fragments of memory he had carried back told him everything.

The one who had burned the Royal Capital to ash, turned the world of men into a living hell, and poured boundless hatred onto everything that existed —

was this seemingly harmless boy standing right in front of him.

He was absolutely certain: that ”evil” had already taken root, deep and irremovable.

The ”innocence” the boy was performing right now was nothing more than contempt and mockery — the calm before a lethal strike.

Even now, even here.

Reinhard had never once fought at his full strength.

He had held back all this time for one reason alone — to force the true face out into the open.

The instant that mask shattered, he would crush this future calamity with the force of a thunderbolt —

Of that, he had absolute confidence.

The sudden accusation nailed Natsuki Subaru to the spot, ice flooding through every inch of him.

Reinhard’s words hit like a sledgehammer, smashing apart the fragile train of thought he had just barely managed to build — his attempt to understand why some version of himself had come to envy Reinhard.

All that remained was a vast, suffocating panic and a sense of sheer absurdity — being branded a villain of the Witch’s Cult.

”Subaru…”

A low, barely audible sob broke the silence.

Emilia was kneeling on the frozen ground, her long silver hair disheveled, cascading forward to veil her pallid cheeks.

Reinhard’s accusation had finished what little remained of the wavering hope inside her — crushed it completely.

Even Reinhard was saying it. Did that mean the only one who was wrong… was her?

Was there still a place for her in this world?

She had returned to this moment, this place — what on earth had she come back for?

Emilia’s slight frame began to shake violently — not from the cold, but from a loneliness and terror that clawed up from the very depths of her soul.

Her ice-blue mana slipped its leash entirely, surging and roaring around her in a torrent like a dam that had finally burst.

The ground beneath her erupted — frost spreading outward from where she knelt, freezing, then shattering with explosive cracks in every direction.

Jagged spires of ice shot upward like thorns gone wild and uncontrollable.

A howling storm of ice crystals spiraled around her, letting out a piercing, keening shriek.

She snapped her head up — and the eyes that had once been as clear and pure as amethysts were now flooded entirely with churning ice-blue mana.

But in the very next instant, the ice-blue was devoured by something else — a darkness, frantic and absolute.

Deep within Emilia’s body, a vast quantity of witch factors surged into existence from nowhere and began to awaken.

And as their numbers mounted, what came swiftly in their wake was a complete and total rampage — Emilia losing all reason.

This was nothing like the contained disturbance of the [Shadow of ”Wrath”] from before. This was as though an entire city of shadow had descended upon the mortal world.

Within moments —

A torrent of darkness erupted around her like ink bursting from a punctured vessel, spraying and spreading in every direction.

The ground, with her at its center, was swallowed in an instant by shadow so thick it seemed solid — spreading, consuming, swelling outward without end.

Countless writhing tendrils of darkness proliferated like the claws of some abyss-born creature. A twisting black vortex wheeled around her, howling, giving off a deep, resonant moan that made the soul itself tremble.

Light was stripped away at terrifying speed. The field of vision collapsed inward. It was as if the entire world was being dragged toward a lightless abyss.

She jerked her head up, teeth clenched so tight her jaw ached.

”No — no, that’s wrong! Subaru is not some Witch’s Cult Archbishop!”

She screamed it — but her voice was swallowed by the low, thunderous roar of the shadow storm, and what came out sounded more like a cry of despair.

”Liars! You’re all liars! You’re trying to take Subaru… away from me!”

The mana raging out of her control condensed before her into a single massive, unstable core of shadow — something that seemed to absorb all light that came near it.

That core pulsed like a heartbeat, and from a distance it looked for all the world like a miniature black hole.

Its terrifying gravitational pull locked onto Reinhard from across the distance, and cast Elsa’s silhouette deep within the shadow of annihilation.

A sick, obsessive love and a desperate, all-consuming need to protect — in the depths of that despair, both had twisted beyond all recognition.

They had become a force of finality that devoured everything in its path.

Across the whole open ground before the Loot House, the light went out all at once, plunging everything into an absolute, viscous darkness so complete that a hand held in front of one’s face would vanish entirely.

The Loot House itself looked no larger than a speck of dust within that natural disaster — as though a single touch would reduce it to rubble.

Reinhard’s expression shifted sharply as he faced the out-of-control Emilia.

He stepped forward, and the invisible aura of mana radiating from him shattered the shadow tendrils surging toward him.

At the same instant, the dragon sword at his hip let out a sudden resonant hum — and a dazzling golden radiance, unlike anything it had ever produced before, tore through the surrounding darkness.

That light was sacred and absolute, carrying with it a terrible, awe-inspiring pressure that seemed to emanate from the very source of the world itself.

The dragon markings on the scabbard looked as though they had come alive, releasing a deep, rolling roar.

”The dragon sword is responding… has it truly come to this?”

A flicker of something complicated passed through Reinhard’s clear blue eyes — but it was immediately subsumed by total, unwavering resolve.

”Forgive me, Lady Emilia… no.”

”Witch of Envy.”

His long fingers closed around the legendary hilt — firm and without hesitation.

”Shing ——!”

The moment the dragon sword cleared its scabbard, the sound it made was not some earth-shaking thunderclap.

It was something else entirely — a keen, pure ringing, as though space itself had been sliced open, and the sound of it made the soul shudder.

The blade ran with light like liquid gold, silently annihilating and pushing back the darkness that raged all around it.

Reinhard simply extended the dragon sword calmly forward.

No cataclysmic collision.

Time seemed to stretch out infinitely in that instant — then collapsed back in on itself in a single breath.

A white light, utterly and completely pure — the kind that seemed capable of severing the very laws of the world — swallowed everything around it, without sound, without warning.

It swept past Emilia’s side in silence, and passed over the massive Loot House behind her.

No explosion. No shockwave.

Only annihilation.

The vast, solid structure of the Loot House — like a snowbank cast into a blazing sun — began to dissolve the instant that white light touched it, breaking apart from the most fundamental level of matter itself.

Brick, timber, rooftop… all of it, within that incomprehensible white light, dissolved without a sound into the finest of dust.

As though an invisible hand had simply erased it — leaving not even powder behind, gone completely and utterly.

In its place remained only a single massive hemispherical crater, its edges smooth as polished glass.

And the air, thick with a scorched smell that had no name.

At the same moment.

Elsa forced her near-broken body into motion, and her serpentine arms erupted with a shocking burst of strength.

She lunged out and seized Natsuki Subaru’s wrist — he was still frozen in stunned disbelief — and yanked him away from where they stood in an instant.

”Move, Subaru! Now, while we still can!”

The howling wind that rushed past made Natsuki Subaru suck in a sharp breath, and he snapped back to his senses.

Elsa didn’t hesitate for even a heartbeat.

In truth, she had already grabbed Subaru and fled in the direction completely opposite the Loot House — well before the dragon sword had ever met the shadow.

Even so, it was nowhere near far enough.

”Almost there. Everything is going smoothly — just like I remember. I’ll be able to meet that Subaru again soon. The one who makes my heart race.”

Elsa pressed every last ounce of her strength into putting distance between herself and the devastating epicenter, her face alight with a fervor, as though the fulfillment of a long-held wish was almost within reach.

But in the very moment she was about to take that final step out of the Loot House district —

Her vision went black without warning, and every last thread of consciousness went with it. She pitched forward and crumpled to the ground with a dull, helpless thud.

Natsuki Subaru, still caught in her grip, went down with her.

The corner of Subaru’s forehead struck the ground and split open — but he made no sound.

Because just like Elsa, he had been plunged into unconsciousness for reasons entirely unknown.

A gentle breeze drifted through the Loot House district, carrying away a little of the acrid stench of smoke and ruin.

Emilia and Reinhard, too, had both collapsed in that same instant — their consciousness cut off as though a switch had been thrown, just as Elsa’s had been.

What had a moment ago been a place shaking with the roar of explosions was now as though someone had pressed a mute button — not a single sound remained.

As if nothing had ever happened here at all. Except for the Loot House — erased from the world as though it had never existed.