"This..."
Natsuki Subaru stared wide-eyed in disbelief at the alley before him.
The alley was dark and damp, carrying a faint but familiar pungent smell, yet it was otherwise completely empty.
The fruit stall owner who had been sitting here just moments ago...
Had vanished without a trace.
If not for that strange smell still lingering in the air, Natsuki Subaru might even have suspected that the pressure had driven him insane.
Yet everything before him was so real that he could not deceive himself.
"This... what the hell..."
Natsuki Subaru's face filled with shock and confusion as he broke into a run, charging madly into the alley. He immediately dropped to the ground and began inspecting it desperately and carefully.
The golden-green juice stuck to the ground.
Several cracks in the bluestone slabs where the owner had punched them.
There was even an Essence Berry lying quietly on the ground nearby.
All of these traces told Natsuki Subaru one thing: what he had just seen was absolutely not an illusion. The fruit stall owner had indeed appeared, and after shouting that he was quitting, he had vanished into thin air.
As if...
He had truly left this world.
"This..."
Natsuki Subaru's expression was a spectacle of collapse, horror, and disbelief, as if something within him had been shattered outright.
"C-Could it be..." He knelt there in a daze and despair, his heart undergoing violent turmoil as he muttered to himself, "Could all of this be fake? Then what did all my desperate efforts amount to?"
"Is this world really just a game?"
"Emilia... is she fake too?"
Thinking of everything he had experienced with her, of every smile and frown she had shown him, Natsuki Subaru nearly broke down completely.
After enduring who knew how many loops, Natsuki Subaru's