── My neck,
I found myself held down by a light body as if mounted like a horse.
Small knees pressed sharply into my shoulders as I floundered underneath. A dainty white arm covered in cuts loomed in my vision, choking down on my neck. Those gashes reminded me of crimson flowers, I thought, before feeling irritated at myself. That was really failing to read the mood.
── Breathtaking, breathtaking, it is breathtaking when your neck is being throttled.
"────"
Right in front of his eyes were a pair of pupils glowing with passion.
Endless fury and hollow despair stretched deep, deep in those large round eyes.
"I might fall into those bottomless eyes..", Subaru though blankly.
"Ah, it is …"
── Badum-badum, badum-badum, badum-badum, those were the sounds I made as I flailed around wildly.
It was not that I was struggling so much in an effort to get away.
Thoughts of escape had already disappeared by evening. So my struggles were not an expression of my will to live, but merely a tantrum born of sheer suffering. My body cried out uselessly on its own.
The brain was lacking oxygen, the mind had lost its will to live, but the body was still writhing in protest.
There are differences in everything, just seeking balance is bad, I hate that way of thinking.
Can't I just die quietly? I want to just die quietly.
As peacefully as possible, like I was simply going to sleep, that was the most enjoyable way to die for me.
But such a wish was not to be. Far from being granted, my fate was really to be the complete opposite of that.
"Kuh, ku, ku-hu"
With wide-open eyes bulging from their sockets, biting down hard and foaming at the mouth, with a body grown emancipated after only a few short days, it was in this state that I twisted and groaned like a wounded beast.
It's my last chance to act along, should I do it?
It's my last chance to say what's most fitting, should I try it?
Hey, why and how was it that I came to be in this kind of situation?
"── What's, so funny?"
Suddenly, he heard a voice.
Unlike these animal groans, this was a cold but clear sound.
The owner of those eyes laden with fury, her lips pressed thin as she squeezed his throat, looked up at the sound of the voice.
"────"
What's wrong, even if you ask me that, I can't find the answer.
There is nothing funny here in the first place. There isn't, so what are you even asking?
The question was confusing. Some rude kind of nonsense, a riddle.
Even if someone forced me to reply, I wouldn't have any answers. But the time I spent waiting in silence still felt like lying on a bed of thorns, he thought.
Absurd. Flung around like this by the force of some divine providence, just how many times has it been already?
"── What's, so funny?"
There's nothing weird like that.
"Huu, heh, hee-hee"
Then, is it the person asking that has something wrong with them?
Or, is it that this person just failed to read the mood, and so they are having fun at the moment?
Are they enjoying the sight of this woman mounting me like she's on horseback, strangling away at my neck? If you say that, then any sense of liking them gets flipped on its head, he thought.
"── What's, so funny?"
There is nothing wrong here. Even though there is nothing, this question keeps getting thrown out there again and again.
Throwing, not even. She's not that far away. That's not even it.
Close enough to feel each other's breath, gazing up at the beautiful face of the girl opposite him, he was surrounded by her voice. Blanketed in it.
She had, without words, without hurtful abuse, shown clear hate in her voice.
"── What's, s-?"
Do it.
This question that repeatedly sought an answer suddenly faded away like mist.
"── Euh"
Tilt, the face of the girl in front of me suddenly tilted to the left.
Her angled neck does not rise. Still slumped to the side, that girl's body crumples onto the white snow. Of course, as the thin arm formerly wrapped around his neck had also come loose, Subaru's path to suffocation had ended halfway through.
Coughing, the bitter taste of blood rose up from my neck.
Collapsing lungs inflated before receding again, sending much-needed oxygen through my body in turn. That is also a reflex, survival instinct. If someone just refused to breathe and died, then they wouldn't be working properly.
Questions like whether that would be a normal thing for a person to do or not, I don't want to discuss that right now.
"────"
The feelings in Subaru's heart that had, up to this moment, accepted death, now faded away. It was replaced with a desire to live in the name of more oxygen, an obsessive desire that could not be let go. Desperate, striving, he coveted more to the point of looking pathetic.
While like that, ceaselessly filling his lungs with cold air on every breath, he came to realize.
"────"
In the center of that fluffy white snow that was piling up around, before him lay a girl collapsed on her side.
Her face and lips had grown pale with poor circulation, raising her unrealistic beauty to even greater heights. Those exceptionally glittering white eyes were empty and spread wide, a telltale sign that a life was ending.
Looking carefully, it was a sight that did not seem well-fitted for the snow.
That maid uniform revealing bare shoulders and thighs, this cloth material that should ward off the cold isn't nearly thick enough to do so. The nape, the ears, and other areas easily chilled were being hit by the wind.
The state of that bared form──Moreover, aside from her, this side was in the same condition as well.
"────"
── Shiver-shiver, shiver-shiver, shiver-shiver, like that this out-of-place Subaru was trembling.
Whether it was the cold, or the strong melancholy of his heart that was the culprit, he did not know.
In this situation, rather than worrying about the state of his body, instead he could not take his eyes off of the girl in front of him.
"──M"
Even fallen over in the snow, with half her face buried in it, she still looked beautiful.
That unquenchable hate and fury was inflaming that slender body and keeping it alive, he could only think that. Covered in wounds to that extent, it was a strange situation that this girl was still alive.
"────"
Pure-white snow, and around him and the girl, countless corpses were lying around.
Those beasts that consumed life, indulged in it, and destroyed the soul, all before the wind of this girl had turned to corpses. So, in this place, the survivors, were only two. Himself and the girl, but two.
That, too, in a moment, could immediately become one, become zero.
"────"
What is going on, next to the girl mumbling that he slowly stood.
The emancipated fingers on both his hands were discolored. In those fingers whose temperatures had dropped significantly, there was no feeling remaining. Weak itching was the only evidence that these fingers were still attached to the body.
Shaking about those fingers that couldn't be be relied on, he lifted up a head-sized stone.
Without any reason or purpose, it was just a stone that happened to be there.
The fact that he lifted it secretly brought him much relief.
Comparing the stone in his hand with the collapsed girl.
For a moment, to him, that held stone seemed to be making a similar face to the one who had fallen.
He did not know if he was laughing. But the burning image this finally brought to his mind was heated. An oni, just flesh, and shoving it into an enemy, just that.
As if having pulled it up by the roots, in both hands he lifted the rock skyward.
That action, looking up at it, the owner of those pink pupils spoke with a faint voice, but with an unquestionably clear voice,
"──Definitely, I will kill you."
─ ─ The sound of something hitting something hard, in the snow-blanketed forest slowly, slowly echoed.
It echoed.
Classroom of the Elites.... Volumes 1-10
1
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1cgnKfyvlwsXTAzXS7gMrGW52mYN8PCuz/view?usp=drivesdk
2
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ZnGdrkYa9he04T_3so3d7VPCxL5x9uDk/view?usp=drivesdk
3
https://drive.google.com/file/d/11aMSD2KEOXskvFJnusDHfGi00XC_UzSb/view?usp=drivesdk
4
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1zJiMWJXyeStIrDha3BovjZYEyQFk20Bf/view?usp=drivesdk
4.5
https://drive.google.com/file/d/18ty8ImGtG5_LN_POvWpFFuMGiLKYO4HB/view?usp=drivesdk
5
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ZuKg2CLejEUHR65cPMjAP1HULwYWqRLL/view?usp=drivesdk
6
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1T2pOyyJspkNzZWE3lWg-uH8oU6P6UVkh/view?usp=drivesdk
7
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1DkMo1gmqq7O2hX731z6mvFfX2Sshpl3O/view?usp=drivesdk
7.5
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1owstO0buwGKaKLQsj4bwfEoZdM7rLXLF/view?usp=drivesdk
8
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1DaUgI7BSkIjWCmpdX2sen5bve6oDSTj6/view?usp=drivesdk
9
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1wyTy0S1_Ku07SWQIaqSbEW2guPO1pIaU/view?usp=drivesdk
10
https://drive.google.com/file/d/10hKZ51bNUPCsyaw10uvgWKi7LT3KLLUU/view?usp=drivesdk