Subaru Natsuki entered Felt's shack alone, intending to negotiate with her and buy back the stolen insignia.
But the moment he stepped inside, the scene before him froze the air.
A hulking giant of a man and the young thief Felt were both sprawled in pools of blood.
Blood ran across the floor in thick, ugly streams. The entire scene was drenched in a horror-film atmosphere, the colors sinking into a dim, oppressive gloom.
Jin Kudou blinked, and all at once, his drowsiness vanished.
A slice-of-life anime usually would not depict a bloody scene with this much realism.
And then -
"So, you saw it. In that case, I can't let you leave alive."
A voice rang out from the darkness, soft and alluring, with an almost natural sweetness to it.
A silver flash cut through the room.
The boy collapsed instantly, blood pouring from his abdomen.
The silver-haired girl, Satella, who had rushed inside after hearing something was wrong, was caught off guard and killed in the same instant.
Dead.
Both the protagonist and the heroine.
"Huh...?"
Jin Kudou stared blankly at the screen, completely caught off guard.
Barely twenty minutes into the anime, and both leads were dead together.
"I swear... I'll save you."
At the edge of death, Subaru Natsuki looked at the silver-haired girl who had been killed because of him. With the last of his strength, he reached out and gripped her hand. His voice trembled violently, but beneath that pain, the seiyuu's performance carried something else too - a stubborn, desperate resolve.
Then the screen flashed.
The scene returned to the moment when Subaru Natsuki was being loudly berated by the apple vendor.
Time itself seemed to be reversing.
Jin Kudou blinked again.
The background music changed in an instant.
A witchlike murmur. A distorted variation of the insert track. Subaru Natsuki's dazed expression.
And in Jin Kudou's own mind, a jolt ran through him as the meaning of that scene finally clicked.
"He went back... to daytime?"
His eyes lit up at once.
What kind of mechanism was that?
After being killed, the protagonist could return to the past - was that his cheat ability?
And if so, how many times could he use it? Was there a limit? A cooldown?
As a die-hard lover of difficult games, Jin Kudou's sleepiness disappeared completely.
More than twenty minutes into the broadcast, this was the first time the anime had made him think, This is interesting.
The same alley.
The same familiar little thief.
And here, Subaru Natsuki displayed what was, without question, the single brightest high-combat moment of his entire story.
That was right.
In the dozens of episodes that had aired in that other life, this was the one stretch where the male lead was at his strongest.
By relying on surprise and timing, he actually managed to break through the encirclement of those three pathetic thugs.
The swelling, adrenaline-filled music made Jin Kudou's blood heat up.
Then, a second later, he felt embarrassed.
"A transported protagonist actually needs an ambush, plus knowledge from dying once already, just to beat three worthless street punks... what exactly am I getting hyped for?"
But whether it was Subaru Natsuki or Jin Kudou watching from outside the screen, both of them understood now.
The protagonist had already died once and reset.
This was the second loop.
This time, after figuring everything out, Subaru headed straight for Felt's hideout. He wanted to buy back the insignia before Satella could trace it there like she had in the first loop - and before that terrifying woman who liked carving into people's stomachs could kill her.
There was the negotiation with Felt.
Then came the arrival of that terrifying woman, shattering the whole discussion in an instant.
The moment she learned that Subaru wanted to buy the insignia and return it to the silver-haired girl, she immediately made her move to kill him.
Without Jin Kudou even realizing it, the story had already slipped into a sharper phase - one built on collision, reversal, and genuine danger.
He found himself staring at the screen without blinking, unwilling to miss even a second.
For an audience that had never really seen anime built around time loops and repeated death, this return-by-death mechanic felt like the opening of a completely new world.
Whether other people liked it or not, Jin Kudou had no idea.
But for someone like him, someone obsessed with high-difficulty games, this premise was almost tailor-made to burrow into his mind.
After all, what was a game, at its core, if not a player using countless lives to carve out a single path to victory?
Then what if a person were transported to another world...
And possessed the ability to reset after death?
What kind of future could he create for himself by gambling his own life over and over again?
Those thoughts raced through Jin Kudou's mind as the television showed Felt cut down by the black-robed killer, followed by the boy once again having his abdomen sliced open. In the final moments before death, terror, unwillingness, and pain were laid bare in his eyes.
The cruelty of it made Jin Kudou shiver.
And yet it thrilled him.
"Hey, kid. You buying apples or not?"
The irritable voice of the apple vendor rang out once more.
Within this stretch of the story, Subaru Natsuki had already been murdered twice by the Bowel Hunter.
Now he had reached the third loop.
Then the ending theme rose.
With its strange percussive pulse and almost hypnotic weight, STYX HELIX began to play.
Back in that other life, fans of the Re:Zero anime had called it the divine reset song, and the moment it entered here - paired with that fleeting glimpse of Satella's silver-haired silhouette passing through the crowd - Jin Kudou's pupils tightened.
Why had Subaru Natsuki died twice?
For what?
For the silver-haired girl who had helped him in the first loop. The girl who was beautiful, gentle, and kind. The girl who had saved him from the thugs.
He wanted to change her ending.
He wanted to save her from being murdered by the Bowel Hunter.
But when Subaru finally ran up to her and called out -
"Satella - "
The girl turned around and looked at him with naked caution and disgust.
"I have no idea who you are. And yet you're calling me by the Witch of Envy's name. What exactly... are you trying to do?"
On the screen, Subaru Natsuki's face went blank.
And at the same time, both he and Jin Kudou understood.
Satella had only been a fake name.
Something she had said casually.
Subaru had thrown himself into death twice for her sake.
And yet the silver-haired girl had never even told him her real name.
What hit Jin Kudou even harder was another realization: every time Subaru reset after dying, he alone retained the memories of being saved by her, of walking beside her, of dying for her.
But she remembered none of it.
To her, he was nothing more than a suspicious stranger approaching her on the street and calling her by the ominous name of the Witch of Envy.
A painful ache rose in Jin Kudou's chest.
If he had been the protagonist, he would have felt crushed.
For her sake, Subaru Natsuki had his stomach split open. He died twice in agony, writhing through blood loss and pain.
And yet by the end of the first episode, the two of them were still nothing more than strangers.
At last, the ED faded out.
The fifty-minute first episode of Re:Zero kara Hajimeru Isekai Seikatsu came to an end.
Jin Kudou remained seated for a long time without moving.
To be honest, for someone seeing a time-loop anime for the first time, the concept was a little mind-bending.
But mixed into that confusion was something else rising from deep inside him - excitement, delight, anticipation.
This was good.
No, more than good.
This anime matched his taste perfectly.
What was so fun about watching an overpowered protagonist steamroll everything in front of him like some invincible power fantasy?
The Bowel Hunter was so strong. The protagonist was so weak.
So how exactly was Subaru Natsuki supposed to save the silver-haired girl from someone like that?
Would he give up?
After all, every failed attempt meant suffering through the pain of being tortured to death by that woman. Subaru Natsuki was just an ordinary person - chuuni, untalented, weak, and painfully human. How many loops could someone like him endure before he finally broke, gave in, and numbly watched the silver-haired girl die?
By the time the first episode was over, all of those questions had surged into Jin Kudou's mind at once.
He wanted to see episode two.
Right now.
Inside the office of an animation company in Tokyo, Touga Kuze and Natsuyuki Shirasawa watched the television in silence, their expressions grave.
At almost the same moment, the same thought formed in both their minds.
So an isekai adventure anime... could be written like this too.
The setup was interesting. The plot itself had no obvious poison in it either.
The only real problem was the protagonist's characterization.
No matter how you looked at it, dying three times and still being so powerless that he could only be slaughtered like that felt a little too humiliating for an anime lead.
And worse, after seeing the Bowel Hunter - the woman who had killed him - he was visibly afraid. He even had that spineless urge to back down and avoid it all.
Would viewers with strong immersion really accept that?
Or would they tear it apart the moment they watched it?
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