At Yume Animation, production on the second half of the first season of Re:Zero, scheduled for the fall cour, had already entered full swing. Sora had also begun distributing the relevant scripts to the Southern Network and to the core staff of each department within the company.
Among them was the most important material from the latter half of the first season: the White Whale subjugation arc.
As assistant Kantoku, Sumire could only find time to read those scripts after work, so she had not looked at them yet. Yumi, on the other hand, was by far the freest person in the company as its investor, and she managed to finish everything Sora had written in a single afternoon.
She read all of it.
Including the White Whale arc, where Subaru Natsuki fought the Archbishop of Sloth over and over through endless loops. He kept trying to save Emilia, kept throwing himself into battle again and again... only to collapse at the very end every single time.
Even with infinite chances to start over, how many times could a human being endure watching the person they loved die right in front of them?
After yet another failure, Subaru finally gave up.
Bereft of all pride, he was ready to flee the royal capital with Rem, leave everything behind, abandon that living hell, and never again suffer being butchered by the Archbishop of Sloth just to try and save Emilia one more time.
And then, at that decisive moment, came Rem's confession.
It struck Yumi so hard that she spent the entire day with tears shimmering in her eyes. And in the middle of that emotional wreckage, she realized something crucial. A problem so maddening it nearly drove her crazy.
"Sora, what kind of script is this for Re:Zero? The story doesn't even end, and Rem still ends up in a vegetative state right in the middle of the White Whale battle!"
Sora had still been working when Yumi, having finished all the scripts for season one, barged straight into his office and interrupted the storyboard session he was doing with Sumire. It genuinely gave him a headache.
"So this anime has a second season, right?"
"Second season...?" Sumire and Yumi both turned to look at him at the same time.
Sora smiled.
"That depends on how well the first season performs, and what kind of response it gets from the market."
The truth was, Re:Zero had never even been finished in the world he came from. From the moment he decided to bring this work here, Sora had never planned to end it anytime soon.
But that did not matter.
Sooner or later, the version of Re:Zero in the system space would eventually synchronize with the updates from his previous world until it reached the ending. When that day came, he would simply hand the real conclusion to the audience of this world.
In fact, when he was bored, he even kept up with long-running works like One Piece and Hunter x Hunter in that space. There seemed to be some strange rule that kept the amount of content there synchronized with his previous life. The only limitation was that, before redeeming them, he could not bring those works into this world. Reading them himself, however, was not a problem.
"So... Rem wakes up later, right?" Yumi asked, unable to hide the anxiety in her voice.
After reading the entire first season's script, she had truly become deeply attached to Rem. She liked her enough that her chest actually ached for her.
"She does."
Sora paused for a moment, recalling the later developments of the original story, then nodded.
Of course, he did not mention that even after waking up, Rem would essentially be reset to factory settings. There was no need to bring that up now.
"Now I get why you said Re:Zero might have a chance of surpassing Touga Kuze's Dragon Flame Breath once it reaches the later stages."
Yumi settled into the chair as she spoke. The dark hem of her skirt shifted slightly, revealing her slender legs wrapped in black stockings, one crossed elegantly over the other. Once her mood relaxed, other thoughts naturally began to surface.
"By the way, Sora... you've never dated anyone, have you?"
"Huh?" Sumire's pencil stopped dead on the storyboard.
"Cough - " Sora almost spat out his tea.
He coughed before answering.
"And why are you asking that?"
"Because that's exactly the kind of impression you give off. You feel like the sort of boy who still believes in love... and only someone like that could write something like Rem's confession, something so innocent and yet so moving," Yumi said, as though she were merely speaking her thoughts aloud.
Sora paused briefly, then smiled faintly.
"Not necessarily. That's just the fixed image you have of me."
He leaned against the desk and continued.
"Didn't you say before that you wanted me to create an animation with an atmosphere similar to Voices of a Distant Star?"
Yumi's eyes lit up immediately.
"You still remember that?"
"I don't forget promises I make to people. Especially when that was one of the conditions for you investing in Yume Animation in the first place. And that work will completely shatter the narrow impression you just described. My creative style changes a lot. Far more than you imagine."
It was convenient to make that clear now. In the future, Sora still intended to bring out many different works, each with a completely different style. Better to plant that idea early so no one would find it strange later.
"A romance?" Yumi asked, now genuinely interested.
She quite liked that kind of anime. Romance in live-action dramas felt too grounded in reality, while romance in animation carried a more fragile, almost aching kind of beauty.
"Yes. It's a romance."
Sora thought of 5 Centimeters per Second.
Once Re:Zero's performance stabilized, he truly intended to redeem that work and produce it. After all, the animation industry was not limited to TV series. There were also theatrical animated films. And considering the huge number of animated movies stored in the system, Sora had plenty of ideas.
During production, time always seemed to slip through his fingers.
Before long, Friday, August 1st, arrived.
Episode five of Re:Zero officially aired.
It marked the beginning of the second loop of the mansion arc.
In the first loop, Subaru Natsuki had chosen to stay and work at the estate, only to die on the fourth day. So in this new cycle, he made the same decision, but behaved far more cautiously. Since he still did not know exactly when the danger that would kill him would strike, he became more careful with every step. At the same time, because it was no longer his first time living through those events, his familiarity with Roswaal's mansion made both Ram and Rem suspicious of how close he was getting to Emilia. Because of that, the two of them began to watch him more closely, both openly and subtly.
And yet, precisely because of that, Subaru also ended up spending more time with them. He even went out with Rem to run errands in the nearby village. Gradually, he began to believe that in this loop, he was truly growing closer to the sisters. Maybe he had even become their friend.
At the end of the episode, he stayed awake through the fourth night in the mansion, determined not to sleep. He wanted to wait and discover, once and for all, who had killed him on that corresponding night in the previous loop.
But in the middle of the night, his body suddenly collapsed.
Severe symptoms erupted all at once: weakness, illness, exhaustion, a kind of violent deterioration that seemed to devour his life from the inside. Using the last of his strength, Subaru crawled out of the room, trying to reach Emilia's room and beg for help.
He never made it.
A gigantic flail attached to a long chain emerged from the darkness. The first blow crushed his arm. The second...
Blew his head apart.
That grotesque sequence alone lasted nearly three full minutes of the episode.
The seiyuu's desperate performance as Subaru, with screams that tore through the air right up to the moment of death, conveyed such intense terror and helplessness that it pierced straight through the screen and into the audience.
A lot of viewers had still believed this was just another ordinary isekai adventure anime. But in its first three episodes, Re:Zero had already introduced the disturbing premise of Return by Death. Subaru had barely survived and defeated the Bowel Hunter... only to begin getting murdered over and over again inside Roswaal's mansion.
And in episode five, he suffered his most grotesque death yet: his arm smashed apart on screen, flung upward to hang from the ceiling lamp... and then his head crushed in the next instant.
Worse still, he never even saw his killer's face.
That night, NatsuYume exploded.
Re:Zero fans had already suspected episode five would be intense, but what they got far exceeded their expectations.
"This was grotesque on an insane level."
"My god, the thing I look forward to most every week is finding out how Subaru is going to die. Is something wrong with me?"
"Who was the one with the flail? How could someone like that appear inside Roswaal's mansion? Was it Roswaal himself?"
"Doesn't seem likely. Roswaal's a mage, so why would he use a weapon like that? And the sisters, Rem and Ram, are so cute, plus they're maids... they don't seem threatening at all. Beatrice is always shut up indoors, and that flail was bigger than she is. No way it was her. I bet it's some accomplice of the Bowel Hunter who snuck in to kill Emilia, and just happened to eliminate Subaru too because he ruined their plans in the last arc."
"I genuinely can't accept that Re:Zero and Natsume Yuujinchou have the same Kantoku. The gap in style is way too huge."
"Just think about all the gentle people and yokai in Natsume Yuujinchou... then look at Re:Zero, where the protagonist dies everywhere he goes and in more horrifying ways each time. Was this really made by the same Kantoku and the same scriptwriter?"
"Subaru's seiyuu is unbelievable. I don't even want to imagine what state he was in after recording those screams."
"Damn it, the way Kantoku Sora cuts the episode off is torture."
"Couldn't Subaru at least learn magic, swordsmanship, anything to get stronger?"
"That takes time too, doesn't it? In every loop of the mansion arc, he only gets four or five days before he either dies from the curse or gets his head smashed in by that killer. What's he supposed to learn in that time? Emergency street fighting?"
"If it keeps going like this, he's going to uncover the murderer hiding in the mansion and win over both Ram and Rem. I'm seriously looking forward to that."
"In the first arc, the heroine felt like Emilia. In the second, it's already become Ram and Rem. I'm starting to think this is some grotesque harem romance anime."
"Why think so much? I'm all in on Rem. I really like that blue-haired girl."
"I'm loyal to Emilia. The main heroine's position is untouchable."
At that exact moment, after the end of episode five, countless fans were still intoxicated by the thrill of seeing Subaru killed.
Because everyone already knew the protagonist would not die permanently, the audience could not fully immerse themselves in the pain of death itself. To most viewers, it was almost treated like a special ability, a narrative cheat skill belonging to the protagonist.
It was like a video game.
What player actually stops to grieve for the avatar under their fingers, wondering how many times it died before clearing a stage because of their own terrible play?
No one.
No one except the character himself.
Thanks to the sheer shock of the episode, along with Subaru's increasingly compelling emotional dynamic with Ram and, especially, with Rem, the fans came away more than satisfied. That very night, Rem's stock soared straight through the roof.
By the next day, episode five of Re:Zero closed with a rating of 4.56%, and the anime's score had climbed to 9.1.
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