Re:Zero - Tome 13

Re:ゼロから始める異世界生活 [Re:Zero Kara Hajimeru Isekai Seikatsu] #13

by Tappei Nagatsuki, Shinichirou Otsuka

大人気WEB小説第13弾!

ついに姿を現した忌々しき"魔女"! スバルの運命や如何に。大人気WEB小説第13弾!

Genres: Light Novel, Fantasy, Fiction, Manga, Young Adult, Novels, Adventure

256 pages, Hardcover

First published June 24, 2017

About the author

Associated Names:
Tappei Nagatsuki
長月 達平 (Japanese)
長月達平 (Traditional Chinese) / 长月达平 (Simplified Chinese)

Reviews

[Siew Hok Rui Ray · Rating 5 out of 5]

After watching and reading the novel and the tv series adaption. I got to say, Re: zero has got to be my best read novel of all time. Without a doubt, this novel has stolen the special spot I've placed Evangelion on. In this novel and the rest of them introduces a cast of characters that blew my mind away, although it wasn't something I've never seen before, but the way the story makes them interact with each other just blows my mind. This is my biased review on the current state of Re:zero 2020.

[Ricardo Matos · Rating 5 out of 5]

If I had to summarise this book in 2 words: character growth. This is it, this is the last iteration of the arc, there’re no more deaths, it’s do or lose! Some side characters step up and have their great moments and...

Tbh I don’t know what’s going on with the witches... or with the politics of the world... the author has woven a really complex story that has you always second guessing what you’ve read and you really can’t predict how it will end. Love it!

[Jon Ureña · Rating 4 out of 5]

This volume finally catches up, around the twenty percent mark, to the anime adaptation. I ended up not agreeing with certain directions the character arcs took (particularly the protagonist’s), but overall it was another very compelling volume.

We left our protagonist, a guy who got snatched from Earth into a fantasy world, and who due to having been blessed/cursed by a witch he goes back in time whenever he dies, in a death dream maintained by the spirits of the dead witches, who are the closest thing to a Hellenic pantheon in this godforsaken fantasy world. The coolest witch, the Witch of Greed, had grown so fond of the protagonist that she had offered a lifelong pact in which she would weave her spirit with his soul, and from then on they would enjoy deranged adventures that would involve the protagonist stabbing himself in the throat like every fifteen minutes. The Witch of Greed, whose name’s Echidna, found herself rejected despite her general coolness and hotness, because the protagonist considers her a sociopath of sorts. Echidna didn’t have too much time to grieve, though, because the worst witch, the one who four hundred years ago had killed the others (and herself, presumably), wanted to join the tea party. It’s Satella, whose very name has been taboo for hundreds of years.

We learn that the Witch of Jealousy, Satella, is actually two; contrary to the rest of the witches, Satella, due to her innate character, didn’t gel with the curse/blessing of Jealousy (this is a fantasy world in which some people receive the incarnated forces of platonic concepts at birth), and she split into Satella and the witch. Satella is a somewhat incoherent, schizotypal shy girl who loves the protagonist for some reason, and the Witch of Jealousy is an unpredictable monster who can swallow the entire world, and even managed to swallow half of it four hundred years ago. The other witches are wary of Satella because they never know if the version they are going to face is the Witch of Jealousy, who could erase the other witches from even the afterlife. In any case, Satella had wanted to speak with her beloved protagonist now that she had the chance, but the protagonist doesn’t want any part of Satella’s unearned, obsessive love. After that witch forces a conversation on him for a while, the protagonist has enough of these damn witches. He had opened himself to Echidna only for her to turn out to be an uncaring user, and Satella wants to push her unearned love on him. He doesn't want any more of this shit and of life in general. He bites his tongue off, and as he’s lying around on the fake grass, the other witches argue with each other regarding whether they should leave the guy to die because he chose to, or whether they should force him to continue to endure his Sisyphean nightmare. In his dying hallucination he recalls phrases from the people he had grown to appreciate, and he finally states to himself that he doesn’t want to die. The Witch of Wrath, in her usual intense way, cures him of his wounds through headbutting him (because that’s her blessing: everything she physically attacks she cures).

While the protagonist cries like a little boy, a comparison that the Witch of Sloth is eager to emphasize, Satella communicates somewhat incoherently that her goal with giving the protagonist her time travel ability wasn’t so he could go around saving others, but to save his own existence. He was wrong to consider that he should subject himself to dying over and over to save others: he should learn to love himself, to value himself more, to want to keep living. He says that he’s a worthless, powerless idiot whose only value is in being able to sacrifice himself for the sake of those he appreciates. As Satella herself argued that he deserved to be loved, I found myself annoyed at this regression; we already went through this back at the protagonist’s Dark Night of the Soul during volume six. Back then his unconditional supporter the demon maid Rem had bolstered him up when he had decided to give up and run away, through making him understand that she genuinely loved him and that he has the means to continue living with pride. With the mentioned demon maid out of the picture in a magical coma, now the protagonist regresses to his previous position? Are the words “who is Rem” going to come out of your mouth too, boy? This isn’t the only instance in this volume that spits right on the demon maid’s cute face.

In any case, the protagonist decides that from now on he’s going to have in mind that whenever he dies he might be abandoning an entire universe and his friends it contains to ruin, and he’s not going to factor dying voluntarily into his choices. This goal of his, however, of trying to solve any incoming disaster through not dying is a fool’s errand given that any given day there are a few different forces attempting to end his existence. It works as psychological development, though.

In any case, the protagonist makes peace with the fact that the Witch of Jealousy isn’t entirely evil, and that there’s a part of her that he can communicate with. Staring at her face, which again is either the heroine’s or maybe a very close relative (mother?), he again promises that he’ll try to save her, echoing the promise he had made as he was dying for the first time, holding the hand of the recently deceased heroine he had failed to save.

Once Echidna pushes him out of her death dream (not before giving him some clues on how to solve his current problems, because she doesn’t want him to think of her as irredeemably evil), the protagonist refocuses: if the people trapped in Sanctuary don’t manage to break the barrier and escape, the witch-created disaster which is the Great Rabbit horde is going to eat them all. If the protagonist doesn’t leave Sanctuary to stop the contract killers that will assault the mansion, the two servants and demon maid Rem, who remains in a magical coma, are going to die as well. He figures that he needs the brains of the most intelligent man he knows, the clownish lord Roswaal, in order to figure out some alternative.

Meeting with the lord in private, the protagonist demands to know if there’s some way to bypass the barrier, like there was for Frederica, the quarter-beast maid (because she wasn’t half, the barrier didn’t trap her). The lord realizes that the protagonist is using it as an excuse to delay trying to break the barrier and instead fly to the mansion and save the people there. He makes a show by becoming despondent and claiming that he was wrong about the protagonist, that he is still at the starting line of his resolve. There are plenty of great lines in this conversation. When the protagonist suggests that he ought to save everyone and not take the place of the heroine in the trial, Roswaal says “I expect you to have the will to carry out your objective, even if it means tramping on [the heroine]’s will. If you truly do it for [the heroine]’s sake, then you must ignore what [the heroine] wants. A child who dreams of a childish paradise is not capable of the resolve necessary to walk through the hell you must choose.”

When the protagonist goes quiet, unable to refute the lord’s words, Roswaal opens up about knowing that disaster is coming for his mansion. The protagonist is surprised that the lord knows about it. Turns out that Roswaal not only presents himself as half clown, half David Bowie, but even took his strategies out of the Joker from “The Dark Knight”: he declares mirthfully that the order to kill everybody at his own mansion came from himself. The goal was to sharpen the protagonist’s resolve; given that the protagonist’s ability to go back in time is the most powerful weapon to create the future the lord wants, Roswaal intends to shape him into someone who will save a single person (the heroine) and discard every other distraction. He figures that the protagonist won’t be able to save both Sanctuary and the people at the mansion, including demon maid Rem, who is the protagonist’s biggest supporter. The protagonist, terrified, calls him insane. Roswaal answers, “yes, indeed. I have been insane for a long time. Ever since the moment I was enchanted by those eyes 400 years ago I have been insane. Why aren’t you insane yet? To overcome circumstances that one must be insane to face, to walk the path of isolation, the human heart is only a hindrance.” Although the protagonist begs the lord to call off the attack on the mansion, the guy doesn’t relent. In the end the protagonist retreats backwards towards the exit, while sweating profusely out of terror, and claims that he will never become like the lord. “I am human. I will always be human.” His way of leaving the room while facing an impossible person reminds me of one of my favorite moments in “The Count of Monte Cristo", when one of the bad guys realizes that the person who he is facing is the protagonist, who should have been dead for a long, long time but that instead of that had been destroying his life piece by piece. Gripped by terror, that character had attempted to leave the room phasing through the wall backwards.

From now on it’s mostly stuff that the anime adaptation hasn’t covered and won’t until the second season resumes in a few months. If you read it anyway, don’t go crying to me.

The anime left out a vital conversation with the heroine, although I suspect they are going to add it in the next episode: they meet in a wooded area near the village as she was trying to take a breather in the middle of the night because she can’t sleep. When she opens up regarding her fears about the trial she alone must pass, the protagonist convinces her to open up about her past, believing that putting it into words will make it tolerable. Turns out that the first thing the heroine remembers is breaking out of a frozen cage to discover that every person on her village had been turned into pillars of ice as well. It was her now missing guardian spirit, Puck, the one who freed her. She figures that her parents must be amongst the frozen people, but she didn’t keep any memory of them. Afterwards she spent around 12-13 years tending to the frozen people in an isolated forest, until lord Roswaal, who had read in his magic book that tells the future that the heroine is a suitable candidate for the royal throne, came to make a pact with her: if she became the next ruler of the kingdom, she would be able to unfreeze her people. That seems like a naked lie from the clownish lord, but it isn’t beyond the naïve, goody-two-shoes heroine to believe it.

After some calculations, the protagonist surmises that the heroine lived for six years as a normal person only to become trapped in ice for a hundred years, and then live until the present day as a regular unfrozen person. So she’s a hundred nineteen years biologically, nineteen physically, and fourteen mentally. I’m not sure where the fourteen thing comes from, except from her general maturity, but whatever. The protagonist realizes that the terrible memories that the trial forces her to go through are not consciously accessible for her, which means that the trial won’t progress no matter how many times she attempts it. He proposes that she should just run away from it ("is facing something always the right choice, even if it breaks you?"), leave destroying the barrier for other people. By “allowing” her to give up, he’s acting as he had wanted the demon maid to do for him during his Dark Night of the Soul back in volume six, but he immediately regrets taking that position: the heroine is saddened that the protagonist doesn’t support her, that he doesn’t encourage her, and that he believes she should leave everything up to others.

After they part ways, the protagonist, overwhelmed by the pain he keeps causing to others on top of the insurmountable nightmares he must prevent, spends hours in isolation in the woods hoping to come up with something that will save them. He is found by his pal the terrible merchant Otto (who incidentally can speak to animals), who procures him the appropriate therapy between two men: a fistfight. Otto had met the protagonist when the people the protagonist was commanding while hunting the Witch Cult rescued Otto before the cultists sacrificed him, but with time Otto had realized that the protagonist was just a regular guy aiming way above his station in life, including having fallen in love with a princess of sorts. He sympathizes with the protagonist’s suffering and his struggle, and wants to help him in any way he can, but for that he must allow himself to be helped. The protagonist enlists Otto to “distract” the local tigerman Garfiel, guardian of Sanctuary, while he does with the heroine what he needs to so she can finally pass the trials by herself.

The protagonist, wanting to know how the heroine was doing, finds her sitting on the floor of her room, unable to sleep. After he laments his mistake of not having supported her, and proclaims to be there with her for whatever, she asks him to spend the night with her holding her hand. He promises that he will, which is a mistake that this motherfucker has failed to learn from. They had their enormous breakup back in volume four, after the protagonist got beaten up to a pulp by a knight for running his mouth. The heroine, who bears trauma related to people breaking their promises, had made the protagonist promise that he’d stay put and not ruin her royal meeting, only for him to completely ignore her and fuck it up. In the present, no way the protagonist is going to spend the entire night cuddling with her when the time is running out until everybody dies.

Shortly after the heroine falls asleep, an interesting thing happens: the protagonist needs to bring Puck out, Puck being the heroine’s guardian spirit who resides on the pendant hanging from her neck. Puck had been missing from the beginning of this arc for reasons, but if anything of him remains there, the protagonist has a single way of bringing him out. The previous times the heroine had been in mortal danger Puck had appeared, mostly too late, in order to destroy her killers and then the world. So the protagonist grabs the sleeping heroine’s neck with the intent to choke her, and his hands get frostbitten. That drew out the guardian, who seems weakened for some reason, but who understands what the protagonist had intended to do. The protagonist convinces him that for the heroine to pass the trial, Puck will need to make a major sacrifice. I have issues with this strategy, but I’ll mention them when it plays out later on.

[continues on the comments]

[Ray Flores · Rating 4 out of 5]

The beginning of this LN had me in tears. One thing I’ve always praised about Subaru is the fact that he doesn’t hide his emotions. He’s never been perfect and has made a lot of mistakes along the way but hello! We’re all human. We are complex creatures and we don’t always have the right answers. That’s why I like him as an MC –he’s always been real.

With that being said, he has to make a bet with Roswaal, who we already know is on the grayer area –not being a hero but not quite a villain.

For the most part, this novel focuses on Otto and Garfiel’s fight. We know about Otto’s past and how he struggled since he was a little kid thanks to his powers. And we also figure out why Gar never wanted to go outside the Sanctuary.

I’m guessing Puck and Subaru made a deal for Emilia’s sake and though she doesn’t know why she can’t pass the Sanctuary’s trial, she tells Subaru she’s older than 100 years, that she is struggling with her memories and she’s hurting quite a lot.

Despite this, Subaru has always loved her and he finally confesses his feelings for her. He doesn’t want to change a thing about Emilia and fully embraces all her flaws and tells her he will always believe in her, no matter what. They share a long-awaited-kiss and eventually find themselves in front of a wounded Gar.

Subaru and Garfield also fight against each other and Subaru stands as the winner ‘cause he’s well aware he needs others to accomplish things. Eventually Gar joins their group too and now, calls Subaru “general” –he’s a 14 y/o kid so no wonder he acted so cool and reckless.

Anyway, I loved so many moments from this LN and I can’t wait to read the next one! Oh, how much I missed these characters~.

PREVIOUS REVIEWS:
Volume 1 | Volume 2 | Volume 3 | Volume 4 | Volume 5 | Volume 6 | Volume 7 | Volume 8 | Volume 9 | Volume 10 | Volume 11 | Volume 12

[HardLight · Rating 4 out of 5]

I wanted to give this one a 5/5 because of how it works and how it looks but I just can't. It's fantastic as always with Tappei building groundwork and setting up gut punches like with Garf but it was VERY heavy on the building again.

True enough there's more than enough body horror in this one again to have things work out and there's developments like how we see NEARLY all the Witches gathered together.

But it was dry, the pain and suffering Subaru goes through is dry in this, he gets his ass handed to him over and over and there's really nothing but building character in this.

Admittedly the Otto section is heart-wrenching and painful but decent in how he just wants to trust people and has been let down over and over.

BUT that isn't enough.

Admittedly the argument between Subaru and Emilia is a decent pay-off for her always whining and moaning and I think we can finally start to see her develop as a person. But it isn't enough for the 5/5.

Who knew Vol 14 would be where my second best girl is shown.

Choose me. that'll be worth everything here.

[Daniel Williams · Rating 5 out of 5]

Despite how amazing everything before and after this is I still think that at least as of now this might be my favourite portion of the story, not just in arc 4 but overall. Quite literally so much emotional development and character growth comes into play from Subaru being asked to value his life to Otto helping him bounce back after Roswaal backs him into a corner only for a newly renewed Subaru to completely turn the tables with a bet and then Subaru and Emilia’s awkward but engaging conversation in the tomb and finally Garfiels true self being shown and Subarus speech to him Emilia and himself it’s all just phenomenal

[Lancer Littles · Rating 3 out of 5]

The plot is finally chugging along

After what felt like a glacial pace in the previous couple books, there is finally some headway made towards solving the huge problems facing Subaru and the gang. Overall the pacing felt nice, but it is unfortunately hampered by a mediocre at best translation. Plenty of typos and errors and sometimes hard to parse as well. Here’s hoping translation improves moving forward because I really am hooked.

[Joseph Miller · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great story! Only thing I can complaint about is that whoever translated this volume dropped random words from sentences throughout the story (probably around a dozen times, enough to be noticeable). I could still understand the sentences, but these were easy things to fix with some proofreading. Hopefully, the next volume will see improvement.

[Jonah ´༎ຶོ༎ຶོ · Rating 5 out of 5]

Otto the freaking GOAT man holy shit you’re the best. Garfiel I’m sorry I hated you, you’re an interesting character for sure and I’m glad you’re finally under the Generals command. Lots of development between Subaru and Emilia!! I especially liked the ending where Emilia confronts echidna like Subaru would do. Solid Volume!!!

[VSP · Rating 4 out of 5]

¡Me encanta! Adoré por completo toda la parte de Subaru y Otto :"3 el acercamiento a Emilia y Garfiel de la forma en que se hizo no lo vi venir.
Al menos la parte de Emilia me hizo llorar entre risas, me llegó y como teniamos a Subaru fue casi inevitable que me riera.

[Marco Cascio · Rating 5 out of 5]

Almost caught up with the anime and I was not disappointed one bit!
It's really amazing to fill the small gaps that the anime left open, and it's amazing to see that everything is consistent and make sense in the storytelling.
I really can't wait to read what's next!

[Zahryn10 Cuming · Rating 5 out of 5]

great

[Petar Golubović · Rating 5 out of 5]

Translate faster you beautiful beings

[Eldon Siemens · Rating 5 out of 5]

Solid volume, finally some progression in many of the characters! Can't wait for volume 14

[Ha Pham · Rating 3 out of 5]

Reading this makes me confirm that I cannot tolerate light novels anymore.

[Ryan Chiu · Rating 5 out of 5]

This volume is amazing, the character developments are great. Can't wait to read the next volume.

[Mirageee · Rating 5 out of 5]

"You are not allowed to stay standing still forever." "Witness Me"

RAWWWWWW

[Santiago Mendoza · Rating 4 out of 5]

sigo preguntandome como es que Garfield está tan roto con solo 14 años

[Nick · Rating 5 out of 5]

some of the best fights and most importantly subaru and Emilia kiss

[Stradivariuss · Rating 5 out of 5]

Magnificent.

The transition from utter despair to hope is beautifully written. Sometimes i think it's unfair that someone can write disturbing events with backbreaking, nerve-wracking situations and at the same time can conjure light hearted and serene events.