Then he woke on the cobblestones. Same bruised sky. Same stolen bread. Same Emilia.

He learned quickly. The first loop: he tried to warn her. She thought he was mad. Dead by thugs. Second loop: he tried to fight. He was a programmer, not a brawler. Ribs, again. Third loop: he hid. Watched Emilia get cornered alone. The guilt was a new kind of death.

By the seventh loop, Leo wasn’t watching Re:Zero . He was living a debug session where the bug was reality and the stack trace was his own blood.