Why Did Hitogami Want Roxy Dead?

Roxy Was a Target Because of the Future She Created

The title is broadly correct, but the motive needs precision. Hitogami does want Roxy dead in the disastrous future revealed through future Rudeus's diary. His concern, however, is not that Roxy will someday challenge him in a duel or personally destroy him.

In Volume 15, after the future Rudeus exposes the basement trap, Hitogami explains that his own future has become dangerous. He can see a path in which Orsted is involved in his defeat and Rudeus's descendants are on Orsted's side. That makes Rudeus's family a strategic problem.

Roxy is especially important because she and Rudeus are destined to have Lara. Later volumes reinforce that Lara is not an ordinary child in the long conflict surrounding Hitogami. The Sacred Beast Leo attaches itself to the Greyrat household and to Lara, while Orsted recognizes that she is likely to become a major obstacle for Hitogami.

That still does not mean "Roxy kills Hitogami," or even that the completed main light novel shows Lara delivering the final blow. The confirmed point is narrower: Roxy's survival allows a future lineage and alliance that Hitogami sees as threatening to his survival.

Hitogami Had Been Trying to Manage Rudeus and Roxy for Years

Hitogami's plan works because he does not begin with an obvious assassination attempt. For much of Rudeus's life, he appears as an irritating but often useful adviser. Several pieces of his advice produce real short-term benefits, giving Rudeus reasons to keep listening even while distrusting him.

When Hitogami finally explains himself, he makes clear that he had tried to keep Rudeus and Roxy apart. Their connection proved difficult to erase because both are protected by unusually strong fate. In Mushoku Tensei, fate is not a simple prophecy that forces one exact script, but some people and outcomes are much harder to divert than others.

This is why it is risky to assign a secret Roxy-related purpose to every single piece of Hitogami's early advice. The novels reveal a long campaign of manipulation, but Hitogami is also a liar, and not every intermediate move is explained with perfect transparency.

What is confirmed is the larger strategy: he attempted to steer events away from the future produced by Rudeus and Roxy, found their eventual union difficult to prevent, and then looked for a moment when Roxy's normally strong fate became vulnerable.

Pregnancy gave him that opening. Hitogami explains that Roxy's fate weakens while she is carrying Rudeus's child. Instead of trying indefinitely to stop Rudeus from loving or marrying her, he can wait until the pregnancy and remove both mother and unborn child at once.

That is the context that turns an ordinary basement instruction into one of the series' most important traps.

The Basement Rat Was Designed to Kill Pregnant Roxy

Near the end of the Volume 14 material, Hitogami gives Rudeus an apparently minor instruction: go into the basement.

In the future that the older Rudeus originally lived through, Rudeus follows that advice without knowing what is at stake. His action allows an infected rat to escape from the basement. The animal carries Magic Stone Disease and eventually contaminates food that Roxy eats.

Roxy becomes seriously ill. The disease progressively petrifies the victim, and the available treatment is far beyond ordinary healing magic. Future Rudeus, Cliff, Zanoba, and others desperately search for a solution, but they fail to save her in time.

Roxy dies while pregnant.

The unborn child is Lara.

That is why the rat is not a random tragedy that Hitogami happens to exploit afterward. The light novel treats it as a deliberate setup. Hitogami needed Rudeus to perform one harmless-looking action at the right moment, allowing an indirect chain of events to kill Roxy without Hitogami personally appearing in the physical world.

The intended scene is small and ominous rather than explosive: Rudeus at the entrance to his dark cellar, unaware that a diseased rat inside represents a threat to Roxy and their unborn daughter upstairs.

The Future Diary Shows What Happens When Hitogami Wins

The future diary is essential because it separates two versions of events that are often blended together in summaries.

In the future timeline, Rudeus opens the basement, the rat escapes, and Roxy contracts Magic Stone Disease. Her death devastates Rudeus and becomes the first major break in a much darker life. Fans commonly call this older version of Rudeus "Oldeus," although that is a fandom shorthand rather than his formal name in the story.

The losses continue. Rudeus becomes increasingly consumed by grief, anger, and his desire to understand and eventually oppose Hitogami. Other people close to him die as the years pass. His relationships collapse, and his life becomes almost unrecognizable compared with the family-centered future he had been building.

Decades later, that Rudeus develops time-travel magic. He cannot simply reset his life without cost: traveling into the past catastrophically damages his body. He reaches his younger self shortly before the basement incident, gives him the diary, warns him about the rat, and leaves instructions intended to prevent the same chain of disasters.

That encounter is the "second chance" around which Seven Seas describes Volume 15. Future Rudeus does not create a separate parallel adventure that then continues alongside the main story. His ruined future becomes information that allows the main Rudeus to choose differently.

This distinction is crucial when answering whether Roxy dies. She does die in future Rudeus's timeline, but that death is prevented in the main light-novel timeline.

In the Main Timeline, Roxy Lives and Lara Is Born

Armed with his future self's warning, present-day Rudeus does not repeat the mistake. He deals with the rat before it can infect Roxy, preventing the disease and preserving the pregnancy.

Hitogami's scheme therefore fails in the main timeline.

The failure forces their conflict into the open. Hitogami reveals more of why Rudeus's family matters and pressures Rudeus toward killing Orsted. Rudeus prepares extensively for that battle, using the Magic Armor and every advantage he can assemble.

He still loses.

The result is disastrous for Hitogami's strategy: rather than eliminating Orsted, Rudeus becomes his subordinate and ally. Orsted, in turn, agrees to help protect Rudeus's family from Hitogami.

Roxy later gives birth to Lara. The child whose existence the basement plan was meant to erase is now alive inside a household directly cooperating with Hitogami's greatest enemy.

For an illustration, the important image is the future the rat failed to erase: Rudeus and Roxy with Lara, with Leo close to the child and Orsted's larger conflict hanging over an otherwise domestic family scene.

Why Lara Is So Dangerous to Hitogami

Lara's importance becomes clearer after her birth. She is Rudeus and Roxy's daughter, is unusually connected to the Sacred Beast, and is treated by Orsted as a potentially important figure in the eventual campaign against Hitogami.

There is also a practical reason Rudeus's descendants matter to Orsted: they do not react to Orsted's fear-and-hatred curse in the normal way. Rudeus himself is an anomaly in this respect, and his descendants can cooperate with Orsted without the instinctive hostility that makes ordinary alliances difficult for him.

Late in the main story, Rudeus is shown a future involving Orsted, Lara, and other figures in the confrontation with Hitogami. That strongly supports the idea that Hitogami was correct to view Lara as part of the threat surrounding his eventual defeat.

But the completed 26-volume story remains Rudeus's life story. It ends before the entire distant conflict is dramatized as a conventional final battle from Lara's perspective. Volume 26 is explicitly marketed by Seven Seas as the final volume of Rudeus's tale, while later books such as Redundant Reincarnation continue with side stories and aftermath material.

So the safe canon statement is that Lara is an important future participant in the anti-Hitogami outcome. Saying that Roxy herself defeats Hitogami is wrong, and saying Lara alone is definitively responsible oversimplifies a future involving Orsted and multiple allies.

Hitogami's Foresight Is Powerful but Not Absolute

The rat plot can make Hitogami seem omniscient, but his abilities have important limits.

Hitogami can see futures and manipulate people toward outcomes favorable to him. He also monitors his own future, which is how he realizes that Orsted and Rudeus's descendants become dangerous. That foresight allows him to construct plans that unfold over years rather than days.

However, he cannot freely rewrite any destiny he dislikes. Strong fate limits how easily he can eliminate certain people or relationships. Rudeus and Roxy repeatedly resist the future Hitogami would prefer, which is why he waits for the vulnerability created by pregnancy instead of simply arranging Roxy's death at any earlier point.

Orsted is an even larger problem. Because of the special circumstances surrounding Orsted's reincarnation and time-loop technique, Hitogami cannot directly perceive Orsted's present and future in the normal way. He can see the effects on his own future, but not simply observe every move Orsted will make.

His future sight also becomes less precise when he is managing multiple apostles. That is one reason his influence usually works through a limited number of carefully positioned people instead of direct control over the whole world.

Most importantly, foresight does not account perfectly for unprecedented disruption. Hitogami successfully produces the future in which Roxy dies, yet that same tragedy creates the older Rudeus: a version of Rudeus desperate and knowledgeable enough to develop time travel and warn his younger self. The plan succeeds once and, through its own consequences, supplies the information that defeats it.

What the Anime and Manga Have Reached

The explanation above is based primarily on the light novel, which is the completed source-material version of Rudeus's main story. Seven Seas has published all 26 main volumes in English.

The basement rat, the future diary, and Hitogami's full explanation come from Volumes 14 and 15, after the anime's Chaos Breaker section begins. The adaptation has not assigned those later revelations a definitive episode number, so any precise episode prediction would be speculation.

The manga is also behind the completed light novel. Seven Seas released manga Volume 23 on July 21, 2026, and that volume covers the climax of the Teleport Labyrinth expedition. Readers looking specifically for the basement explanation therefore need the light novel rather than assuming the manga or anime has already reached it.

The original web novel contains the same broad turning point and future-timeline structure, but the published light novel is the cleaner reference for the franchise's finalized main narrative. Across those versions, the central answer does not change: Hitogami targets Roxy because killing her during her pregnancy prevents Lara's birth and attacks the future in which Rudeus's descendants help Orsted threaten him. Roxy is the indispensable mother of that future, not the person canon says personally defeats Hitogami.