Pindel Morein (2)

A shattered alley came into view. Footsteps I could not pin a direction to struck the walls and echoed, and the gaps between the sounds were very short. I walked the alley in silence.

And then, as I came near the corner.

A hideous shriek reached me, the kind that comes out of torn human vocal cords. The monster that made it had been shaped with legs stuck all over its body.

“…”

Its bulk, a little smaller than mine.

It came at me screaming. I twisted my upper body clear of its leap and at the same moment drove the longsword, broken in half, in around its neck. Knee pinning its countless thrashing legs to the ground, I brought the blade down on the neck over and over until the bone gave with a grinding crack.

The other monsters that had heard its cry would find this place soon, so I left in a hurry.

A week had passed since I hid myself away in Oskalt’s alleys. The city was a ruin and the fortress had lost its function. The change came the moment the second day arrived. Undead that had crawled over the wall fell on the monsters.

This is how incapable man is. The lull the soldiers had built up over the whole of their lives fell back to the primeval in a single day.

This was not a war between the monsters and me but a three-way fight between the monsters, me, and the undead.

If hell punishes those who have sinned, then what on earth does this place punish? This city of death has no one being judged and only those who judge; wouldn’t even the name of hell be too generous for it?

A commotion had been raised, so the monsters would come swarming soon. The monsters that swarm in raise a greater commotion, and that draws the undead. In the end the undead were serving as an inhibitor, keeping the monsters from massing into an excessively large horde.

The loose weave of the alleys helped too. I never had to take on several hundred monsters at once, and that mattered, because however much I do not die, several hundred coming at me all together would beat me to a bloody pulp and grind me into the ground on the spot.

The road to the wall was hard going. Straight through, I could have reached it in a day, but keeping their notice off me as much as possible had stretched that into a week.

And then, today at last.

“So I’ve arrived.”

Oskalt’s wall spread out before my eyes. The undead come over it as smoothly as a snake over a wall, so it is not much to lean on, but what brought them over in the first place was the monsters’ commotion, and they would hardly come this way merely to catch one human. Pormel would need at least another week to arrive. I meant to put the wall at my back and hold out that week.

I was making my slow way along it when something moved on the street beyond the end of the alley.

Corpses in the middle of the street, tearing at some unidentifiable lump and eating it.

…Guards from up on the wall?

It seemed the soldiers-turned-monsters and the undead had fought each other. Going by the look of things, the winner would be the undead. They had come out of it relatively intact. To think that even rotting corpses look sound beside humans sculpted any old way.

I did not go so far as to frown at it now. Instead I went quietly toward them.

The undead catch the scent of the living. Since I had already made them out with my naked eye, there was no option left that did not involve engaging them. The rotted corpses let out an unmistakable beast’s cry.

Three big ones, two small.

Dealing with all of them is not difficult. The question is how quietly I deal with them. In fact that was not so complicated a matter. All I have to do is not resist when they come at me every which way. Having my flesh torn off and eaten would feel a little foul, but there is no better method for shutting them up and putting them down one at a time.

— Grrrrr!

The undead fastened onto me one and all and chewed noisily at the leather. The armor was tough, and they were having trouble biting through to my flesh. Armor is the very thing made for a situation like this; it would be a problem if it were not tough.

“…”

I took the short blade in a reverse grip and drove it down into the head of the one clinging to my left arm. The skull burst around the blade, buried to the grip, and spilled its brains. One after another I snuffed the life out of them, mechanically. Every undead with a smashed head laid its body down on the ground, and before long the only one still fastened to me was a small one gnawing at my calf.

“Filthy.”

It was not my body that was filthy but my mood.

The undead are beasts made of the dead brought back to life.

An undead of large build was a well-built person in life, and a small undead a short person.

A short person. A child.

Five years old, would it have been? There is no telling when it died.

The decay alone put it at half a year or so, but the undead stop rotting the moment they come back.

What is it that makes the undead hungry?

Why do corpses that do not rot covet the blood and the flesh of the living?

Probably because they envy warmth.

The thing they do not have. The thing that was there before and is not there now.

The thing this young undead, biting at me desperately, craves so much.

That thing is human warmth.

It is warmth, and breath, and memory.

The undead are those who were human once and have had every last thing they once took for granted stripped from them.

That is why I do not much like the undead.

Because it feels like looking at my own end, drifting further and further from humankind.

Because it feels as though they are telling me my own ending will be no different from theirs.

— CRUNCH!

The small undead, having lost everything above the neck, laid its cold body down on the cold ground.

Just as the other undead had.

It did not breathe, it said nothing, and it left behind only a handful of bloody water.

Just as everyone in this world will one day.

Time went steadily by. A day passed, and two days, and on the third day.

I could not rub out the question that had risen in my head.

…Is this really the end of it?

Pindel Morein is a cunning man through and through. It would be dangerous to assume he thought a mere thousand monsters would be enough to handle me. The monsters were a threat, certainly, but given what Oskalt is like, hiding one body from them was not so difficult. Pindel Morein is a man whose head works well enough to sculpt an entire city solely for this moment and to shove Kalen and me into a trap at the end of it.

A strange conviction came over me. That this would certainly not be the end of it.

An uneasy groundless worry never does end up merely groundless.

It came around the time five days had gone by.

— KWOOOOO!

A hideous shriek shattered the usual stillness and rang through the whole city. The birds taking wing beyond the alley wall were somehow ominous. Treading up the fallen rubble, I climbed to the top of a building with some height to it.

“…”

I could see a lump of clotted flesh. Every monster sculpted out of a human looks like a lump of flesh, so there was nothing special in that. What was worth noting was the size of it.

A size I could make out with the naked eye from near the wall.

The monster that had raised itself up in the center of Oskalt stood a good deal taller than the wall.

“It goes on growing.”

That was not the end of it. Countless monsters crawled out from between the alleys and flung themselves at the lump, and soon soaked into it. I say it again. They soaked in. Watching human flesh melt in like a liquid was by no means a pleasant experience.

Its bulk had by now passed the troll ghoul I saw in the primeval forest. You would have to stack three Pormels up on two legs to come roughly level with it.

The alleys are in the way, so it means to smash them flat outright?

If the alleys keep the monsters from massing, then all you need is an enormous monster that can lay the alleys themselves to waste.

The monster bellowed at the top of its voice, as though the undead and their like made no difference at all. And in fact no undead came anywhere near the center, where the big one had begun to move. Which was only natural, unless they meant to be trodden to death.

The thing had been wrecking everything around it at random, and then it stopped. Unease came over me, and I narrowed my eyes.

— KWOOOO!

Sure enough, it broke into a run straight in my direction. Before a bulk that could shatter even the wall to pieces with one kick, the buildings broke like crackers.

“Damn it.”

I hurried down from the top of the building. Down on the ground there was of course nowhere at all to take cover, and running from a thing like that is realistically impossible. The booming footsteps drew nearer by the moment. By the timing, Pormel’s return was close, but help from anyone else is hard to count on right this moment.

I moved through the narrowest of the alleys running along the wall, keeping out of its sight as much as I could. Monsters sprang out here and there, alien dots in that maze of a landscape. Ducking my head and twisting my body, I slipped their leaps. I ran hard, as though trying to shake off the alleys’ maze of identical turns. I had the feeling the big monster’s roar was chasing along behind me.

I’ve come along the wall and swung wide to the right. I should be at least three streets from the point where it spotted me.

But its footsteps are not the least bit different from before. I had opened up the distance, but the sound reaching me had not lessened. There is only one thing this means.

It’s tracking me exactly. It seems to know where I am.

For all the effort I had put into keeping deliberately to the narrow ways, the big monster came on at me without dropping its speed in the least. How is that possible?

Even while I turned this and that over, the assorted monsters kept rushing me. I kicked one that burst out at a corner, drove it into the angle of the road, and ran on.

…Surely not.

Looking back, I saw that the big monster was not the only thing on my heels. Countless smaller ones were following me as well. The big one must have been chasing them, not me. A group stands out more than an individual; that is only natural. And chasing a pack of monsters all moving in one direction was the same thing as chasing me.

Which is to say that to shake off the big one, I had to fool the eyes of those things first.

A headache.

It is not as if I have any great tricks up my sleeve. Whatever moves I could take could only be piecemeal.

The moment I rounded the corner of a narrow alley I threw myself through a building’s window. By the dust-covered furniture it had been an ordinary family home. From far off came the sound of the ground shaking, and I ducked down.

Soon the footsteps of countless monsters kicking off ground and wall covered the whole area. All I could do was pray they would pass this neighborhood by. And so a few seconds that felt like a few hours went by.

“…”

The small footsteps drew gradually away again. Only then did I let out the breath I had been holding without realizing it. With this the big one too would simply pass the place by. I meant to sit tight in this building until it was fully away.

Sitting with my back to the wall, waiting a while.

— KA-BLAAM!

Most of the building was blown clean away, the roof and the wall I had been facing along with it.

“Truly, one thing after another.”

As bad luck would have it, the big one chasing the monsters that had passed this place had put a kick through it. The monster’s eyes met mine, and it let out a hideous shriek. My ears went dead. It felt as though both my eardrums had torn.

I got to my feet. Its arm was about the size of an old tree in the primeval forest. Take a swing from a thing like that and there is no pretty sight to be had.

“…This is going to be a hard day.”

The monster brought its palm down at last, as though swatting a mosquito.

The great noise I expected never came. Not because my brain had been smashed. My body was fine. Instead the monster came into my sight with its thick wrist cut clean off.

— KWOAAAAA!

The muffled cry of the beast and a loud ringing filled my ears. Even so, a voice came through the sharp ringing.

“—Brother!”

It was Drick.