Pindel Morein (2)

A smashed alley came into view. Footsteps struck the walls and echoed back from no direction I could pin down, and the gaps between the sounds were very short. I walked the alley in silence.

And then, as I neared the corner.

I heard a hideous shriek, the kind that comes out of torn human vocal cords. It was a monster shaped like a body with legs stuck on all over it.

“…”

Its bulk, just a little smaller than mine.

It came rushing at me, screaming. I twisted my upper body to slip its leap and, in the same motion, drove my half-broken longsword in near its neck. Then I pinned its countless thrashing legs with my knee and brought the blade down on its neck again and again, until there was a grinding crack and the neck bone gave.

The other monsters would have heard its cry, and they’d find this place soon. I left in a hurry.

A week had passed since I’d gone to ground in Oskalt’s alleys. The city was a ruin now, and the fortress no longer worked as a fortress.

The change had come as soon as the second day began. Undead crawled over the wall and fell on the monsters.

Man is this incapable.

The calm the soldiers had built up over their whole lives went back to the primeval in a single day. This wasn’t a war between the monsters and me anymore. It was 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? In this city of death, where no one is being judged and there are only those who judge, isn’t even the name of hell more than it deserves?

A commotion had just broken out, so the monsters would soon come swarming. Monsters that swarm in raise a bigger commotion, and that draws the undead. So in the end the undead were serving as a check that kept the monsters from forming too big a horde. On top of that, the loose weave of the alleys meant I never had to take on several hundred monsters at once. Because however much I don’t die, if several hundred came at me together, they’d beat me to a bloody pulp and bake me onto the ground on the spot.

The road to the wall was hard going. Pushing straight through, I could have reached it in a day, but trying to draw as little notice as possible had stretched that into a week.

And then, only today.

“Made it.”

Oskalt’s wall spread out before my eyes.

The undead go over a wall as smoothly as a snake, so it isn’t much to lean on. But what brought them over in the first place was the monsters’ commotion, so they’d hardly come this way just to catch one human.

Pormel wouldn’t arrive for at least another week, so I meant to put the wall at my back and hold out until then.

I was moving slowly along the wall when something stirred on the street beyond the end of the alley. Corpses in the middle of the street, tearing at some lump I couldn’t make out and eating it.

…Guards from up on the wall?

It looked like the soldiers turned monster and the undead had gone a round, and by the look of it the undead had won. They were fairly intact. To think that even rotting corpses look whole beside humans sculpted any old way.

I didn’t go so far as to frown at that anymore. Instead I went quietly toward them. The undead catch the scent of the living, and since I’d already seen them with my own eyes, there was no option that didn’t involve fighting.

The rotted corpses let out an unmistakable beast’s cry.

Three big ones, two small.

Dealing with all of them isn’t hard. The question is how quietly I do it.

In fact, it wasn’t so complicated. All I have to do is not resist when they come at me from every side. Having my flesh torn off and eaten feels a little foul, but there’s no better way to keep them quiet and put them down one at a time.

— Grrrrr!

Every one of the undead fastened onto me and chewed noisily at the leather. The armor was tough, so they seemed to be having trouble biting through to the flesh. But armor is made for exactly this kind of situation, after all, so it would be a problem if it weren’t 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 blade went in to the grip, and the skull burst and spilled its brains.

Mechanically, I snuffed them out one after another. Each 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 wasn’t my body that was filthy. It was my mood.

The undead are beasts made from the dead brought back to life. A large undead was a well-built person in life, and a small undead was a short one.

A short person. A child.

Five years old, maybe? There’s no telling when it died. By the decay alone it looked like 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 don’t rot crave the blood and flesh of the living?

It’s probably because they envy warmth. The thing they don’t have. The thing that was there before and isn’t there now. The thing this young undead, biting at me so desperately, craves so much.

That thing is human warmth. It’s warmth, and breath, and memory.

The undead were human once, and they’ve had every last thing they took for granted taken from them. That’s why I don’t much like the undead. Because it feels like looking at my own end as I drift further and further from humankind. Because it feels as though they’re telling me my ending will be no different from theirs.

— CRUNCH!

The small undead, everything above its neck gone, laid its cold body down on the cold ground, just as the other undead had. It didn’t 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, then two, and on the third day.

I couldn’t 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’s dangerous to be sure he thought a mere thousand monsters could handle me. The monsters were certainly a threat, but Oskalt being what it is, hiding one body from them wasn’t so hard. And Pindel Morein is a man clever enough to sculpt an entire city just for this moment, and in the end to shove Kalen and me into a trap.

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

An uneasy, groundless worry never does stay merely groundless.

The incident came about five days in.

— KWOOOOO!

A hideous shriek shattered the usual stillness, rang through the whole city and reached me. Beyond the alley wall, birds took wing, and somehow that was ominous. I climbed the fallen rubble up onto the top of a building with some height to it.

“…”

I could see a lump of clotted flesh.

Every monster sculpted from a human looks like a lump of flesh, so that alone was nothing special. What was worth noting was the size of the lump. A size you 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’s still growing.”

And that wasn’t all. Countless monsters crawled out from between the alleys and flung themselves at the lump, and soon they soaked into it.

I’ll say it again: they soaked in.

Watching human flesh melt in like liquid was by no means pleasant. Its bulk had now passed the troll ghoul I’d seen in the primeval forest. You’d have to stack three Pormels standing 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 one 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 the undead didn’t come anywhere near the center, where the big one had started to move. Naturally, unless they wanted to be trodden to death.

The thing had been wrecking everything around it at random, and then it suddenly stopped. Uneasy, I narrowed my eyes.

— KWOOOO!

As expected, it started running straight toward me. Before a bulk that could shatter even the wall with one kick, the buildings broke like crackers.

“Damn it.”

I hurried down from the building. But even down here, of course, there’s nowhere 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 is close, but it’s hard to count on anyone else’s help right now.

I moved through the narrowest of the alleys running along the wall, trying to stay out of its sight as much as I could. Monsters sprang out here and there, like foreign dots in that maze of a landscape, and I ducked my head and twisted my body to slip their leaps. I ran hard, as if to shake off the alleys that kept repeating themselves, and the whole time I felt the big monster’s roar chasing along right 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 aren’t the least bit different from before. I’d opened up the distance, yet the sound reaching me hadn’t lessened. That means only one thing.

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

For all my effort to keep to the narrow ways, the big monster running at me hadn’t slowed in the least. How is that possible?

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

…Surely not.

When I looked back, I saw that besides the big monster, countless monsters were following me. So the big one must have been chasing them, not me. A group naturally stands out more than one individual, and chasing a pack of monsters all moving in one direction was the same as chasing me. Which meant that to shake off the big one, I first had to fool the eyes of those things.

A headache.

It’s not as if I have any great tricks up my sleeve, so the moves open to me could only be simple ones.

The moment I rounded the corner of a narrow alley, I threw myself through a building’s window. From the dust-covered furniture, it seemed to be an ordinary family home. Far off, I heard the ground shaking, so I ducked down. Soon the footsteps of countless monsters kicking off the ground and the walls covered the whole area, and all I could do was pray they’d pass this neighborhood by.

A few seconds that felt like a few hours went by.

“…”

The small footsteps slowly drew away again. Only then did I let out the breath I’d been holding without realizing it. Now the big one would simply pass this place by too, so I meant to sit tight in this building until it was well away.

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

— KA-BLAAM!

Most of the building, roof and the wall I’d been facing included, was blown clean away.

“Really, it’s just one thing after another.”

As bad luck would have it, the big one, chasing the monsters that had passed this place, had broken the building with a kick. Its 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, and take one swing from a thing like that and there’s no pretty sight to be had.

“…This is going to be a hard day.”

At last the monster brought its palm down, as if swatting a mosquito.

Unexpectedly, there was no great noise. It wasn’t 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 beast’s muffled cry and a loud ringing filled my ears. But even so, a voice came through the sharp ringing.

“—Brother!”

It was Drick.