Chapter 36 — I’m the One Who Decides What Death Is

There were now only four people still alive in the square. Yogiri Takatou stood idly while Tomochika Dannoura looked hesitantly around them. The young man in the suit lifted his hands as if in surrender, but Masayuki was still standing on the mound of bodies, frozen in place.

"My name is Ryouta Takahashi. I'm the lord of this city. He did all of this on his own; I had nothing to do with it!" The man in the suit jumped to explain his own place in the scheme of things, a quick and shrewd act as expected of a lord.

"What...what happened? What is going on here?!" Masayuki shouted angrily, as if to cover his confusion. "Screw you, man! How did you even kill the undead? How did something that was already dead die again?!"

"Undead? I don't really know what that means, but I'm not sure you can call them dead. They were moving, so that means they were alive, right?" Yogiri asked without mockery in his voice. Even if something was a dead body, the fact that it was moving meant that it was alive in some way. Dead people didn't move. That was common sense to him.

"And now something I've been trying to ignore barges its way back in! I think a moving corpse is a pretty big contradiction already!" Apparently, Tomochika had been trying to avoid overthinking it all.

"Well, all of your friends are dead. So what are you going to do?"

"Dammit! Lain! You knew about this, didn't you?! Instant Death Magic? There's no way that's what this is!" Raising his face to the sky, Masayuki howled a string of curses. He seemed to be yelling at someone named Lain, but there didn't appear to be anyone by that name in the square.

"This doesn't seem like the best time for complaints. I'm asking what you're planning to do next. You can see what's happened here. Try using your head."

"That line got to you, huh?" Tomochika commented.

Masayuki jumped down from the pile of corpses. "What did you do?! That's not the Sage's Gift. Did you get it from a Swordmaster? Or maybe a fallen dragon? Either way, that should still be impossible! How do you kill something that's already dead?!" Unable to accept what he was seeing, Masayuki struggled to get past the basic fact that his walking dead had been destroyed.

"I'm the one who decides what death is. If it moves, it's alive. If it dies, it stops. Your opinion doesn't matter."

Confusion, bewilderment, exhaustion. As a flood of emotions washed over Masayuki's face, he finally settled on rage. Killing intent exploded from within him, filling the space around him like a miasma of hatred, imposing enough to freeze a weaker-willed person in place.

The violent emotions coursing through his mind soon manifested in his physical form. His fangs and claws began to grow. His coat merged with his body to form a pair of wings, and thick black hair covered the rest of his body.

It took almost no time at all, but he had made the wrong choice. His only chance at winning had been a swift strike, one that could take Yogiri's life faster than Yogiri could process what was happening. In the end, his decision to fight without an actual plan was the one that sealed his fate.

Yogiri responded to the killing intent reflexively.

"Couldn't you at least have let him finish transforming?!" Tomochika said, looking at the fallen Masayuki. He was now lying on the ground, in a form somewhere halfway between a person and a beast.

"Why should I have to wait?"

"It's like an unwritten rule, isn't it? Anyway, what happened to negotiating? What are we going to do about the barrier?"

"We don't need this guy anymore. Isn't that right, Ryouta Takahashi?"

"Uh, right!"

With his hands still in the air, the lord of the city nodded vigorously. They could just negotiate with Ryouta instead. He seemed far more likely to give in to them. That's why he had introduced himself in the first place — in short, he had completely cut himself off from Masayuki at that moment.

"I have no combat ability at all. I'm not sure I'll be able to talk much if I'm under threat of dying without warning, though."

"We're just protecting ourselves, so if you don't plan on fighting then you have nothing to worry about."

"Not at all! Not even a little bit! To start, would you mind if I got the key for the barrier back? Masayuki had it."

At Yogiri's nod, Ryouta approached the fallen creature, crouching down and rummaging through his clothes. In short order he had retrieved a single small key.

"Um, I think there are still zombies throughout the city," Tomochika pointed out. "What are we going to do about that?"

"Ah, that. Masayuki added his Necromancy power to the barrier. So people should stop turning into zombies when they die now that he's gone...at any rate, I'll find a way to deal with it. We have contingency plans for handling wandering zombies already."

"Leaving that alone, then, do you have any idea what's actually going on here?"

Since the one who had started the whole incident was now dead, Yogiri was still in the dark about why any of this had happened.

"Ah, well, don't get angry, okay? Sage Lain gave Masayuki orders to kill you two. Masayuki was messed up, so this is the way he chose to do it. I didn't want to let him have his way with my city, but I couldn't counteract the Sage's orders."

"So are you able to not carry out that order?"

"I'm an attendant like Masayuki was, but I didn't get any direct orders. So my priority is keeping the city safe."

Tomochika cocked her head, remembering her meeting with the Sage on the bus. "Wait, wasn't the Sage's name Sion or something?"

"Lady Sion is also a Sage, but her jurisdiction is elsewhere. This area is under Lady Lain's control. And this particular region has been entrusted to me."

"But Sion summoned us here and told us to work to become Sages, so why are they trying to kill us?"

They had been summoned as Sage candidates to increase the number of Sages, so it didn't make much sense for the Sages to want them dead. Although, from the opposing point of view, it made sense to get rid of Yogiri seeing as he was actively reducing the number of Sages that were currently in the world.

"I haven't heard anything about it, so I can't say. But I have no desire to get in your way, and I'll do anything I can to help you." After seeing them wipe out the Immortal Corps, he clearly had no intention of plotting against them himself. "You want to go to the capital, right? In that case, I'll just open the barrier...huh?" Touching the key he had retrieved from Masayuki's corpse, Ryouta's expression turned doubtful.

"Is something wrong?"

"It won't go back to normal...what's going on?! Is this a fake?" Flustered, Ryouta looked at Masayuki's body, but his fellow attendant wasn't someone who would bother with such trickery, nor had he had the time nor reason to do it. "No way...is Lady Lain controlling the barrier directly?!"

The key was an object for delegating control of the barrier to the local lord. In short, for Lain, there was no need for a physical key.

"That's the Sage you were talking about earlier, right? Is she coming here?"

"I don't know. I don't think she can control the barrier from that far away, though...she probably just doesn't want you two escaping."

"It looks that way, doesn't it? But to what end? The Immortal Corps is already finished." Yogiri looked around. The Immortals were strewn across the square. They would never move again. There was something else wrong that he noticed right away, too.

Killing intent. Black lines of it were now pointing at Yogiri from every direction. The sound of countless footsteps echoed from the streets leading to the square.

"What is it? More zombies? Doesn't look like it."

Their eyes were mad, but they weren't undead. They all moved like ordinary humans, and they didn't throw themselves mindlessly forward either, stopping to leave a ten-meter radius around them clear. Beyond that radius, the square was now filled to the brim with people.