The Boy in the City of the Dead

by Kanata Yanagino

  In fact, I could have had them healed without a trace by further use of benediction, so long as I was prepared for Mary to turn into a torch again. She had offered to do that for me, but I turned her down. It was partly because I didn’t think the burns were bad enough to ask something like that of her, and partly because Blood had told me they were a badge of honor.

  I received treatment for it, including by Gus’s magic, and after much suffering, I was left with discolored skin from the palms of my hands to somewhere up my arms, mostly as expected. They told me I was pretty lucky. I’d actually been steeling myself for the burns to turn into gruesomely swollen scars, so I was left feeling a bit like, “Oh, is that all?” But even now, my badge was still coiled around both of my arms.

  Since then, I had shot up in height. I was now at eye level with Mary, and getting pretty close to Gus as well. I still had to look up at Blood, but he complimented me once on how manly I was looking.

  When I was reborn into this world after my past life, I hadn’t exactly brought a ruler with me. I could only guess at my height in “old figures,” but I thought I was probably over 160 cm at this point.

  This world mainly used anthropic units of measurement. Like how, if you make a finger gun with your thumb and index finger, the distance between the two is about fifteen centimeters. I couldn’t help but convert to metric, though. It must have been the influence of my past life’s memories.

  Let me return to the present situation.

  For the past five days, I had been taking time off my lessons with Gus and Blood to perform the rite of silent prayer. It was a strict religious rite performed in the winter at monasteries for Mater the Earth-Mother. Mary had gone through it herself a number of times while she was alive.

  The rite was... quite something.

  From sunrise to sunset five days later, you were forbidden to utter a single word, except in the event of an emergency. Communication could only take place through a bell, and other than the time spent sleeping and so on, which was to be kept to a minimum, virtually all the remainder of the time was to be devoted to single-minded prayer.

  Get up, pray. Sit down, pray. When your body starts becoming stiff and painful, get up and walk, and while walking, pray. Once you feel back to form, sit down, pray. When it’s time for bed, before bed, pray. There were to be prayers of thanks while eating meals, prayers of dialogue while looking at yourself, prayers of petition to wish for protection, prayers of praise for God.

  And after performing that repertoire of every kind of prayer under the sun, the rite was to be concluded with those several long hours of no-mindedness.

  When I first heard what I was in for, I, too, was in disbelief. But it’s quite terrifying and surprising what feats humans are capable of when they actually make the attempt.

  Mary, incidentally, told me that she was physically incapable of praying for such a long length of time without reducing herself to ashes. She assisted me instead. I understood, of course.

  I did wonder, for a brief moment, whether I might be blessed with benediction after all this praying, but there were no signs of that happening whatsoever. Judging by that, it seemed that benediction really did require a strong affinity with your god. Mary had told me that many deeply devout believers are never blessed with the art. I figured that was just how it was.

  In any event, Mary’s teachings on prayer were certainly an ordeal, but...

  There was actually worse.

  ◆

  The rite of silence was the worst that Mary’s lessons had to offer, by far. Normally, they were far more tame: how to make shoes, how to sew clothes, how to grow vegetables, how to conduct yourself with decency, and so on. They were... y’know, soothing. Ordinary.

  Gus’s lessons, on the other hand, had been getting a little out of control recently.

  I was grateful for him teaching me, despite his face telling me louder than his words that he really didn’t want to bother. The problem was the content, which had become increasingly advanced. It was also far more dense in terms of how much he would teach me at once.

  I was seriously overloaded.

  He had me committing all kinds of Words to memory, and combining Words to make phrases and sentences. He would make me practice vocalization and pronunciation, so that I could speak them and recite them correctly. He would teach me everything at once, from geometry and arithmetic to rhetoric and argument. There was geographical history, law, astronomy, civil engineering, construction, medicine, economics and business management... and after teaching me all of that, would tell me to have it memorized by the following day.

  The following day there would be a test, followed by further cramming, followed by another test, and once every ten days, there would be a review of what we had covered. “Cramming” was too easygoing a word for the quantity offensive he had launched against me.

  Honestly, I had begun to wonder whether he was secretly hoping for me to throw in the towel.

  Of course, my past life’s memories were of use for geometry and arithmetic. I’d been pretty good at math, so for a while, I was using that to give myself some breathing room. However, even that was now becoming difficult, because when Gus judged that I was understanding something, he would skip right over that part like I’d just been moved up a year, and find something extra to teach me as well.

  A part of me wished that I’d kept him fooled a little longer. Still, I’d decided to live this life seriously. I wanted to pull out all the stops. Luckily for me, this body was still young, and had a great memory, so I was somehow still hanging on.

  And having been taught so much, I was finally coming to appreciate that not only was Gus’s knowledge extremely broad, but unfathomably deep as well.

  Blood had once told me that Gus used to be exalted as “The Wandering Sage.” I could get the sense that he really had wandered the world and been to all kinds of places, and had learned from both experience and factual knowledge.

  This world’s civilization was less advanced than my previous life—assuming you discounted the magic bits. Yet whether Gus talked about the anatomy of animals or the procedure for constructing a building, he spoke pragmatically and with clarity. Not a single moment was spent on the kinds of fanciful ideas that the medieval scholars of my old world had indulged in.

  Even when Gus talked about demihumans and mythical beasts, which in my past life were nothing more than figments of the imagination, there wasn’t the slightest hesitation in his speech. As I listened to him talk about these things after having apparently actually encountered them, I started to realize I was not being smart or clever by constantly doubting their existence. My past life’s knowledge could not be applied to this world, and I was beginning to feel stupid for thinking it ever could. After all, the person in front of me was indisputably a ghost.

  In any case, Gus’s lessons ran on an incredibly tightly packed schedule. I was desperately trying to keep up, but it was questionable how long I would last. Gus, irritable as he was, would have no hesitation in stopping the lesson if I started to whine about it, so I wasn’t even permitted to grumble. I simply had to work hard and show I could carry out the immense number of tasks he was setting before me.

  It was grueling. I could be forgiven for calling it a little out of control. But Gus’s lessons, despite my complaints, were still only second-worst.

  Blood’s lessons were out of control even in comparison to Gus’s. Not “a little” out of control—seriously big-time crazy.

  We’d moved on from our play-fighting, and I’d been practicing with more realistic wooden swords and wooden spears, and learning techniques and form. This much was okay. As an extension of our hunting, I’d learned how to set traps, how to drive prey, how to bring down big game, and how to survive for days in the forest. This, too, made sense. And the regimented training runs and muscle training Blood had begun to impose on me as my body started to take shape were also nothing surprising, and obviously in line with his approach.

 
The real equipment started coming out: real swords, real spears, and genuine leather armor. I had no idea where he’d gotten these, but it was only natural that you’d keep them hidden and out of a child’s reach. He had me run around wearing that stuff, and practice my swings and techniques with it. All this I considered a completely natural part of a warrior’s education.

  But after that, it started to get crazy. Seriously crazy.

  “Okay. So, from today on, I’m gonna start throwing you into real battles.”

  What?

  “Lemme warn you, the guy you’ll be fighting is gonna have nothing on his mind except killing you.”

  What?

  “Okay, let’s go. I’ll supervise, of course, but if there’s an accident, you’re seriously gonna die. So, uh, try not to end up dead.”

  WHAT?!

  ◆

  I’ll spoil the ending. I had an awful time.

  To get into the specifics, Blood gave me a long sword and circular shield, and made me fight to the death against a weak undead he’d captured somewhere.

  It was the dry, pitch-black corpse of a monster. It had no nose or ears, one cyclopean eye, and a mouth that opened wide in a disturbing smile shaped like a crescent moon. Its build was not much different from mine. When Blood released it, I was immediately charged, as it swung its chipped and cracked claws.

  Oh, yeah. I was terrified.

  That might surprise you after hearing about all my training. However, the training and the real thing were worlds apart.

  It was horrifying to face an opponent who intended to kill you. How could I describe that horror?

  There was a sense of security that came with training. It had restrictions, agreed upon by everyone taking part, so that the risk of accidents or serious injury was reduced as much as possible. If your opponent took on risk and surprised you with a movement you were unable to deal with, you wouldn’t end up seriously injured, and you wouldn’t die. The same would hold if you tried a risky and bold action of your own.

  The cost to pay for the act of taking on risk was low. That was what allowed you to try out all kinds of different behaviors, investigate their pros and cons, and distill them down to the one or two that were really effective. In my past world, too, the martial arts enjoyed great popularity and technical advancement as a result of establishing a safe format for fighting.

  But in a real battle, all actions came with risk. If you took a single bad hit, if your foot slipped just once, that alone could be the end of you. Death: the ultimate dead end.

  I was now in a real battle, and every action I took had the possibility of leading to some level of risk. My mind went blank, and I started to lose confidence in what I was meant to do.

  Of course, I remembered having a previous life, but my intuitive feeling was that this was an exceedingly rare occurrence, and I had no expectation that I was going to get another. Even if I were, it wouldn’t have made a jot of difference to the biological aversion to death that was bubbling up within me.

  And fatal wounds weren’t the only thing I was scared of. If I got my eye gouged out, I wouldn’t be able to see anymore. If a tendon were cut, I’d lose movement in that limb. My windpipe could be crushed. I could lose my fingers. I wondered if there was any truth to that rumor I’d heard in my past life, that if you got your nose cut off, mucus would dribble out of the hole in your face.

  My enemy’s murderous intent forced me to confront all those horrifying possibilities at once.

  I got tunnel vision. My heart raced. My breathing grew ragged, my body started shaking, all thought ceased—and as if none of that mattered, I moved to cut my enemy down with a single stroke.

  As the undead monster swung its claws down at me, I bashed them away from me with my shield and stepped diagonally forward. As we crossed, I slashed my sword horizontally towards its torso. Assisted by the rotational inertia of my well-trained lower body, my shoulders and arm muscles drove the sword in.

  I felt a reassuring resistance as the blade connected.

  I put distance between us again. When I looked next, the bone-dry body of the undead creature had been sliced in two, and was crumbling to dust.

  Fighting in a real battle was terrifying. I could say without doubt that I’d been scared stiff. My muscles, however, which had been conditioned from a young age, were faithful and brave. They moved on their own, leaving my cowardly thoughts behind. The best response to any given attack was already imprinted in them as a reflex action.

  In my previous world, soldiers and fighters who had undergone a lot of training for battle were sometimes referred to as “killing machines.” I now understood how apt that description was. Properly trained warriors could kill their enemies as a mechanical response, setting all their fear and disgust to the side, just as Blood had once told me.

  “Phew...”

  The monster I’d just cut down was probably a demon, one of the minions of the evil god of dimensions, Dyrhygma. Unless I was mistaken, the demon I’d just fought was one of the lowest-ranked and weakest. I’d gained that knowledge from Gus’s natural history lessons, so I was sure it was right.

  I was a little surprised, though. Demons were beings from another dimension, and I’d heard that when defeated, they often simply disappeared. I had no idea they could become undead as well. Maybe that one was special, I thought, as I stood over the monster I’d cut down and watched it turn to dust.

  I’d just killed something that looked like a person. Sure, it was an undead monster, but I still found it strange how emotionless I felt. I wasn’t feeling pumped up, panicked, or confused. If another of the same kind of enemy were to charge at me, I was sure I could cut it down in the same way. My lack of hesitancy toward taking a life was probably the result of how proficient all my training had made me.

  After I made sure that it had entirely turned to dust, I looked at Blood, whose face appeared stupefied. His skeletal expression was no different from usual, of course, but his mouth was half-open, and he was looking directly at me.

  “Blood, I won. What’s wrong?”

  “Uh... Right. Yeah, good job. Uh, that was okay, considering it was your first battle.” He tried to pass it off like it was nothing, but his voice was a little unconvincing. He seemed pleased.

  The impression I was getting was that Blood personally thought what I’d shown off there was very good, but he didn’t want it to go to my head, so he was telling me to take it easy.

  Well, well, well. I softly chuckled through my nose. Learning this made me happy. I’d made use of what Blood had taught me. I was feeling very proud of myself. Now, then...

  I said at the beginning that I had an awful time. You’re thinking “that wasn’t so bad,” right? Yeah, no. This was where it all went wrong.

  “H-Hey! Don’t get cocky. It was okay, I said, just okay.”

  “Come on, give it up. Just say it, I’m a genius!” Of course, I was joking. I was setting him up to make a joke at my expense. That wasn’t what I got, though.

  “Genius, huh. Yeah... Maybe you are.” For some reason, Blood responded to my joke with a relatively serious tone. And then, switching to a cheerful one, he said something absolutely horrifying. “All right, genius, why don’t we move up the schedule and give a harder one a go?!”

  Seriously?

  ◆

  The ruined city was always something I’d looked upon from above, from the temple hill. I’d never been allowed to approach it because it was too dangerous, and so I’d never known before now that it also had a complex underground portion.

  Before we’d gone inside, Blood had told me that this city had once been inhabited by humans and a race of dwarves.

  The dwarves were of short stature, but powerfully built, and excelled in metallurgy, engineering, and construction. Familiar with the earth, they preferred living in caves underground, and this place was no exception. They had constructed a large city of their own below the city here.

  In the present day, the underground city bel
ow the ruins was a dangerous place, roamed by savage and mindless undead like the one Blood had captured earlier. The reason I’d been forbidden to approach the ruined city was because undead creatures just like that one occasionally wandered out of the underground.

  That underground was where I now found myself.

  The equipment I’d been given was clothing, shoes, leather armor, a longsword, a dagger, a circular shield, and finally, the pack on my back, which contained bread, dried meat, and a skin full of water. Blood had left me here, deep in the underground city. I was to make it back out of here myself with only the stuff I’d been given.

  Deep blackness was spread out before me. It wasn’t merely dark. I couldn’t see my hand in front of my face. This was true blackness, without the slightest trace light, throwing off even my sense of balance.

  As you may have noticed, a source of light was not included among the equipment I was given. Blood had carried me here through the pitch darkness. He, of course, no longer had human eyeballs, and seemed to use some other paranormal method for perceiving his surroundings. Of course, I hadn’t been able to memorize the path we’d taken to get here. Then, he’d just left, without even giving me a light, leaving me in the middle of this den of the undead. So here I was.

  Things were not looking good, to say the least, and I hadn’t even started yet. That said, panicking wasn’t going to solve anything. Essentially, this was a practical exam. This was, presumably, meant to be a situation I could get myself out of, if I made good use of everything given to me so far.

  I breathed in deeply, and as if expanding my sense of touch outside the limits of my skin, I sensed the surrounding mana, and synchronized with it. Drawing my dagger, I then carefully engraved the Word Lumen, which meant “light,” into my shield.

  The shield lit up, and with its magical light I could see the surrounding area, up to about ten meters, in vivid detail. The light didn’t waver like a flame would, and was brighter, too, close to the brightness of a fluorescent lamp from my old world. It would run out in a few hours, but once that happened, it could be made to shine again by drawing the surrounding mana into the engraved Word.