by Nisioisin
However, the situation was about to exceed anything we’d anticipated, by far.
Humankind had perished in this world.
Humans had disappeared from this world.
All those people had vanished─everyone, but where on Earth had they all gone?
I was about to find out.
Right, they hadn’t gone anywhere at all.
I found out.
They’d been here─all along.
No, to be precise.
Their corpses were all along.
022
“!!”
Astonishment.
What other reaction could there be?
I wasn’t conscious of that much time having passed, but by the time I realized what was going on, it was pitch dark. It had gotten all mixed up with my pitch-dark mood, delaying the realization─or no, because my powers of sight were actually stronger at night, it wasn’t harder for me to see after dark, so maybe that was why I didn’t notice night had fallen.
Whatever the case, it didn’t change the fact.
That it was definitely too late.
By the time I realized what was going on─we were surrounded.
Surrounded? By what? you might ask.
And of course the answer would be─by corpses.
What’s more, they were─how can I put this?─decaying corpses.
Oozing, festering, their tattered clothing mingling with the flesh sloughing off their bones, those kinds of corpses.
With a thud.
A corpse’s─arm fell to the ground.
And not just one arm.
All throughout the scattered crowd of zombies, arms started falling to the ground in viscous streams before melting into the earth.
And not just arms.
Here a leg, there a torso, or a head.
Crumbling like fragile clay on a potter’s wheel.
But they seemed indifferent.
Because just like clay reshaped by a potter’s hands.
The arms regenerated with a muddy squelch.
The legs regenerated with a blubbery plop.
The torsos regenerated with a mushy sloosh.
The heads regenerated with a viscous pop.
They returned to the way they were before, then fell apart as before.
And it just kept happening, over and over.
Repeating, as though the corpses had been condemned to continue dying for all eternity.
Those corpses, which shouldn’t have been able to move, wafting stench, nevertheless rose up, moved, and encircled me and Shinobu.
There were so many packed into the modest shrine grounds that counting them was futile, but since there was nothing else to do, I made a rough tally─and there were more than fifty people.
Or is that the wrong unit?
There were more than fifty bodies, is that better?
Perhaps, seeing that they were just barely managing to maintain their human forms, they needed to be treated as people after all, no matter what?
Was that the ethical thing to do? The moral thing?
But this…overwhelming situation seemed to upend such everyday concerns─this overwhelming situation of being surrounded by lumbering, decaying corpses.
What I felt in its face wasn’t astonishment, then.
It was simple terror.
“Wh-What transpires here?”
It wasn’t just me.
Shinobu, too, had turned pale. Though in her case, she was reacting with neither surprise nor terror but plain confusion, it seemed.
“What is the meaning of this─be these the inhabitants of the town? The corpses of the inhabitants? Did they catch wind of our presence and follow us up the mountain?”
“The inhabitants…”
Shinobu’s words may not have been a soliloquy, she may actually have been asking me a question, but what was I going to say?
It was impossible to distinguish one individual from another among the swarm of corpses surrounding us, given that their faces were running like mud in a rainstorm─you could just about distinguish adults and children by the size of their bodies, but once you tried to get down to, say, males and females, things got extremely dicey. You could sort of tell from their frames─but at this point, why bother?
Yes.
I knew what to call these.
Not just me─everyone knew.
“Zombies…”
“Do not move, my lord…”
Not that I had anything particular in mind, but Shinobu grabbed the hem of my shirt as I was about to take a step and pulled me back.
Her face was still pale.
“It appears that if we remain here, they will approach no closer.”
“Oh…okay.”
Once she pointed it out.
I could see that though the zombies had us completely surrounded, they maintained a fixed distance─it had been hard to tell initially because of their sluggish movements.
Eyeballing it, I guessed the distance was about ten feet.
Around there they stopped walking and just bobbled from side to side.
But their number was growing with each passing moment.
They just seemed to keep on coming up the mountain.
“What the hell… Why don’t they come any closer?”
“’Tis likely due to the talisman,” replied Shinobu, pointing at the talisman pasted on the main hall behind us. “Thou hast experienced its efficacy for thyself. Thou wert able to touch it thanks to the humanity remaining inside thee─but they, who are clearly full-fledged aberrations, can only approach so close. They know ’tis at their peril that they approach any closer.”
“They know?”
Did they?
Sure, the fact that they weren’t coming any closer could be due to the talisman─thanks to the talisman, but…
Did they─actually have anything approaching volition?
Their eyes were vacant─or rather, nothing more than hollows plugged with decaying eyeballs… Who knew if they could even see anything?
“I don’t really know what’s going on, but…are they the ones who wrecked the world?” I asked. “I’m pretty sure zombies eat human flesh, don’t they? And if you get eaten by them, you turn into a zombie too…”
“Well, it must be said that there are many variations in that regard─but for now, it seems best we depart from this place while the talisman retains its miraculous efficacy.”
“Huh? Depart? Isn’t this the only place where we’re safe?”
“As thou canst see for thyself, their number is increasing by the moment… To be honest, I cannot foresee how this will go. Even if they do not wish to come closer, they may yet be pushed forward when things become too crowded─and, well. They are aberrations, but I do not think they are my enemies…nor thine.”
True.
They were creepy, and being unable to tell what they were thinking made them all the more frightening and repulsive─still, I didn’t sense the same kind of combat ability that I did from the vampire hunters or the monkey.
It was just that there were so many of them.
That in and of itself was a problem─but.
Nevertheless.
“Nevertheless,” observed Shinobu, “knowing that they may have once been the inhabitants of this town, that they may be zombies created from the corpses of the inhabitants of this town, we cannot heedlessly plow through their midst.”
“Right.”
From behind her, I nodded at Shinobu’s unexpectedly upstanding remark.
If anything, I’d been thinking that maybe we ought to just plow through their midst, so the nod included a suitable amount of contrition on my part.
But seriously, what the hell was going on?
I had no idea.
Hadn’t the world…hadn’t the human race been destroyed?
Or─no. It couldn’t be.
“Which is why for now we must flee, my lord.”
“Flee─to where?”
We were completely e
ncircled on all sides, left and right, front and back─and even now, the zombies just kept on coming.
Where could we run?
“If left and right, fore and hind are closed to us, there is nowhere to flee but up,” said Shinobu, wrapping her arm around my waist─and leaping.
Not like a time jump.
This time she actually jumped.
“Whoa…”
We leapt into the air so suddenly that there was barely time for my startled voice to pass my lips─and we reached an absurd altitude in the blink of an eye.
If I had to guess, I’d say she jumped over a thousand feet into the air.
Without even bending her knees.
It was deeply dubious whether those zombies even had the power of sight, but if they did, it must have looked as though we’d vanished from before their very eyes.
The return of so much of her power had enabled the feat─and it was terrifying to think that she wasn’t even close to full strength.
God, at the apex of her power she must’ve been able to jump into outer space without so much as a running start.
Maybe all that nonsense about toppling the sun someday wasn’t a joke after all, maybe it was just a straightforward goal, well within her reach.
She might have been able to snuff out a star.
Which would definitely alter history.
“We seem to have made good our escape, for the time being.”
“Yeah…but what the hell were those things?”
“I know not… Though they may not have been zombies, so much as─” Shinobu started to tell me but stopped in midsentence.
Because what goes up must come down, and in this case what goes straight up must come straight down, which wouldn’t do us any good, Shinobu skillfully rotated her body (along with mine) in midair, spreading and bending her legs so as to exploit the air resistance, and began zigzagging through the sky, seemingly searching for a place for us to land─in other words, for a safe place as far away as possible from that zombie-covered mountaintop. However.
However, looking down from that great height, we could see that nowhere in our town.
Nowhere in the world.
Was there such a thing─as a safe place.
“……nkk!”
“……nkk!”
There in the sky, Shinobu and I─simultaneously found ourselves at a loss for words.
At a loss for words, as we looked down on the nighttime town with our vampiric vision.
It wasn’t that zombies had gathered atop the mountain─at Kita-Shirahebi Shrine.
Fifty?
Sixty?
Maybe eighty in all?
That many zombies had been able to completely hem us in─but that was a tiny minority.
“The town is…overflowing with zombies.”
There was no point in looking for a place to land.
In every corner of the town─there were zombies strutting around like they owned the place.
There certainly was no point in trying to count them, but the number was without a doubt roughly equivalent to the town’s population.
No, not just our town.
If I strained I was just able to see the next town and some of the further outlying areas─and it was the same phenomenon everywhere. The massive number of zombies who had appeared from wherever the hell they had been hiding up until now, buried in the ground or what, I don’t know, were staggering around─in the middle of their evening stroll.
In other words.
“Every single human has turned into a zombie?”
Humanity had fallen.
But they weren’t gone─all of them, every single one, had become a corpse.
And an aberration, apparently.
The type of aberration that Ononoki would say─goes on in death.
“Holy shit…”
The result of trying to prevent Hachikuji’s transformation into an aberration was that, somehow─I ended up turning the entire human race into aberrations.
“I’ve made an…inexcusable, unpardonable mistake… It’s unbelievable, just by trying to change the past with a little time slip, I turned the entire human race into zombies…”
“Nay, my lord. Let this not discomfit thee,” Shinobu said, still holding me to her. I thought she was just trying to comfort me─but that wasn’t so. “’Tis I who have erred.”
The vampire who’d gone white as a sheet wasn’t trying to comfort me, but confessing.
“All this is my fault.”
“…? What are you talking about? What, is covering for each other the next step after blaming each other? Thanks all the same, Shinobu, but it was me who─”
“Nay, I am not trying to cover for thee, ’tis simply the naked truth. The harsh reality.”
“Shinobu.”
“Enough, hark thee well. First off, those are not zombies, but the degraded shadows of what once were vampires.”
“Vam─pires?”
You mean.
Like us?
That gaggle of aberrations, with their flesh sloughing off them like mud, those walking corpses?
“Not like us, like thee─for all of them, like thee, are former humans made into vampires by me.”
“Wha… By you?”
“Aye,” Shinobu replied feebly, looking sheepish. “In other words─the one who hath brought ruination upon the world in this timeline, is me.”
023
Now that our two protagonists have become the prime suspects for unprecedented worldwide ruination, a two-man cell unlike any before or since, it can’t be helped if our readers abandon us in disgust. But even though to shut up now might be the least I, as the perpetrator, could do as a show of good faith, please allow me to relate the subsequent developments, presumptuous though that might seem. I feel a certain duty to do so.
A horde of zombies overflowing all over town.
No safe place for us to land.
I didn’t know if they had any real will of their own, but recalling the circumstances back at Kita-Shirahebi Shrine, it was clear that they would be all over us the second we touched down.
What they would do to us then was less clear.
But when I thought of their fangs, the only sharp things standing out amidst the dripping flesh─yes, when I thought of their vampire-like fangs, their vampire fangs, I started to get an inkling.
Naturally Shinobu and I were hardened veterans. Especially since we had enhanced one another’s vampiric levels, we could probably “plow through” an infinite number of zombies like we were playing a shooting game at an arcade.
But if they were former humans─to say nothing of them being the town’s former residents, then we couldn’t do anything of the sort, just as Shinobu said.
On the other hand, if we alighted once more within the precincts of Kita-Shirahebi Shrine, it was unlikely that we could maintain a safe equilibrium. It would be preferable to avoid being jostled by a huge number of zombies with that talisman at our backs, again just as Shinobu said.
So what did we do, you might ask─carelessly having leapt into the air without realizing that anywhere we would try to land would be a playground for zombies, what did we do? I’m sorry to say the answer is kind of a letdown, which is that we didn’t land at all.
We didn’t land.
In other words, we kept on floating at an altitude of over a thousand feet.
For those of you who are thinking, How long can they really continue a conversation in midair?
I would ask you to recall that Shinobu Oshino can fly.
By sprouting bat-like wings from her shoulders.
Incidentally, I learned later that she’s able to sprout the wings themselves (decorative wings?) even when she’s in her less-than-full-power Easy Mode.
Which is a skill totally beyond my grade.
To actually fly, she has to be in proper Vampire Mode─she can’t do so in her little girl form─but though I say her wings were bat-like, she neither rode the winds nor made use of any
kind of buoyancy; the fact is that she remained aloft through sheer strength.