“The enemy sorcerer never ceases to amaze me.”
That night, I headed outside the city once again. There was nobody in the morgue—only a few fireflies floating about as usual.
“I can’t believe they have undead necromancers too.” Given that there had been other undead mages, it wasn’t particularly surprising, yet I couldn’t help but be astonished after seeing it in action. “That’s just not fair. If you make the undead use necromancy, then make those new undead also use necromancy, you can endlessly expand your forces. Obviously, there are limits to magical power, and finding skilled necromancer corpses isn’t a simple feat either, but still.”
Depending on what sort of trick the necromancer was using, I had the feeling those issues were surmountable. Particularly for a sorcerer so deeply invested in necromancy.
“But you beat the corpse that was controlling the other corpses, right? Did you find any clues?” Yuki asked, poking out from atop my head. “Since they’re absorbing the slain townsfolk, corpses that can control others must be an important asset for the enemy. It wouldn’t be strange if there was some trace tying them to the mastermind’s location.”
“Unfortunately, there wasn’t anything.” I shook my head. “There was a guild tag around the corpse’s neck. It seems like he was just an adventurer who was a necromancer. They must have absorbed him in some town and then deployed him as part of their forces, the same as the other undead.”
“You don’t think that might be camouflage?”
“I doubt it. His handling of the dead wyrm was too clumsy. Normally, they would go underground, but he made it crawl along the surface and crush his allies. I don’t feel like that was acting.”
“Hmm...”
“If they were an important asset, the enemy would use them more carefully. The slain townsfolk are being turned into undead in some other way. That said, any traces of the spell were erased by the barrier, so I can’t be sure,” I added.
“Umm, Master Seika,” Yuki said hesitantly. “Then why did you use a barrier? Shouldn’t you have tried to avoid erasing any clues?”
“Honestly, I just kinda reacted automatically, though I don’t think it was a bad decision in retrospect.”
I needed to neutralize the wyrm, and my ways of doing so without getting the nearby robed undead wrapped up in it were limited. In addition, if I had taken too long, the undead army would have spread out, and suppressing them would’ve taken even longer. There was no telling what they might do with that extra time. While I didn’t think I was beneath them in spellcasting ability, the enemy wasn’t someone to be underestimated.
“Even if I hadn’t used the barrier, I doubt I would’ve found any clues,” I told Yuki, who seemed to think I had made a mistake. “Our enemy isn’t so careless. Besides, I learned two things today. That’s not a terrible result.”
“What did you learn?”
“First, how they managed to capture a fortress city. I suspect they used a wyrm.”
Being undead, there was no way the rebels could have used someone on the inside to open the gates. I’d been wondering how they managed it until now. If they dug a tunnel from outside the city, then the city’s walls didn’t matter. Then they could send in hordes of undead. The wyrm could be a corpse, or it could be a living one controlled by a tamer like today. There were various methods they could use.
Given the forces they had sent to take this city, which was also well fortified, I was confident in that conclusion. They probably only had a limited number of wyrms, so the group I had defeated during the day was likely one of their main forces. We were lucky.
“That’s nice and all, but unless you’re a city about to be attacked, such knowledge doesn’t really help. What’s the other thing?”
“How the enemy necromancer is overcoming distance limitations. They’re probably having the corpses use necromancy themselves. I can’t think of any other explanation.” I had suspected as much, but after today, I was certain. If ordinary undead could use necromancy, then the method I envisioned should also be possible.
“Using corpses that control other corpses like we saw today?”
“No, it’s something different from ordinary undead. That method would result in the undead becoming increasingly harder to control the further down the chain you go. This is a more refined technique. I suspect the necromancer is creating undead in their image and using them as relays for the spell.”
“What do you mean by ‘in their image’?”
“Exactly that. A corpse that closely resembles them,” I explained. “The closer the likeness, the more efficiently the spell is conveyed.”
“Now that you mention it, I remember hearing you tell your disciples about that before.”
“Of course you do. It’s one of the foundations of sorcery. I explained it to them countless times. People tend to assume that when two things resemble each other, they must share the same qualities. But naturally, that isn’t actually the case. You can stuff someone’s hair into a straw effigy and hammer nails into it all you like—physically, it’s nothing more than straw. It can’t hurt the owner of the hair.”
“However,” I continued after a pause, “it’s a different story when belief comes into play. If you convince yourself that the straw effigy is the owner of the hair, then the act of hammering the nail becomes a curse and can reach the true owner. Even someone with no training in sorcery can occasionally curse another, because the essence of sorcery lies in the conscience. Magic is similar.”
Spells were a craft like any other. They had theory, methodology, and things that could be taught to others. If you followed the same steps, you could arrive at the same results. As with other crafts, where sometimes intuition or raw strength mattered more than theory, there were places where force of will meant everything.
Molding the shape of a tool used in a spell to resemble something is one way to strengthen the will behind it. That’s why an exorcist’s talismans are shaped like people. The reverse is also true—if you asked me to curse a human using a wooden carving of a bear, even I would find that quite difficult. My consciousness would be pulled toward the bear. To the extent that it would frankly be better to use nothing at all.
Yuki was silent, seemingly deep in thought.
“Is something wrong?” I asked, prompting Yuki to give a startled reply.
“Ah, no. Umm, so you’re saying the enemy sorcerer prepares corpses that look like them and transmits the spell through them?”
“That’s my hypothesis. By having the undead strongly believe they are the caster, you can make them use the same spell. I think, anyway. If you can place relay corpses at regular intervals, you can break free from the distance constraint.”
“Which means if we can find corpses that look like the enemy, we might be able to find a lead.”
“Yes,” I nodded. “Though since we don’t know what the enemy looks like, we have no way of doing so.”
“Right.”
Guessing the enemy’s trick didn’t actually help us make any progress.
“In fact, it might be faster for us to try to figure out how they’re communicating with their collaborator.”
“Oh, you did mention that. Do you have any ideas?”
“Not yet, unfortunately,” I said with a bitter expression. “If they’re using corpses to relay the spell, then it would be possible to use a bird corpse to deliver letters. That said, I don’t imagine this sort of sorcerer would use such a commonplace method. I have a feeling they’ve devised something faster and more covert.”
“Aren’t birds fast enough? What would be faster?”
“Shouting transmits a message at the speed of sound, and flags or smoke signals transmit it at the speed of light. Those are all short-range and obvious to everyone around, but they’re certainly fast.”
“Light and sound have speeds?”
“Yes. Sound is surprisingly slow, but light is incredibly fast.”
I had hoped talking it out would help me come up with a new idea, but nothing had come to mind. In fact, I was beginning to think it was impossible to narrow down the method at the moment.
“I guess there’s no way we could know for sure. In its most basic form, communication only needs ones and zeros.”
“Ones and zeros? Doesn’t that just mean you’re only saying yes or no?”
“Not at all. You should know how it works.”
“Huh?”
“Bagua. It uses lines representing yin or yang combined in groups of three to depict eight trigrams. Yin and yang are essentially zero and one. You get eight trigrams with three lines, but with six lines, you get sixty-four hexagrams—that’s sixty-four pieces of information. With that many, you could even map all the phonemes of Japanese onto them. You can build an entire system of communication with just zeros and ones.”
With seven lines, there would be 128 patterns. With eight, 256. Any amount of information could be transmitted. I didn’t know of any cases where such a code had actually been used, but in theory, it was entirely possible.
“Hmm... I don’t get complicated stuff,” Yuki said, boredom evident in her voice.
Even among my disciples, this sort of talk always caused a split between those who were interested and those who weren’t. I hadn’t really expected Yuki to understand anyway.
“Fortunately, we were able to protect the city this time,” I said with a sigh. “We’ll probably stay here for a few days. I guess I should use that time to come up with a better way to take down the undead armies next time.”
“Oh, so you’re not gonna use the barrier again?”
“Just to be safe. Even though the chances of finding any clues are slim, I wanna make sure we can examine any traces of the spell.” I turned around and started heading back to the city, before a thought suddenly occurred to me as I walked. “Actually, did you come up with anything?”
“Pardon?”
“You seemed like you were spacing out during my sorcery talk.”
Silence fell over us for a while, only the sound of my footsteps filling the air.
“No,” Yuki finally said. “What you were saying just made me realize something.”
“What’s that?”
“If humans see the original in a mere likeness, and you’re no exception,” Yuki continued hesitantly, “then maybe the reason you’re so invested in the Hero girl is because you see that disciple in her.”
I stopped in my tracks. Looking down at the long shadow stretching beneath me in the moonlight, I responded quietly. “Maybe so.”