Night was beginning to fall. As the dusk deepened, a girl of about ten walked alone through the ruined city square. She was holding an old, worn-out book up to her chest. The girl was one of the few survivors after the undead assault on the city.
There were no other figures in the square. It was completely lifeless, filled with only piles of hastily cleared rubble. Other than the girl, the only movement came from the glow of a few scattered fireflies. The girl started toward the only building in the square that had light spilling from its windows, but just as she reached for the door, she seemed to notice me standing there.
“Wah!” The girl was startled for a moment, then stared at my face before suddenly breaking into a smile. “It’s you!” It was the same little girl Amyu and I had rescued from the rubble. “I’m so glad you came back! Everyone’s still scared... They don’t know when we might be attacked again. I’m sure they’ll be relieved to know you’re back!”
I didn’t respond, but she kept speaking with the same radiant joy.
“We’ve slowly been going back to our normal lives. I got some vegetables today, so I made soup. Is that red-haired girl with you? Would you like to eat with me?”
I still didn’t respond. It was odd. Neither Amyu nor I had exchanged more than a few words with the girl we’d rescued. All we’d done was pull her seemingly unconscious body from the rubble and leave her at the makeshift shelter. She shouldn’t have even remembered our faces, yet there she was, smiling at me.
“My dad’s better now, thanks to you two! Come on, dad!” The girl turned back to the house, and the door opened, light pouring through the crack.
A plain, ordinary-looking man stepped out. “Ah... Ahh...” He was looking up at the sky rather than at me. Hollow words spilled out of his slack-jawed mouth. “Th-Thank...you...”
“Dad! Speak properly!”
“Thank you...f-for saving...my daughter...”
“Thank you...for...”
Another voice rang out, and a middle-aged man appeared from the dark house next door. He was a generic sort of man you could find anywhere, and he had the exact same face as the first.
“Th-Thank you...”
“You...saved us...”
Two more men walked out of an alley to the west.
“I thought...I was dead...”
“I’m so glad...to be alive...”
More middle-aged men rose up on the roof of a house and inside a shop.
“B-But if you had...”
“If you had come sooner...”
“We wouldn’t have suffered...so much...”
“Why... Why...”
“You’re so strong... So why...”
From behind rubble, from the windows of ruined houses, from the mouths of broken chimneys—middle-aged men all bearing the same face emerged from every location.
“Did you not enjoy my performance?” the one taking the form of the young girl asked, the smile now gone from her face. “A pity. I went through such lengths to make it entertaining for you. Dealing with the living is always so troublesome.” The necromancer sounded frustrated. Both their tone and the content of what they were saying were ill-suited to the little girl they were appearing as.
“Seems like you knew I was coming,” I said, surrounded by the undead men.
“Of course.” The necromancer nodded with an oddly composed smile—one far too self-assured for the face of the young girl. “I am a necromancer. The corpses I command aren’t limited to humans. Did you know that a bird’s vision far surpasses that of a man’s? Their colors are peculiar, but perhaps that’s because they can see hues invisible to us,” the necromancer said, a hint of pride in their voice.
Ordinarily, a necromancer couldn’t share sight with the undead. What the mage before me was describing was far beyond conventional necromancy.
“At any rate, you have quite the curious dragon serving you. I’d very much like to have it when it dies.”
“That would be difficult, seeing as you’re going to meet your end tonight,” I replied quietly.
“What a hot-blooded being you are.” Despite my threat, the necromancer maintained their composure. “However, you seek a dialogue, no? Seika, I believe it was. I don’t know if that’s your real name, but that’s what you were called back then, if I’m not mistaken.” Ignoring my silence, the necromancer continued.
“You must have things you wish to know, as a fellow practitioner of the arcane arts. I have questions of my own. Allow me to begin, if you don’t mind. What brought you here?” the necromancer asked, almost philosophically.
I paused a moment before answering. “Distance limitations.”
“Oh?”
“No matter the spell, the effect always weakens with distance. To control so many undead across a vast area would require some sort of trick. And I think that’s your trick right there,” I said, casting my gaze on the middle-aged man standing behind the necromancer. “You relay your spell through special, identical corpses. We found another corpse with the same face as the one we pulled out of the rubble here.”
“How lucky for you,” the necromancer said as though surprised. “There are only a few corpses acting as relays. You were lucky to find one. I assumed that if the dead were all cremated together, or if their faces were even slightly damaged, they would never be discovered.”
“It wasn’t luck. Rendering armies powerless without damaging their bodies is a simple feat for me. I’ve grown accustomed to the circumstances, which has granted us some leeway. The leeway to properly mourn the dead.”
It was by no means mere good fortune. It was because Amyu had decided to bury the dead and defeated Ren that I was able to see through the enemy’s trick and make it here.
“If there was any luck on our side, it’s that you turned out to be unexpectedly foolish.”
“Hmm...”
“Someone calling that corpse father only brought more attention to it. In hindsight, it was a bafflingly stupid move.”
“You’ve got me there. At the time, I thought it was my best option,” the necromancer said with a forced smile. “I feared you would examine the relay corpse. While I tried not to leave any extra traces, it was always possible I might have missed something. I wanted to pass the body off as a resident’s corpse. I thought my acting was pretty good for something I came up with on the spot, but I suppose it completely backfired.”
“That was quite an unfortunate encounter,” the necromancer continued. “I had intended to make this city into one of my workshops, but you all showed up before I could finish. I tried to hide under the rubble, only to end up getting found by that red-haired girl. I suppose that was my first error in this experiment.”