Hydemary paused there and recalled a conversation from the past. Once, when he’d gone to face a certain battle, she’d asked, “What’ll you do if you die?” He’d dodged the question at the time, but despite facing such a hopeless fight, Suimei had seemed strangely optimistic, like he wasn’t afraid of death.
Could such a magician truly be defeated so easily? But even before any of this, Suimei had come back from modern Japan with everything he’d wanted. There was no way his preparations had been lacking. Even if he’d only been ready for the bare minimum, he was supposed to possess more defensive power than a fortress. He had to have considered the worst-case scenario. Any magician had a plan for when they died.
“I don’t think this is the end,” Hydemary said.
“Is that so? Then cling to that delusion until the end of time,” Moolah spat back. “Die with that despair in your heart.”
Moolah was ready to make a move. She wasn’t going to overlook the opening created by the shock everyone was experiencing, and she would defeat them all, right here and now. Despite recognizing this, Felmenia and the others were sluggish, failing to react. The loss of the one they believed in had a clear impact on them. Felmenia’s eyes wandered all over. Lefille clenched her teeth and didn’t move.
“Hmph. So that man was your pillar,” Moolah said, lording over them.
“How dare you...”
Hatsumi trembled with rage, but her grief won out. She couldn’t put any strength into her limbs. Liliana glared at Moolah, looking like she was about to burst into tears at any moment.
“What a state you’re all in,” Moolah said. “Cleanup will be a chore.”
And just then, the situation took a drastic change.
“Aaaah. Aaah. Check. Check. This is a mic test. Not that this is a mic. It’s a retro cassette recorder. Aaaah. Check. Check.”
An idiotic voice came out of nowhere, and there was no mistaking it for anyone but Yakagi Suimei.
“Huh?”
“Wuh?”
“Hah?”
Felmenia, Lefille, and Hatsumi all made weird noises. After all, this was Suimei’s voice. They obviously understood it was recorded, but they couldn’t help but question the timing.
Why was his voice suddenly playing like this?
Where was it coming from?
They turned to the direction of the voice, then noticed a small cassette recorder under the scrap of Suimei’s suit. His voice then continued playing from it.
“Uhhh, if this worn-out recorder is playing, then I must say, with the deepest of regrets, that I, Yakagi Suimei, have passed away. Man, how lame. Please tell me, ‘Wow, you’re such a dumbass.’ Oh, did I even leave a corpse behind? Have I maybe been reduced to atoms? Jeez. That sucks.”
Felmenia and Lefille were both bewildered by his sudden monologue.
“Wh-What is this...?”
“I have no idea...”
Nothing made sense. Even if they could suddenly hear his voice, there was no telling what it meant.
Hydemary then realized that the recorder was charged with mana, and at that moment she figured it all out: this recorder was a lifeline to Suimei’s survival.
“Everyone! Protect it!” she shouted. “And don’t touch it!”
“Huh?”
“What do you mean...?”
“Among the magicians of my world,” Hydemary explained, “there are some who are very hard to kill. They’re called liches. They’re said to have released themselves from death.”
“Liches?”
“Now that you mention it, Suimei-dono mentioned something like that before...”
“By difficult to kill, I mean they have methods of escaping the cause of death,” Hydemary elaborated. “As far as I know, this can generally be split into four categories.”
With that preface, Hydemary began enumerating these techniques one by one.
“First: A stock of lives. In short, they have multiple lives, just like in a video game. By preserving enough energy to substitute for life beforehand, you can create a fixed number of lives to escape death.
“Second: Quantifying the point of fatality. A technique that makes it possible to define the point of death by damage to mana or the soul instead of the flesh and internal organs. In short, creating an HP pool.
“Third: SMOS. Swampman Operating System. A pseudo-resurrection technique accomplished by creating a new body with the same memories.
“And the hardest to pull off, a Grand Resurrection Ritual. This is a genuine spell to revive the dead...”
“Revive the dead...?” Moolah repeated. “Such a thing is impossible.”
“Are you so sure?” Hydemary said.
“I am,” Moolah stated. “Life cannot be restored once lost. It’s absolutely impossible to revive the dead. Not even a god’s power can accomplish it.”
“That’s true. However, where is the boundary before it’s absolutely impossible? Does someone die when their heart stops? Yet a cardiac massage can make a heart move again. And so, by changing the definition, the perspective changes too. Your definition of death is different from ours.”
“You mean to say the conditions aren’t equivalent?” Moolah asked.
“Exactly. The conditions,” Hydemary confirmed. “For humans, both life and death have certain conditions to be met. But magicians aren’t human anymore, so these conditions are different for us.”
Before long, the cassette recorder cut to the main point.
“I wasted some time with that useless chatter, but let’s begin Yakagi Suimei’s Grand Resurrection Ritual. Hm? Grand ritual makes it sound overblown? Shut your trap. Not only am I stabilizing my lost astral body, I’ve gotta fully analyze the vast records of my ether body. Things end up on this scale whether you like it or not.”
The cassette recorder beeped, and Suimei’s voice began chanting verse after verse. Sensing the danger behind this, Moolah took action.
“Tch! Ridiculous!”
She launched miasma at the cassette recorder, but it seemed to be protected in some way. It wasn’t even scratched.
“Uhhh, just so you know, attacking this thing is useless. You might have had the tiniest chance while I was chatting away, but the defensive spell is already in place. You really thought I wouldn’t protect the recorder? Hah! Well get a look at this! Dumbass! I bet you were all excited and giggling about killing me, but now you’re going, ‘Huh? What’s going on?’ like a total moron. Idiot! Dolt! Twit! ‘He died, so there’s no way a recorder popping out of nowhere can resurrect him on its own?’ Has your brain melted? Is your head rotting? Hahahahahahahahaha! Dumbass!”
Suimei’s voice was hurling abuse like a grade school student, sneering at the opponent in his imagination. As for the actual opponent this was being directed to... she trembled in rage, completely red in the face. Naturally, what followed was a peculiar kind of dialogue.
“How dare you mock me!” she cried.
“But you’re a total idiot! You must’ve been so smug after beating me. Were you? Oh yes you were. Otherwise, you wouldn’t be so pissed! Hahahahahahahaha! Ack! My sides!”
“I’ll kill you! I’ll kill you! I’ll kill you! I’ll kill you!”
“Not gonna happen now! You’re just gonna have to give it another go after I resurrect!”
“Shut your filthy mouth!”
“Hey, what’s it feel like? Come on. Tell me. Hahaha! It must be so frustrating! Hahahahaha!”
“Graaaaaaaaaah! You bastaaaaaaard!”
Even though this was supposed to be a prerecorded message, the conversation flowed as if Suimei were actually present. It was so natural, in fact, that the question rose as to whether Suimei should be praised for intuiting the conversation so well or scorned for being so foulmouthed.