The previous night, the dead had already emerged by the time I turned around to see them, so this was actually my first time witnessing the moment when the dead appeared.
The first change that was apparent along the road was in the air.
It suddenly got colder, and an uncomfortable chill ran up my spine. Then bluish-white lights began to appear on the street and silently gathered into little swirling eddies. There were one, two, three, four little swirls…their numbers increasing one by one.
Every one of those little eddies was one of the dead.
The eddies eventually changed and took on human forms, and just like the night before, they started making wordless noises.
“Ahhh…”
“Ohhh…”
“I see.”
After observing the transformation, I waved my wand.
According to what Clarice had said the day before, physical attacks were effective against them.
“Hyah!”
I immediately let off a blast of magical energy from the tip of my wand. I figured I could go ahead and smash right through them.
I rained down attacks on the dead as they appeared, one after another.
However—
“Uaaah…”
—the orbs of magical energy I conjured were completely, harmlessly absorbed by the bodies of the dead.
Mm-hmm, interesting.
“Excuse me, but it doesn’t seem to be working at all.”
I glared at Clarice, who was swinging her sickle around behind me, slicing up the dead.
Hang on. Just what is going on here?
“Ah, sorry. Physical attacks do work, but if you just hit them with plain magical energy, it doesn’t have any effect, so be careful about that.”
“I wish you would have told me that ahead of time.”
“I’m telling you now, so forgive me. Sorry!”
As she lopped off a ghoul’s head, Clarice offered a rather casual apology.
I see, so rather than attacking them directly with magic, it certainly might have been safer to make sure I had something prepared that could deal physical damage, like her sickle.
And so I tried again—
“Hyah!”
With a spell, I conjured two swords and swung them around, controlling them with my wand. I presumed from the way she had said it that basically as long as it wasn’t magical energy, any kind of attack would work against the dead.
They were probably somewhat difficult opponents for mages to fight.
Though they were no big deal, as long as you understood how to combat them.
“How is it? Going okay?”
I heard her voice behind my back.
When I glanced over, I saw Clarice kicking up a breeze as she swung her sickle around, slicing up even distant ghouls with ease. Just what one should expect from a three-hundred-year-old ultra-veteran, I suppose.
“You can defeat them just by swinging your weapon around, so yeah, things are easy for now.”
I on the other hand had stuck my swords together hilt to hilt and was making them spin round and round in midair. Caught up in my slashing attack, the bodies of the dead fell to pieces.
“Home, go home—”
“Why did this happen to me—?”
“N-no—”
I cut them up, silencing their delirious talk.
I cut and cut, but one after another, more glowing eddies whirled into existence on the road, and the dead appeared again.
Sure enough, the dead seemed to be out in great numbers under the crescent moon.
“There’s no end to these things…”
I couldn’t help but sigh.
Even though I was a long way from exhausting my magical energy reserves, my enemies were dangerous things that could cause me all sorts of harm, major and minor, just by brushing against me. I couldn’t let my guard down for a moment.
“No end in sight at all, huh? Ha-ha-ha!” Clarice answered my complaint with a laugh.
Her laugh sounded dry. It didn’t sound like she was just talking about that night. I’d heard the real feelings of a woman who had been hunting the dead like this for three hundred years.
I recalled what she had said earlier that evening, right before we had come to this place.
I remembered the words she had said to me.
“—You know, really, I’d like to end this already.”
With a sigh, but still smiling, she had muttered those words.
✦ ✦ ✦
When Clarice was still young, her mother was a very kind and good person.
“You are my little treasure.”
She was always saying things like that with a smile and gently stroking her daughter’s hair. Clarice loved her mother.
She even thought that, as long as she had her mother, she didn’t need anything else.
However, her mundane life was thrown into disarray when she was ten years old.
“I think you probably already know about this, about what happened to my life,” she said. She had just gotten back home and sat down on the sofa with a big sigh. Then she continued, “My mother, she died right in front of me.”
I didn’t tell her I had already listened to that story just a little while earlier, right there in the same spot.
I stayed quiet and waited for her to speak.
There were parts of the tale that I hadn’t understood at all, when I’d heard it from her current mother.
Reincarnation.
She kept being reborn and living again and again.
I wasn’t clear on whether that was her own intention, or whether she was granted a new life every time she died like some kind of curse.
I didn’t know which was true for her.
“My greatest regret was watching my mother die without doing anything.”
What she told me then was a story from three hundred years earlier.
It was the truth, which wasn’t written in her memoir.