Still nothing. Monkey was perplexed by the lack of any response whatsoever from the man, but quickly she learned that he simply hadn’t been listening at all.
She shouldn’t have left that manhole cover open.
A swarm of birds flew out from the hole.
He wasn’t listening to me—he was waiting for his underground reinforcements to arrive. And he didn’t want a one-on-one fight, he just wanted to split us up.
His strategy was without regard for anything else and devoid of even an iota of emotional attachment, as if he were putting together a jigsaw puzzle. To call it machinelike wouldn’t quite have been right. He was working chess pieces on a board—or rather, Othello pieces, where each is indistinguishable and only position matters. There was no humanity in it at all.
Monkey had negotiated with all manner of people, but this man’s values were so alien to her that he might as well have been from outer space.
Undaunted, unwavering, Monkey persisted, “Rabbit, is your wish—”
But then the roar of flapping wings drowned out her voice.
The birds rushed her, and no words could dissuade their attack. At least here, aboveground, she wouldn’t have to worry about getting some terrible infection, but the animals’ beaks and talons were still dangerous enough on their own.
This leaves me no choice!
Monkey steadied her resolve and began slapping down the dead birds as they assailed her from all directions. From a distance, she appeared only to be flailing wildly, but in reality, her movements were calculated, and she struck the mock-phoenixes one by one, sending them slamming to the ground. Not every attack connected with her winged enemies, but even those would-be misses were feint attacks designed to restrict and guide the birds’ movements. The strikes that landed didn’t simply drop the creatures either, but broke their wings so that they wouldn’t take flight again.
Monkey considered her opponent’s fighting style inhuman, but her own technique was superhuman. Even in the sewer, she might have been able to fight with equal success—except there, she had been accompanied by a child and decided to act with caution.
With moves so smooth they seemed choreographed, she wielded her hands like knives and chopped down the birds one after another. But inside, her emotions were not so poised.
Dead or not, attacking these little creatures feels wrong.
Was that Rabbit’s plan all along? Had he sent the birds in first to mentally weaken her?
Just as the birds were nearly all felled, and Monkey began to feel a moment of relief, the main challenger struck. He came in low, swinging his massive blades in an attempt cut her torso in half.
He’s going for my stomach, Monkey realized—an unfeeling attack, as if her body was nothing but a container for her jewel inside. That mindset is as grave a danger as I’ve ever seen—but his skill is not on that same level.
His fighting skills weren’t just on a lesser level—they weren’t even close. His swing was that of an amateur, if anything. It seemed his decision to have Snake ambush her as she came up from the manhole hadn’t just been to safeguard himself from a possible counterattack, but to cover for his own deficiencies.
Well, a necromanticist has little need to be a master swordsman—but his not being one will save my life.
The birds had indeed thrown her mental state into some small amount of disorder, and were she facing someone of, say, Ox’s caliber, even she might have been in danger.
Monkey leaped high into the air, passing above the horizontal swing of the twin blades, and then even above Rabbit’s head, finally landing behind his back. She could see—from not just how he handled his weapons, but also from the placement of his feet and the way he moved his body—that he was no master fighter. Unlike Monkey, he lacked the expertise to respond to an attack from behind—and she wouldn’t give him the time to turn around. She moved to pin him down—her thoughts were already on how she would incapacitate him, how to subdue him, and how to convince him to see her way, when she heard him say,
“Got you.”
And she felt two objects inside her, and her thoughts stopped in their tracks.
“What?” she said.
She didn’t need to see his twin blades to know they were what impaled her, but she couldn’t help herself from looking. When she did, she wished she hadn’t.
There they were, deep inside her fragile body—too deep. They looked more like two handles sprouting from her flesh.
Without turning, Rabbit had twisted his wrists to drive those two massive blades into her, each passing cleanly into each of her lungs. Derailed though her thoughts had been, it was clear to see that these wounds were fatal. Whether she would die first from asphyxiation or loss of blood was anyone’s guess, but she was going to die.
How—how did he do that? Where did that come from?
He had failed to cut open her stomach to reach the poison jewel within, but still, it was a masterful strike. Had he been putting on an act to trick her into believing he was an amateur? Was it a feint? Monkey didn’t think so. If he was that good at putting on a performance, he should have been an actor, not a fighter. What was it then?
As the strength seeped from her body, she slumped forward onto the blades that were still lodged in her lungs. She went limp, and her shoulders fell back, along with her head, and then she found the answer.
A short distance away from where they fought, dangling like a giant fruit from the limb of a roadside tree, was a severed head—recognizable to anyone who had been there at the start of the game. It was Snake’s head.
That’s right … the Snake that went off with Rat was just a headless body. Meanwhile, she had known nothing of the whereabouts of the bodyless head. But what should it have mattered? A body without a head could still do something, at least, but what could a head without a body accomplish?
But Rabbit had found a use for it. He suspended it from a tree branch to make an impromptu surveillance camera—one that could watch his back. One that could protect him.
Without turning, Rabbit said, “It’s nice to have a friend that you can trust will have your six. It’s really, really nice.”
Then he continued, “It’s going to be all right. Don’t be afraid. I’m only going to take your life. But in exchange, I want you to be my friend too. You know, I always liked you, from the moment I first saw you.”
At the start of the Zodiac War, when Monkey was looking for friends to join with her, and Rabbit raised his hand, not one person in the room believed his offer was genuine. Not even Monkey, the pacifist at heart, completely believed his intentions were true. But when it came to wanting to befriend her, he had been uncharacteristically sincere. And now, Team Rabbit had its newest member—the shadow of a hero, bereft of the pacifism more precious to her than her own life.
Rabbit vs. Monkey
End of the 4th battle