Real Name:Sumihiko TSUJIIE
Born: August 8
Height: 140 cm
Weight: 40 kg
Sumihiko used to be an arms dealer who only frequented war zones to make his sales, but after repeatedly getting caught in the flames of war, he began to distinguish himself as a fighter. Eventually, he caught the eye of a daughter in the family of one of his clients, the Tsujiie clan, and he was married into the clan.
The days when he traveled far and wide selling arms are long past, as is the fighting; for some time now Sumihiko has remained away from the front lines. But when he learned that his beloved grandchild was going to be chosen for the Zodiac War, he volunteered himself first.
This is his second Zodiac War—his previous being the ninth—and he was, obviously, the winner. (His wish: to see his grandchild.) In his active years, he wielded all manner of heavy weaponry to terrific and destructive effect, but lately he’s taken to grenades. He oversees the manufacture of his own custom grenade, Shūkaiokuri, the Old-Timer, which he boasts of as more of a work of art than a weapon.
Though the habit is unseemly for one his age, he is addicted to smartphone games and often tops the biggest spender lists of the most popular games. Through his online persona, the old man has once again found fame as a highly respected warrior.
Hitsujii, the Fighter of the Sheep, thought, If the twelve fighters participating in this battle were ranked by overall strength, even the most charitable assessment would place me at tenth or worse. After all, youth is strength. Damn, how I wish I could stop getting older.
But age alone wasn’t the whole of his problems. As times changed and new generations came to prominence, fighting styles and tactics changed in equal measure. In the high-rise, he had observed the other eleven fighters one by one and was struck by how many seemed alien to him and unlike any warriors of his day—of course to one another, they were nothing unusual. He was a relic from another time; not just aged but old. In the intervening years, fighters had evolved and left him behind. That was the way of the world.
But he didn’t believe this put him at a significant disadvantage—just as the others were inscrutable to him, he was as inscrutable to them. Likewise, if the others possessed advantages he lacked, so too did he possess advantages they lacked.
Of those, I have more than I could count, but the foremost is experience.
Monkey might have saved more lives than any other combatant there, but none had seen as many battles as Sheep. He had escaped death so many times that he’d have liked to tell the organizers a thing or two about the tame rules they cooked up for this Zodiac War. That sentiment only reinforced the feeling that the times had changed.
I won’t make that tired complaint, “The old days were better,” and all that—the present is better as a matter of course. For one thing, soldiers have fought hard to make the world a safer place.
As long as humans walked the earth, war would never cease. A mercenary would never be without employ. But the kinds of battlefields Sheep saw on the front lines of war—or before that, when he worked as an arms dealer—with mountains of corpses and rivers of blood, were nowhere to be found anymore.
This was a good thing, but thinking about it made him feel lonely. Over the course of his long life, he had come to see the passing of time from a more distant perspective, as if gazing upon a landscape. This too was an advantage exclusive to Sheep.
Another was information, which in the Zodiac War was practically life. Sheep knew who his eleven rivals were. He knew exactly to which houses they belonged—actually, that wasn’t quite true. He knew of ten, but the last was a simple process of elimination. The only combatant about whom he hadn’t managed to dig up any information was the Fighter of the Rat, who must have been the kid.
Well, some wet-behind-the-ears whippersnapper won’t have any history on or off the battlefield for me to find.
Now that he’d observed his opponents in person, he didn’t merely rely upon his research, but fine-tuned his mental dossiers.
Of the competitors this time around, three stand out as unquestionably the top fighters in the world: the Fighter of the Monkey, Sharyū; the Fighter of the Rabbit, Usagi; and the Fighter of the Ox, Ushii. When you assemble twelve people together, some are bound to possess talents far surpassing the rest—but these three are just beyond.
Sheep didn’t know if the trio had been brought here by chance or by purposeful design—but whatever the case, Sheep knew he mustn’t face them head on.
I’m just skin and bones—I wouldn’t last ten seconds against them. But if I can arrange it so they destroy one another, even a feeble old fighter like me would have a real shot at winning.
According to Sheep’s analysis, after taking his opponents’ personalities into account, Ox stood unsurprisingly at the top. Nearly as dangerous at number two was Rabbit, and the pacifist Monkey ranked third. If he hadn’t factored in her character, Monkey would likely have claimed the top spot, but Sheep couldn’t imagine that a hero like Monkey would ever betray her pacifist ways.
Boar, of the previous winning house, is fourth, and Horse and Dog, who both seem the up-close-and-personal types, share fifth and sixth. In seventh and eighth are the twins, Dragon and Snake—or at least they were, when they came as a set. With Snake as the first dead, Dragon’s placement will surely drop. For now, I’ll slot Chicken in ninth.
At the starting point, only Chicken had observed the other fighters with the same eye as Sheep. She recognized that she lacked strength and was seeking to turn her weakness into an advantage. The woman was making the necessary effort to turn her weakness from the reason she wouldn’t win into the reason she could win.
She would likely rank herself at the very bottom, though I would never agree. For now, I’ll give myself tenth place, leaving the only two I can say for a fact are weaker than me: Rat and Tiger. Tiger is so lacking I can’t even fathom what she’s doing here.
Rat was young—too young—and even if he could have somehow squeezed Sheep’s life experience into his own, the child would have been prone to making careless misjudgments, and as such, the old man didn’t see much hope for him. But Tiger didn’t even seem like she belonged here. Of course, there must have been something about her that earned her a place in the Zodiac War. That might have been enough cause for Sheep to reassess her threat, but he dismissed it. He needed to look toward those above him, not those below. How could he surpass the nine who ranked higher than him? How could he close the gap that separated him from them? Those were the questions he asked himself.