The strongest fighter, then, needed to avoid overwhelming the weakest fighters so thoroughly that the weak would abandon the contest—and in Horse’s case, Ox had gone too far. Once Ox crossed that line, he needed to do everything in his power to make the kill. Maybe the natural-born warrior couldn’t fathom what it felt like to not be dead but broken-spirited.
Setting aside the discussion of the nature of Ox’s virtuosity for another time, when Horse lost his will to fight and barricaded himself away, he put the more likely winners, like Rabbit and Ox, in greater jeopardy. For all twelve fighters to die would be an unsatisfying end to the contest, but what reason did Horse have to give anyone a satisfying ending?
Horse wasn’t even sure he’d die from the poison when the time limit ran out. That would depend upon Stirrup. If this were a role-playing game, Stirrup bestowed upon him the defense of a post-game item. If his special ability could protect him from external attacks, then maybe—just maybe—it would work against internal attacks—even poison. That could have been his advantage, just as Rabbit the necromanticist could gather a tight alliance, and Dog had neutralized the poison in his body, and Chicken’s Eye of the Cormorant lifted the fog of war. If he, too, possessed some advantage tailored to the rules of the game, maybe this was it.
Of course, Horse had no proof behind this theory, and it wasn’t as if he barricaded himself in the bank vault having thought through any such plan. But if all the other fighters died from their poison, and Horse alone survived, then maybe the result wouldn’t count as a victory under the rules of the game, but as a living being, survival itself was a victory. As Sheep would have said, to live was to win.
Given this unexpected turn of events, the warriors who were still fiercely competing now found themselves in a precarious position. The likely winners—Ox, Rabbit, and Tiger—all possessed abilities that focused on fighting other people—none had the capability to smash through a barricade that had no entrance or exit. The only ones who had possessed that kind of pure destructive power had been Boar and her machine guns and Sheep and his grenades, but both fighters had already passed on to the next world. Barring any dark horse upsetting the contest’s current trajectory, the Twelfth Zodiac War would reach an ignoble conclusion.
The worst ending, however, would be if Horse’s Stirrup proved ineffective against the poison and he died like the others, only all alone in the vault.
Then a voice said, “If we don’t get some light in here, I’m going to fall asleep.”
A light then sprang to life and pierced the pitch-black darkness inside the vault. It seemed like magic, although the source of this light was purely technological, the exact opposite of fantasy. Though everyone walked around carrying one of the gadgets, it represented the culmination of modern technology—a smartphone. The glow of the awakened screen illuminated the vault and revealed not only the giant man slumped over, hugging his knees as he sat on the floor—but also the smartphone’s owner.
He was a boy in his mid-teens—of the demographic perhaps the least surprising to own a smartphone. It was the Fighter of the Rat, though Horse only knew him as the napping kid from the high-rise.
Rat’s sleepy eyes were fixed on his phone, like a commuter checking his email on the train. Without looking at Horse, he mumbled, almost as if talking in his sleep, “They say the glass they use on these smartphones is the same stuff the military uses. I heard about this guy that got shot with one in his pocket, and the phone stopped the bullet. Like an urban legend or something. You think it’s true?”
Without waiting for an answer, Rat continued, “You know, when I get a new phone, I’m the type who cracks the screen on purpose, first thing. The screen gets these radial cracks, almost like a spider web. It looks kinda badass, right?”
Horse hadn’t heard of anyone who broke their new phones on purpose, let alone that there was apparently a “type.” Horse was the type who never even removed the protective film. One could say that he had holed himself away in the vault because he spent his life fearing such scrapes, and that touches upon a serious, broader social issue, but this was no time for a therapy session. A more pressing question was at hand—how had the boy gotten inside?
Answering the unasked question, Rat said, “Oh, don’t worry about that. The thing about rats is, they always find their way in through even the smallest cracks.”
A crack? When Horse had entered the bank vault, he broke the lock behind him. The vault door was already built to keep intruders out, and he had enhanced the bulwark even further with a hastily constructed barricade of the heaviest objects he could find. Horse couldn’t guarantee that, given infinite time to search, an invader would never find a way through, but he was certain he hadn’t left any gap or any crack that could have been found and exploited so quickly.
Yet here the boy was.
“I am Nezumi, the Fighter of the Rat. I kill inexorably.”
Rat tossed out his introduction without even looking up from his smartphone. There was nothing of the fighter left in Horse, but he responded by rote.
“I am Uuma, the Fighter of the Horse. I kill in silence.”
Here he was calling himself a fighter when he didn’t even feel he deserved to be called the head of the Sōma clan. Until now, all he had felt was fear; for the first time, he felt self-loathing.
If Rat noticed, he didn’t show it. “Okay,” he said, eyes still glued to the glowing screen. The boy gave no indication that he was going to attack. From the battle’s start, he hadn’t once shown any interest in fighting. Since Horse was in no condition to fight, he owed his life to the boy’s apathy.
But Horse still had questions he would have liked to ask, like, “How did you get in here?” or similarly, “Why did you come in here?”
Unprompted, Rat said, “Oh, I just needed kind of an emergency shelter. Like a panic room, right? This Snake guy is chasing me. Well, I say Snake guy, but he’s really a corpse. I was supposed to be chasing him, but things happened. It’s like I’m being surrounded by the coils of a boa constrictor. Well he is Snake, eh?”
Horse didn’t know what the boy was talking about. Rat certainly didn’t seem to want to stop and explain either—it felt like he was talking to himself, if anything. A fighter who didn’t talk and a fighter who talked to himself, together in a locked room—just where was this going?