“Say, you were on board with Monkey’s peace proposal, weren’t you? Since you’re letting me crash here, I’ll let you know—that all went up in smoke. No Monkey, no peace. And Monkey got herself killed. That pacifist was at the heart of whatever plan she was cooking up, so that’s finished now. You know, I shouldn’t speak ill of the dead, but she was a real loser. It’s like, what good does all that talk about peace do when you’re killed? She never even told anyone what her plan was. Now it’s gone with her. You ask me, I think she might have just been making it up. She saw negotiating ceasefires as her heroic duty, after all. So maybe the first step was just to say anything she could say to stop the fighting, and then everyone could think of a solution together, or something like that. Sounds believable to me. No matter how prim and proper a front she put on, a hero would still pull a trick like that for the right cause. Don’t underestimate her hollow words, right?”
These half-mumbled ramblings weren’t enough to give Horse a good picture of what had happened outside, but he caught the part about a top competitor being killed. Who had killed her? Was it Ox with his saber?
“I just don’t get it,” Rat said. “Just how important is peace anyway? If everyone just stays on the defense, like you’re doing, the world will stop changing, won’t it? Audacity and mischief, that’s what brings change and evolution. A world that’s gone still is no different than a world that’s been wiped out. Just like how you’re the same as dead right now.”
Horse didn’t know what the kid was talking about. He didn’t want to know either.
“Being alive without taking action is the same as being dead. Compared to that, those corpses under that freakish rabbit’s control seem more alive. Say, you don’t know where that Sheep geezer is, do you?”
Sheep … geezer? Did he mean that old man who asked about his use of explosives? Horse had a vague recollection of the man, but why did this boy want to know his whereabouts?
“Ah, you don’t know,” Rat said. “That’s fine. Well, don’t worry about it. All right, I’d better get going. Hiding away in a place like this would be too demoralizing—or like being a horse with a busted leg, waiting to get shot. Bye then.”
The boy put his phone to sleep as if he’d finished replying to his mail. The vault plunged back into total darkness, and the boy seemed to have gone.
Then Rat said one last thing. “That Snake guy might come here looking for me. I think you should escape too. At least, you should do something, anything—that is, if you’re still alive. If you want to keep living.”
By the time Horse’s eyes adjusted to the dark, the boy really had left. Rat’s parting commentary was as arrogant as his invasion of Horse’s sanctum, but the fact was they were in the midst of a battle. The broken-spirited fighter should have been thankful that Rat had spared his life. He wondered if maybe he should take the child’s advice. If he simply blamed Rat for bringing danger to this place, then Horse would be the arrogant one.
But where could Horse run? Outside was Ox, the Natural-Born Slayer. However dangerous remaining in the vault might have been, going out there was far worse.
The mystery of how Rat had slipped past the barricade remained, but Snake—or was it Snake’s corpse—would surely be incapable of the same feat. Even if Horse took Rat’s warning in earnest, remaining barricaded in the safety of the vault still seemed the best course of action. As long as he was safe, he needed nothing else.
Rat’s words echoed in Horse’s mind. “A world that’s gone still is no different than a world that’s been wiped out. Being alive without taking action is the same as being dead.” For some reason, he couldn’t shake them. Again and again, the phrases repeated, dizzying his thoughts.
They were just the casual teasing of some kid who knew nothing about how the world worked. They were just one-sided ramblings which Horse had no need to take seriously. But he couldn’t get them out of his mind.
To shelter, to withdraw, to do nothing; to no longer need to fight should have been the easiest thing in the world, but instead it felt stifling—so oppressive, so suffocating, Horse could hardly breathe.
He could hardly breathe.
Suddenly, Horse realized it wasn’t the boy’s words that were making him feel this way, but by the time he stood, the vault was already filled with smoke, the shadows taken over by black clouds. Something was burning.
Not something. Everything.
The entire vault was burning. The temperature was rising with no end in sight, and the air carried an acrid stench so foul and so powerful it almost made Horse faint.
But the vault wasn’t just burning.
It had been set on fire.
Had someone judged his barricade too strong to be destroyed and decided to burn it? What, to melt it away? It made no sense. Horse’s defensive ability, Stirrup, would not be so easily damaged, even from the heat of a blaze.
But even though Stirrup was resilient against damage inflicted upon him, it was not so robust against damage resulting from something being taken away. Human life required oxygen, and so did fire; if the latter consumed all the oxygen, then the fate of the former was certain.
Confronted by this primitive, primal force—this chemical action—the silent warrior (or rather, former warrior), who sought survival through inaction, released a final cry that might have been a whinny.
The headless corpse stood before the burned-out husk of the bank. He had set fire to the vault, barricade and all—or rather, it wasn’t he who had done it. Yes, the liquid flames had been spewed by the flamethrower strapped to his back, the one he had worn as the Fighter of the Snake before his head was taken from him, but his actions after his death were under the necromanticist’s command.
His current command was to pursue Rat, and Snake had only set fire to the vault as part of the chase. Though he had no head with which to see or speak, he sensed that he had failed to finish the boy off. He didn’t linger over the building’s smoldering remains; he simply turned his back, and tenacious as his namesake, he pursued his prey.
In this way, Horse, the defensive giant, succeeded in escaping the battle—by being defeated without a fight.
Rabbit vs. Horse
End of the 6th battle