Real Name: Takeyasu TSUMITA
Born: October 10 (officially)
Height: 164 cm
Weight: 58 kg
Takeyasu is a young warrior who fights alongside his elder twin brother. Such fiercely idiosyncratic fighters rarely band together on the battlefield, but Dragon and Snake provide a legendary exception. Their superiority in battle goes without saying; though they are only the most recent of a long line of Tatsumi Brothers, they work together better than any in history.
The younger brother favors weapons of flame in battle, and he has a reputation for starting fires so devastating that the bodies of his enemies can’t be told apart from one another. He often claims that without the outlet his mercenary career provides him, he would have been a serial arsonist. He is undoubtedly a most dangerous man.
He calls the flamethrower he wears on his back Hitokage, written with the kanji for “person” and “shadow”—the implication being that he will burn people until not even their shadows are left. That the name shares the same pronunciation as the word for “salamander” is intentional.
At home, he raises a wide variety of reptiles. He publishes an anonymous blog, which is incredibly popular among fellow enthusiasts, about his experiences raising the creatures. Whenever a precious pet passes away, he grills the reptile and eats it. Unlike the battlefield, where he doesn’t give any thought to those he kills, when it comes to his pets, he looks after them all the way to the end.
Five challengers remained in this, the Twelfth Zodiac War. In zodiac order, they were: Rat, Ox, Tiger, Rabbit, and Dragon. To recap their accomplishments, Rabbit had killed Snake, Boar, Monkey, and Horse; while Ox and Tiger killed Chicken and Sheep respectively. Rat had not defeated anyone, and Dragon had not yet been in a fight. That said, the Zodiac War was not a contest of who could kill the most people, nor was it at all relevant who among the fighters was the strongest. In some cases, depending on the rules and the course of events, a person might claim victory without ever fighting any opponents.
Based on all present knowledge, one fighter—Rabbit, the only to form a lasting team—held an overwhelming advantage over his enemies. Not only had he successfully formed an alliance, his corpses acted as a monolithic unit over which he held absolute command. He had lost the former Fighter of the Boar to a ravenous flock of birds, but his remaining forces continued to pose a considerable threat to the other fighters—and now that fewer than half the combatants remained, Rabbit and his minions were a greater danger than ever.
The second half of the Twelfth Zodiac War would now hinge upon the eradication of Team Rabbit. In theory, the simplest solution would have been for the other four fighters to join forces, if only temporarily, and fight as one team against another. That idea, however, was doomed to remain a fantasy. The fighter most capable of building an alliance was Monkey—who now belonged to Rabbit—and of the remaining living challengers, Dragon—who had not yet battled any opponent, and whose movements remained a mystery—was unlikely to cooperate. In all of Dragon’s experience on the battlefield—and off it, in his daily life—he had never worked alongside anyone except his little brother.
At present, the surviving fighters had no practical course of action to thwart Usagi, the Fighter of Rabbit, and his corpse army.
I am Tatsumi the Elder, the Fighter of the Dragon. I kill for the money.”
“I am Tatsumi the Younger, the Fighter of the Snake. I kill for the money.”
The brothers would never again stand shoulder to shoulder, striking an intrepid pose, and announce themselves in unison. For one thing, the younger brother’s vocal chords had been severed in two. Unable to hear, smell, or speak, his headless corpse wandered the ghost town that served as the Zodiac War’s battlegrounds. The roaming dead seemed a perfect fit for an abandoned city, but this corpse wasn’t simply walking at random.
He walked with a purpose—not his own, as he possessed no consciousness, but a purpose nonetheless. His superior had assigned him a command as relentlessly unfeeling as the corpse itself—kill the Fighter of the Rat.
He didn’t have to understand whom it was he pursued. Nothing mattered to him anymore. Without a consciousness, he couldn’t think; without thought, he couldn’t make any decisions; without making a decision, he couldn’t stop. The corpse kept on walking and kept on moving.
That he couldn’t see or hear didn’t matter either. Much like the slithering reptiles with which Snake shared affinity, the fighter’s feet detected minute vibrations in the ground that allowed him to sense and react to his surroundings—although to be clear, he was dead, so he didn’t sense anything. He merely reacted to the stimuli, like a dissected frog hooked up to electrodes, each jolt spurring its legs into motion.
The detailed mechanics aside, Snake’s unique ability—Earth’s Guidance—served as a kind of sonar that would lead him to Rat wherever the youth fled and hid—even if the hiding place was, for example, a bank vault. But a zombie was still a zombie, and Snake didn’t move with great speed, but because he had no conscious self, he would never give up his tireless pursuit, not until his legs rotted and snapped—and possibly not even then.
Meanwhile, Rabbit kept Snake’s head and took it with him to a new location. Rabbit had made excellent use of the severed head in his fight against Monkey, and he seemed to have another use for it in mind now.
That brings up a difficult question that once raised may never be settled—what constitutes a person? Which portion of the human body is the man? When Snake’s head was removed from his body, in what part did his essence dwell? His mind was in his head, but his heart was in his chest; his hands were what used tools, his legs were what walked.