Ox tore the arm from his throat and tossed it to the street. Then he fell to his knees, coughing and gasping for air. Even for the natural-born fighter, the outcome had nearly been fatal. If any other proof was needed, one needed only to look to his throat, where the deep impressions left by Snake’s fingers remained. Ox’s skin was not only bruised but ruptured into bloody trails.
Once reanimated, the necromanticist’s corpses never stopped—chop them up or cut them apart and the pieces kept moving. But in a few exceptional cases, they had been stopped with relative ease. Chicken (whom Ox had killed with relative ease) gave Boar’s corpse a Sky Burial, leaving no trace of flesh behind. Ox was not aware of this, as it hadn’t come up in their short conversation, nor had he seen it with his own eyes. But Ox was the Natural-Born Slayer after all and had been able to correctly surmise the zombies’ weakness from something else he had seen not long before.
What he had seen was the charred remains that had once been Horse (whom Ox hadn’t been able to kill with relative ease). The giant warrior had been steamed alive in the locked vault—though the direct cause of death had been a lack of oxygen—but either way, his dead body was, in fact, dead.
Just as Tiger had gone to investigate the fire, so had Ox. When he arrived at the bank, he found Horse dead with the giant’s jewel already freed from his stomach. At the time, Ox didn’t think much of it—the master swordsman had not been moved by any petty desire to kill his escaped enemy—but now, he saw as plain as a burning flame that the necromanticist’s minion had killed Horse. And yet Horse had not joined the other walking dead. There must have been a logical explanation. By following that line of logic, Ox had been able to single-handedly land upon a method to kill the undead corpses for good.
Ox stood, his momentary display of weakness now over. He wasn’t healed by any measure, but the battle was not yet finished, and this was no time to rest.
He glanced at Tiger, whose flames had died out, and explained, “To put it simply, I killed him again with fire. It’s the cells in his body. If you cook them, they’ll go through necrosis, and he won’t be able to move anymore.”
At first, Ox’s unexplained gambit had thrown her into confusion, but even as drunk as she was, she was still an experienced warrior and had clued in to the general idea. She hadn’t reached the same logical conclusions—that the necromanticist’s legion was vulnerable to fire, or anything about cellular necrosis—but considering her throat was being crushed, such a realization couldn’t be expected of anyone. She did, however, understand that Ox was trying to burn the corpse’s arms. Even as she rolled on the asphalt to extinguish her flames, and even as the reanimated arm continued crushing her throat, she held the thing tightly against her chest—and she burned the arm to a final death.
As the flames died down, the tenacious arm finally lost its grip and went slack.
But now she howled, “You bastard!” Even though she owed Ox her life, he had set her on fire without so much as a word, and she wasn’t about to meekly bow her head and give him her thanks.
“I’m going to kill you! You think I’m going to treat you like some kid playing with fire? You’re dead!” She hurled another growl at him.
“If you’re feeling that lively,” Ox said to the raging Tiger, “then you must still be up for our fight. None of your burns look to be too bad either.”
As she didn’t offer her gratitude, he didn’t offer an apology. Perhaps he thought he had done nothing wrong—he had taken extreme but appropriate measures and only after properly securing her cooperation. Whatever the case, he decided that this conversation was over. He turned his gaze from Tiger and gently picked up the saber he had so roughly mistreated, even if the emergent situation had required it.
Then he moved his attention to unfinished matters.
Snake’s headless, armless corpse had finally managed to stand.
“Well,” Ox said, “this is more of a predicament than I’d expected.” Despite having just lived through a near-death crisis, Ox remained as gloomy as always—but he had good reason to, as he was without the means to deal with the walking torso. He knew what he needed to do—burn the abomination like he’d burned its arms—but he had no more fuel for a fire. In killing the arms, Ox had exhausted Tiger’s fuel.
Even worse, it would require a much larger blaze to burn an entire body—or an almost entire body, in Snake’s case. If a gas station had been nearby, that might have solved their problem, but Ox and Tiger weren’t so lucky. An electric-car charging station stood pointlessly within sight. Ox dismissed it, since shocking a corpse might only make it more active.
That left Ox with only his saber—but any foolhardy slicing-and-dicing would only result in a repeat of the macabre slapstick routine. If Ox cut off the corpse’s legs, they could crawl their way to him and have another go at crushing him, and the same could be said of the corpse’s innards. Slicing apart the corpse was worse than ineffective, it was countereffective.
As an aside, it should be noted that not every necromanticist operated under these same rules. The walking dead existed in many forms, and some zombies could be stopped by simply crushing their heads. Snake’s corpse owed its extreme tenacity to both Rabbit’s talents as a necromanticist, which transcended typical limits, and to Snake’s superiority as a warrior.
Earth’s Guidance—Snake’s sonar-like ability to grasp his surroundings via vibrations in the earth—gave his various scattered, severed parts the ability to keep on fighting. If he hadn’t been killed before the Zodiac War began and had been allowed to participate in the battle as was his right, he might have been able to fight his way into a spot among the favored winners. Earth’s Guidance, if used properly, could have given him the understanding of everything that happened in the abandoned city, whether outside, inside, or underground. Such an awareness would have provided him an incredible advantage. Perhaps Rabbit had understood this and decided to eliminate and convert this formidable rival to his side at an early—too early—moment.
With a growl, Tiger—who now reeked more of char than booze—stood and joined Ox in facing the corpse. Rather, she didn’t stand, but got on all fours. She said, “After this, you and I are gonna talk.”
“And I’ll listen. Now, can I count on you to work with me until we defeat this thing?”