Of course, bunnies couldn’t jump to the moon. That amount of jumping power didn’t exist in the realm of biology, and Usagi, necromanticist and Fighter of the Rabbit, did not possess that exceptionally superior of a physique. The realm above the skies should have belonged solely and incontestably to the elder Tatsumi brother, the Fighter of the Dragon. Rabbit’s incursion had been a feat beyond miracle. How then, had the necromanticist soared to such heights?
He had the help of a dear and trusted friend—Sharyū, the Fighter of the Monkey.
Or to be more precise, he had the help of her corpse. Alive, Monkey would almost certainly never have helped him in that way. Alive, she had been a pacifist beyond compare, and she had never used her powers for such a purpose—nor had she ever even considered it. Now that her undead corpse existed only to serve her precious ally, all her restraints had lifted. The hero was once said to be capable of putting an end to any war on earth—perhaps even beyond—were she to decide to finish it by force rather than seek a peaceful resolution. Now, freed from any moral boundaries or physical limiters, she would do anything for her so-called friend.
Her first duty was to hurtle Snake’s head as hard as she could into the skies above the abandoned city. Throwing any object straight up was not such an easy task for most people, but it was for her—most feats that would have been difficult for others came easily to her. Rabbit’s only worry had been that she might throw Snake’s head into orbit or beyond, but even that outcome wouldn’t have been ruinous. From the moment Rabbit had gained the allegiance of Monkey’s corpse, he secured a decisive advantage in the battle. A small mistake here or there wouldn’t prove his downfall.
The dead hero proved herself still capable of heroic feats, and Snake’s head traced an almost perfectly vertical path and narrowly avoided breaking free from Earth’s pull. The purpose of the throw was, as Dragon had surmised in his final moments, to provide Rabbit a bird’s-eye view—much like Chicken’s birds had once provided her—so that he could see the state of the battle as it reached the final act.
One reason he chose this course of action was because Snake—cornered by Ox and Tiger—had lost his quarry, Rat. Monkey had thrown Snake’s head to hunt down her own former ally, with whom she had shared a hideout. That in itself was ironic, but the greater irony played out when the head’s descent led it right into the arms of its brother and genetic match.
Their reunion was entirely a product of happenstance. The chances against it weren’t astronomical—at least not literally, as this was a head, not a meteoroid—but it was akin to winning the lottery.
A more romantic view would attribute the chance occurrence to the intangible bond between twins inseparable in their childhood and on the battlefield. Perhaps, even after death, the younger brother wanted them to be together.
On any other trajectory, Snake’s head still would have looked down at the arena from above his older twin; Dragon would have been revealed to the necromanticist regardless. But had the severed head not clamped onto its brother’s arm, Dragon might have been able to narrowly evade the leaping Rabbit’s killing strike.
Rabbit didn’t actually leap that high, of course. Monkey had thrown him too. This time, she aimed for that exact place.
The toss was almost out of a cheerleading routine, except without the cheer. While she had been living, the ever-serene pacifist would never have thrown the severed human head or the man with a better physique than her own, yet now she did both without hesitation—even with the understanding that Rabbit wouldn’t hesitate to kill Dragon. Now that she was dead, it wasn’t a matter of what she understood or didn’t understand. Her place was but to unfeelingly carry out Rabbit’s commands. If Rabbit had asked her to throw him all the way to the moon, she might have dutifully done so.
When gravity pulled Rabbit back to ground, her role was to catch him. As for Dragon—who had been split in two by Rabbit’s crude twin blades, Sangatsu-usagi and Shiro-usagi, or March Hare and White Rabbit—his two halves retained the power of flight, even in death, and as such required no catching. Besides, Rabbit didn’t coddle his new recruits. All of his friends held equal standing, whether rookie or veteran to his team. He didn’t play favorites, instead issuing orders equally to all—for the new recruits, this made for a kind of on-the-job training.
Even as he made his rapid descent, Rabbit quickly issued a command to Dragon’s separate halves—to make full and free use of their power of flight to go to their brother’s aid. Rather than send them away, he could have used them to carry him safely to ground, but the duty of the leader was to believe in his team—and he believed that Monkey would catch him.
As he plummeted downward, fulfilling his leader’s duty, he counted on his fingers. “Rat, Ox, Tiger—only three are left.”
Unaware of Team Rabbit’s impending charge, Ox and Tiger continued their standoff with Snake’s headless, armless corpse. In truth, the three weren’t in a true deadlock—Dragon’s read of the situation had been accurate. If Ox and Tiger wanted to flee, they could have. But that option was closed to them by Ox’s warrior pride and Tiger’s rage at nearly being killed. The moment seemed like it could have stretched on in perpetuity.
Then, as if dropped by a bomber plane in the far-off skies, the upper and lower bodies plunged down and shattered the standoff.
The lower body landed, cracking the pavement, while the upper body hovered roughly one meter off the ground. The pair made for a surrealistic splatter-flick sight. That Dragon had achieved flight, one of mankind’s great aspirations, might have once made him the subject of envy, but Ox regarded the dead man’s severed upper body, floating forlornly without its lower half, with unbridled contempt. Elevating the sight from splatter-horror to a grotesque and surrealistic farce was the object cradled gently in its arms—a severed head with an identical face. More than anything else, Ox despised the way Rabbit made playthings of the dead.