But to examine the situation from the flipside, any fighter who met the conditions of victory would be the winner—even if that fighter were dead.
This interpretation of the rules—as extreme as it was—led Rabbit to take his own life before he could be killed. He had regarded his life with the same unfeeling attitude he had toward the lives of others. As if merely deciding to take a left turn upon seeing that the right turn was blocked, he recognized that he had no chance at winning alive and instead chose to seek victory dead. Before he ended his conscious existence, he imprinted himself with one command—collect the twelve jewels.
Ox thought, The judge could have prevented this mess merely by saying that death was grounds for disqualification—but the organizers could never have imagined the necromanticist would do this.
Or perhaps they had, and this was part of the advantage given to Rabbit. From what Ox had seen, he speculated that all twelve fighters held their own unique advantages against the rules.
Except for myself, that is.
For Ox to desire some advantage above and beyond his incredible innate talents was perhaps shameless. It could be said that his opponents hadn’t been given advantages but rather handicaps to even the match against Ox.
No, I did have a significant advantage—by meeting Tiger. If we hadn’t fought together, and if I didn’t have her help, I would be dead.
In any event, Rabbit had in effect lost the Zodiac War, then created for himself a loser’s bracket from which he could remain a contender. That being the case, when he stabbed Tiger in the stomach rather than somewhere more vital, he might not have missed his aim—if he was aiming for the jewel she had swallowed.
I can see his logic. If I remove any emotions from consideration, all of Rabbit’s actions can be explained. He’s not just showy and bizarre for the sake of it—though unusual in his looks and his methods, he’s making all the right moves.
But why was the man willing to go this far? The winner of the Zodiac War could make any single wish. But as long as there was life, there was hope—what wish could a person want so badly to be willing to die for it? If he wanted something that badly, shouldn’t he have given up on the contest and applied himself to finding some way to survive?
What had Rabbit decided to do, and what was he doing?
Ox’s questions lingered, but he cleared them from his mind. I don’t think I’ll ever solve this mystery. Even if I tried to find out what he sought by coming here, I’d have nowhere to start looking. If we couldn’t reach any mutual understanding while he was alive, we surely can’t now that he’s dead. In the end, it doesn’t matter. All I can do now is give him a proper funeral.
Giving Rabbit a funeral might have sounded like a kindness, but Ox really meant a cremation. Incinerating the necromanticist’s corpse was the only effective option left to Ox now. Theoretically, he could also freeze the zombie, but liquid hydrogen, or something of the kind, would be hard to find in the abandoned city.
Not that finding fuel and a fire starter will be easy. A gas station might still be my best bet. I could also go from car to car and siphon the gasoline, but that would take a while.
This time, he would have to face the corpse alone, and he remained unaccustomed to devising tricky strategies. As he tried to do so, his thoughts were interrupted.
“What—?” he even said.
He had put enough distance between himself and Rabbit that he thought he’d have a little more time before all the little pieces could catch up—and when Rabbit appeared, it wasn’t in pieces.
The carved-up chunks of the necromanticist’s corpse had reassembled themselves into the shape reminiscent of a man.
However, the form was only human in rough outline. The mass of parts shared a similar silhouette with Rabbit before his death, but in places all over it had been assembled wrong. His left arm was inside out, his right arm swapped with his left leg, his eyes lodged in his stomach, the top of his head protruding from the bottom of his back, his fingernails jutting out from his chest, his tailbone stuffed in his mouth, his heart exposed, and his fingers crawling around—everything had been so thoroughly jumbled, it was harder to find a part situated in the right place, like a plastic model put together by the whims of a builder lacking instructions or a finished picture.
Part hodgepodge and part patchwork, the parts were bound together by blood vessels and muscle fibers—among other binding agents like coagulated blood as glue, stripped-off skin as wrapping, bone fragments as bracing, and ripped-out wisdom teeth as pins. Though their arrangement was haphazard, the pieces were held secure so that they wouldn’t fall apart.
Rabbit’s blades, Shiro-usagi and Sangatsu-usagi, were there too, included like any other body part. The pieced-together corpse was using the weapons like crutches to help him walk. Since his arms—one of which was actually a leg—were in no shape to hold them, the weapons had been fastened in place with a couple lengths of small intestine.
He isn’t even a zombie anymore—he’s an abomination.
Through his many battles, Ox had seen dead bodies in terrible, grisly states, but this was the first time he had felt the urge to look away.
Here, too, Rabbit’s logic was present. Unlike Dragon and Snake, the necromanticist hadn’t the power of flight, nor had he experience with slithering and crawling along the ground. After being chopped up into many pieces, he must have reasoned that the fastest way to catch Ox was to reconstruct himself and walk just like was normal—although of course there was nothing normal about the amalgamated corpse’s sluggish shamble.
Disturbing as Rabbit’s appearance was, it gave Ox hope.
Being nearly strangled to death left me focused on that tactic—I’ve been assuming the corpse would attack me in pieces. Depending on the former fighter, a zombie might not consider remaining split up to be an effective choice. If that’s the case with Rabbit, chopping him up again might work to my advantage.
It might, but it wouldn’t get Ox anywhere new. He might be able to buy himself some time, but it would never finish Rabbit off.
I can’t afford to waste my time on this man—not that he’s leaving me a choice.