Real Name: Ryōka NIWA
Born: June 6
Height: 153 cm
Weight: 42 kg
Throughout her early childhood, Ryōka was the victim of abuse so abhorrent that words fail to describe it. She has no memories of her youth before the age of fifteen—she doesn’t know what happened, what was done to her, or what she had done. Her first memory is that of standing over a pulpy mess that seemed to have once been her parents, with a warm and bloody egg slicer in her hand. The authorities took her into their care, but the Niwa family took notice of her abilities and, after adopting her, began to force her to fight for them. Given no clear purpose, volition, or convictions of her own, she had only her orders. Because she has no qualms about killing or perpetrating deception or betrayal, her role on the battlefield is often that of the spy. But after years of duplicity, she is beginning to find it hard to tell friend from foe.
Her weapon is not a trident but rather a spading fork, which she has taken to calling Cockscomb. When she feels overstressed, she likes to go to an onsen, and she’s always a little bit happier when her battles take her near a spa resort. Her favorite food is eggs slow-cooked in the hot spring water.
Timid, but not weak; not strong, but determined. Not powerful, but not powerless; not hyperintelligent, but cunning. Niwatori, the Fighter of the Chicken, approached fighting now much as she had the first time she took up arms. She never cared at all about whatever gap in skill or ability might exist between her and her opponents, nor did she factor in their unique qualities or character traits. She could respect and appreciate her more formidable enemies, but ultimately, such things were situational—as mutable as the weather. The very best fighter might have an off day, and the weakest might hit upon a lucky break. The virtuous could be corrupted, and evildoers could reform. Such vagaries never captured her attention.
It’s myself I need to be thinking of.
She wasn’t self-indulgent or needlessly violent, but rather the opposite—she was so meek and restrained as to border on servile. But few were as self-possessed as she. To Chicken, other people were merely background elements. The Zodiac War’s principal rule—victory goes to the last survivor—suited her surprisingly well.
Of all twelve warriors participating in this contest—an event that came only once every twelve years with the promise of fulfilling any single wish—perhaps she alone viewed it not as a spectacle, but as a simple extension of her normal way of life.
When it came to Rabbit’s plan to use Boar’s corpse as live bait—or at least, undead bait—Chicken might not have grasped the necromanticist’s strategy as thoroughly as Dog had, but like Dog, she wasn’t distracted by the repulsive nature of Rabbit’s tactics. She found the man disturbing and creepy, of that there was no doubt, but that too was simply circumstance. And it was one she had turned to her own benefit.
By revealing what she knew about Rabbit, she was able to instill fear in Dog, lure him from his place of hiding, and at last, entice him into injecting his One-Man Army drug into her. Perils weren’t to be managed; they were to be leveraged. Chicken trusted nothing but her own abilities, and for a time, they had been boosted to their limit. Now she wanted to put an end to this contest before the effects wore off.
But this rush of power wasn’t going to tempt her into attacking Boar’s shambling corpse. Chicken wasn’t so reckless as to rush headlong into a field test before getting better acquainted with her new strength—at least, not when she had a better way, a way in which she could take care of Boar from afar.
In dealing with Dog, Chicken had perhaps oversold the threat posed by Rabbit’s undead soldiers. Though the necromanticist was indeed a threat to her, he wasn’t anything she couldn’t handle.
Wielding her spading fork, Cockscomb, like an orchestra conductor’s baton, she flicked her wrist, and for a moment, nothing seemed to change. But several seconds later, the effects were dramatic. A roar of hundreds of flapping wings cracked through the air above Boar’s walking corpse and announced the descent of the birds themselves, a torrential downpour of sparrows, swallows, crows, doves, skylarks, black kites, hawks, hummingbirds, and cuckoos alike and more, all acting as one.
As Chicken watched, she announced, “I kill by pecks,” though her target was too far, and maybe too dead, to hear. Every bird in the vicinity of the abandoned city had gathered to peck at Boar’s corpse. “I give to you my Sky Burial.”
Dog’s secret power was the One-Man Army, and this was Chicken’s—although she typically used it to clean up the battlefield after all the fighting was done. Unlike a video game, in the real world your enemies didn’t simply disappear after hitting the ground. It was a dilemma that had plagued soldiers of all stripes across the ages. But not Chicken.
There was an old saying, “A bird does not foul the nest it’s about to leave.” In other words, a person should leave a place the way they found it. After her battles were won, Chicken instructed her birds to consume the bodies. Paired with her Eye of the Cormorant, the two abilities constituted a mutually beneficial relationship between her and the birds. She would provide them with regular meals, and they would provide her with information. She had only kept her so-called Sky Burial a secret because she didn’t ever want to be forced to use it to clean up after other people’s messes.
Chicken was never the best strategist, but the advantage the Sky Burial provided her against Rabbit was so overwhelming that even she had no trouble grasping it. Normally, she would have trouble convincing the birds to attack a living adversary—such an act was beyond the scope of their arrangement—but Rabbit’s allies were corpses. Moreover, the undead were an affront to nature.
In one moment, hundreds of birds stripped Boar’s corpse to the bones, and in the next moment, even the bones had been carried away—probably to serve as nest-building material. But even though it was a corpse, it was an animated corpse—specifically, the animated corpse of a warrior chosen for the Zodiac War. The birds, though many, were merely birds, and the undead fighter hadn’t gone down without resistance. A few dozen dead birds had been left behind, their bodies scattered nearby. Apparently, Boar had managed to shoot them down, though the sound of her gunfire was drowned out by the flapping of the swarm. Now those guns, too, had fallen to the empty street.
What had she called her ability—“Making It Rain”?
Chicken hadn’t needed to be told that by Dog. Her birds had already told her before he had the chance. Boar was capable of spraying those two machine guns without ever needing to stop to reload, and judging by the number of birds she had shot down, her corpse had still been in command of that power.
Chicken had assumed that once dead, the fighters’ skills would be lost to them. Lucky for her, she hadn’t let her own enhanced strength get to her head. Had she instead decided to test herself directly against Boar, she would likely be covered from head to toe with bullet holes. Chicken’s faulty assumption nearly cost her life.