●
An unusual tension filled the living area of the Schillings mansion. A cloth had been laid out on the floor, and atop it were ten people, old and young, men and women alike. None of them moved at all; they looked as if they were dead. In fact, although none had any external injuries, they could be said to be corpses.
“Another one is being brought here,” said the butler. Yukinari and the others nodded. The butler backed out of the room; in his place, some young men from the community watch carried in a new body. This one was a middle-aged man. The same one who had reported one of the murders to Yukinari, right here at the mansion.
In fact, all of those laid out in front of them were familiars. On the far end lay Ulrike. At first they had propped her up on the sofa, but as one fallen familiar after another arrived, they spread out a cloth so that everyone could be set on the floor.
“This man’s dead, too!” one of the men from the community watch announced as they carried in the new familiar.
“I know... Please, calm down,” Fiona said, a strained expression on her face. “He was already dead. Er, what I mean is, he may not be permanently gone, so try to calm down. Leave everything to us.”
“Y— Yeah, sure...” The young men didn’t fully understand what she was talking about, but with the words coming directly from the deputy mayor, and with Yukinari nodding along beside her, they decided to defer to her judgment. They left the mansion, still looking rather disturbed.
When they had gone, Fiona turned to the erdgod, now looking anxious herself. “Yukinari...”
“I know. I already had Dasa look into it. She says they’re not necessarily completely dead. You could say they’re... only mostly dead. Their heartbeats and breathing are extremely slow, though.”
He could already tell what was going on: all of Yggdra’s familiars in Friedland were being put out of commission.
Strange though these people may have looked, they were the familiars of the erdgod of Rostruch, a town Friedland was engaged in trade with. The townspeople weren’t quite sure how to handle the bodies, so Fiona announced that she would collect them all at her mansion.
According to those who brought the bodies in, the familiars all collapsed at about the same time Ulrike had; in other words, the previous night. Yukinari and the others hadn’t slept a wink since then, wanting to keep an eye on what was happening.
It turned out Dasa’s pronouncement of “She’s dead” on her initial examination of Ulrike had been mistaken. Yes, her breathing and pulse had been impossible to detect at the time Dasa had examined her, but as Yukinari had just said, they had simply gotten very, very slow. The only thing remotely similar in Yukinari’s experience was hibernation, or perhaps “playing dead.”
The familiars’ body temperatures had fallen until they were close to the ambient. Although these familiars had been joined with a plant, their basic human anatomy hadn’t changed. They still relied on their hearts to pump blood, still needed a skeleton to support their bodies, and muscles to move. And of course, they still produced body heat, if somewhat less than the average human.
The only difference seemed to be that Yggdra was somehow involved in their brains and nervous systems; the familiars in general had no sense of individuality. Everything their bodies did was controlled by, or at least connected to, Yggdra.
The familiars had begun as living sacrifices offered to Yggdra—or rather, they were the elderly and the ill too weak to ever recover. Rostruch’s medicine could not save them, so they were given to the erdgod instead. All this meant that the familiars had already died once.
Yggdra would plant a seed in the dead person, plant cells to support the body and eliminate whatever had killed it. The nervous and circulatory systems began working again, and a familiar was born. So when Fiona said that these familiars were already dead, she was right. They could only move because Yggdra was controlling them.
Silently, Berta put a blanket over the newly arrived familiar. It didn’t mean much. They no longer felt things like cold. As strange as it sounded, they were in a “vegetative state” in the most literal sense.
“Um, Lord Yukinari...”
“Aren’t you tired, Berta? And you too, Dasa. You should go rest for a while.”
Despite Yukinari’s suggestion, both girls shook their heads.
“If you can’t rest, Lord Yukinari, then neither will I.”
“I’ll go to sleep when you do, Yuki.”
This was actually the third time they’d had this conversation.
“All right. But this could turn into a real endurance test. If you reach your limits, you should rest. No, wait—rest. That’s a command.”
“Okay,” Dasa said, nodding. “But you mustn’t overwork yourself, either, Yuki. That’s a... command, too.”
“Right,” Yukinari said after a long moment, and smiled.
He had actually been planning to take a break before much longer. According to what Ulrike had told him, at present there were twelve familiars in Friedland besides her. By his count, all of them were now lying in this room. There was no way around it: all of Yggdra’s familiars were down for the count.
“What in the world is going on...?” Fiona said, looking down at the bodies.
“Every familiar in town seems to have stopped moving at the exact same time, so it’s hard to believe something happened to each of them individually. Especially not Ulrike. I was watching her when she collapsed.”
“Yes, that’s what you said.” Fiona nodded.