A wrecked alley came into view.
Footsteps whose direction was hard to place struck the walls and echoed.
The intervals between the sounds were very short.
I walked the alley in silence.
And when I drew near the corner.
A screech from torn human vocal cords reached me.
It was a monster shaped with legs stuck all over its body.
"......."
Its bulk was a little smaller than mine.
It was screaming noisily as it charged at me.
Twisting my upper body to avoid its leap, I drove the halved longsword into the area of its neck.
Pinning the thing's countless legs with my knee as it thrashed, I struck down at its neck several times.
Soon a grinding crunch came and its neck bone broke.
Other monsters that heard its cry would find this place before long.
I hurried away.
A week had passed since I hid myself in Oscalt's alleys.
The city had become a ruin, and the fortress had lost its function.
The change happened on the second day, immediately.
Undead that climbed over the wall attacked the monsters.
How incompetent a thing a human is.
The lull the soldiers had built up over their whole lives reverted to the primeval in a single day.
This was not a war between the monsters and me but a three-way struggle among the monsters, me, and the undead.
If hell punishes those who have sinned, then what exactly does this place punish?
Is not even the word hell too generous for this city of death, where there are none who are judged and only those who judge?
A commotion had risen, so the monsters would swarm before long.
The swarming monsters would raise a greater commotion and draw the undead in.
The undead were in effect serving as a suppressant, keeping the monsters from forming excessively large packs.
On top of that, thanks to the tangled structure of the alleys, I never had to face hundreds of monsters at once.
Undying or not, if hundreds came at me all at once, I would be a paste crusted onto the ground on the spot.
The road toward the wall was arduous.
If I forced it I could reach the wall in a day, but trying to draw as little of their attention as possible had dragged it out to a week.
And only today.
"Here at last."
Oscalt's wall spread out before my eyes.
The undead came over it like a rat snake sliding over a fence, so it was not especially reassuring, but since the reason they came over in the first place was the monsters' commotion, they would not come this way merely to catch a single human.
Formel would need at least another week to arrive.
I intended to hold out that week with my back to the wall.
I was moving slowly along the wall.
Something moving came into view on the street beyond the end of the alley.
Corpses in the middle of the street, tearing into a lump of something unidentifiable.
'......Guards from atop the wall?'
The soldiers turned monster and the undead seemed to have had a round of it.
The victor, by the look of it, was the undead.
The undead were comparatively intact in appearance.
To think that even rotting corpses looked sound beside humans sculpted at random.
I did not go so far as to grimace at it anew.
Instead I moved quietly toward them.
The undead smell the living.
Since I had already confirmed undead with my own eyes, there was no option of not engaging them.
The rotting corpses let out the unmistakable cry of monstrous beasts.
'Three big ones, two small.'
Dealing with them all wouldn't be hard.
The point was how quietly I could do it.
In fact, that was not so complicated a matter.
All I had to do was not resist as they lunged in at random.
Having flesh torn off would leave me feeling somewhat foul, but there was no better method for shutting them up and disposing of them one at a time.
- GRRRRR!
The undead clung to my body each in their own place and chewed away at the leather.
The armor was tough, so they seemed to be having difficulty biting into my flesh.
Armor being made for precisely such situations, it would be a problem if it were not tough.
"......."
Gripping the short sword in a reverse hold, I drove it down into the head of the one on my left arm.
The skull, buried to the hilt, shattered and spilled brain matter.
I mechanically cut off their breath one after another.
The undead with their heads smashed all laid their bodies on the ground, and before long the only one still clinging to me was a small one gnawing at my calf.
"Filthy."
It was not my body but my mood that was filthy.
The undead are monstrous beasts that died and were revived.
A large undead was a well-built person in life, and a small undead a person of short stature.
A person of short stature. A young child.
Five years old, perhaps. There was no knowing when it had died.
Going by the progress of decay alone it looked about half a year gone, but the undead stop rotting the moment they revive.
What makes the undead hungry?
Why do corpses that do not rot crave the blood and bodies of the living?
It is probably because they envy warmth.
What they do not have. What they once had and now do not.
What this small undead tearing at me so desperately longs for.
It is human warmth.
It is heat, and breath, and memory.
The undead are those robbed of everything they enjoyed as a matter of course back when they were human.
That's why I don't much care for the undead.
Because it feels like looking at my own end, drifting further and further from humanity.
Because it feels like being told my ending will be no different from theirs.
———CRUNCH!
The small undead, having lost the body above its neck, laid its cold body on the cold ground.
Just as the others had.
It did not breathe, it did not speak, and it left behind only a handful of bloody water.
Just as everyone in this world someday will.
***
Time passed steadily.
A day passed, two days passed, and on the third day.
I could not erase a question that surfaced in my head.
'......Is this really the end of it?'
Findel Morein was a cunning man.
It would be dangerous to assume he thought a mere thousand monsters could handle me.
The monsters were certainly a threat, but given Oscalt's character, hiding a single body from them was not so difficult a matter.
Findel Morein was sharp enough to sculpt an entire city solely for this moment and to drive Kallen and me into a trap.
A strange certainty came over me.
That this would absolutely not end here.
Uneasy misgivings never end as mere misgivings.
The incident occurred around the fifth day.
- KROOOOOO!
A roar shattered the usual stillness and rang across the whole city.
The birds taking flight beyond the alley wall seemed somehow ominous.
Treading over collapsed rubble, I climbed atop a building of some height.
"......."
I saw a clotted lump of flesh.
Every monster sculpted from a human looked like a lump of flesh, so that was nothing special; what deserved attention was the lump's size.
A size that could be made out by the naked eye from near the wall.
The monster that had risen in the center of Oscalt stood a good deal taller than the wall.
"It's still growing."
That was not the end of it.
Countless monsters crawled out from between the alleys and hurled themselves at the lump, and then seeped into it.
I say it again: they seeped in.
Watching human flesh melt in like liquid was by no means a pleasant experience.
Its bulk now exceeded the troll ghoul I had seen in the primeval forest.
You would have to stack three Formels set upright on two legs to come to roughly the same height.
'The alleys are in the way, so it means to smash them outright.'
If the alleys kept the monsters from massing, then an enormous monster capable of laying waste to the alleys themselves need only step in.
The monster bellowed away as though the undead were of no consequence whatsoever.
In fact, the undead would not go near the center where the large monster had begun to move.
Naturally, unless they meant to be trampled to death.
The thing, which had been destroying its surroundings at random, abruptly stopped moving.
I narrowed my eyes at the unease that came over me.
- KROOOO!
As expected, it began running straight in my direction.
Before a bulk that could shatter the wall with a single kick, buildings broke like biscuits.
"Damn it."
I hurried down from the building.
I had come down, but of course there was nowhere at all to take shelter.
Running from a thing like that was realistically impossible.
The booming footsteps were drawing closer by the moment.
By the timing, Formel's return was near, but expecting help from another right now was difficult.
I moved through the narrowest of the alleys hugging the wall, trying to stay out of its sight as much as possible.
Monsters popped out here and there like alien dots in the maze-like scenery.
I ducked my head and twisted my body to evade the monsters' leaps.
I ran as though shaking off the repeating scenery of the alleys.
I had the feeling the large monster's roar was chasing my back.
'I followed the wall and swung wide to the right. I should be at least three streets from the point where it spotted me.'
Yet its footsteps had not changed in the slightest.
I had opened distance, but the sound reaching me had not diminished.
This could only mean one thing.
'It's tracking me precisely. It seems to know where I am.'
Making a mockery of my effort to take only narrow paths, the large monster's speed as it ran at me had not dropped in the least.
How was that possible?
Even in the midst of such deliberations the assorted monsters kept lunging at me.
One leapt out at me from a corner; I kicked it into the side of the road and ran on.
'......Could it be?'
I looked back to see, beyond the large monster, countless monsters following me as well.
The big one would be chasing not me but those.
It is only natural that a group stands out more than an individual.
Chasing a pack of monsters moving in one direction was the same thing as chasing me.
Which meant that to shake off the big one, I had to deceive their eyes first.
'Troublesome.'
It wasn't as if I had the kind of skill that lets a man fly or crawl his way out of anything.
The moves I could take were bound to be limited.
The instant I rounded a narrow alley corner, I threw myself through a building's window.
Judging by the dust-covered furniture, it seemed to be an ordinary home.
The sound of the ground shaking came from far off.
I crouched down.
And soon the footsteps of countless monsters kicking off ground and walls covered the area.
I could only pray they would pass by this vicinity as they were.
A few seconds that felt like a few hours passed.
"......."
The small footsteps gradually receded again.
Only then did I release the breath I had been holding without realizing.
With this, the big one too would pass by this place.
I intended to stay quietly in this building until the large monster was fully distant.
I sat with my back against the wall and waited a while.
———CRASH!
Most of the building, including the wall facing me and the roof, was blown away.
"You really are full of surprises."
By ill luck, it had been smashed by a kick from the big one pursuing the monsters that had passed by here.
The monster, meeting my eyes, let out a screech.
My ears rang dully.
Both eardrums felt torn.
I rose to my feet.
Its arm was about the size of an ancient tree from the primeval forest.
Nothing good would come of being swatted by something like that.
"......It's going to be a hard day."
The monster finally brought its palm down, as though swatting a mosquito.
Unexpectedly, no great noise came.
It was not because my brain had been smashed.
My body was fine.
Instead, the monster came into view with its thick wrist severed clean off.
- KROOOAAAAR!
The muffled cry of the monstrous beast and a loud ringing filled my ears.
But even so, there was a voice that came through the sharp ringing.
"—Brother!"
It was Drik.