“... I had wondered if that might be the case. So there was a connection to the Holy See.”

Hostility briefly flashed in Tyr’s eyes as she watched the Regressor. It was reflexive hostility.

Loathing and enmity welled up like an instinct, steeped in her blood and engraved in her bones.

Had Tyr’s heart still been stopped, she might have joined the Earth Sage in attacking the Regressor. But...

“... Yet Shei was so genuine for someone associated with them. What could it mean?”

They had spent a long time together. She had seen many sides of the Regressor.

Not once in all that time had she sensed hostility or contempt. She had merely chuckled at those clumsy attempts at friendliness.

Three months. To Tyr, it was little more than an instant, but with her heart beating anew, it had been enough to leave a deep impression.

And so Tyr decided not to interfere in their fight.

See, Regressor?

I know what you were worried about, but I told you she wouldn’t interfere.

Having just landed in the sea of blood with Callis, the undying one felt the swirling wind and murmured,

“Hmm! I thought there was some connection to the Sky God, what with those powers of the sky—wind and clouds!”

“The Holy See’s authority does not belong to the Sky God. The Sky God has never bestowed any power upon humanity.”

Tyr had clashed with the Holy See more than anyone else alive, and her words carried a corresponding certainty. Her blood-red eyes followed the invisible sword as she spoke.

“They call themselves followers of the Sky God, yet revere the first Saintess more than their god. Every so-called Saintess since has also been known as a prophet or a seer.”

“Oh? Now that I think about it, you’re right! Then isn’t that all the more impressive? It means they built such prosperity without a god’s authority!”

“The authority of the Aspect of Time and World, which sees through both, is the truly absurd thing. Hmph. Cowardly vermin...”

Apparently, having a beating heart had done nothing to dispel her resentment. Tyr murmured with undisguised contempt.

“In any event, Shei cannot be a seer. Since the first Saintess was impaled upon the cross-shaped stake, only women have been able to become Saintesses. Unless Shei has been concealing his sex... Unless...?”

Tyr was tilting her head at the sudden thought when it happened.

“Grrrr!”

Hanging from the support frame like a bat, Azi barked furiously. With her instinctive aversion to human corpses, this entire stretch of ground probably looked like a minefield to her.

They were already dead, so stepping on them or smashing them wouldn’t really be a problem. Still, there was no reason to make her come down if she hated it.

“All right. Stay up there. Don’t come down if you don’t want to...”

“Grrrrrr!”

But Azi wasn’t barking simply because she disliked corpses.

Something stirred among the bodies. Detecting the movement, one of the searchlights swiftly swung around to illuminate it.

Thanks to that, I got a very clear view of a corpse in loose-fitting clothes bracing its hands on its knees and standing up.

Not that I was particularly grateful.

Death is the cessation of life, an involuntary act that blurs the boundary between oneself and the world.

Accordingly, a corpse that has died and returned to the world should not be able to move of its own accord. It is supposed to be eaten away, starting with the skin, until it becomes one with the world.

In other words, that corpse staggering to its feet was engaging in behavior absolutely not recommended for corpses.

“For fuck’s sake. Seriously.”

I grimaced at the corpse, which had committed the number-one thing you should never do in a grave: getting back up.

“A vengeful spirit? Well, with three hundred thousand bodies, it is hardly strange for there to be one or two.”

Tyr took it in stride.

This was why Mother Earth’s faith and its buriers were necessary, and why they had once flourished.

Sometimes, lingering thoughts inhabited corpses that bore a grudge, moving or transforming their dead bodies. You might call it a primitive form of body-mediated magic manifested just before death.

Of course, mere lingering thoughts could not be stronger than living humans, so most were simply dispatched. Even so, disposing of a corpse all over again when it started moving was extremely unpleasant and inconvenient, so people would pay buriers to bury their dead.

Underground, where even a living person could not escape, those lingering thoughts would merely stir for a little while before fading away.

“It is insignificant. Wait a moment.”

Of course it was insignificant to the world’s worst vengeful spirit, Progenitor Tyrkanzyaka, who had been buried alive and returned to the world in a body as close to a corpse as could be.

“There is no need for me to exert myself personally.”

Tyr waved her hand.

A vague shape flashed in the darkness. In that instant, a pitch-black sword tore through the possessed corpse’s belly with a wet thrust.

It was the Black Knight.

The Black Knight pulled out his sword and kicked the back of the corpse’s knee, sending it slumping to its knees. Then he lopped off its head. With a slicing sound, the severed head flew out of the searchlight’s beam.

I applauded his performance.

“Wow! The Black Knight! Your first contribution of the season! You might finally shake off that reputation as a punching bag and a paycheck thief!”

“... Naturally. Surely you did not expect the Black Knight to lose to a mere vengeful spirit.”

Come to think of it, the Black Knight was a sort of vengeful spirit himself. The lingering wills of knights Tyr had killed. So knights ought to be stronger than ordinary soldiers...

Just as I was thinking that, something clamped onto the Black Knight’s ankle. He turned his pitch-black helmet downward, only to be toppled by the hand yanking his foot out from under him.

Countless hands appeared over him. Fingers crawled across his body like swarming ants, tearing, pinching, and clawing at the darkness. The Black Knight struggled with his whole body pinned down, then unraveled strand by strand and crumbled to dust.

Beneath the searchlight, there was nothing but a mass of hands.

Everyone fell silent for a moment. With a cold expression, I retracted my earlier remark.

“I take that back. Vanishing after taking out one corpse is a pretty pathetic record for a knight. How about Black Grunt instead of Black Knight? No, ‘Black’ sounds too powerful. Let’s call you Dirt Grunt instead.”

“Is this the time for wordplay? Stay close to me for now. We are not in danger, but something is amiss.”

As if to underscore Tyr’s words, an alarm sounded throughout Tantalus.

WEEEEOOO.

The artificially synthesized, piercing noise stabbed at my ears.

The searchlights gave up trying to track anything further. There were too many human shapes, and far more than one or two moving targets.

Instead, with a fierce whine, their beams began to widen. The arrow-sharp shafts of light spread out, while more lights rose from the edges of Tantalus.

I had thought the daytime lamp was the only proper source of illumination, but apparently I was mistaken. Small lights hidden along the edges of Tantalus rose all at once. Each was far dimmer than the daytime lamp on its own, but...

When the lights around the perimeter switched on together, dazzling light filled the entire bottomless pit.

A low ceiling, and shadowless light cast from sources on every side.

Thanks to that, the mountain of corpses was now plainly visible.

A mountain made of clothes, flesh, arms and legs, and the occasional head. The sight of rounded human bodies piled upon one another to form rounded ridges had gone beyond horror. Now it left only the revulsion of looking at a shoddy work of art.

That revulsion lasted only a moment before an even more horrifying sight unfolded before us.

At the edge of the corpse mountain lay the sea of strained, bloody fluid.

All along its shoreline, corpses in loose-fitting clothes began rising together.

There were enough vengeful spirits to call them an army. Faced with them, Tyr looked tense.

“... It is bright. Shadows will be difficult to control. Instead...”

The lapping bloody water rose at her call.

Though her blood manipulation had become difficult to project beyond her body since her heart began beating, she could still control blood this close.

Suspending a crimson orb in the air, Tyr said,

“Stay by my side, Hugh.”

Then she snapped her fingers. A wave of blood rose in a fan and swept away the corpses in one stroke. The possessed bodies left no corpses behind—no, not even a trace that they had ever existed.

Even so, Tyr could not relax.

Because it wasn’t the possessed corpses she feared. It was the possibility that I might get hurt.

“I will protect you. You have my word.”

How reassuring. I gave her a thumbs-up and shouted,

“The Black Rose is better than the Black Knight! I mean, the Dirt Grunt!”

“You truly have no sense of tension whatsoever!”

Over on the other side, Callis and the undying one were fighting the possessed corpses. The undying one threw punch after punch, smashing bodies apart or sending them flying with every blow.

But it was a poor matchup. Tireless though he was, he only had two hands. Even if he sometimes took out three bodies with a single punch, dozens more swarmed in during the opening, inevitably pushing him back.

And with someone to protect, he had no choice but to fight even more defensively. The undying one shouted,

“Callis! Stay close to me! You mustn’t leave my side!”

“No! I’ll fight too!”

“You’re injured! You can’t fight! I never tire, so don’t worry! These things aren’t worth a single punch!”

At that, Callis abruptly yelled,

“You idiot! It was all an act! Take a hint already!”

“Huh?”

The time the undying one spent hesitating became distance the corpses gained on them. Biting her lip, Callis inserted her military armament packet into her biometric terminal.

“Call to Arms!”

CLACK. CLACK.

A steel gauntlet wrapped around her left arm in a glow of alchemical light. Equipped with her military armament, Callis punched an approaching corpse. Its skull crunched, sending teeth flying. She snatched them out of the air with her right hand and quickly slotted one into a groove on the back of the gauntlet.

Then she aimed it and shouted,

“Set, Fire, Fire, Fire, Pascal, Heaven!”

The groove would normally vent steam. Instead, compressed air forcefully propelled the tooth out.

THOOMP.

A sort of blowgun. The tooth shot forward like an arrow and struck an approaching corpse in the head. With a sharp crack, its neck tilted back slightly.

But that was all. The corpse resumed walking as though nothing had happened.

“Tch! The dimensions are wrong! It’s too light, too...!”

“Well, it is a tooth, isn’t it?”

“Perhaps because they’ve been dead so long, their teeth are soft and have no alchemical resistance! In that case!”

‘Improvised alchemy!’

Callis clenched her right fist and opened it, revealing teeth reshaped through alchemy. They varied in shape and size, but their thickness was uniform.

She slotted a tooth, shaved down to fit exactly, into the groove and fired. A faint puff of air, even quieter than before.

“Heaven!”

The tooth shot straight through an approaching corpse’s right ankle. It lost its balance and collapsed.

“I’ll provide support!”

“Ah, um. Don’t overdo it?”

She had never had the chance to shine among all these monsters, but a prepared officer was a precision-engineered war machine. The Military State would be in trouble if its officers couldn’t manage at least this much.

Of course.

Even so...

“Heavenly Sword Art, Thunderbird!”

“O Mother Earth!”

She couldn’t compare to those two.

A flash.

Lightning raged. Brilliant yellow electricity burst from Sky Cherry Blossom and struck toward the Earth Sage.

But the Earth Sage lowered her body and leaped to evade it. She was slower than the lightning, but it could not track her once she had become one with the earth.

The Earth Sage stamped with a boom, sending vibrations through the corpses. They spread like ripples before converging beneath the Regressor’s feet, where the bodies suddenly erupted upward.

A corpse hurtled at the Regressor with the speed of a shot put. Whether by chance or design, its spinning arm aimed precisely at her flank. The Regressor lightly sprang into the air, stepped delicately on the corpse, and leaped again.

‘Tch. She’s already adapted to ground made of corpses? I thought I’d have the advantage with no earth beneath our feet...!’

“Did you think you would have the advantage because this ground is not made of soil and stone?”

The Earth Sage had seen through the Regressor’s thoughts.

“The earth is Mother Earth’s body. Whatever trifling things lie beneath us, they all originated from the earth. I make no distinction between one ground and another!”

“Aren’t you impressive...!”

Grumbling, the Regressor landed on the overturned ceiling. Her highly refined energy arts allowed her light body to walk along the slanted ceiling as though it were the ground.

The Earth Sage could probably do something similar, but she would not be as agile as the Regressor. Above all, earth arts required her feet to be planted on the earth...

It did not take long to discover that was a misconception.

“There is no sky here, either. Just because this vast stretch of earth has become a ceiling does not make it your ally!”

Speaking firmly, the Earth Sage dug her fingers into empty air. Tendons stood out as she strained her fingertips.

Judging by appearances alone, one might have thought she was miming. She seemed to be exerting herself against thin air.

But this was not mime. Mime was pretending something existed when it did not.

“Let wrath descend!”

The Earth Sage’s power, however, was very real.

Her hand swung as though gripping something. At the same instant, the concrete earth overhead split into a grid, and square blocks assailed the Regressor. The earth obeyed the Earth Sage’s will even without her feet touching it.

‘She can do this much even without Earth’s Ripple!’

Should I call it erupting upside down, or falling?

Either way, hard concrete hewn into squares swept past the Regressor. Though she hastily leaped out of the path of a direct hit, the impact still coursed through her body.

“Tch...!”

Nowhere she set foot was safe. Breathing hard, the Regressor landed far away.

In contrast, the Earth Sage walked on, looking no different than she had when she first set foot here.

“How dispiriting, champion. Do you lack ability, or hostility? Why bar my path when you lack one of the two? A sense of duty? Or is this the only road to the future you desire?”

The Earth Sage regarded the Regressor with deeply somber eyes.

“If you will not fight, I ask that you step aside. I have no wish to fight someone who bears me no hostility.”

The Regressor replied,

“... The people you’re going to face won’t bear you any hostility, either.”

“Then they will stand aside of their own accord. I merely seek to hold them accountable. They must reveal every vice they have concealed and apologize.”

“That doesn’t mean they’ll let you pass. They’ll have their own sense of duty to protect their holy land. Just like you.”

A clash between one sense of duty and another. Wasn’t that simply another name for pure tragedy, with neither good nor evil?

Despite her lack of eloquence, the Regressor somehow managed to put that meaning into words.

The Earth Sage frowned briefly, but she did not deliberate for long. She had already reached her conclusion.

“... Then I shall simply remove them and proceed.”

“That’s why I can’t let you go. You... Right. You won’t fall. Even if you have to knock everyone else down.”

That was the Regressor’s duty in protecting the future. She raised her sword again. As though she had steeled herself, not even its tip trembled now.

Watching her newly resolute opponent with dispassionate eyes, the Earth Sage composed her own emotions and calmly declared,

“I will ascend and take the Grand Master’s keepsake in my hand. That is as inevitable as a boulder rolling downhill. If you would stand before me, prepare yourself accordingly.”

The words were clearly directed at the Regressor. It was a kind yet firm declaration, telling her to make a definite choice rather than remain ambivalent.

“You will not stop me without breaking me.”

And so the one who would not fall climbed the mountain of corpses.

Straight toward the summit.