They're Called Zombies
I look straight ahead.
"Graaah!"
"Ghk—agh! D-don't! Don't bite me!!"
"Aaaah! Honey!"
The things fall on a couple who had been fleeing together. They tear into the man as if his flesh were a choice cut of steak, seasoning the feast with the screams he throws, while his wife can only shriek and stamp her feet, helpless to do anything else.
I turn my head to the left.
"Die, you monster bastard!"
Erik, a fellow recruit of mine, drives his spear into the thing's chest.
"Ha, serves you r—"
Before he can even finish the sneer, the thing charges him with the spear still buried in its chest and savages the nape of his neck without mercy.
"Guh..."
Erik doesn't manage so much as a scream. He simply drops where he stands.
This time I look the other way.
People run. The things give chase. They chew their victims apart, and the people die screaming.
This is hell. Yes—hell. Hell has come down on Erka. If it isn't that, there is simply no way to explain what I'm seeing.
"They said it was a riot..."
I had been making my usual patrol of the royal capital's outskirts when a suddenly revised order arrived. Unidentified rioters had started a violent incident in the square where the crown prince's wedding was underway. There were too many of them for the royal army to put down alone, so they needed the city guard's support.
"Those damned bastards. We're short-handed as it is, they already hauled off half the guard for the crown prince's precious wedding, and now they want reinforcements?"
"What do those high-and-mighty royal army pricks even do, besides stuffing themselves on expensive rations?"
Bad-mouthing the royal army with my comrades, I was walking at an easy pace toward Pirke Square. We were about ten minutes out when a crowd came running from far ahead.
"What are those guys...?"
Before we could make out who they were, they charged, and the slaughter began. The things threw themselves at civilians and guards alike and bit. Punch them, spear them—nothing made them stop. They only kept greedily chewing down people's flesh.
The riot was supposed to be at the square. How has it already spread all the way here? What is the royal army even doing? What do I have to do if I want to live?
Run. Yes. First, I have to run.
The instant I make up my mind—
Crunch!
"Huh...?"
Erik... you were definitely dead...
Legs reinforced by acceleration magic, I kick off the streets of the royal capital and run. I stay on my guard in case zombies come at me from either side, but fortunately the outbreak doesn't seem to have reached this far.
"Renit."
Esmela calls my name. She is still cradled in my arms like a princess. Her blonde twin-tails sway up and down in time with my stride, and the hem of her blazing red dress snaps in the headwind.
If things weren't what they are, I would have begged someone to preserve this rare sight of Esmela, even if only in a photograph. Among everyone who has ever played Love and Dead, this scene is a privilege reserved for me alone—the one reincarnated out of it. Thinking that, I feel like dropping into a full formal bow of thanks to the heavens that sent me back, right this second.
"Yes, my lady."
I answer, forcing down the fanboy fervor boiling up inside me.
"Now tell me what you know about those things. What are they?"
At her words I look down at her face. Anxiety and fear are spreading across that beautiful face once more, and the pitiful expression drags my heart, lost in a daydream, back to reality.
"Understood."
All right. How do I explain zombies to Esmela, and how far do I go?
"So you're saying a legend passed down in your hometown has beings like those in it?"
"Yes. That is why I was truly shocked when I saw them with my own eyes. A monster that only ever appeared in the superstitions the grandmother next door would tell me now and then... why it should stand right in front of me, I could not say."
For the moment, I muddied the source of what I knew, telling Esmela that beings from a superstition handed down in my hometown had been very much like those things.
"I've never heard a story like that... Where did you say your hometown was?"
"A small island village on the eastern coast of the kingdom."
"Hmm... Then it might be a superstition told only in that region."
In the world of Love and Dead, the hometown of my second life is a tiny country island a long way from the capital. Even if someone doubted me, it would be easy to pass the tale off as a superstition known only on a remote island. Of course, if Esmela later sent someone to my hometown and actually checked whether any such superstition existed, my lie would be exposed without a shred of mercy.
What else can I do? It's the best excuse this head of mine can produce. Later is for later. Right now, the priority is giving Esmela what I know about zombies so she can prepare for them.
"Then what does this superstition of yours say?"
"It was the sort of story every village has at least one of, told to frighten children who wander about at night."
Good. From here, I get to tell Esmela the one-hundred-percent original fairy tale I wrung out of my brain right up until this moment.
"My father is a fisherman. Because of the habits of the fish along Arkesia's eastern coast, the fishermen of my home island often took their boats out onto the night sea. If Father had to go out at night on a day when Mother had also left the island to buy things needed in an inland city, she would leave me—still a child—with the grandmother next door until she returned."
That much is drawn from my own life, set in front of the invented tradition to lend my false testimony more weight.
"Staying with Grandmother, once night fell I would grow anxious without my parents and keep whining that I wanted to go home. Whenever I did, she would tell me of the corpses that could not die—corpses that wandered every night in search of a sacrifice."
"Corpses that could not die?"
"Yes. My lady, are you familiar with Hadiron, the god among the thirty-six of the Ladain Faith who gathers the dead?"
"Yes, I know of him. I don't particularly believe in the Ladain Faith, or in religions in general, but we covered it in religious studies at the academy."
"Then this should go quickly. They say that when someone dies, Hadiron appears beside the dead and guides their soul to the underworld. The one at the heart of Grandmother's story, however, was a dead man who refused Hadiron's guidance."
Before I launch in earnest into the legend I made up, nerves make me swallow dry without meaning to. I draw a quiet breath.
"Most of the dead follow Hadiron and depart obediently for the underworld, but now and then there were those who refused his guidance. As a rule they were people who, before they died, had nursed a very deep grudge against someone, or who held a wish they had longed for and never achieved—people who could not accept death, and so resisted Hadiron. Upon those who refused to return to the underworld as the natural order demanded, Hadiron grew wrathful and laid down a curse."
"A curse?"
Esmela stares straight through me.
"Yes. A curse of being able neither to die nor to live. Those who receive it have died, yet cannot go to the underworld, and because they are dead, they cannot return to life either. Their souls try to force their way back into their original bodies, but the flesh has already accepted death and begun to rot, so they cannot even settle into it properly. In the end, all they can do is crudely jerk a body that has decayed and fallen apart, the way a child handles a doll."
What comes next is the truly important part—the part Esmela needs to hear with care.
"The cursed dead, trapped in rotting carcasses and become beings who can neither die nor live, are said to blindly repeat only one action until that carcass rots and rots until it can no longer move."
"And what's that?"
Esmela can't restrain her curiosity and keeps pressing me onward.
Good. From her reaction, the story seems to be landing.
"It is... making a living human into the same state as themselves."
"Why?"
"Out of jealousy toward the living, they say. They despair of their own lot, cursed to wander forever on the border between life and death, and at the same time they envy and rage against everything that still lives. That is why they do it."
"What kind of story is that? Even a stretch has its limits."
Esmela sounds thoroughly unimpressed.
"It is truly so, my lady. Now, returning to the tale... After she had told me of these cursed corpses, Grandmother would always frighten me this way. If you wander outside alone at night, they will come running to take you as prey. Do you know what becomes of you if they catch you? First they will covet your flesh and tear the living meat from you with those filthy teeth. Once their teeth have broken your skin even once, before long your body will rot as theirs do, and your soul will take the same curse, and in the end you too will become a corpse that cannot die, wandering in search of the next prey..."
I steal a glance at her color. She is wholly absorbed, mouth slightly parted, hanging on every word.
"What do you think, my lady? The look of a corpse rotten through, a blind aggression toward humans, the habit of tearing living flesh... Do they not resemble the things we saw far too closely?"
That is the whole of the story I invented. Now I have only to wait and see how Esmela reacts.
"...A name."
"Yes?"
"Do the beings in that story have a name?"
A name? I haven't decided on one yet.
"Why aren't you answering?"
When Esmela turns a suspicious eye on me, I panic and answer before I can think.
"They're called... zombies."