Chapter 84
It was the dead of night on a new-moon night, perfect for scheming.
Tokyo, the city that never sleeps, had lost the glittering neon lights of the past, but in their place, the soft glow of magical fire had begun appearing here and there, and the night was starting to breathe again.
However, the Zombie Witch's territory was a dead, pitch-black darkness without a single light.
The Zombie Witch was a witch of the Tokyo Witches' Assembly who governed a territory spanning Fuchu, Kunitachi, and Kokubunji. During the earliest days of the Gremlin disaster, she had turned the vast number of corpses produced in densely populated Tokyo into zombies and gone around collecting them, saving Tokyo from the calamity of an epidemic caused by rotting corpses.
The number of zombies she collected exceeded nine million.
About half of them had been smashed, broken apart, and reduced to dust by magical death over the seven years since the disaster, mainly in battles against monsters, but more than four million still remained.
There were far more dead than living people in the Zombie Witch's territory. The living were required to serve the dead, and after death, they were added to the ranks of the zombies. Unable to endure their days bowing before the dead in a city filled with the stench of decay, anyone without some truly compelling reason wished to move to another territory.
The Zombie Witch interviewed those who wished to leave. If they had unattractive faces, she granted permission; if they were good-looking, she refused.
The Zombie Witch was extremely fond of beautiful faces.
And because she loved beautiful people, she had formed a secret pact with Iruma's wizard, a beautiful Transcendent so gorgeous that he seemed to have been crafted by the god of beauty himself.
The broad outline of Iruma's wizard's coup plan was to turn all the witches of Tokyo into puppets, breed them with himself to mass-produce high-performance children, and build an army.
Wizards were to be slaughtered without exception, but the future-seeing mage alone would be captured and controlled, then made to have children with witches who were gifted with an aptitude for future-seeing magic.
Iruma's wizard's ultimate goal was world conquest.
It sounded like a child's dream, but from the Zombie Witch's perspective, Iruma's wizard seemed to have devised an extremely realistic plan, and he possessed the intelligence and power necessary to make her believe that Iruma could undoubtedly accomplish it.
The prospect of Iruma and the witches producing a large number of children was more than welcome to the Zombie Witch as well.
The children of handsome Iruma's wizard would surely have beautiful faces and excellent figures.
In particular, the children of Iruma's wizard and the Blue Witch inspired tremendous expectations, since they would be the product of two beautiful people.
However, the number of people Iruma's wizard was trying to overthrow was immense, including the Vampire Wizard, the future-seeing mage, the Blue Witch, and the Dragon Witch—a truly impressive lineup.
The Zombie Witch had judged that Iruma's coup would succeed nine times out of ten, but she chose to hide during the coup in case of the one-in-ten chance.
The Zombie Witch would not help Iruma's wizard during the coup.
However, she would not resist, either.
She had become a bat who sat on the fence and would join whichever side won.
The world Iruma's wizard sought was her ideal, but a world led by the Vampire Wizard would not be bad, either.
Iruma's wizard magnanimously forgave the Zombie Witch for her fence-sitting declaration.
Iruma's wizard launched his coup, certain of success, but he was not foolish enough to fail to prepare a second plan.
To prepare for the possibility that some unpredictable event might cause the coup to fail, he agreed to keep the Zombie Witch in reserve as a hole card.
In the end, the secret pact between the two of them paid off.
Iruma's wizard's plan was destroyed by the Blue Witch, and he died.
The Zombie Witch, who had silently remained on the sidelines, escaped the fate of being executed alongside Iruma's wizard. It had been a narrow escape.
But bats were disliked in the world of politics.
The Zombie Witch, who had chosen silence instead of joining the battle against Iruma, naturally became the subject of suspicion.
Since she had not helped Iruma's wizard in the slightest, she was not considered evil, but she had lost people's trust.
The Vampire Wizard and the future-seeing mage kept the Zombie Witch under their wary eyes, leaving her unable to act.
For several months, she stayed completely hidden, keeping her nerves taut even when moving a finger; then she began sneaking around under cover of darkness.
The Vampire Wizard had suffered an utterly unexpected sudden death during the Great Monster Invasion.
If the only person watching her was the future-seeing mage, it would be difficult to act, but not impossible.
One of the weaknesses of future-seeing magic that Iruma's wizard had told her about was darkness.
Future-seeing magic was magic that allowed its user to see scenes from the future. It was not magic that let one see through darkness. Therefore, even if something happened in pitch-black darkness where nothing could be seen, the future-seeing mage would not know about it.
As the world collapsed and electricity disappeared, Tokyo had grown darker than it had been in the past.
The Zombie Witch secretly moved zombies only on new-moon nights, when even the moonlight disappeared, and collected Iruma's remains.
After Iruma's wizard had been killed by being frozen in ice, he was thawed, burned, thoroughly smashed, and scattered into the sea so that he could never be revived, even if the resurrection magic whose existence had been predicted was discovered.
The Zombie Witch was fortunate that every one of his bones had been scattered into the sea.
If even a single bone had been clearly located and placed under strict guard, completely gathering the remains would have been impossible, but that had not happened.
Just as the Dragon Witch had a nose for treasure, the Zombie Witch had a nose for corpses. It was a secret power she had never told anyone about.
Each month, on the night of the new moon, the Zombie Witch moved her zombies and gradually gathered Iruma's tiny, sweetly fragrant bone fragments, little by little, just a tiny bit at a time.
The total number of zombies owned by the Zombie Witch was so enormous that no one noticed even if several hundred went missing. No one noticed when zombies scattered across the bottom of Tokyo Bay to gather bones in the dark depths of the sea, either.
Strictly speaking, the Mermaid Witch had noticed, but fortunately, the Mermaid Witch's intelligence had deteriorated. Even when corpses walked along the seabed and picked up bones, she felt no suspicion. Rather than watching the walking corpses, she focused on searching for beautiful jellyfish to give her family.
The collection of Iruma's remains itself had been completed by the time the Blue Witch, having defeated the Demon Lord, returned to Tokyo.
However, she had held off on zombifying the remains.
Not yet. The time was still not right. The future-seeing mage was still keeping watch.
The Zombie Witch's zombification magic had certain limitations, and corpses that had been dead for far too long could not be turned into zombies.
When zombification occurred, the target's maximum mana decreased, but living creatures gradually lost maximum mana after death. It could also be described as their mana being evened out until it reached the faint amount found in inorganic matter.
If too much time passed after death and a corpse's maximum mana fell too low, zombification would still cause magical death, turning the corpse into dust.
In that respect, Iruma's wizard possessed an enormous amount of mana, surpassing even the Blue Witch. There was plenty of time before his mana fell too low for zombification.
There was enough time to wait for the future-seeing mage, who was working himself straight toward an early death through overwork, to die and then revive Iruma.
And then came April 2031.
The future-seeing mage entered recuperation, just as he had announced long ago.
He temporarily left Tokyo and moved to a peaceful ranch in Hokkaido.
The Zombie Witch suspected that the future-seeing mage had merely pretended to leave Tokyo and secretly returned, so she cautiously investigated for about two weeks.
However, she became certain that the mage really had gone to Hokkaido.
The Zombie Witch smirked.
The Vampire Wizard would never have let his guard down like this. He would never have taken his eyes off her. He would never have relaxed his vigilance.
This was the limit of the future-seeing mage.
The future-seeing mage was nothing more than an ordinary person who had gained power. No matter how much effort the mage devoted or how desperately the mage worked, the mage was of a different caliber from the "real thing."
The Zombie Witch had won through sheer persistence, holding her breath for more than six years so as not to arouse suspicion, pretending to be harmless, and finally drawing out a moment of carelessness.
The hollow excavated beneath Kunitachi Hospital, where countless zombies silently crowded together, was the Zombie Witch's sanctum.
It was a magnificent necrophiliac reverse harem exclusively for her, filled only with young male zombies who were especially handsome, well-built, and capable.
In one corner of that decadent sanctuary was a darkness darker than the rest.
Through the Eye Witch's night-vision magic, the Zombie Witch saw a beautiful white mountain of bones piled up in the darkness.
As handsome male corpses bowed before her, the Zombie Witch wore a faint smile beneath her veil and raised a magic stone as she wove her spell.
"If you abandon everything and move forward, I will pick up everything and follow behind."
A swarm of thin purple tentacles welled up from the ground like threadworms, gathering the scattered bone fragments and assembling them.
Before long, the completed patchwork skeletal specimen of a boy around ten years old was beautiful enough to make one's mouth water.
Ah, Iruma's wizard was this beautiful even after being reduced to bones.
The handsome male zombies kneeling before her stared at their excited mistress with hollow eyes.
Snorting with excitement, the Zombie Witch aimed her strongest zombification magic at the restored human skeleton and amplified it with a magic stone as she chanted.
"Even the mountain of corpses you piled up, I will take with me."
Rough black smoke like a swarm of winged insects spurted from her fingertips, coiling around the bones and soaking into them.
Once the smoke had been absorbed into every bone, the skeleton twitched a finger and rose to its feet with smooth movements.
"Good morning, Iruma. Ufufufufu...!"
The Zombie Witch gazed rapturously over the moving white skeleton, naked of even a stitch of flesh.
Because she had used the powerful zombification magic with the greatest mana cost, Iruma's animated corpse possessed the same personality and thinking ability he had in life.
And yet, he was subordinate to the Zombie Witch and obeyed her commands.
The Zombie Witch had nothing like Iruma's ambitions. She only wanted to gather beautiful things and dote on them. As long as her own paradise was thriving, she did not care what happened to the rest of the world.
Iruma's animated corpse was the finest possible pawn for that purpose. He was good for doting on, and good for using as her hands and feet.
Under her pact with Iruma, she had promised to cast resurrection magic on him if she discovered it.
However, there was no need to honor a promise made to the dead.
The worst wizard, who had once come within a step of ruling Tokyo, would now become the Zombie Witch's adorable, adorable pet and walk at her command. He could even serve as an intelligent partner for written conversations.
At once, the Zombie Witch ordered Iruma's animated corpse to serve her.
But before that, Iruma's white skeleton raised the index finger of one hand and pressed it to his mouth.
The meaning was obvious: "Be quiet."
The Zombie Witch was intrigued and called off her command.
He had apparently revived with some wicked scheme already in mind.
A white skeleton could not chant magic. Though he was sturdier than a human, possessed greater physical strength, and was cleverer, there should have been very little he could do in his current state.
What on earth was he planning?
When the Zombie Witch lightly waved her finger and gave him free rein, Iruma grabbed the neck of a nearby handsome male zombie and snapped it.
The Zombie Witch bristled when one of the zombies she especially favored was suddenly destroyed, but Iruma once again gestured for her to watch quietly.
Iruma broke the zombies' necks one after another and tore their mouths open.
After destroying seven zombies, he dragged out pieces of flesh and began grafting them onto his own bones.
Lips, tongue, cheeks, throat, lungs.
Sometimes making fine incisions, sometimes tearing out hair and tying the flesh together to adjust its shape, Iruma rapidly fleshed himself out with his own hands.
The Zombie Witch remembered the human experiments Iruma had conducted by consuming people from her territory and from Ome.
She did not know specifically what kind of experiments he had performed.
However, watching Iruma carry out this self-modification, she could vaguely understand part of what those experiments had involved.
Iruma had determined the structural differences between the vocal organs of ordinary humans and Transcendents by dissecting and modifying a huge number of test subjects.
Iruma knew how to modify human vocal organs to reproduce those of a Transcendent.
Just to learn this one thing, how many hundreds or thousands of people had Iruma consumed?
The Zombie Witch watched Iruma's self-modification with awe.
Whatever knowledge and techniques he had used, something that should have been utterly impossible according to the medical common sense of the previous era was taking place. Even if there were many Transcendents in the world, Iruma's wizard was probably the only one capable of such a feat in every sense of the word.
However, the Zombie Witch's awe was soon overwritten by an even greater astonishment.
Having finished fleshing himself out with practiced skill, Iruma's wizard chanted a spell.
"I forbid the prohibition of ××××."
Something invisible spread outward from Iruma, accompanied by a sound like shattering glass.
At the same time, the Zombie Witch felt the magical connection between herself and Iruma being severed, and she was left stunned.
It was probably a spell belonging to the supposedly lost Edogawa Witch.
The Zombie Witch knew that the Edogawa Witch used dispelling magic. She had also thought that Iruma's wizard had probably learned dispelling magic.
But she had never imagined that a deft spell existed which could remove only the subordinate control while maintaining the zombification effect.
Iruma's wizard had risen again as an animated corpse.
He had regained his flesh and his voice.
He had even regained his freedom.
With only a small nudge, he had solved every problem.
In awe, the Zombie Witch remembered something for the first time in nearly six years.
The unfathomable depths of Iruma's wizard.
And then.
From the depths of the darkness came the fresh, gentle, beautiful voice of a young boy.
"Good morning, Zombie Witch. Tokyo was pretty lukewarm without me, wasn't it?"