Chapter 37.2: Necromancer’s Vexation (2)

She began to walk towards the center of the plaza, stepping over bodies and weaving between staggered mantlets. This wasn’t just to draw the necromancer’s eyes away from the road behind her, where Wiz was hidden, but also to put herself smack in the center of a whole lot of guns just laying around.

All the while, the necromancer’s eyes tracked her opponent. She didn’t hold any particular emotion toward Alyssa. In fact, she didn’t particularly need to kill anyone, and least so Alyssa in particular.

Her mission, after all, was simple: prevent reinforcements from reaching Jon Fuze.

The Order was about to breach the gate, so she stepped in. Simple.

Reinforcements might react to the sudden loss of forces, so she had her new lackeys attack their rear lines as a distraction. Simple.

Alyssa wasn’t getting any closer, so she didn’t need to engage. Simple.

Oh, of course she “knew” Alyssa, insofar as “watch out for this person” — followed by a holographic projection — counted as “knowing” someone. Maybe they could’ve been close friends in another life, what with the cold way Alyssa was gazing at her right now.

It was truly wonderful how there wasn’t a single drop of murderous intent in that gaze — just pure, unadulterated battlefield calculation.

… On the other hand, Alyssa was feeling like she was being looked down on, and not just literally. Why wasn’t the enemy moving? She was like a vulture just perched there, waiting for a reason to swoop down and pluck an eye out.

[Ah. I remember her.]

Alyssa froze. That kind of reaction from the Lady wasn’t going to be anything good.

[I want her.]

“There’s something wrong with you,” Alyssa muttered.

[Et tu. Now, will you get her for me?]

“What — dead? Alive?”

[Why, how considerate. Half-dead would be perfect!]

Why did she even ask? What a headache. “Alright, you know what? I’ll make this simple for everyone. How about it?” she muttered, possibly on the verge of insanity.

She looked up at the necromancer. “Oi! You!”

The necromancer slowly pointed at herself. Alyssa hadn’t taken a step further, so … this was still within mission parameters, maybe? She didn’t fail to notice the change in Alyssa’s expression, though; long gone was her cold, calculating face, replaced by blood-curdling exasperation. What a shame. Her cold expression was cuter —

“Obviously, you! Now, listen! Lady Ravena has her eyes on you!”

— Huh? Wait, wait, wait, did she hear that right?

“It’s not just me versus you anymore! It’s us versus Her!”

The necromancer froze — then waved her hands in front of her, miming “No way, no way.”

“We can make this easy for the both of us!”

The necromancer gave it pause. Being hunted down by Alyssa was one thing, but if she heard things right, then Ravena was finally coming to collect, wasn’t She?

“Switch employers! Come on!”

S-switch employers? H-huh? Well, from a past agreement, she had to, sure, but what’s she going to tell her client? ‘Hey, hello, sorry, goddess says I gotta go’?

“Please! I beg of you!” Alyssa was already crying. “Even if you kill me, she’ll just keep reviving me and send me after you again!”

… Even the necromancer didn’t do that. It was like asking for a favor from the same person twice in a row. She wasn’t like that.

Well, this was a problem. She’d been prepared for every reasonable situation, but alas, getting headhunted by Ravena — potentially literally, if she refused — and this kind of timing was not reasonable at all.

She eyed Alyssa. She’d witnessed her ability to control rifles, and she was certain that extended to many other types of guns. Between her shadows and Alyssa’s guns, it was safe to say that it would be an even match.

It would easily turn into a game decided by wit and surprise.

The necromancer knew herself well. She wasn’t a sophisticated thinker at all, so if it came to wits and surprise, then she’d lose nine times out of ten.

This made things a lot simpler. Alright, life is greater than money! Ravena calls! Time to betray my employer!

… But there was a problem.

She was mute.

It was all she could do to frantically mime her intentions towards Alyssa — or maybe she should say ‘hiring manager.’

From Alyssa’s perspective, all she saw was a silhouette with blurry hands. Those hands could be flipping her off, for all she knew!

— Or drawing a spell formation in the air, somehow?

She’d heard of such techniques from a wandering group of elves from Gaelwood: by focusing mana onto one’s fingertips, it was possible to draw spells in the air itself. Although it dissipated more easily than spells drawn on other media, it was enough to accommodate simple formations.

Ordinarily, such a technique would create a soft glow in the air where the spell was drawn. Considering that the necromancer up there used some kind of shadowy Skill or magic, however, any spells she drew in the air would be near-invisible!

— You’re not getting the drop on me!

Hundreds of rifles rose up into the air, pointing straight at the surprised necromancer.

What did I do? I’m surrendering! I’m surrendering! She stood up straight and raised her hands in the air.

This should have been fine … but she did it too fast.

Imagine a hooded figure making complicated hand motions, and then suddenly throwing its hands into the air — while perched on a castle’s ramparts, bathed in moonlight, looking over the devastation of a battlefield she had wrought.

Alyssa opened with an orchestra of dozens of rifles shooting, another dozen going without event, and a token few just weakly fizzling out due to underloaded powder.

Dozens of bullets met the necromancer with less than two feet of spread — and her Skill, Dead Pass, deflected them all.

Elsewhere, Cecilia and her soldiers fought a hard path towards the cathedral. It was chaos with shadows randomly jumping down from the surrounding roofs. Jiraya was about to take a hit from a shadow falling right on top of him — but it exploded in dozens of holes, turning into mist much too fast. He thought the riflemen around him had miraculously decided to target the same enemy, but that was just wishful thinking. Those men had piss-poor aim in this darkness. He decided to thank Ravena and moved on to Amani’s side.

The necromancer stumbled back from the surprise attack, but only because of her own surprise, and not of the bullets’ momentum.

She fell on her back on the rampart, and it took her a few seconds to get back up. She thought to just hide behind the crenellations, but in this battlefield in particular, she wouldn’t be safe.

There were multiple infantry support cannons littered around the battlefield, some of them unfired. She’d never had the opportunity to use Guntalker on anything resembling a cannon before. Well, there was a first time for everything.

The infantry cannons were small, much closer to being “exceptionally chunky grenade launchers on tiny carriages” than anything else. The wheels of each unit reached up until her waist, so the gun itself was much smaller.

Controlling them felt a lot more different than controlling a pistol or a rifle. There were far more moving parts; adjusting them felt heavy, somehow, and there was an undertone of riding a bike for the first time.

She’d learned how to ride a bike pretty fast.

Soon, five loaded cannons were aimed along several points of the ramparts. “You can’t hide!” Alyssa taunted, and in the next second, fired them all.

The merlon beside the necromancer exploded in a rain of rocks, throwing back her hood, revealing a set of cat ears poking out of a head of black hair.

Her ears rang in two different pitches, and she held her head and squirmed on the ground, hoping it would subside. Even though she wore special ear plugs to deal with the noise of the battlefield, they didn’t do much for being caught up in an explosion.

Though her defenses were sufficient to survive, pain was pain, and she just wanted it to stop. How could she make Alyssa stop? She didn’t know. She wanted to surrender, but she didn’t have any good opportunity.

— No, there’s one way.

She crawled to the blasted-out edge of the rampart, eyeing the bodies of the deceased below. Although she would have preferred fresher corpses, they would have to do. She didn’t need them to attack.

One by one, the corpses around Alyssa rose, none of them with any light in their eyes. She didn’t think the necromancer had such a card up her sleeve! How sly of her to hide the fact that she didn’t need fresh corpses up until the last moment!

Again, it was really just an incidental preference.

Alyssa took control of whatever rifles she could, shooting the first zombies who rose, but when she saw it was pointless to waste ammo on such low-level fiends, she began to beat them to death, instead. Dozens of rifles flipped over and she tried … everything.

At first, she was content with wacking them overhead, but then she found that her rifles tended to hit them on the shoulder as they lazily shuffled closer, their head moving left and right as they did. She shifted technique to hitting them sideways across the face, instead. This worked a lot better, but then there were those who were crawling across the ground.

After a while, her rifles formed a two-layer circular formation around her. The outer rifles would hit zombies across the face at head level, while the inner rifles dealt with those that dragged themselves closer across the dirt.

The necromancer saw this, and thought it was cheating. The fact that Alyssa was beginning to optimize the arrangement, soon turning into some kind of blunt saw blade made of rifles, rubbed it in even further.

But she didn’t need to reach Alyssa with an attack.

“It hurts…” one of the zombies moaned. Alyssa smacked it away. Their voices could be nothing more than the twisted magic of a necromancer torturing a poor soul.

“Stop…” a crawler moaned, its arm outstretched. Alyssa smashed a rifle stock down over its head.

The necromancer winced. Her intentions still weren’t getting through.

She shakily got to her feet. It seemed she needed to go down there and tell her, herself.

A coat of shadow engulfed her, and her body disappeared at the same time as a pool of shadow grew somewhere near Alyssa, bursting upwards, coalescing, and reforming into the figure of the necromancer.

Alyssa knew she was there. Years of fighting in situations where she was surrounded on all sides had honed her senses to detect even the slightest aberrations in the air: the slightest whisper, the slightest crunch.

She spun around along with a half dozen pistols, fully intending to meet the necromancer head-on.

In the necromancer’s perspective, she was faced with a final boss type of character; a sawblade of guns spun around the opponent, sweeping a wide area with what barely counted as melee attacks, all the while a halo of pistols and rifles orbited over her head, waiting to discharge accurate fire at anything that moved.

Although she was technically an even match for such an opponent, the fact that Alyssa was an agent of the Theater — who’d openly declared that Ravena was going to resurrect her over and over again until she submitted — weighed supremely against her chances here.

So she raised her hands — slowly, this time — and got to her knees.

Alyssa squinted at this apparent surrender. Why send a last ditch wave of undead against her, then? This seemed like such a pathetic display of what should have been a fearsome necromancer. Was it a trap?

She approached the girl with cautious steps. Now that she was looking properly, she saw that she was a catkin like Amani, and probably around the same age, as well. Was such a girl really capable of turning dead bodies into tools at the drop of a hat? The girl’s gaze was pitiable, too.

She stopped twenty feet away. For a while, they just stared at each other.

“Spare...me…” the body beside the necromancer suddenly spoke in a raspy, broken voice.

“Do you intend to surrender, then?” Alyssa asked.

“Yes…” a different body said.

Using zombies to speak grated on Alyssa’s nerves. “Do you intend to use your voice?”

“No...voice…” another body said, this time much closer to Alyssa.

Well, that was surprising. “I will ask this clearly. Do you consent to offer your agency, to do Lady Ravena’s bidding in exchange for a reward of equal merit?”

Alyssa took out a special pistol for this occasion, loaded with a special bullet. Although the understanding of the Theater and the natives of the Aranai about Ravena weren’t exactly the same, they nevertheless had a common understanding of what offering themselves to Her fundamentally entailed.

The body at Alyssa’s foot stirred, speaking with broken words, “To Ravena...Keeper...offer...yes.”

“Lady?”

[Petition received.]

Alyssa exhaled, relaxing as much as she could. “Sorry about this,” she told the girl. This would be her first time doing this kind of thing.

She took aim with the pistol and shot the girl in the heart with a silver bullet.

She watched her body slump dead, and for a while, it didn’t move. She kept telling herself over and over that she hadn’t really killed her, but the seconds dragged on regardless.

“Well, that wasn’t any outcome I’d expected!” Wiz called out. Alyssa turned around, watching him hobbling over.

He finally came to a stop near her. “I must say, I’ve always been curious about this process.” He paused, side-eyeing Alyssa. “Shall I be given the same treatment?”

“I don’t believe She is that interested in you.”

Wiz chuckled. “Indeed. I’m not as young as I should be, after all!”

Deep inside, however, Alyssa really did wonder whether or not Ravena would eventually make the call to “induct” the old man.

[He belongs to Lumina’s ilk.]

… Now that she’s mentioned it, Alyssa could see that being the case. Wiz was a scholar and dabbler; he must be, or else he wouldn’t have become so powerful as a mage. Although he surely must have a few screws loose somewhere, it was nothing “broken” enough for the Lady to take interest in.

She heard a small gasp. Turning towards the necromancer, she saw her sitting up and breathing deeply, clutching her chest looking for the bullet hole that wasn’t there.

Alyssa got a small amount of relief from that. Well, she knew the weird ritual would work, but only in the academic sense. Actually having the confidence to shoot someone and expect them to come back was a whole different rollercoaster.

The necromancer got up and approached her, stopping a respectable distance away before pulling out a notepad from her chest pocket … which had a hole in it…

So anyway, she took a pencil and started writing around the bullet hole, showing it to Alyssa while averting her eyes.

“Your name’s ‘Aji Lamai’?” Alyssa said aloud, to which Aji nodded, still avoiding eye contact.

Had Amani ever mentioned having a second name? Maybe things were different between tribes. Amani’s tribe, after all, had been one of the more ancient ones.

Meanwhile, Aji … never thought she’d get to this point. She’d quickly betrayed her original employers over nothing more than a single mention of Ravena’s name. She owed the goddess not just her power, but also a second chance — one that she had squandered.

To be found by one of Her agents and being demanded to hand over her agency, it was like being caught with her hand in the bread basket. It was just...too difficult not to feel guilty.

Back in that theater in Heaven, Ravena had told her in no uncertain terms, “This is your last chance.”

And so for the next ten minutes, she showed off her full cooperation, detailing everything she knew about tonight’s operation. Currying more favors and goodwill with scary gun lady, after all, should increase her survivability by leaps and bounds.

The information she provided, however, no matter how vague, made Alyssa go pale. That there was an entire organization who was explicitly going after the Jon she knew … it was just unbelievable.

Aji couldn’t provide a name to the organization. She only knew them as “the organization,” and she didn’t even know about subcontractors other than herself.

Most importantly, Alyssa was confronted with a choice: look for Jon, or head for the cathedral. Aji didn’t know what was going on in the cathedral, per se, but she did have orders to come to the cathedral at the cue of a purple flare. Well, wasn’t that suspicious?

A shadow sprinted across the plaza, but as it jumped over a mantlet, Aji raised a hand towards it, and it evaporated like nothing.

“Can’t you unsummon all the other creatures?” Alyssa asked.

Aji shook her head, writing on her notebook:

— Autonomous. Need line of sight.

Alyssa groaned … and sighed … and stomped her feet as she marched around in impatient thought. She wanted to be at Jon’s side as soon as possible, but the cathedral … it bothered her too greatly.

“We’re heading off to the cathedral,” Alyssa finally said. “Lady Ravena, could we kindly step foot in Your Sister’s playground when we arrive?”

[Be informed you as you arrive.]