Baseless Speculation About the Zombies' True Nature

[Tier-Group 3: Control Room]

"According to the Toshima Daikan, the corpses vanish when cut down, but when shot with arrows they merely tumble off the cliff without vanishing. In other words, while it is difficult to deal them a fatal wound, they are not immortal. Is that correct?"

Marie put a line through to Tomiki Chōkei, posted at the checkpoint by the Nameless Bridge, and questioned him.

"The Daikan himself is in the midst of pulling out. This is a report relayed by the Daikan's messenger. If you sever an arm or a leg, it will not reattach, but that alone is not enough to bring one down."

"Then it would be the heart, or the spinal cord…"

"Director of Books, thrusting a spear into the heart is no easy matter, and as for the backbone, even a sword or a naginata could hardly cut through it so readily."

"Since they vanish when defeated, they are most likely dungeon monsters. And because it is impossible for monsters to come out of a dungeon, I suspect some troublesome 'unique law' is at work. From here on it is pure conjecture, but the possibilities are either that 'dungeon monsters are able to act outside the dungeon' or that 'the dungeon has an extraordinarily large allotment of Named monsters.' That said, since assigning names to tens of thousands of monsters one by one would be an immense labor, I believe it is the former, that 'dungeon monsters are able to act outside the dungeon.'"

"Marie-san, you mean to say that a horde of zombies can come out of a dungeon and attack a town?"

"Yes. On that point, however, dungeon energy can normally only be acquired within a dungeon's sphere of influence, so there is no reason to deliberately send monsters out of a dungeon. Given that a quite small-scale dungeon holds ten thousand monsters, I can further infer it also possesses the unique law that 'dungeon energy can be acquired even outside the sphere of influence.'"

"Outside the sphere of influence?"

"For a dungeon estimated to be only about one hundred meters on a side, a small one, to be able to muster ten thousand zombies, it must have been gathering dungeon energy even outside its sphere of influence."

"Could there be some enormous labyrinth buried underground?"

"That is not possible. We have folded the land right up close to here into our own sphere of influence, and land that has another dungeon beneath it cannot be incorporated into a sphere of influence. In short, even outside the dungeon, the very emotion of dreading zombies is being put to use producing still more zombies."

"Troublesome yet again."

"Also, if zombies are corpses, then they are beings that belong to the 'Hell Realm' of the Six Realms. Pretas, for all that, are living things, but zombies are not alive."

"So the lid of Hell's cauldron flies open too, as the saying goes."

"No, that is a misuse. 'The lid of Hell's cauldron flies open too' actually means that during Bon and the New Year even the tortures of Hell take a holiday. Most likely the dungeon itself is a Hell, or is summoning the dead up from Hell, but since we do not know what kind of dungeon we are dealing with, its governing principles and the like remain unknown."

"They've got no heads, so they must be headhunters."

"Master, that is the same as having identified nothing at all. To begin with, the people of this region are headhunters. As is plain from the existence of the 'head inspection,' even in otherworld Japan most everyone but the Chinese and the White Russians and the like are by and large headhunters. Still, the fact that there are this many headless corpses suggests it may have something to do with some large-scale ancient battlefield."

"By the otherworld's geography, this would correspond to somewhere inside the city of Tokyo, perhaps."

"It could of course also derive from a world with a different history, and in that case identifying it would be difficult. It might even be a world in which the Boshin War saw a general assault on Edo Castle, and the hatamoto had their heads taken."

"I see."

"Umeda, the Mercantile City, is a large-scale dungeon city, but in the otherworld most closely tied to this Library-City Dungeon, several thousand human bones turned up at Osaka Station, so had we been influenced by that world, the residents of Umeda, the Mercantile City, would have been skeletons."