Preparing to Repel the Zombies

[Tier-Group 3: Control Room]

"If the enemy were human and were coming to attack us, we could fend them off with ramparts and drop them into pit traps, but since the enemy is zombies, we have no idea what governs their behavior. There are far too many unknowns. Supposing they decide a wall is hopeless and turn off in some other direction, if they head south toward Ebara District it will be hard to respond."

"True enough. There's no way Musashi can scrape together a force capable of facing an army of ten thousand in the time we have."

On paper Musashi's total strength was forty thousand, though the real number was estimated at somewhere around twenty to thirty thousand, and even that was, in ordinary times, dispersed among the castles and lords across the land.

"Aide-de-camp scribe-dono, a headless zombie has no head, and therefore no eyes and no ears, so how does it track a person to pursue them?"

Mint voiced a perfectly reasonable question.

"There are animals that sense people by infrared or carbon dioxide and the like, but since these were originally human corpses, it seems unlikely they'd have such organs. Within a dungeon's sphere of influence the dungeon's direction could be a possibility, but they're plainly outside any dungeon. It's a mystery."

"So, what preparations do we make until the general reaches the site?"

"If we wall everything off completely and seal it shut, there's a risk the zombies will change direction and attack Musashi's villages. Whatever their means of detection, if merely being seen is enough, then posting the knight orders atop the wall should draw them in just like in a zombie movie. But if that's not enough, we'll need to leave a passage open for the zombies while still halting their advance."

"Our forces here amount to nine knight orders plus the rabbits, a little over two hundred. Fighting the zombies directly is dangerous."

"If we cannot halt the zombies with the dungeon's functions, then we abandon the checkpoint on the far bank of the Nameless Bridge. In the worst case we will also consider abandoning the near side of the Nameless Bridge. But Heta is not a directly-held domain that fills our storehouses; it is a fief, so we cannot simply abandon its farmland, and we must halt them before it comes to that."

A fief was land entrusted to a vassal, and were it ravaged, it could deal a fatal blow to that vassal's strength and loyalty alike, which was why Marie wished to avoid it.

"Marie-san, how far out does our dungeon's sphere of influence extend, again?"

"In the direction of Hiratsuka, the sphere of influence runs roughly three to four kilometers from the Nameless Bridge. The zombies will be entering that range before long, so we'll try out a few pit traps and observe how the zombies behave, how they react to a pitfall or to a wall. At the same time we'll attempt to cover the retreat of the Toshima Daikan. Rāja still needs more time to reach the site."

"Makes one want an airplane."

"Once you factor in travel time to the airport and so on, for a distance of two hundred kilometers a car is fastest. Even in the otherworld, planes fly from Tokyo to Nagoya, Niigata, and Sendai, but there are no scheduled flights to the airports at Shizuoka, Matsumoto, Nagano, Wakamatsu, Kōriyama, or Taira."

"So, Marie-san, what specifications for the wall?"

"It depends on the zombies' behavior, but if need be we'll temporarily abandon the far bank of the dry river and build a lower wall on the near side. Later on it can be repurposed as an embankment, so it won't go to waste. As for the Nameless Bridge, once the Toshima Daikan has withdrawn, we'll collapse it by removing several spots from the dungeon's structures."

"What if we go ahead and drop it while the zombies are out on the bridge?"

"Whether zombies, already dead, would die a second time by being dropped off a bridge, I cannot say, but it's worth a try."