bookworm

“Mika...”
“Wait, no, wait! Erich, you’re wrong, I’m—I’m not—”
“You...” Oh, of course. Mika, my friend, how could I not see? “You’re an angel.”
“...What?” My candid opinion was met with an expression that I had never, ever seen before.

[Tips] “Angels” in this world refer to a specific race far to the west of Rhine who devote themselves to a one-true-god. Few in the Trialist Empire are aware of their existence, and divine messengers are referred to as apostles or heavenly kinsmen instead. These messengers are lowly gods whose visits to the mortal realm are only temporary.

Our awkward scene came to a close when Mika sneezed at a chilly autumn breeze. I convinced him to dress himself and we headed back inside, each sitting on our own beds. The air between us was...strained.
Look, I know, I know, but come on! Can anyone really fault me for having remembered the Abrahamic traditions of Earth?!
The silence took on the weight of lead, threatening to crush us under the pressure. At long last, Mika spoke, eyes still fixed on the floor.
“My clan comes from the northernmost lands.”
His lineage’s tale was a heavy one. They’d lived for generations on an island right beside the planet’s pole known as Nifleyja. The name meant “the gloomy isle” in an ancient tongue, and life there always got by on the slimmest of margins.
Winter robbed the land of sunlight, and the abundant rays of summer ironically made agriculture an impossibility. Yet in these remote reaches outside the Harvest Goddess’s sphere, life had taken its hold.
Alas, the extreme conditions meant that any minor shift in the environment spelled death. An extended lack of fish quickly starved fisherfolk, and an outbreak of disease among what little sheep could be kept snapped whole families faster than a wilting flower. And even an island as treasureless as theirs was raided by pirates from the northern archipelago.
Only a handful of specialized demihumans and humanfolk could withstand the harsh environment. Selchies endured the frigid oceans’ churn with their seal-like coats and blubber. Callistoi in this region were better adapted to the cold than their cousins, who’d taken after woodland bears in the eastern half of our continent’s western reach, but retained their powerful builds. It was plain to see that these peoples were supremely suited for life in the bitter icelands, and they had the might to fight off invaders.
Much like the others, mensch had also evolved to make use of their greatest strength in order to scrape by in the arctic environment. These humanfolk had overcome the catastrophic flaw in our excellent reproductive capabilities: an imbalanced ratio of males to females could decimate a population in just one generation.
“I’m...a tivisco,” Mika spat, utterly ashamed of his heritage.
Described as mensch who blurred the line between sexes, one might first suspect them to be hermaphroditic. However, their version of duality involved a shift from one sex to another.
Mensch spawned at an astonishing rate, but the wintery deserts of the north spat in the face of our racial specialty. Evolved to patch up the holes in population caused by the lopsided deaths of either men or women, tivisco were totally asexual until sexual maturity.
Once their bodies were fully developed, they morphed into one of the two sexes at regular intervals. They spent one moon genderless and then gained a set of reproductive organs; a month later they returned to their neuter state, and after another they shifted to the opposite sex from their last cycle. In the event that their population skewed, individuals could consciously override their oscillating cycle to repeat a sex after a fallow month.
This sexual fluidity allowed tivisco to maintain a balanced population at all times to make constant use of menschkind’s greatest evolutionary advantage.
I found the whole affair remarkably effective. Apparently, mothers retained their feminine features for a short while following childbirth—until the baby was weaned—and fathers did the same, putting on characteristically masculine muscle to guard the flock. Had their distinguishing features not required such harsh conditions to arise, I could have seen them becoming the dominant humanfolk on the mainland.
“I...I didn’t mean to trick you...”
Unfortunately, the mensch of the Empire had not given their kind a warm welcome.
Mika’s clan had moved to the Trialist Empire three generations ago, no longer able to bear the constant threat of cold and violence—a lesson that survival alone was insufficient. Imperial citizens were used to immigrants, and the tivisco had clung to the hope that the national acceptance of foreign peoples would offer them safe haven as they began the long trek south.
Yet they were too similar. The local mensch failed to see them as exotic travelers seeking a new home: mankind feared the unknown, to be sure, but that which bore an uncanny resemblance to the familiar was exponentially more frightful. Between the never-ending source of trouble I worked for and the fashion-loving vitality glorifier I sometimes indulged, I was far more disturbed by the latter, as it terrified me to think that a former mensch could be so degenerate.
This knee-jerk uncanny reaction forced the tivisco to remain on the fringes of society. While the imperial people were not so unaccepting as to totally ostracize them, they hesitated before greeting a tivisco in the street. They lived as perpetual foreigners, unable to truly enjoy a festival day.
Mika came to the College’s doorstep determined to clear the tivisco name. If he returned to his ancestral homeland as an oikodomurge capable of making the whole region habitable, no one would ever deride his people again.
His parents worked like mad to scrape together the funds to send him to his local magistrate’s school, where he studied with similar desperation to catch his teachers’ eyes. Combined with the task of currying favor with his magistrate, there was no doubt he’d put in effort incomparable to the average aspiring magus. How much willpower had it taken for him to approach those castle doors?
“I knew... I knew I needed to tell you at some point, but... I just...” Mika’s choking voice wavered. Moonlight spilling in from the window shone on a glistening tear trapped on his long lashes. “I didn’t want you to hate me.”
Wringing out the words, my friend told me the tale of his first attempt at friendship.
Initially, Mika had thought the new environment of the College would be altogether different, and had honestly explained his origins to his fellow First Light students.
They’d found Mika interesting and trampled past his personal boundaries in an attempt to understand him better. Tragically, their overzealous curiosity had turned them into people that he could no longer want to call friends. In good ways and bad, children of our age were naive.
As young scholars, they were pursuers of knowledge unable to suppress their curiosity for the unknown. They didn’t know that people held secrets meant to stay forever buried, and the cruelty born from that innocence was the crux of Mika’s sad story.
Following that incident, he refrained from socializing with his intra-cadre peers, devoting himself entirely to the lonesome act of study.
Yet in a stroke of luck, I had appeared: an indentured servant without relations to the aforementioned students. Perhaps, he’d thought, I can actually get along with him. His refreshing demeanor hadn’t been natural, but a concerted effort to become friends with me.
Mika had hidden the circumstances of his birth and acted the part of an average mensch boy, but he’d meant to tell me the truth eventually. Yet every time he tried to muster the will to do so, the memories of his hometown and the classroom nipped at his heels.
“I just... I didn’t want my first friend—I didn’t want you to hate me. I didn’t want you to look at me like some sideshow attraction either. When I imagined that, I couldn’t bring myself to say it...”
Blurted between sobs, Mika’s confession took on the colors of penitence. For him, his ancestry had become a sin in and of itself—one that had reared its ugly head to ruin the fun of his first long journey with a friend.
I could not imagine how deep this emotional wound reached. For better or for worse, I was and had been an ordinary man. In my past life, the only major issue I’d faced had been my early demise, and the entirety of my new life had been spent in a familiar mensch shell.
There was no way for me to truly comprehend his pain, and even claiming otherwise was morally reprehensible. In a world painted with colorful arrays of peoples that were so close, yet so far, I could think of no greater crime than for an outsider to don the veil of empathy without the cultural heritage to substantiate it. I’d come from a species that had warred among itself; how could I claim to understand another?
I wouldn’t console Mika with cheap words—I couldn’t. I refused to heinously make light of his lifelong struggle by turning it into an easily digestible topic.
“Huh?”
So I said nothing as I embraced my friend. I took him into my arms to stop him from wounding his own heart any further with the daggered words spilling from his lips.

[Tips] Tivisco are a humanfolk race native the extreme regions of the northern pole. Their default form is that of their mensch relatives missing reproductive organs, and they transform monthly to one of two sexes. During this period, their physiognomies are indistinguishable from standard mensch save for a two-day period in which their organs and skeletal structures rearrange themselves. Adolescents remain wholly neuter until puberty, generally observed somewhere between the ages of thirteen to fifteen.
Their striking resemblance to mensch paired with their short history in the Empire has caused the average imperial citizen to regard them as outsiders.

Pressure was a vital part of stemming bleeding in medical emergencies, and I believed the same principle applied in terms of emotional wounds.
When times were tough, there was nothing in the world that soothed me more than a good hug. In my past life, my parents and sister had doted on me in childhood; my parents in Konigstuhl had done the same. When I passed on the gentle embrace to Elisa, she always stopped crying, just as I had once done. I was sure that the warmth of another was the ultimate bandage for a cut on the soul.
“...Erich?”
I kept Mika close and said what needed to be said. I had to show him that this warmth would remain steadfast no matter what happened.
“Mika, who are you?” I asked.
“What?”
“Who are you, Mika?” I repeated. “A student at the Imperial College? A tivisco immigrant?”
In the same vein, the ultimate question hovered between the lines: did his race, or the gender that his situation hid, affect our friendship?
I didn’t think so. I acknowledged that it was an important part of him: much in the same way that I would soon change from boy to man, he would begin taking on masculine and feminine characteristics depending on his transformative cycle.
However, Mika remained Mika regardless of how he changed. The self that governed the body would not yield, and I knew he would stay the same friend that I’d shared the joys of childhood with.
“You’re all of those things and more, Mika. You’re you, no matter the details... You’re my beloved friend—my best friend. Am I wrong?”
Perhaps his personality would shift with his body, but at his crux, he would remain the same. And I’d become friends with him because I’d wanted to be close to the person he was.
I let go of him for a moment and looked straight into his eyes. He was in a state of shock, unable to process the swirling emotions inside of him.
“I chose to be your friend because you were a joy to be with. I invited you along because it was fun to spend time with you. If I considered you a superficial acquaintance, I would’ve come here alone.”
While solo journeys were rife with inconvenience, I was not the type to invite someone I wasn’t even fond of on a long expedition, nor was I philanthropic enough to share a bedroom with them. Most of all, I liked to think I wasn’t careless enough to camp in the great outdoors with someone I couldn’t trust.
I’d brought Mika along because I had faith in him—because I knew to share this adventure together would be fun. I grabbed him by the shoulders and pressed my nose into his; a blink would brush my lashes across his.
“Am I alone? Why did you join me? Why did you fight at my side? Am I some nominal friend, only here to fill the void of your loneliness? Or maybe I’m just a nameless mensch to take advantage of, and the person Erich doesn’t exist to you?”
Mika’s teary eyes blinked once and he pleaded, in a hoarse voice, “No, Erich! Anything but that!”
With another blink, he let his tears fall away to return my gaze. Swallowing back the urge to cry, he at last gave verbal form to his resolution.
“I think of you as a friend too. At first, it was because I thought it’d be easier to talk to someone new to the area, but not anymore... I’m not scared of losing a friend—I’m scared of losing you.”
Mika’s limp body suddenly reanimated as his hands clasped over my shoulders. His hands grabbed onto me with force, as if in an attempt to convince me of his sincerity.
“I know, Mika,” I said. “What am I to you?”
“...A friend, Erich,” came his response. “My friend.”
“That’s right, old chum. And isn’t that enough?”
Both he and I held great respect for the other’s stature. However, not once had I ever thought of his future success as a magus before thinking of him as a person; I was sure that my connections to powerful researchers and professors was of little importance to him as well.
“We’re friends, Mika. Bound in all but blood.”
“Oh, thank you, Erich... Thank you...”
“Friendship isn’t something to be thanked for, old chum.”
“I know. But still...thank you, old pal.”
I hugged my sobbing friend once more and gently patted him on the back. My sister had taught me that this was the best way to soothe a weary soul. Although my body creaked at his iron embrace, it didn’t matter; I kept my hand moving until he was sound asleep.

[Tips] The imperial mantra of solidarity with and tolerance for foreign races has roots in Rhine’s bloody history. Centuries of fighting to establish and protect the country shoulder to shoulder with the alien peoples that the Empire swallowed whole made them develop the camaraderie needed to transform a state of scattered cultures into a nation-state. Any band of people with the collective will to integrate is certain to find itself a true part of the Empire with time.

I awoke in the morning after our melodramatic moment to great embarrassment. This was not the first time I’d buried my face in a pillow out of shame: whenever I got too in character, listening to recordings of my sessions filled me with dread. Hot blood and pure hearts couldn’t wash away the cringe that lingered after what was basically a confession of historic proportions...
“Good morning, old pal,” Mika said.
...And that was all the more true when I shared a room with the person in question.
“Yeah, good morning,” I said back. “Hey, Mika... Uh, about yesterday...”
Delayed as it was, I was incredibly embarrassed. This reaffirmed to me that the humors of night never brought about anything decent. A lifetime ago, most of the scenarios I’d penned past sundown had gone straight to the garbage bin when I’d reread them in the morning—come to think of it, that had applied to workplace documents too.
Everything I’d said to Mika came from the bottom of my heart, but, I mean, come on! What was that?! I’m a grown adult inside! There had to be a better way of putting it!
“Say no more, cherished comrade,” Mika said. “I understand. Nothing would make me happier than to hear those words again, but they aren’t something to throw around so lightly, are they?”
Uh... Mika misinterpreted my concerns in a strange way. I felt like his thought patterns had, at some point, taken a turn for the theatrical. Our verbal game of role-playing the characters of a saga was fine, but I for one didn’t have the acting chops to touch on our nighttime conversation without breaking my cool facade. At this point I had no doubt he’d turn into the sort of player who’d nonchalantly steal hearts with romantic turns of phrase.
“Come on, breakfast awaits,” Mika said, leading me by the hand.
As close as we’d been up until this point, Mika’s step was half a step closer than usual as we walked to the same restaurant we’d visited last evening. I was surprised to see the place so lifeless, but we’d woken up rather late. With how simple imperial breakfasts tended to be—many chose to have nothing but tea and cheese—it was only natural for an eatery to be empty.
The same waitress with the beaming smile and freckles brought us our breakfast for five assarii each: one cut of black bread, a fat white wurst, some small dairy items, and an apricot. It was a respectable portion for what we paid.
We spent an extra couple of assarii for a pot of red tea to share—though this was made with roasted dandelions instead of chicory—and took our time enjoying our peaceful meal. Fall was a busy season for merchants, and none of them had the time to stick around and disturb us late wakers.
“Oh,” I said. “By the way, Mika, I have a little proposition for you.”
“Hm? What is it, o esteemed friend? Ask away: at this point, I’d be happy even to share a tub with you, old pal.”
Then let’s—wait, that’s not the point! Mika was so over the moon that I wanted someone to immortalize his blissful smile in a portrait, but I had to keep his joy in check in order to invite him on my journey to the woods.
“Hmm,” he mused. “The diary of an adventurer, huh?”
Mika took a bite of his sausage and chewed on both it and my proposal. Originally, our job had been to come to this town for one drachma; taking on extra work was his own decision. That said, I felt a bit guilty about asking him now, of all times...
“Sounds fun! I’ll tag along.”
Mika’s mood was so positively superb that I imagined he’d even entertain a request to see him naked again. When I tried to warn him about the possibility we’d run into a bear, he flashed me a gallant smile and said, “All the more reason I can’t let you run off by yourself.”
How long would it take for him to simmer down? However long it ended up taking, the responsibility was mine to think through anything I asked of him for the time being. Otherwise I risked encountering colorful events that would one day become dark, embarrassing memories—his, not mine, mind you. Even if it didn’t, I would never want to take advantage of him when he was so excited about our reaffirmed friendship.
I washed down my worries and the last of breakfast with a swig of tea. With our meal finished, we set out to prepare for our journey. That said, a day’s walk was mere hours on horseback; we’d come prepared to camp out for days on end, so all we needed was a little extra water and food.
“Hmm,” Mika murmured, “everything’s so pricey.”
“’Tis the season, after all,” I said.
The marketplace near the workmen’s district was chock-full of fresh produce and the distinctive merriment of autumn. However, the increased demand for goods always drove up prices around this time.
Merchant caravans with bodyguards and mercenaries in tow hopped from town to town, buying up packaged foods wherever they went. Common folk needed to procure nonperishables to weather the cold winter months, only adding to the number of buyers. The only exceptions to this need were farmers who could stock their own pantries and mages that could prevent rot (and the caravans that employed the latter).
The overwhelming demand meant that sellers could mark foodstuffs up and they’d still sell. Furthermore, this prevented hoarders from buying everything for themselves, so nearly every stall sold goods for two or three assarii more than what was standard.
“How much do we have left?” I asked.
“Uhh,” Mika answered, “we’ll need to set aside this much for the motel, and this much for the exit tax at the gates...”
“So that leaves us with...this much for food. Well, we have to get some jerky, right?”
“Personally, I don’t think I can let go of dried apples and apricots, but they’re looking a bit steep...”
The two of us counted the copper coins in our joint purse—we didn’t plan on using the silver pieces anytime soon and had hidden them in our shoes—and discussed our budget. Then, the jenkin in charge of a nearby preserved food stall let out a massive sigh.
“S’ppose I can’t let’a pair o’ brats go hungr’n,” he said. “C’m’ere, I’ll cut’cha wee o’ the top.”
The man’s thick northern dialect was appended by the sound of his chittering front teeth. His intonation was so far removed from palatial speech and what I’d heard in the southern parts of the Empire that I couldn’t quite catch all he’d said. Still, it was clear that he was taking pity on us after seeing our empty wallet.
“Aye, fer truly?!”
However, the real surprise was seeing my friend fluently respond in the exact same tongue.
“Wee, y’hear?” the shopkeeper said. “Nurly a tad. Can’t do naught’s ’bout’cha if y’don’t have the cash.”
“Thank y’kindly!”
“Go on, go on, take w’e’er ya need.”
They eloquently went back and forth, and Mika ended up buying the goods at no more than standard price. His usual speech never strayed from the male standard of palatial dialects, but it made perfect sense for him to be a master of northern accents. Sir Feige had easily switched between the two as well, and my old coworkers from western Japan had sounded completely different when we’d gone out to drink.
I watched Mika intently as he jovially took the bag full of dried rations. Noticing my gaze, he suddenly blushed and hid himself behind the groceries.
“Uh, um, I mean, I used to talk like this before I learned the palatial tongue, so... Is it really that weird?”
Seeing him so bashful at his unique way of speaking was, well...cute. Alas, I truly must have been a self-indulgent man for these sorts of thoughts to come forth the instant I recognized him as not wholly sharing my gender. Er, well, I’d already danced with similar thoughts prior to this point, but the current lack of stops in my brain were giving me a fair bit of pause.
“No,” I said, “I’m always impressed when I hear people speaking in ways I’m not used to.”
“Impressed? Really?”
“Yeah, you’re incredible. You two were practically using a foreign language to me.”
Modern Rhinian was, for the most part, an easy language to learn once one had a solid command of its grammar. It wasn’t a complicated tonal language by any means, as evidenced by the skill tree: acquiring the palatial tongue had taken quite a bit, but the foundational parts were all dirt cheap.
On the other hand, the sub-branches on my character sheet offering to let me learn regional dialects all went for whistle-inducing costs. The Trialist Empire had once been a smattering of unrelated nations inhabited by all kinds of cultures, after all. Local communities often employed peculiar figures of speech and perpetuated the use of all kinds of words that the general populace considered archaic.
Therefore, without studying the vernacular itself, these so-called dialects could sound very much like exotic languages. I’d encountered something similar in Japan: whether they came from the northeast or the southwest, people with heavy accents had been nigh unintelligible to me. Learning to decipher their words later in life had been like interpreting a foreign language that just so happened to follow the same grammar rules as my own.
“Northern dialects do have a ton of archaisms,” Mika noted. “I can understand Ancient Northern and the archipelagic languages too, and all three share a ton of vocabulary. There are a few differences in spelling, and the emphasis rests on different syllables, but you can mostly hold a conversation between all three languages. Weird, huh?”
“Interesting, I’d say. I’m sure a trip to the far north would be a breeze with you by my side.”
My linguistically gifted companion and I continued strolling around the rural streets, but my mind drifted further north. Truth be told, I knew nothing about the lands beyond the Empire. All I’d learned about this world had come from the Konigstuhl church, explanations from the adults in my life, and the historic tales that poets sung.
The Konigstuhl church was obviously never meant to keep impartial records on foreign countries, so all of the accounts in its library had been from the Empire’s point of view. While they’d been far less partisan than I’d expected them to be, they remained markedly biased to imperial activity and only mentioned other states on the scarce occasions that they were relevant to domestic history. The College’s vault likely had better material, but I spent all of my time in that library studying magic, leaving me with no time to dedicate to the humanities.
However, perhaps that was fine. Exploring a land I hadn’t even read of before with nothing but my blade and my wits was sure to make for a riveting tale. Diving into a new setting without reading through its mechanics was risky, but always incredibly fun. Surely, a trip like that would make me exclaim, This is what it means to adventure!“Then let’s go together sometime,” Mika said. “I know a bunch of beautiful places. You can walk across the northern sea in the winter, and the auroras shimmering in the sky will steal your breath away. Oh, and there’s this massive waterfall that freezes solid—it’s a bit far from my homeland, but that one’s a treat. I think everyone should go see it at least once in their life.”
Mika happily listed off the marvels of the north. They say that locals never visit their own landmarks, but it appeared he’d made the time to check them all out. As he gave form to his nostalgia, I could see a hint of pride leaking through in his expression.
“Those all sound like beautiful places,” I said. “I’d love to see them.”
Despite how pained he’d been while talking about his heritage, it was clear that he loved it. Why else would he want to make a name for himself just to win honors for his parents’ place of birth? If he didn’t love his family’s history, he would just bring them all to the capital after earning the title of magus.
“Then...I’ll take you to my hometown one day, Erich. Even though it’s just ice and snow—oh, plus the sheep and reindeer.”
“I’m looking forward to it.”
We each gave our word for a distant promise: that we’d explore the northern reaches together, and that when we did, he would restore his homeland to glory. And the first step to seeing our oath through was to clean up the little adventure that lay ahead.

[Tips] Modern Rhinian arose as an artificial amalgamation of the tongues of the founding member states of the Empire.

“Woods” is a fairly broad term. Collections of trees can differ greatly in a variety of metrics, and it is hardly novel to expect one thing and find another. Maps may show the cartographical outline of where a forest begins and ends, but rarely ever involve the third dimension of height.
After hearing that our destination could contain bears, I’d prepared myself for a large thicket...but Sir Feige’s request exceeded my every expectation.
“These are ‘woods’?” Mika said in awe. “All I see is an endless ocean of trees.”
“What a coincidence, old chum. I’m seeing the same thing.”
The two of us stared at the forest, agape, to the point that my neck started hurting from looking up at the canopy. I was filled with dread at how plainly the impenetrable wall of trees refuted the idea of human entry.
This was not on the scale of a “little” adventure. These were the sort of deep woods an ancient witch would call home, only meant to be disturbed for a climactic fight or a request to craft long-lost medicines.
Hemlocks, firs, oaks—the forest was a chaotic mix of coniferous and deciduous, making it all the more alien to someone who’d only ever explored the woodlands of Berylin and Konigstuhl. Those well-kept groves were full of oaks and cypress used for woodworking; if they were posh schools for the gentry, then we were knocking on the door of a run-down juvenile detention center.
Here, wood grew freely until it decided on its own terms that it would stop, and the colossal roots breaching from the soil were well hidden beneath a thick carpet of fallen leaves. These trees did not lay out hospitality assuming that someone would come to care for them; they proactively warded off outsiders from entering.
Our quick little journey had turned into a labyrinthian open-air dungeon in no time flat. Had I lacked experience navigating wooded areas, I would have instantly turned around to hire a ranger or scout for safety’s sake. Every TRPG player knows that dungeon diving without a pathfinder is suicide.
Lightly armored, with a few days’ food in our bags, Mika and I felt like we’d been punched in the gut by the sheer magnitude of the woods—but that was no reason to stop. This sort of terrain might have significantly hampered the average party, but the same did not hold true for us.
As an oikodomurge-in-training, Mika was no stranger to dirt, rocks, and wood. Although he wasn’t tuned for harmony with all things natural like the priests who could commune with spirits, he was more than fit to cut open a path for us.
After a short preparation, he cast a cantrip—oikodomurges were better versed in hedge magic, as their work inherently demanded permanence—that made the soil pack itself into a shoulder-width walkway. The earthen serpent advanced straight into the depths, graciously covering all the massive roots and bumps we might trip on.
“Sorry, this is the best I can do without using too much mana,” Mika said.
“What do you mean? This is incredible.”
The dirt path was perfectly level, and was easily traversable despite its slimness. Furthermore, its unerring straightness meant that we were sure to avoid the typical directional confusion that accompanied forest adventures. Neither graph paper nor bread crumbs would get a chance to shine on this trip.
“You think? Well, I didn’t want to mess up and harm the forest. Who knows how much trouble we’d get in if we did...”
I lightly slapped Mika on the shoulder to dispel his worries, and after a short pause, he slapped me back like always. Then, we started on his newly made path with the same close steps as usual.
Even at midday, the woods were dimly lit, and the lichens clinging to every tree contributed to a hair-raising atmosphere. However, the place itself was surprisingly peaceful. I didn’t know if we could chalk it up to a series of cooperative dice rolls, but we didn’t encounter any angry boars, bears, or bandits.
To be fair, leaving the animals aside, there wasn’t any reason to expect a group of ruffians to set up camp here. The people of this world lacked the gusto of the common mobs who popped up in every dungeon and volcano where the dice mandated their presence.
Who exactly would a hypothetical bandit camp even rob in this remote forest? Even if they wanted to exclusively prey on travelers while evading the eyes of imperial patrols, there were plenty of woodlands with foot traffic, closer to towns.
Unaccosted by the irrationality of random encounters, we sauntered through the serene forest, stopping to pick up the occasional useful item. The undisturbed old growth had left plenty of herbs that were worth a coin or two laying around, and the tough competition with the innumerable trees meant that only the finest plants survived. Herbs of this quality would go for a decent sum.
“Look, Erich, acorns! Look at all of these!”
Mika collected a giant pile of acorns from the forest floor with a huge grin. He wasn’t childishly playing around, mind you: acorns were a staple food his people had eaten for generations.
“We used to gather a ton of these in the fall to stock up for winter. If you crush them into a powder and add some water, they’re not too shabby.” As he filled up his bag, he added, “I’ll make some myself when we get home.”
Despite being a staple food in the north, denizens of the capital considered acorns to be pauper food meant to be fed to pigs, not people. Regardless, the mutton we’d eaten yesterday had opened the floodgates for Mika’s desire for home cooking.
“If you extract the bitter parts, you can use it in bread and cookies, and you can steep it to make tea too. Personally, my favorite is when we slowly boil it into a paste, but I haven’t seen it anywhere since I left for the south.”
Our walk went on much like this for a while, with minor detours every so often. Around the time our knapsacks were starting to get heavy with herbs and fruits, I felt something jostle around in my waist pouch—the one with Ursula’s rose.
“What’s wrong?” Mika asked.
I’d stopped in the middle of the road, much to my companion’s perplexion. I asked him to wait for a moment and pulled out the rose. Although I could faintly make out Ursula’s presence from the slight trembling, she didn’t appear from the bud like she’d done before.
Epiphany struck: tonight would have a full moon. Alfar powers ebbed and flowed with the False Moon, so the fully realized form of the Night Goddess naturally indicated a period of weakness for them. If it had taken a new moon for Ursula to appear at the size of a mensch, I doubted she could even take form today.
In essence, I was without my fey backup. Thank God I didn’t invest too much in fey traits. If I had, someone with anti-Erich tech could’ve clobbered me on any new False Moon with my combat value halved.
Jokes aside, it seemed that my current ability to communicate with Ursula only went one way. Without the ability to speak, oscillating in my pouch had been the best warning she could give.
However, that told me nothing about what she was trying to tell me. Omission of critical information was dramatic and all, but it wasn’t very helpful. It couldn’t be that I’d actually spawned a boss fight, right? Personally, I felt that my heartfelt conversation with Mika had been plenty climactic.
“Stay on your toes,” I said weightily. “I’ve got a bad feeling about this.”
“Just a hunch? Don’t worry, pal, I’ve got you.” Without a shred of doubt, Mika waved his wand and a hole appeared in the dirt. “We should be light on our feet, shouldn’t we? Let’s bury our stuff here.”
Not only had he dug a hole, but he’d also neatly packed the crevice with rocks to prevent any curious wildlife from burrowing into it. I surmised that he’d used some kind of stone-paving cantrip, since those were indispensable to oikodomurges. Mika was showing off all his tricks today, and I finally understood why all those caravans had been so grateful to the mages that accompanied them.
Freed from all our luggage except the bare minimum amount of food and water, I used my meager sneaking skills to lead the way. Mika followed at a distance in order to avoid both of us getting caught up in a potential sneak attack. That left our squishy backline mage all alone if someone snuck up on us from behind, but he had a familiar to watch his back. At the very least, he could cover his six better than I could.
Out of nowhere, a breeze carrying a fetid odor assaulted my nostrils. I knew this smell all too well. I had never wanted it to become familiar to me, but so it went. This was the vile sweetness of rot mingled with the stench of excrement—the smell of death.
Death awaited at every corner of this land, and not only because mensch were comically suited for the act. Exemplary punishments were carried out all across the Empire.
I hadn’t seen many in the canton, but every middling city held public executions multiple times a year, stringing up criminal corpses on their castle walls like Christmas lights. On major roads, one could see bandit lackeys and the like participating in the revolutionary new workout method of being hanged by their ankles. Desensitization wasn’t a choice, but a necessity.
The heads of the most heinous offenders were preserved in amber and marched across the Empire in a gruesome cross-country tour. Imperial units had even marched through my hometown to show the fates of great villains and insurrectionists, so butchering livestock was far from my only exposure to horrific gore...and the smell had always been the same.
I raised my fist, and Mika recognized our predetermined hand sign, stopping in his tracks. Quietly, I advanced into the thicket; the smell came a ways away from Mika’s path. I carefully walked forward so as to not scatter any leaves or twigs—all while fighting the urge to dump points into my Stealth skill—and made my way to the source.
Finding it was far easier than one might expect. I came across the figure of a man standing tall in the middle of the trees without any intention to hide. From behind, I could plainly see his dirty clothes, unkempt hair, mud-stained skin, and most damning of all, his missing left arm: he was undead.
Oh, I should’ve known. The stench of humanfolk decay was unmistakable; something in my senses could immediately identify this scent as the putridity of mensch flesh.
I’d figured this might be the case, and it felt as of late that all my worst predictions were the ones that turned out to be true. Still, as well-read as I was, this was the first time I’d seen this kind of undead in person.
In this world where the existence of souls was common fact, there were a handful of different ways a being could become undying. A setting that employed geists and wraiths but no zombies would be half-baked, and the sculptors of this universe hadn’t skimped on adding horror elements to their creation. I think my grimacing face was proof enough of how grateful I was.
As far as the different categories of undead went, the first contained all of the races that lacked an upper bound on their life span. The humanfolk methuselah and demonfolk vampires were the most famous examples, but as the potential victims of murder, few considered them truly undead. Mainly, the classification had been something of a moniker born out of fear of their awesome regenerative powers. In fact, I’d read that most of these peoples considered the title a misnomer and preferred not to be grouped up in this way.
The second type were those who’d been stripped of—or otherwise lost—their ability to die. What few theological texts I’d read contained passages about divine punishment sometimes depriving us mortals of entitlements we’d thought to be inviolable. Sleep, consumption, and emotion could be taken from us, but the greatest sinners lost the right to die.
Those who’d been bereft of sweet release were paired with the more consensually immortal Lady Leizniz and her ilk as the second class of undead...but the man in front of me was clearly neither.
No, he was a case of the third and final type: an empty husk, reanimated without his soul. Magic bent the world to its knees, and there were infinite ways to string up a fleshy puppet to move. Long ago, I’d found a skill tree for summoning undead creatures that could move independently of me and thought, This is strong! However, I’d swiftly abandoned the idea when I realized it would probably turn me into a public enemy.
My definition of strength did not make concessions in the role-playing half of an adventure, so that had been an easy option to drop. It didn’t matter how big my numbers got if I had to twiddle my thumbs outside the city gates every time my party went to town.
However, someone must have disagreed, because the figure in front of me had been resurrected with that sort of power. If not, then a stray geist or excess ichor must have made its way into a forgotten body—his movements were too devoid of higher intelligence to put in the same caste as Lady Leizniz.
Suddenly, the dead man’s neck turned at an impossible angle to face me. His shriveled left eyeball had popped out of its socket, the inertia of his movement swinging it on a fibrous nerve. His right eye was totally missing, having been replaced with mud. As he stared my way with his sightless gaze, his teeth chomped at empty air in unquenchable hunger.
Taken by the appalling sight, a pathetic squeak escaped my throat. Hold on, how does he even know I’m—wait! Come to think of it, undead beings could sniff out the presence of souls with some kind of non-physical sensory system, just like alfar.
The man whirled around far more nimbly than the word “zombie” would suggest and sprinted toward me as fast as any full-grown living mensch. His remaining outstretched hand and the clattering castanets of his teeth were fit for a big-budget horror flick—no editing or FX required.
I faced him head-on—but only for a moment. In the next, I took half a step forward. I’d long since drawn Schutzwolfe as a precaution for this very situation, and one swing was enough to lop off the zombie’s head. His speed had certainly caught me off guard, but it wasn’t anything to write home about. Rather, his brainless simplicity had made him an easy mark.
Besides, the entertainment of my past life had trained me for a run-in with aggressive zombies. My clubmates and I had gotten quite caught up in blowing through hordes of infected as a foursome for a time.
The zombie tumbled forward with full momentum, and his head bounced off a nearby tree to roll to my feet. A clean strike, if I do say so myself. I’d dealt a fatal wound with pinpoint precision.
This was the part where, had I been a whooping jock, I’d get hit for some kind of unpreventable bonus damage and die in a cutscene. But even though I wasn’t, this was still a concerning situation. Undead spelled bad news: there could be a nefarious mage hiding out in these woods, or enough ichor to reanimate a corpse, or even—
Hm? I felt something brush my foot. I looked down curiously, only to meet eyes with the head I’d just severed. And behind me, I heard the crunchy sound of someone trampling leaves and branches...
“Whoa?!” I squealed.
I remembered now: these sorts of enemies always resisted physical damage, and critical hits didn’t even register!

[Tips] Slashing attacks are less effective against enemies without vitals.

Question: What is the difference between fantasy zombies and modern horror zombies?
Answer: Why they keep going.
“Waaaah!” I screamed like a little baby and punted the disembodied head trying to gnaw on my boots with all the force in my body. It was almost beautiful how far it soared before it disappeared into the forest.
Zombies in modern horror movies arose from viruses, parasites, or genetic mutations, and usually stopped once their head was gone. Sometimes, they’d even go dark if they lost their heart. Outside of a few exceptions that literally could not die, the danger a standard zombie posed ended when their head splattered from a critical shot.
If one were to consider why they stopped when their head was removed, then naturally the answer would be that their head was the control center for their body. Whether the cause stemmed from a parasite that overtook the nervous system, a virus that attacked the brain stem and cerebellum, or a general madness that incited senseless violence, it always required a brain to make the rest of the human act.
Working backward, if one assumed the command center was anywhere else, then a zombie could have their head reduced to puree by a shotgun slug and all they’d lose is their main camera-slash-weapon. That didn’t stop them in any real sense.
Exhibit A.
Clumsy as it was, the body pushed itself up on its only arm and lunged for me. Knowing Schutzwolfe was too long a blade to swing freely at this range, I flipped her around, grabbing onto the edge with my gloved left hand. After juking the zombie’s grab, I used my entire body to slam my sword’s handle into its gut.
I felt bones crack and flesh split, but the body only staggered backward without collapsing. A living mensch would be gasping for air and hurling up their lunch, but the thing didn’t even seem fazed.
I’d expected as much. If the body didn’t need a head to move, then breathing lungs and a beating heart were hardly any more important. I could crush its diaphragm whole, but it simply didn’t have the faculties to register its own discomfort.
Extending a Hand to a nearby rock, I applied a few more thorough beatings to be safe. Eons ago, this had probably been the first melee weapon my ancestors had used. The trusty stone continued to dish out plenty of damage to this day...but still the zombie did not die.
This was the horror of fantasy undeath. Animated by mystic or spiritual means, they had no weak point to disable them and none of the reactions to injury of a living organism. While I didn’t risk “turning” due to a stray bite or scratch, the thing easily had enough raw strength to pull off a limb, making the silver lining rather gray.
Living mensch flinched when cut, lost their orientation when blinded or deafened, and crumpled in agony when their guts spilled out of their stomach. Some took one look at my childish frame and let their guard down. While the strength of people varied wildly, across the board, they were one of my best matchups.
Yet none of those weaknesses applied to a corpse. The spells I’d developed to disrupt the senses meant nothing against them, and pain would never prevent their advance. I’d tailored my build to produce crit after crit, but here it was all for naught... I’d been attacked by a hard counter that I wasn’t yet ready for.
“What do I do now?” I mused, overlooking the wriggling zombie. I was keeping it pinned, but it’d been physically strengthened upon revival. Despite having grips on its back, hand, and knees with my new and improved Unseen Hands, it was clear that the base weakness of the spell was becoming a problem.
This was my greatest weakness post-power spike: I wasn’t suited for fights against those that were significantly bigger or stronger than a normal person.
My skill with the blade and my magical endeavors were a mean combo, but a sword was still a sword. The best I could do was cut a narrow segment of flesh—corresponding to the bit near the blade’s tip that was especially suitable for slicing. I didn’t have the reach to pierce the heavens nor the area-of-effect to part a sea.
Even though the limits of swordplay in this magical world weren’t too different from Earth, there were unfortunately many beings that naturally surpassed the level of a mensch combatant. Entities like the undead that broke all the rules were everywhere, and sooner or later, my emphasis on cutting down humanoids on the battlefield would hit a wall.
I would have liked a skill that let me send shock waves with every slice, but alas, reality did not conform to the logic of weekly shonen manga. No, this planet preferred the grittiness of monthly seinen magazines instead.
That wasn’t to say my swordsmanship was ineffective, mind you. My blade was sharp, and a good swing would part armor and scales alike. I was plenty capable of felling giants so long as I chained together critical hits, but severing their girthy limbs or necks was impossible no matter what I tried. Such was the ceiling of swordplay: it offered a chance at victory, but I wasn’t about to chop off a monstrous tail before it slammed into my party-mates or anything.
When faced with an enemy that literally didn’t have a critical weakness, my own weakness became readily apparent. As I pondered this difficult dilemma, I sensed a spell being cast from behind.
Then, a gray sludge hurtled through the air, splattering onto the squirming body. As soon as it landed, it began to harden from paste to solid.
“Are you all right?!” The dependable oikodomurge at my side had blasted the zombie with quick-drying cement. Enhanced with hedge magic, the viscous liquid lost moisture faster than a sponge in a desert. Not even an undead could overcome hardened concrete, and the small bit of its limbs that remained exposed could do nothing but flail helplessly.