By Zephyria 
A short while later, everyone regained their senses.
To train the sword is to train the mind. All of us in our party knew well how to control our own minds. Neither we, who had constantly honed our bodies and minds, nor the mercenaries who always played with weapons on the brink of life and death, would easily give up on life.
I too had experienced controlling my mind through jokes many times when facing a great task. Everyone let out a few hollow laughs and jokes before stopping. I forced myself to look away from the sight of large and small zombies gathered in a swarm, standing blankly and shuffling about.
Now, trying to figure out a way to escape, I felt lost again.
John, who had been biting his lip with both hands for a long time, subtly called me.
“Um, Lord Ernhardt.”
“Hmm.”
I nodded once, granting permission to ask. John hesitated, then stammered, “How are zombies made?”
“…What?”
“I was just wondering how they can churn out so many of them…”
“If I knew that, I’d be a Demon Sect Disciple, no, a Black magician.”
“…That’s true.”
What I knew was how to deal with zombies. I knew that if they were completely shattered or burned, they wouldn’t rise again, and since their movements were specialized according to their former lives, it wasn’t difficult to defeat them if you observed carefully.
But what opportunity would I have to learn about the arts of Demonic Arts? I had no idea how to manufacture zombies.
I stopped my solitary contemplation and turned my gaze to Marianne. Without me needing to ask aloud, Marianne, sensing my gaze, groaned and contorted her face. She grabbed both sides of her short hair and, in a piteous posture, opened her mouth.
“I don’t know either.”
“…Hmm.”
“The magic spells or ingredients for Black Magic are almost lost to practice. What I know are the answers, not the process of deriving the formulas.”
We hadn’t encountered a single zombie since entering the Oasis’s domain. So, despite a vague sense of unease, we hadn’t been overly worried. Even if zombies lined our path ahead, we were skilled enough to defeat Steel Corpses without much difficulty.
However, hadn’t we already experienced the matter of the corrupted Trolls? There was no way to overcome a war of attrition. If the safety of the path through them wasn’t guaranteed, we couldn’t easily leave this area.
Was this place truly safe?
Everyone agreed that the first thing to do was confirm whether zombies could indeed be prevented from entering the Oasis’s domain. If we were caught off guard, it would be a disaster of unprecedented scale.
Just in case, I left the camels and two mercenaries at our current location. I told them to retreat until we were barely visible and, if anything happened, to flee to the Oasis with all the luggage. I decided on this because, by appealing to the Spirits at the central spring, where the Divine Power was said to be strongest, we might be able to beg for our lives for the time being.
The rest of the party also secured four days’ worth of food and water around their waists. My nerves were on edge, thinking about what might happen next.
We slowly approached the edge of the domain. The sound of sand crunching underfoot seemed unusually loud. It was midday, with not a breath of wind. As the midday sun beat down, the sight of the zombies, which were even clearer, made the members of our party clench their jaws to stifle their sighs as they looked closer.
The shambling zombies seemed not to have noticed our presence. Of course, zombies often acted as if they sensed presence rather than saw human forms, but it was strange that they didn’t notice us when we were within five meters.
Something even more astonishing was happening.
“…Isn’t that a Troll?”
“That looks like Black Magic. I can see a Magic Circle on the back of its neck.”
“Where?”
“The fourth from the left, the Troll with one ear cut off.”
There were more zombies created from monsters than from humans. We had assumed this was the case because all the zombies we had encountered so far were made from humans. Since the number of captured humans wasn’t very large, we thought their supply wouldn’t be great. Was it that zombies made from monsters were created later, or that monsters were the first step, followed by reanimation of their corpses?
As I pondered this, a whistling sound cut through the air. A Flying Dagger of a familiar design flew straight towards the group of monsters. Mithril thread was wrapped around the hilt, just below the sword guard. It was Hugh Benson’s. The Flying Dagger curved at a graceful angle, and the zombies did not flee. The Mithril thread wrapped around the waist of a nearby Orc Steel Corpse. Elvin, acting on Hugh Benson’s orders, wrapped the middle of the Mithril thread around his hand and yanked hard, easily pulling the Steel Corpse into the Oasis’s domain.
As if it had just recognized us, it opened its mouth wide and leaped. As expected, Hugh Benson infused Sword energy into the Mithril thread and cleanly severed its waist. The next step should have been to cut off its head, but Hugh Benson did not move his sword. The Orc, with only its upper body remaining, stopped abruptly. It merely rolled its clouded eyes a couple of times, as if its previous ferocity had been a lie. Everyone watched in silence, not daring to breathe.
Then, the Orc crawled out of the domain. It rejoined the other Orc zombies as if nothing had happened. The lower half of the halved zombie sizzled and sank beneath the sand right before our eyes.
Was this the Divine Power?
Elvin suddenly spoke, saying something in his language. Hugh Benson, as usual, translated.
“According to the Oasis, that zombie… it seems to be treated as a monster.”
“What? It has no soul.”
“It might have one.”
“…Yes?”
“Remember when they said Michael’s soul was split or something?”
I recalled the tiny fragments of memory I had recovered. For some reason, I felt uneasy. A few names, and mere dreamlike fragments of pleasant or unpleasant memories. Even with just that much, it was said that the world could be torn apart, so God kept it in his possession.
While listening to Hugh Benson’s voice, I gazed at Elvin’s face. He had his usual calm expression.
“Just like that, if even a tiny bit of soul remains attached to that body, the Oasis treats them as living beings until they are completely annihilated.”
“How can that be? That’s insane!”
“It’s definitely not within the Oasis’s jurisdiction, so it probably won’t let them into its domain, but it doesn’t seem to intend to kill them indiscriminately either.”
“Then.”
“We have to find our own way to survive.”
Still, it was fortunate that immediate safety was guaranteed. When I asked Elvin if he was still hearing Divine Revelations, he said that what he heard occasionally was not real-time revelations but closer to traces or remnants of Divine Power. I desperately wanted to question him about what that meant, but he said it required theological contemplation, so I put it off.
We rejoined the mercenaries who had been waiting at a distance and made new plans for the future. A long, horizontally oval shape was drawn on the ground.
“From the easternmost part of the domain to Felix’s border, it takes two weeks if we run day and night at full speed, and exactly four weeks if we travel at our usual safe pace.”
“…Two weeks?”
“That’s the most optimistic estimate.”
Without using Light Footwork, traveling by camel is several times faster than traveling on foot. Yet, we had spent a full week crossing the third domain of the Oasis from north to south. Even if we had taken two days off, the safe zone wasn’t narrow.
“And here, from the southernmost point where we are now to the Sanctuary of the Sun… it takes three days at full speed.”
I didn’t assume our usual speed. Seeing the hordes of zombies, there was no way anyone would suggest leisurely riding camels through them. Hugh Benson drew another line around the outside of the oval he had roughly drawn with the tip of his Flying Dagger.
“If we see a path to break through in another direction, we won’t go towards the Sanctuary of the Sun. Even if someone is calling us from the Sanctuary of the Sun, we can’t trust them enough to risk our lives.”
“What if the surroundings are swarming with zombies?” Leon asked, objecting. Ruben answered him.
“Don’t we have an appointment to meet Ranunculus at the Sanctuary of the Sun at the end of the year? If Ranunculus can’t find us normally and the new year arrives, he will return to Withrow… and a rescue party for our group will be dispatched immediately.”
“Yes. Fortunately, we have Your Highness among us. Although other kingdoms are in between, so they might not send a huge force, they’ll surely send at least two hundred royal guards. Then, Steel Corpses or Blood Corpse Fiends won’t be a problem.”
At that, the mercenaries’ expressions brightened considerably. Marianne quickly asked, “How much food do we have left?”
“Uh… we still have more than a year’s worth. Thanks to Lord Tedros telling us to prepare generously from the start.”
“And since this is the Oasis’s domain, water is also secured.”
“Then…”
“But.”
Everyone’s gaze fell on Hugh Benson as he cut off his sentence.
“It would be even better if we could directly convey our message to Ranunculus from the Sanctuary of the Sun. Whether requesting a rescue party or anything else, sending a large military force through other kingdoms without definite information would incur a significant penalty.”
“…”
“We’ll scout around and head to the Sanctuary via the best path we can find. Michael, Peter, Giselle.”
“Yes.”
“Yes!”
“Come with me for a round.”
They were the four fastest among the group. Hugh Benson drew a vertical and then a horizontal line across the boundary of the domain drawn on the ground, assigning sectors. Their goal was to check the approximate size of the zombies in their assigned areas and count how many Blood Corpse Fiends were mixed in before returning.
The rest of the party decided to wait a day’s journey north from their current location, in an area where no zombies were visible. I felt a sharp pang of anxiety at being separated from Ruben for the first time in a while, but I endured it, knowing it was unavoidable.