CH 6

Chapter 6: The Beginning of a Legend

“Haah, haah, haah.”

Kousuke Hibiya was running out of breath.

He wasn’t going to make it. There was no saving him from death.

He had four of them chasing after him. Four of those things.

They were things. They were no longer human. They couldn’t be human.

Anyone who could still walk around as if nothing happened while their guts were dragging on the floor, or their hearts pierced through, or their jaws crushed, or their arms missing… could no longer be called a human being.

They simply couldn’t die.

The four that were chasing him were by no means too fast.

By running with all of his might, he would be able to get away from them easily enough.

But they…

They would never get tired.

They would never give up.

And they would never, ever, stop chasing someone they had set their eyes on.

No matter how much he could run.

No matter how much he would try to escape from them.

They will eventually catch up to him.

It was just like a bad dream he had when he was a little boy.

He thought this was the end of the world.

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The world broke apart three days ago.

At the intersection of Shibuya.

Everyone seemed to think that the first one of those “things” was drunk or something.

“It” walked around, grabbed a nearby man’s arm and started biting it.

The brave young man who tried to separate them also got bit.

And thus began the outbreak.

Since then, infected people started to appear in cities around the world.

No one knows the details of when, where, and how the disease –simply called “zombie disease”– originated.

Some say that God had created it to destroy humanity. That the trumpet signaling the end had been blown.

The buddhist Kousuke didn’t believe in those things at all, but he realized that the world was heading towards its end regardless of who had blown the trumpet.

And, even before the whole world ends, his own demise was approaching him a mere meter behind him.

He sprained his ankle.

That had undoubtedly been a fatal mistake.

He felt “their” fingers grazing against the back of his head.

“…Eeek!”

He had seen many people killed by them.

Not just killed. Eaten alive.

He felt an instinctive horror.

He didn’t like zombie movies. He remembered watching a single scene on TV once before, and changing channels immediately after.

In the scene, a man surrounded by zombies took his pistol and shot himself on the head. It was a gruesome suicide scene.

Kousuke remembered thinking that it was stupid.

The man had a gun. He should have made an effort to stay alive until the very end. He should have resisted.

That’s what he had thought on that day.

Only now he could know how wrong he had been.

It’s much easier to hit the reset button of life by blowing your own brains out before you can feel the pain of being eaten alive by those things.

If only he had had a pistol at hand, he would have gladly pulled the trigger and ended his own life right then and there.

Unfortunately, in Japan, which was not a gun society, there was no easy way to get a pistol.

With his face messed up by his own tears and dripping nose, Kousuke stumbled and fell rolling on the school playground.

Something warm started to spread around his crotch area.

His entire body had given up.

“At least, be gentle when you kill me.”

He begged for a merciful death, but the next moment…

“Okay…”

A girl appeared, muttering in a relaxed tone of voice.

A red jersey. A third grade student.

He noticed the “Miyabigaoka High” emblem on her chest.

The way she was fighting…

…He couldn’t really describe it.

It made him feel as if an actual monster hunter had come out of a game.

With an almost mechanical movement, she thrust the tip of a Japanese sword into each of the zombies’s skulls.

That was it.

With that alone, all four zombies died like a bug.

“…Eeh, aah?”

The only words that managed to get out of his mouth were utter nonsense.

The girl extended her hand towards him.

Then, smiling, she said,

“That was close! Are you okay?”

That was the beginning of a legend.