“| feel a chill. Kazuma, didn’t the quest say we were looking for a Zombie Maker? | don’t think it’s that simple... | have a feeling a much worse kind of undead is waiting for us...,” Aqua said quaveringly.

The moon had risen; it was late in the night.

“Hey, don’t say that. You'll jinx us. We’re here to take out one Zombie Maker. Then we rebury the zombies, head back to the stable, and go to sleep. And if anything weird happens and things don’t go according to plan, we'll skip right to going home. Okay?”

Everyone nodded.

It was almost time. We began to walk toward the graveyard, with me on point, using the Sense Foe skill I’d learned from Chris.

Aqua’s words bothered me, but not too much. She was always spouting pointless nonsense, after all.

Well, almost always...

... Huh?

“| feel kind of a tingle. Sense Foe is working. There’s one, two...three?” Huh? That was too many.

Granted, we’d heard a Zombie Maker could have two or three zombie underlings. This was within the margin of error.

Just as | was thinking that, a bluish-white light shone in the middle of the cemetery.

...What was that?

The light was weirdly, wondrously blue. It seemed oddly far-off, and it looked like a magic circle. And standing next to the circle was a black-robed figure.

“Odd... | do not believe...that is a Zombie Maker,” Megumin whispered uncertainly.

Several human forms milled about near the robed person.

“Do we go in? It may not be a Zombie Maker, but anyone in a graveyard at this time of night is an undead for sure. So as long as we’ve got our Arch-priest with us, we’ll be fine.”

Darkness was fidgeting, holding her great sword against her chest. Calm down already, you. Then Aqua seemed to lose it.

“Ahhhhhh!” she screamed suddenly, and then, before | could figure out what she was thinking, she leaped up and dashed toward the robed figure.

“Wha—? Hey, wait!”

She didn’t seem to hear me. Instead, as she neared the mysterious character, she pointed a finger at it accusingly.

“How dare a Lich show her face here so nonchalantly?! You’ll pay for this!” A Lich?

That was a serious undead monster, up on top of the pecking order with vampires and the like. They were known as No-Life Kings: mages who’d mastered the very limits of magic and then abandoned their natural bodies through arcane rituals.

Unlike the average undead, who got that way because of an enduring grudge or powerful attachment to this world, Liches were unhallowed beings who’d deliberately twisted the laws of nature.

Basically, you might expect to see them as a final boss. And here we were

looking right at one...

“Eeeek! St-st-stop iiit! Who are you, ma’am?! And why are you trying to break

[??

my magic circle?! Stop it! Please stop “Shut your undead mouth! You’re up to no good with this circle, I’m sure! Spit

it out! Confess!”

Our enemy, the fearsome foe, the final boss, was clinging tearfully to Aqua’s legs, trying to keep her from stomping all over the magic circle. The undead that the Lich (?) was controlling did nothing to intervene, just stared blankly at the two of them.

Sooo...what now? | guess we didn’t have a Zombie Maker on our hands, at any rate.

Aqua kept shouting about a Lich, but the supposedly powerful monster looked more like a girl getting bullied by some punk.

“Stop it! Stop, please! This circle helps lost souls find their way to Heaven!

|”

Look! You see all those souls ascending from the circle, right?

It was true: Bluish-white humanlike figures were appearing from out of nowhere, entering the circle and floating up to the sky in the bluish light.

“You put on a pretty good nice-girl act, Lich! But how about you sit back and let an Arch-priest handle the good-guy stuff?! Why bother with a silly magic ring when | can take care of this whole cemetery at once!”

“Whaaa—? Wait! Stop!” The Lich grew ever more panicked at Aqua’s pronouncement. Aqua ignored her. She spread her arms wide and cried:

“Turn Undead!”

A white light spread out from Aqua and engulfed the entire graveyard. No sooner had the light touched the Lich’s zombies than they vanished. When it reached the human souls who’d gathered in the circle, they, too, disappeared.

And then the light reached the Lich... “Eeeyaaahh! I-l’m vanishing! Stop! Please stop! I’m going to disappear! I’m not ready to move on yet!”

“Ahhh-ha-ha-ha! Foolish Lich! Defier of the laws of nature! Undead abomination, turning your back on the will of the gods! Soon I'll erase you without a trace!”

“Hey, leave her alone already.” | gave Aqua a bop on the back of the head with my sword hilt.

“Huh?! O-owww! What’s the big idea?!”

The knock on the head must have broken her concentration, because the white light vanished. Aqua turned on me with her hand to her head and tears in her eyes.

When Darkness and Megumin joined us, | was ignoring Aqua’s attempts to strangle me and instead talking to the Lich, who sat shaking on the ground.

“H-hey, are you all right, um...Lich? Can | call you Lich?” | could see that her legs were semitransparent, having started to disappear. They slowly returned to normal, and she unsteadily stood up.

“I-I-I’m all right... Th-that was a close one. Thank you for saving me! Y-you’re right—I’m a Lich. My name is Wiz.”

As she spoke, she drew back her hood. The moonlight illuminated a face that looked like a normal human’s, albeit someone barely twenty years old. Brown hair framed her face. In fact, she was quite lovely.

Somehow, I’d imagined a Lich would look like a skeleton or something.

Wiz’s robes were all black, the very picture of an evil mage. Wait—did she still count as an evil mage if she was also a Lich?

“Um, Wiz... What exactly are you doing here? | mean, in a graveyard in the middle of the night? You said something about sending souls to Heaven? Aqua might have been a little hasty, but | agree that that doesn’t sound like something a Lich would do.”

“Be careful, Kazuma! If you talk to this rotten apple, you’ll become undead, too! Let me cast Turn Undead on her!” Aqua angrily jumped to her feet and made to cast a spell on Wiz.

Wiz ducked behind my back, looking both frightened and dismayed, before saying, “Y-yes, | am a Lich, as you can see. A No-Life King. Because I’m a ruler among the undead, | can hear the cries of wandering souls. This is a communal graveyard. Most of the people here were too poor to receive a proper burial. Now they drift among the graves every night, unable to reach Heaven. Since they are under my authority, | come here regularly to help all the little ones who wish to ascend to Heaven.”

Gosh, this...this really pulls on my heartstrings.

She was actually a good person. Other than some shopkeepers, maybe the first really decent person I’d met since getting here.

| mean, | guess she wasn’t a person in the strictest sense.

“That’s really admirable, but...isn’t that something you should leave for the town’s Priests to take care of? Well, Aqua aside.”

Wiz glanced uncomfortably at Aqua’s frustrated expression before replying—

“Well, you see...the Priests in this town, they...they really care only about money. The poor go forgotten...”

No wonder she looked uncomfortable, with an Arch-priest—Aqua, at that— standing right there.

“Followers of the almighty eris, eh?” | said. “I guess they wouldn’t be caught dead holding services in a graveyard for the poor—if you'll excuse the expression.”

Everyone looked at Aqua in silence, who awkwardly avoided our collective gaze.

“Well, no changing that, | guess,” | went on. “But do you think you could stop summoning all these zombies? We came here thinking we were on the trail of a Zombie Maker, you know.”

Wiz seemed uneasy at my words. “Oh...| see... But | don’t exactly summon them; when | come here, the spirits who still have bodies simply react to my magical power and come out on their own. If | knew someone was helping the lost souls, though, | wouldn’t need to keep coming here...” A long pause. “Oh, isn’t there something we can do?”