Meanwhile, above deck, Jiraya fought against dead men. The mercenaries’ and sailors’ skins were peeling off from having been burned in the grapefire blast. They moaned in pain, their voices hoarse from previously inhaling high temperature flames — and yet, they continued to fight, as if they didn’t know what else to do. They really didn’t. There was nothing left for them to do but fight.

This wasn’t the first time Jiraya saw men like this, whose reason had been pushed beyond the brink, but this was the first time he’d seen so many shambling towards him with sabers. He still far surpassed them all in raw skill with the sword … but he was quickly tiring out.

—The fastest blade of the Aranai, defeated by mere malnutrition.

He scoffed at himself in his mind. There was no one to blame for his failures but himself, and his subordinates paid for his failures in blood.

He had little hope now. He raised his blades and prepared himself to receive the attacks of seven desperate Kittari — his tragic kinsmen.

Two of them lunged at him with simple attacks. He parried these away easily enough, but the strikes felt heavy against his blade. He felt like such a mediocre swordsman for parrying those attacks like an amateur; receiving attacks directly, edge-against-edge, was the fastest and easiest way to chip one’s sword.

By the time he’d be dead, he’d be holding a saw instead of a sword.

He slashed one of the sailors across the chest, but something was wrong. The sailor cried out more in fury than in pain, and he slashed his cutlass at Jiraya in a wide arc.

Jiraya stepped back in time, taking two steps to get out of the reach of two consecutive slashes. Such a thing should’ve been impossible. That cut across the sailor’s chest should’ve incapacitated his ability to even raise his arms!

This, too, Jiraya had seen before. Some people had the talent or perseverance to use magic to animate themselves, so even if their muscles had been cut, they would continue to move like it was nothing. There were Skills for it as well, but if someone had even a single Skill, they wouldn’t be ordinary people, and there was even less of a chance that they would be cannon fodder like these poor bastards.

Well, this was just one enemy among dozens on the deck. He retreated to a different opponent behind him, cutting him with a slash that spanned from one shoulder to the other. Even Jiraya would be hard-pressed to recover from a blow like this —

He weakly parried a counterstrike from the sailor, which sent him stumbling back.

There was seriously something wrong with these guys! He re-attuned his senses to more broadly take in the battlefield, and soon enough, he realized that the overall battle was already winding down. The cannon fire had stopped, and smaller explosions harassed the encampment on the wharf.

More importantly, the closer he looked at the mercenaries, the more … properly dead they seemed: flayed skin, wounds that weren’t bleeding, and a single-minded desire to reach him.

He sighed … for he’d also seen this type of thing before. He’d been under the service of Her Highness for a long time. Perhaps the fact that all her strange tasks brought him to ever stranger places was a godsend here.

To take down one of these things, decapitating them wouldn’t be enough. He’d need to cut off all their limbs; it wouldn’t kill them, but he just needed them to “stop moving” — good enough, wasn’t it?

Unfortunately, he wasn’t strong anymore. He wouldn’t be able to hack through an arm if he tried. He found himself surrounded in a circle of the dead. He grit his teeth and gripped both his swords with whatever strength he had left. He could kill maybe three of them.

As he prepared to defend against the one closest to him, a chain wrapped around its neck and pulled it back.

Jon looked down at the strange-looking mercenary; he expected a panicking man, but he was more like a zombie. “He’s not alive!” Jiraya shouted. He didn’t know if his intention had been conveyed, but when Jon used the chain-and-dagger to stab the mercenary in the head, it seemed to have been.

Of course, the mercenary didn’t stop moving just from that, but Jon was quick to adapt. The modern world, after all, was rich in media depicting multiple types of zombies. This particular type was nothing more to him than a variant of something utterly overdone.

Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

He whipped the chain towards a nearby saber and picked it up, bringing it to his hand. He cut down at the zombie’s hands, disabling its ability to grab things, and then at the zombie’s head, disabling its ability to bit–

Hacking down at the ball socket of its arms, however, the saber only left a shallow gash in the padded armor. The zombie tried to get up, but Jon kicked it back down.

There were other zombies shambling towards him and shabbily cutting down with sabers. He could fight them, but he saw Jiraya struggling with a zombie from the corner of his eyes. Light on his feet, he evaded the immediate strikes and used the chain to sweep zombies off their feet as he passed them.

He reached Jiraya just as he was about to get done in by a slash from a second zombie. He sent the whip to wrap around the zombie’s wrist, redirecting its blow to hit the zombie Jiraya was wrestling. Jon swept the surrounding zombies from their feet, finally giving them the breathing room they needed.

“What’s going on here?” Jon asked.

“There’s a necromancer somewhere nearby.” Jiraya scanned the ship, but there was no other living person on the deck. “Hiding really well, too. How about my subordinates?”

“Holding off a group downstairs.”

“You left them?” There was a bite of disbelief from Jiraya’s tone.

A second blast of grapefire exploded out of the aft of the deck. Good thing they were fighting near the fore ramp; had they been any closer, they’d have lost an eye at least.

“They’ll be alright,” Jon said. “But these.”

The zombie mercenaries were already starting to get up. It was all a sick joke to him to have to fight these things that were straight out of a TV. He was also beginning to feel the fatigue of protracted battle; he couldn’t imagine what Jiraya and the others might have been feeling at the moment.

“Any other way to make zombies around here?” he asked.

Jiraya thought back to his various missions — ah, who was he kidding? They only had one mission that ever involved necromancers and the dead … but that was the problem. All the methods he knew of raising the dead involved necromancers.

“I’m just an assassin,” Jiraya replied. “I only know how to cut people up.”

If that was the only thing they knew how to do, then that was the only thing they did. Jon knocked down one of the zombies and cut off another’s sword hand, working overtime so that Jiraya didn’t need to fight too often; the man was growing weaker by the second. It didn’t help that most of the mercenaries wore armor. Had they been mortal, an aimed cut to the neck would’ve easily taken them out — but zombies weren’t as fragile.

There was one who was close to reaching Jiraya. Jon slashed the mercenary in the face, but that only made it stumble back a bit. Even taking aways its eyes didn’t make it stop, and it seemed as though they didn’t even need eyes to home in on them. “How much damage can they take?” Jon thought. “How can I kill them?”

He went through every single possibility he could think of in the heat of battle — concussive attacks to the head, cuts to specific muscle groups around their exposed limbs — but nothing worked.

At that moment, the surroundings brightened up, like the clouds had moved to expose the moon — but it didn’t stop getting brighter. It was already at the level of a faraway flood light, and judging by the shadows cast by the surrounding sails and masts of the ship, it was coming from the sky.

Jon glanced up, only intending to take a second to confirm that the aberration wasn’t going to distract them for too long — but it was more than just an aberration. Miles and miles of clouds around them were shining. Whatever source of light was behind them was intense enough to penetrate miles of clouds, and even then, it was like a floodlight warming up. The shadows he cast on the deck had a crisp outline.

The clouds parted into an oculus. At first, nothing happened — then everything went white. There was no sound when it struck, but there was a strange shockwave that felt like it was about to rip his soul away — he couldn’t explain it.

He saw the shockwave — a wall of rainbow light — spreading out to sea. Around him, the zombies fell like puppets with their strings cut.

“I ... I feel better,” Jiraya remarked. He was looking down at his hand, then the rest of his body. His overall condition had improved, though his bones were still showing.

Jon didn’t know how to process all of this. It was no exaggeration to call it an act of god — and that was what he called it in his mind, taking a brief moment to realize that there were, indeed, goddesses in this world, and what he’d seen was likely just a fraction of their overall power. Heck, knowing at least one goddess’ personality, something like this ... might have just been on the level of a tease.

From the encampment came victory shouts from hundreds of men. Going by the mission time — Jon always counted the seconds, just in case — they should be the Order’s response forces.

He faced Jiraya. “We need to go.”

Jiraya nodded. “Let’s get my subordinates.”

Jon, Jiraya, and the last surviving assassin took a dip in the waters and swam to shore. The brothel was close, just up the hill, but they couldn’t show up as they were.

Drying himself with magic, Jon looked back to the smoldering harbor, watching the flags of the Order wave with the dragoons who patrolled the grassy surrounds, looking for stragglers of the zombie mercenaries.

The Order would find the slaves and levy the funds to see to their health. He was satisfied with that outcome.