Chapter 244

“Yaaawn.”

Tel, the forest keeper of Lost Estate, stepped outside late at night to use the toilet. He yawned, then shivered at the cold wind. The chill quickly cleared the sleep from his head.

“Huh?”

He glanced up at the sky and frowned.

“Is tonight the Red Moon?”

That couldn’t be right. Hadn’t it risen just a few days ago? Tel never forgot its cycle. Whenever the Red Moon appeared, the monsters grew especially violent.

“Had the moon gone crazy?”

Tel muttered, then yawned again. Red Moon or not, all he wanted was to finish his business and get back to his warm bed.

Creeak... Creeak...

“Hm?”

A strange sound reached his ears as he headed toward the toilet. At first, he thought the forest monsters were making a ruckus again because of the Red Moon, but it wasn’t that. The sound was nothing like what he usually heard.

Thud... Creeak... Clack...

“...What the hell is that?”

Even after years as a forest keeper, Tel never heard anything like it.

Sounds like something hard hitting something else. And something’s falling too.

Creeak... Crack... Creeeak...

What is that?

The location was troubling as well.

That’s the graveyard.

It was where the people who had died in the black forests were buried together. Their bodies had been too difficult to identify, so they had no choice but to hold the funerals simultaneously. They had dug several large pits and buried everyone together.

Now, those strange sounds seemed to be coming from that very graveyard, deep inside the woods.

“Damn... Are bandits digging up the graves?”

Every now and then, some lunatic would come along and dig up the communal graves to steal valuables from the dead.

If you’re going to rob graves, go after the nobles.

Those cowards wouldn’t dare go near the nobles’ graveyard. The security was too tight, and they were too afraid of getting caught.

They’d barely find a few coins in a commoner’s grave, and yet they still want that.

There were always people greedy enough to try.

Swish.

“I’ll teach these b*stards a lesson!”

Tel grabbed the shovel he’d left outside his quarters. He needed something to use as a weapon.

He’d worked as a mercenary for a while in his younger days, so he knew a thing or two about fighting. A shovel would be more than enough to deal with petty thieves like these.

Crunch... Creeak... Thud...

The strange sounds grew louder as Tel approached the graveyard. There must be more than one or two thieves. Something about the noise was unsettling.

“Hey! You damn punks—”

Tel called out as he approached, but the words died in his throat.

W-what is that?

He stared at the sight before him, his mouth hanging open.

Crunch... Creeak...

Something was crawling out of the ground. Something long and white...

“...B-bones?”

Bathed in the red moonlight, what was slowly crawling out of the earth was unmistakably bone. Human bones.

“Eek!”

Tel clamped a hand over his mouth to stifle the scream. But it wasn’t just bones crawling out of the ground. Half-rotted corpses were emerging, too. Some still looked exactly as they had when the monsters tore them apart.

W-what is this...?!

Tel shuddered as he watched the strange things crawling out from all over the graveyard.

Thud!

Perhaps it was the tension, but he accidentally dropped the shovel he was holding. The sound rang out far louder than it should have in the surrounding silence.

Snap!

“—!”

At that moment, every one of the strange creatures turned its head toward him.

[GRAAAAAH!]

The creatures let out hideous shrieks and charged at him.

“A-aaaaah!”

Tel’s scream echoed across the mountain, now bathed in red.

***

“Did you hear? They say the Herok region also got hit.”

“It’s not just there. The whole country’s in chaos.”

“Did you see the red moon last night? These days, even the color red gives me the creeps. Damn... It’s completely insane.”

“The red moon was always creepy.”

The world was in an uproar.

And with good reason.

Ceres sighed quietly as she listened to the mercenaries talking.

It was all because of a bizarre phenomenon that had happened recently. The red moon, which used to rise only once a month, kept appearing almost every day. When people gazed up at the blood-red moon, their hearts were slowly filling with anxiety and fear.

Well, that part would be fine.

In the past, the red moon never caused any major problems. It merely made monsters and wild animals a little more agitated than usual.

But recently, a new and terrifying phenomenon had begun. Strange things were waking up.

The dead.

The dead were rising from their graves.

And not just anyone.

To be more precise, it was the people who were trapped in the black forests and killed by monsters there.

At first, Ceres thought the red moon was causing every corpse to rise from the dead. But it soon became clear that every corpse crawling out of the ground was killed by a monster.

Corpses that crawl out of their graves at night...

The casualties were staggering. The dead attacked anything alive, human or monster, and the death toll kept climbing.

Even swords are useless against them.

Soldiers and mercenaries could barely put up a fight. The dead were already dead, after all. Stabbing them through the heart or cutting off their heads did nothing to stop them.

With these creatures appearing out of nowhere, people had no idea how to defend themselves, let alone fight back. The only good news was that the creatures crawled back into the ground when the sun came up.

Once people learned that, they ventured out at daybreak to dig up the corpses hiding underground and burn them.

But there are simply too many of them.

How many people had died in the black forests over the years? Far too many to count.

And they’re scattered everywhere.

If they’d known this on the very first day, perhaps things wouldn’t have gotten this bad. Most of those who died in the black forests were buried together in mass graves, after all. They could’ve simply found those graves and burned every corpse.

But by the time people understood what was happening, the corpses had already crawled out of their graves and spread far and wide. Even if the attacks stopped at sunrise, tracking down every last one and burning them all was no easy task.

And it spreads, too.

Those killed by the dead began behaving just like them. They started hunting down and killing the living.

Then, those newly risen dead attacked more people... It was an endless cycle of violence.

There was something else as well.

“I hear the nobles wouldn’t let people burn the bodies?”

“They won’t let anyone burn their own family members.”

“What a bunch of b*stards!”

“That’s why the casualties got even worse.”

People were furious when they heard the news.

It wasn’t just commoners who had died in the black forests. Nobles had died there, too. Naturally, their bodies were buried separately on their own family grounds rather than in the communal graveyards used by commoners.

The problem was that, when this happened, commoners had dug up and burned the corpses that hadn’t yet risen, while the nobles stubbornly refused to let anyone touch their graves. They insisted that they could never desecrate the graves of their children or parents. Since their dead hadn’t risen yet, they believed their graves would remain undisturbed.

They rose in the end, just a few days later.

Unlike those buried in mass graves, the bodies that had been identified and buried individually simply rose at slightly different times. But they all rose eventually.

The nobles’ selfishness only made things worse. Their family graveyards were often near their estates rather than deep in the mountains. The corpses that crawled out of them quickly made their way into the surrounding settlements, causing even more deaths.

Pathetic.

The nobility’s foolishness was nothing new. What made it so infuriating was that ordinary people were always the ones who suffered for it.