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The Last Man Standing is already thirty seconds in when 1x1x1x1 remembers. The corner up ahead was the exact spot where he'd cornered that sniveling little fanatic earlier and opened them up just to watch them gurgle. A body down. A body that, if memory serves, should still be rotting there behind the pillar, ripe and ready.
Perfect. Dusekkar's route runs him straight past it.
He plants both swords into their own chest without slowing his stride. It is a wet motion, ichor spilling down in rivulets over their torso as they unshank them from their torso, a spray of two twin circles of ichor painting the ground and fizzling where it touches grass. The ground behind the pillar answers, dirt splitting, a snarling husk of a body clawing its way upright right on cue.
She grins with all her teeth. Dusekkar's about to get a face full of consequences for existing.
There is no cry or yelp that comes from behind the pillar where 1x1x1x1 had expected the zombie to hit Dusekkar, nor is there a zombie that trails after the pumpkin mage. Instead, he floats out of the corner it, several inches off the ground, robes doing that insufferable billowing thing they do, like his own two feet are beneath him and he comes out the other side completely, disgustingly untouched.
1x1x1x1 stops dead.
He stares at the empty air where a very good ambush just failed to happen. Rage flickers hot behind their eyes - did the Spectre mess with their kit again? Some invisible tweak patched in overnight, some cosmic hand fiddling with things that aren't theirs to fiddle with? He'd just buried two swords in their own ribcage for nothing-!
- and then they hear it. A soft thud from behind the pillar.
She stalks over, murder still simmering, only to find the zombie crumpled sideways in the dirt. It isn't slashed. Not dismembered by a sentinel doing its job, even if 1x1x1x1 didn't remember that pacifist mage having any offensive abilities of any sort to do such damage.
The zombie was just... down. Passed out. Chest rising, falling, twitching occasionally like it's having a bad dream.
1x1x1x1 crouches and jabs it once with a claw. It doesn't so much as growl. Just lies there, fainted, alive, inexplicably fine, having apparently gotten up, taken one look at consciousness, and decided against it.
He doesn't have the first idea how a corpse she personally reanimated is somehow both animate and unconscious at the same time. It shouldn't be possible. It isn't supposed to be possible. Hatred coils tighter in their chest at the sheer nonsense of it, a fresh, personal insult layered on top of the ambush that just fizzled into nothing.
But there's no time to interrogate a fainting zombie. It's last man standing. Dusekkar's getting away.
They leave the useless little heap in the dirt and take off after him, twin blades still dripping, already furious all over again as they rip out their eye.
This time it's another day, another round where it's 1x1x1x1's turn to hunt down her prey. It's about midway through the round, with ample time, and now that there wasn't as much time pressure as there would've been in Last Man Standing, 1x1x1x1 could take their time to investigate what really happened.
She'd made a point of it, actually. Hunted the fanatic down first, ahead of her cursed creator even, ahead of everyone. 1x1x1x1 had cut them down deliberately, almost clinically, the way someone sets up an experiment rather than just commits murder. This one was for science.
1x1x1x1 made sure to have a strong stance before both swords went in together, twisting, and come out slicked in thick green ichor that flings wide in an arc as they're unsheathed. 1x1x1x1's own body glitches slightly from the sheer force that came from unsheathing the swords from their gut - the force perhaps a byproduct of the lingering frustration from the failed Last Man Standing.
The zombie reanimates, rising from the ground, and-
It gets about as far as its knees.
Then it wobbles, sways gently to one side like it's caught in a breeze nobody else can feel, and folds over sideways into the dirt. Alive, technically, but utterly unconscious, exactly like last time.
1x1x1x1 doesn't even have the energy to feel a second wave of rage this round. He just stares.
They crouch down next to the fanatic's crumpled body, prodding it once with a claw like it might yield an answer if handled correctly. It doesn't shout it's little 'oi!' as it reanimates. It doesn't twitch with malice. It just lies there, breathing, out cold, having apparently gotten upright for exactly two seconds before deciding that was enough responsibility for one afterlife.
1x1x1x1 scowls. What is going on here?
1x1x1x1 has killed this same idiot a dozen times over by now, across a dozen different rounds, and every single time it's the same pathetic show. The corpse claws up out of the dirt just fine, gets maybe half a second of upright, rotten glory, and then keels straight back over like something invisible reached out and switched it off.
No sentinel involved. No damage to explain it. Just a fresh zombie, standing, and then not standing, over and over, like the ritual itself has a design flaw specifically calibrated to this one body. It was consistently, insultingly specific to this one corpse and no other.
So, 1x1x1x1 starts doing something they rarely bother with: paying attention.
Round after round, they'd noticed things about the survivor without really counting them as anything: the way that cultist always looked a shade too pale even before taking a hit, the way they'd brace against a wall or duck their head after standing up too fast from a generator or needing their 'friends' to help them, the way they lagged behind everyone else scrambling at the start of a round, winded from nothing.
Small, boring, mortal things. Things 1x1x1x1 never had a reason to care about, because why would he? Two Time was prey, another nuisance, not a patient.
So they trace it backward: not "why does the zombie faint," but "why does the cultist faint," and the second the question flips, all those useless little observations slot into place at once: the dizziness, the paleness, the breathlessness, all of it pointing at the same mundane, embarrassingly human diagnosis.
Two Time has iron deficiency.
The pieces click into place, Alive, dead, reanimated, it doesn't matter. It was as if it's a moral failing specifically to inconvenience him.
As if the entire rotten, vengeful, undead condition he grants people comes with a asterisk buried in the fine print that nobody bothered mentioning: some assembly required, results may vary, does not function in patients with pre-existing conditions.
Hatred simmers, but it's a tired, disgusted kind now instead of the hot immediate kind. He'd wasted a perfectly good minute confirming a theory, and the theory turned out to be true, and being right about it doesn't feel half as satisfying as it should. Somewhere above, she's fairly sure, biology is laughing at her.