That "Battle Start" ringing in his ears made Schiller visibly freeze. Countless clues suddenly became clear in his mind.
Come to think of it, when had he heard the system's Battle Start prompt?
The first time had been in the Wooden House, when he faced a corpse that had suddenly begun moving. The Beyonder had given that prompt then. The following times had mostly been the same: human corpses moving, followed by the Battle Start prompt.
But there had been no prompt when they fought those five hounds. They had not even entered a turn-based state; it had simply been an ordinary brawl.
What did that mean?
At first, Schiller had thought the Battle Start prompt was triggered by incidents involving anomalies.
Then why had he heard it when fighting Greed?
There were now two possibilities. One was that the prompt only appeared in battles involving anomalies, in which case the prompt during his fight with Greed meant Greed was connected to the anomalies.
The other, more hidden possibility was that the prompt only appeared when fighting Players like Greed, while the suddenly revived corpses had actually been manipulated by a Player.
Instinctively, Schiller felt the latter was more likely.
He was not making baseless speculation. First of all, they had never seen the Wanderer from beginning to end. They had no idea whether that fellow truly did what they had previously deduced—possessing living people, killing living people, then controlling their corpses. It had all been nothing more than their guess.
Second, if the Wanderer truly possessed such an ability, he should not have been so fragile and easily defeated. Those moving corpses had caused them no trouble at all. So far, every injury they had suffered had either come from failed dice rolls backfiring on themselves or from that