Ah. He's said something wrong, hasn't he? All right, he'd been a bit flippant there; he can acknowledge that. He puts his hands up again in surrender, though he refuses to take a step back. Or be properly intimidated by the taller man. (Here, the image of Taura helps considerably; no one is going to top his eight-foot-tall girlfriend.)

"An illness," he says, looking up at the other man with those clear gray eyes of his. "Upon death, the body rises again as an empty monster. Your world is overrun with it."