◆
In the dim light of the Great Cavern, Valacirca swung his claws at me.
“Kah!!”
“Acceleratio!”
With a Word, I accelerated straight towards the foul-dragon. I ducked his sword-like claws and his fingers which were each as thick as a human’s torso, and pressed forwards towards him. A low sound accompanied his tree trunk-like arm swinging above my head. That one attack could have taken my head off.
The stereotype of large creatures being sluggish is a falsehood. Large creatures are strong and fast just by virtue of their size. The length of each of their steps is on a different level, and each swipe of their arms covers an entirely different range. The same goes for their ability to withstand attacks. Being stabbed with a thumbtack would probably be a fatal wound to an ant, but do the same to an elephant and the tack would be unlikely to even break the skin.
In that sense, Valacirca was simply strong. When it came down to it, he was hopelessly physically strong. And I was well aware of it.
“Lamina!”
Leaping in close, I extended a blade of mana beyond Pale Moon’s physical blade and thrust it towards what appeared to be an old wound on his side. However, the dragon twisted, and my blade met resistance, blocked by the dragon’s scales.
Dragonscale...
— If you’re going to fight him, I’d focus on his old wounds. A dragon’s scales are tough. I’ll tell you now, I doubt even Blood could have cut to the skin through dragonscale.
Gus’s words came back to me. Cutting through dragonscale would have been difficult even for Blood. But I wasn’t just going to follow in Blood’s footsteps forever!
I took a quick breath and roared. I made the muscles throughout my body work in concert, transferring force from my feet to my knees, then my thighs, twisting my body at the hips to transfer force to my shoulders, my arms, my wrists. Summoning every last bit of force as expertly as I could, I pushed my obstructed blade in harder.
“Gnng?!”
Valacirca groaned. I felt the unmistakable sensation of the blade piercing the dragon’s massive, tough scales. I kept going.
“Acceleratio!”
A roar of surprise accompanied an arm lashing fiercely out at me. I avoided the strike as I accelerated with Pale Moon still embedded in the dragon’s skin. Clutching my spear tightly with my whole arm, I ran alongside Valacirca, using my blade of mana to slice a horizontal wound into the dragon’s side. From there, I headed straight for a small gap between the rows of giant furnaces, hoping to escape, but Valacirca was not one to miss that.
“Hng... Hahaha... So you strike through the defense of dragonscale! Perfect, bracing stimulation!”
Behind me, I heard him roar out and then draw in a large breath. He was surely about to unleash scorching miasmic dragonbreath. I was protected by several layers of magic and miracles, but if his breath hit me directly, it wouldn’t be surprising if I was burned beyond recognition or even melted. My heart leaped in panic. However, the lethal breath was never to touch my back.
“You’re not only up against Will!”
“Shh!”
Even without looking, I could tell it was Menel and Reystov. While I was charging in from the front, they had already spread out and made their way around to his left and right sides. The two of them were skilled enough to inflict serious wounds on the dragon.
Menel’s Silver-string produced several elegant notes. The radiance of mithril arrows cut through the darkness of the Great Cavern. Reystov’s nameless sword glinted as he drew it and slashed in a single lightning-speed motion. Engraved with Gus’s Signs, the sword’s slash extended like a twisting snake, closing in on the dragon.
Menel’s target was Valacirca’s golden eye, while Reystov had aimed at the toes on the foot Valacirca was putting his weight on. The arrow carried enough force to shoot through an eyeball, and the slash had the sharpness to chop off toes. Even an ancient foul-dragon like Valacirca couldn’t ignore them.
“Tch!”
He was forced to twist his neck and pull back his leg to dodge. With his posture disrupted, he couldn’t hold the aim he had before. I reached the gap between the furnaces and spun around. As the dragon swung its neck, breathing in random directions, I blocked the heatwave with my large shield.
The heatwave from his breath, thick like black smoke, held more than enough heat to roast a human whole. But with the defensive magic and the many blessings that were placed on my entire body, as well as my magic shield engraved with Signs to protect against heat and poison, I endured.
This was just the heatwave. If his breath engulfed me directly, instant death would be putting it lightly. When Valacirca said that my soul itself would be incinerated and I would vanish from the eternal cycle, he might have been telling the truth.
“Impressive teamwork... haven’t you?!”
With an effortless swing of his arm, Valacirca clawed huge chunks out of the stone floor, transferring momentum to countless stone pellets that were sent scattering towards Reystov. But Ghelreis’s Sword-smasher shield and armor knocked them out of the air. Valacirca didn’t care. He swung again. But this time, out of nowhere, an old wooden tower platform that had been built inside the Great Cavern came toppling down.
“...?!”
It was Al. With his Immense halberd, he had smashed the platform’s seemingly fragile supports, sending it toppling onto the dragon. Valacirca knocked it away, but broken pieces of wood fell everywhere and obstructed his vision.
It has to be now, I thought. I couldn’t see a long battle being anything but a disadvantage for us.
It was difficult to imagine a mythological dragon running out of stamina. It was probably best to treat Valacirca as having inexhaustible energy. The same went for his ability to withstand our attacks. He could probably comfortably withstand as many as we could deal him. That was why right this moment, he was enjoying the fight and testing us out instead of going on a serious rampage against us.
We, on the other hand, would be finished for good if even one of Valacirca’s attacks landed a direct hit. He would still have plenty of opportunities to attack no matter how many hits he took, whereas we would be done for if we took so much as one serious blow. I’d known this before I took him on, but just knowing it didn’t make these conditions any less ridiculously one-sided.
If we attempted to win in a straightforward confrontation, it would call for a strategy of offense and defense similar to passing through the eye of a needle. We would have to make it succeed over and over. Then Valacirca would finally get serious, and we would have to repeat that feat at an even higher difficulty, at which point perhaps we could catch a glimpse of victory over the horizon.
It wasn’t a matter of it being difficult. It would be impossible. Our stamina wouldn’t last. Our concentration wouldn’t hold up. Even if we used up our entire lives’ supply of luck in a single fight, it still wouldn’t be enough. So I had to bet on this right now.
I rested my spear and shield against a furnace and spread my arms wide.
“Ligatur, nodus, obligatio...”
A colossal amount of mana converged and darted at high speed. My Words, incanted quickly and with extreme precision, flew at Valacirca like shooting stars.
“...conciliat, sequitur!!”
While the dragon’s vision was obscured by the collapse of the platform, I bound him in chains of mana that formed a multilayered magical seal.
“Vastare!”
The dragon immediately fired off the Word of Destruction. At the moment his vortex of devastation was just about to wrench apart the chains, I finished my response. The Word meaning “guardianship” drawn by my right hand obstructed the vortex. The Word meaning “erasure” drawn by my left hand wiped it out.
“...?!”
Triple casting. It was Gus’s specialty, and a technique that I had been practicing constantly. This particular combination was the most hidden of hidden techniques, burned into my eyes on the day I saw that batt
le between Gus and the god of undeath’s Echo.
“Pallida mors aequo pulsat pede...”
With my arms spread wide, I visualized myself scooping in the enormous amount of circulating mana and gathered it at a single point. And all the while, I weaved fluent Words and scribed fluid Signs.
“You would cast that in a real battle?!”
“...pauperum tabernas...”
I ignored the dragon’s roars. In an almost trance-like state of extreme concentration, I made fine adjustments to the mana and carried out the ritual movements in an abbreviated form.
“...regumque turres!”
“■■■■!”
For the first time, Valacirca cut the idle chatter. In a rasping kind of voice unique to dragons, he started reciting some kind of Word at a furious pace. But it was too late now. This was a ritual spell intended to be cast by a team of several people working in tandem. It was one of the ultimate magics, which was virtually impossible to perform on your own.
“Damnatio memoriae!”
It was a colorless, invisible pulse of destruction. As it traveled, it tore to shreds the connections between all of Creation’s Words, breaking them apart and isolating them. The body, the soul, the phenomenon—it rendered them all meaningless and returned them to mana.
The acme of destruction through Words, the devastating pulse of the Word of Entity Obliteration slammed into Valacirca.
◆
A crater was gouged out of the floor, as though a humongous creature had taken a full bite out of it. Strong winds blew about the Great Cavern, as if to fill in the blank formed by the pulse that had wiped everything from existence. The dragon was nowhere to be seen. It had... looked as though the pulse had engulfed and annihilated him...
“Did we... do it?” Al said while looking all around the cavern.
“Seems kinda like it,” Menel said cautiously.
Ghelreis agreed. “Victory sometimes comes with unexpected ease.”
Reystov cast his gaze carefully around the cavern and eventually nodded too, the hem of his cloak flapping in the raging winds.
The dragon had been annihilated. Thanks to an opening created by Al, his very existence had been wiped out with the ultimate destructive magic before he ever took us seriously.
And yet, somehow, I couldn’t convince myself we’d won. Was it because it had been so sudden, so anticlimactic? Not every encounter ended with a high-stakes, intense battle to the death. Sometimes you could be stabbed without a fight by someone who should have been below your level, and conversely, sometimes you could be facing someone better than you and have a fluke drop a cheap win into your lap. I knew all that, and yet for some reason it still didn’t feel real. Had we really won? This victory had fallen into our laps so easily that it still didn’t seem to have sunk in for any of us.
We stood there feeling strangely empty as the wind blew between us, howling.
The wind was... howling?
The moment I realized, an extreme chill ran down my spine. I immediately guarded with my spear and large shield as I shouted.
“No! He’s still—”
But it was too late. Four bodies sprayed blood. At the same time, a violent impact slammed my shield. I was sent flying backwards. I rolled and bounced across the rubble-covered ground.
The wind had claws. It was a nonsensical description, but there was no other way to describe it. The wind blowing about had changed for an instant into sharp claws.
Suddenly, an old story I’d heard from Gus when I was a child crossed my mind. It was the story of a sorcerer who transfigured himself into an animal, took on the animal’s thought processes perfectly, and ended up as nothing more than a wild beast.
“Trans...formed?” I mumbled, stunned.
“Ghaha... Precisely.”
The wicked wind that had sucked four people’s blood swirled inward, and the shape of a dragon once again formed in the crater.
Metamorphose...
Just as the name suggested, it was transfiguration magic. However, this was an extremely risky Word beyond a human’s ability to control. Anything more than changing into a different person with a similar body shape was very dangerous. Just spending a short amount of time transfigured into an animal, even one with similar body mass, could result in your mind being held back by the animal, preventing you from returning. And transforming into something inanimate with completely different mass? That required you to prepare yourself for the possibility you would never be human again. Using it that way was equivalent to taking a revolver loaded with a few randomly positioned bullets, putting it to your temple, and pulling the trigger. The circumstances would have to be very extreme to even consider it.
But now that I thought about it, how had Valacirca even entered this underground kingdom with a body of his size in the first place?
“So you realized. Yes!”
The foul-dragon laughed. It was howling laughter, as if he couldn’t contain his amusement.
“We are close in nature to the Words.”
The elder dragons were denizens of myth, the closest beings to the Words of Creation.
“Yes, the Word of Entity Obliteration probably would eradicate even me.”
His golden eye pierced me. Scorching breath flowed slowly from his powerful jaws.
“If you could hit me with it, of course.”
He had completely predicted the Word of Entity Obliteration’s trajectory. Not only had he predicted it, he was well aware that strong winds kicked up afterwards and had used the Word of Metamorphosis to transform into wind to make it look like he’d been annihilated. He had disguised himself among the raging winds that followed the blast and struck everyone down with his claws.
He was well versed in how to counter even the strongest destructive magic. No, not just destructive magic; I was sure that whatever other Word I had chosen, the result would have been the same. This dragon had fought on all battlefields and battled against all Words, including all those Words and Signs that were lost to the past. He was familiar with them all, and he had conquered each.
So this was a dragon. This was a foul-dragon as old as the gods.
A cold, clammy sensation spread through the core of my being.
I knew this feeling well.
Its name was despair.
◆
The foul-dragon calmly drew himself up. He had a slight cut on his side, nothing more.
“Now...”
We were at an overwhelming disadvantage. I tightened my grip on Pale Moon’s shaft. I thought despair would swallow me if I didn’t.
“Faraway Paladin, you fought admirably and with bravery.”
Surprisingly, Valacirca hadn’t tried to kill me right away. But I had too much on my mind to consider a response. I glanced around. The others didn’t seem to be dead yet. Wait, how was that possible? It was a complete surprise attack with the striking power of a dragon and he’d failed to kill any of us? That was impossible. He had chosen not to kill them. Which had to mean...
“In light of you fighting so hard, I will make you an offer. What do you think of becoming my servants?”
It was just as I thought.
“I see you understand. I have provided you an excuse.”
Valacirca smiled. He looked as though he was enjoying this, and in fact, he probably was.
“If you turn me down, I will burn your allies to cinders. Bones, souls, and all. There. Now that your allies’ lives are in need of protection, you have a noble justification to submit to me.”
I couldn’t cover everyone at the same time. They had collapsed in different places, Menel and Al on the left and Reystov and Ghelreis on the right. In the first place, I had no more plays to use against this dragon, no more ways to bring a quick end to this battle.
“I have seen many with eyes like yours. You will not be swayed or intimidated just because I threaten to incinerate you. Even now, you are stubbornly searching for a way to cut through this situation.”
He was
right. Even at this moment, I was silently holding off on answering while my mind worked desperately to come up with some kind of an out.
“But you have nothing. Am I right? Even with time to analyze the situation.”
I had to admit that it was just as the foul-dragon said. I had no more convenient breakthrough ideas.
“Oh... no, not exactly nothing. You do have one move, one way not to yield to me.”
His words caused me to frown. A move? I still had a move, in this situation?
“You can kill yourself.”
The idea had never even occurred to me.
“You are adored by the goddess of flux, are you not? All you need to do is cut off your own head.”
There was no hint of laughter in Valacirca’s voice.
“There will be a next world, won’t there? And one after that. And one after that. As many as you please. If you think winning is impossible, toss out the game board and hang yourself. If you want to reject tragedy, simply say, ‘Not yet. There will be a next world. This isn’t where I’m meant to fight,’ and drive a dagger into your own chest.”
His words were a hideous caricature of the truth. Everyone knows that things can’t actually be simplified that way. But that probably wasn’t the dragon’s point.
I shook my head. “I won’t take that choice.”
“Good. If you saw that little value in your own life, you wouldn’t even be worth subjugating.”
To Valacirca, who had an attachment to this world and had lived in it since the age of the gods, whether or not I had the will to make the most of my own life was a crucial point he couldn’t budge on.
“Then choose. Join me, or resist and be eradicated.”
My allies had been severely wounded to the point that they couldn’t do anything to help. I myself wasn’t uninjured, and my game-winning moves had already failed. I didn’t even know how many thousands of successful attacks would be needed to win by ordinary methods. I was completely checkmated. The situation now was even more desperate than it had been in my battle against the god of undeath. However—
“If I join you, I can easily imagine how you’ll use me.”
The Lord of the Rust Mountains (Complete) Page 31