The Nail That Sticks Out Gets Hammered Down (4)
"What did you say?!"
Ganix, who had been lounging with supreme leisure on a luxury sofa that an ordinary fantasy-world laborer could never afford even after a lifetime of work, shot up from his seat in a panic.
"Are you certain? How did you find that out?"
"Uh, how did I find out, how did I not… It's already famous throughout the Great Forest! They're saying a human noble who joined hands with the Third Princess has tamed the Black Flame Dragon…"
"Hell, eighty percent of the elves living in the Great Forest claim they saw it with their own eyes, so it has to be true."
"Haa… Hold on. Just wait a second."
As Assir's report kept coming through, Ganix covered his face with one hand and let out a sigh he couldn't suppress.
"………"
The Black Flame Dragon. That insane lizard brat… with those bitches?
Tenebrix Nox.
Anyone who had seen the ending of Starlight of Dawn would know exactly what that existence was.
In the latter half of the original novel, just as the protagonist seized the upper hand in the war against the demonkin and began steering a faltering conflict toward humanity's victory—just as hope filled the air and the hero's epic was about to draw its final period—that dragon appeared.
A single beat of its wings shredded thousands of imperial soldiers. A single breath swept the supporting cast away. It was an overwhelming presence that taught the world exactly what cosmic horror meant.
Even in the original work, Tenebrix Nox was stronger than any other being—stronger even than the final boss.
The cursed Black Flame Dragon that heralded the extinction of mankind: Tenebrix Nox.
"Fuck. It's a transmigrator."
Ganix understood at once why that dragon was stuck to the Evergarden family.
"…But why?"
Even though this was a contingency that person had half-expected, the reality of it left Ganix reeling. Still, he forced his head to cool and began analyzing the situation.
Tenebrix Nox was, put simply, a nuclear bomb. Put even more simply, it was a being that could fire nuclear bombs indiscriminately every second of every minute and still walk away unharmed after taking a direct hit of equal force—a creature that transcended species entirely.
If someone had possessed a being like that, how had Ganix and the others failed to notice until now?
From there, he could form a few hypotheses.
1. The one who possessed Tenebrix Nox had only transmigrated relatively recently.
That one was wrong. Cross-referencing with the other transmigrators had already established that everyone had arrived around the same time.
2. The Evergarden family had somehow managed to take ownership of Tenebrix Nox.
That was wrong too. No matter how he turned it over, he couldn't imagine them possessing any means of coaxing a soul that had been dropped into that ultimate body.
Which left the last one.
"They either knew each other before the possession… or it's some soft brat who's never killed a person in their life. That's it."
3. Compared to the original, the transmigrator had a weak, soft personality.
That was the hypothesis Ganix found most convincing.
It had already been well over half a year since someone possessed Tenebrix Nox. The fact that they had lived this long without causing a single incident, keeping their identity hidden the entire time, suggested either a complete lack of desire to show off—or an extremely frail disposition.
A dragon. A dragon.
It was a being that no one could casually stop—not even if the entire Empire came at it. Most people who became something like that would move to satisfy their own greed. But the person currently inside Tenebrix Nox had not.
No matter how much this place was a fantasy world, the soul inside that dragon's body was a modern person. If that modern person was the type to cling to ethics and morality that no longer served any purpose, even after gaining overwhelming power, then it made sense that Ganix had never heard a whisper of Tenebrix Nox until now.
"In that case, we should be fine for a while. If they were going to do something, they would have done it already."
If Freya of the Evergarden family and the Black Flame Dragon were perfectly on the same side, and if that Black Flame Dragon had no qualms about killing people, then Ganix should already have been dead the moment he shoved a glass vial of poison at Freya.
A Black Flame Dragon could have managed it easily, and there would have been no consequences for doing so. But he was still alive.
He had only faced her briefly, but Freya's nature was cold to the bone. She was the kind of person who would kill you on the spot if she had the power to do it, then slip away with a perfectly straight face and the intelligence to match. The mere fact that she had been traveling with the dragon and still had not ordered it to assassinate him told Ganix everything he needed to know about the relationship between those two—and about the dragon's personality.
But a dragon was still a dragon. Only then did the realization hit him that he could have died right there, and a chill ran down his spine.
"Hey. You still listening?"
"Wh-what? You tell me to wait out of nowhere and then—"
"That dragon is a half-measure. Keep an eye on it for now, but don't cross any lines. Just maintain things the way they are."
"Are you kidding me? That's Tenebrix Nox!! If that dragon so much as swings a hand, I'll be paste—"
"Then I'm hanging up~"
"You son of a bi—"
Click.
With a final order to Assir not to cross any lines and to stay put, Ganix cut the connection.
"…Whew. Still, this is a real problem."
He had talked big to Assir, but the current situation was a mess. The opponent he had written off as easy turned out to be sitting on an absurd secret weapon, and Ganix's head was spinning.
He still needed to keep pressure on the Evergarden family—but he couldn't accurately gauge where the line for that pressure even was. The thought that crossing it by mistake could separate his head from his body sent cold sweat trickling down his back.
But.
"Still… it's not like they're the only ones with a secret weapon."
Ganix recovered the smile on his face and worked the crystal ball again.
"Uh… it's me. Yeah, put me through. Direct line."
Ganix Obina. Confirmed.
"…Yes, it's me. Yes. I'm afraid I have some rather bad news to report."
"Still… you can handle it, right?"
And so Ganix passed along the news Assir had delivered to the someone waiting on the other end of the crystal ball.
"…Damn it! That smug blond bastard! Talking like it's not even his problem!"
Crrrk—
At that same moment, Assir—whose connection had been unilaterally cut by Ganix—clenched the crystal ball in her hand so hard it looked ready to turn to powder.
"…Haa. This is seriously rough…!"
In the end she couldn't bring herself to smash it, and set the orb back on the table with a deep sigh.
Celebrian Assir.
Her true identity was Kim Han-sik, a twenty-eight-year-old freeter.
The day he first arrived in this world was still vivid in his memory.
After finishing a late-night shift at a PC bang, Kim Han-sik had been staggering like a zombie through the rising morning light, dead on his feet—and it was only as he tumbled down the stairs that he regretted not taking the convenience-store job on the first floor across the street instead.
His neck and cervical vertebrae struck the stair railing and fractured on impact. Then came a hard blow to the back of his skull. For roughly forty-five minutes and twenty-five seconds, Kim Han-sik had been trapped in a body that would not move, drowning in the steadily tightening terror of death.
Then his consciousness cut out. Just as he thought he was dead—Kim Han-sik transmigrated into another world.
And not just any world. He had become Celebrian Assir, a supporting heroine from the web novel he used to skim for fun during his shifts: Starlight of Dawn.
To be precise, the protagonist was a heroine and it wasn't a yuri story either, so Assir still counted as one of the main cast.
Kim Han-sik had been thoroughly pleased with his second life.
Compared to his old body—short, with a face that defied narrative logic—Assir's body was perfect. A firm figure. A face like a sculpture. He had felt a certain despair at the fact that he, a man, had become a woman… but so what?
Compared to a modern life spent as a freeter, hopping between one-room apartments after graduating university without ever landing a real job, Assir's life as the Second Princess of the elven kingdom was a hundred times—a thousand times—better.
The problem, however, arrived immediately.
The point at which he—no, she—had changed was before the original story even began. Which meant Assir had not yet reached the imperial capital or enrolled at the Academy.
And right now, Assir was living in another forest entirely, having left the Great Forest behind.
Forest to the left. Trees to the right. Even as a nature-attuned elf, a woman who had spent her entire previous life in a jungle of concrete could not for the life of her find her way.
After the possession, she had simply kept walking forward. Fortunately, an elf's body seemed to move through the woods with something like instinctive ease—that much was a blessing.
But the problem found her soon enough.
The elves of the Great Forest, by the grace of the World Tree, could live their entire lives inside its bounds on nothing but dew and fruit. Assir, however, was currently where? Outside the borders of the Great Forest.
And so, around the same time a certain dragon was living a pitifully mismatched life of homelessness, this long-eared woman was also filming her own little production of Elf vs. the Wild.