115. Tasian Peiloy
115. Tasian Peiloy
Dragons.
The pinnacle of all creation, part of the world itself—beings whose influence over this world was so profound they were called small worlds with their own will.
The primordial dragons had helped shape the world under the guidance of those called gods, but after the world was completed and they lost that purpose, their descendants drifted through their lives in emptiness despite their inborn nature.
That very fate had been meant for her as well.
The Smoke Dragon—Tasian Paleoi.
A symbol of a fallen age, clinging to life in a crumbling body through an absolute vow that bound even a dragon.
-Thump, thump.
The final kindling that such a being had left behind.
In this moment, facing the dragon who had declared humanity's extinction, I felt its embers gradually catch fire.
"So it truly came to pass as foreseen."
Now, even without satisfying the conditions of the vow, she would be able to exert her power.
The vow she had sworn was to judge whether humanity's existence held value—and if it was found lacking, to "carry out humanity's extinction with her own hands."
Naturally, if someone else caused a disaster that would annihilate humanity before the moment of judgment arrived, that outcome could not be achieved by her own hand. She would have to stop it.
"Well, if they're a race doomed to perish even without me lifting a finger, I suppose their value truly is nonexistent."
-Thump, thump.
The moment her long-dormant heart pounded fiercely, she understood in her very bones that she had lived for this instant. She flicked the cigarette from her mouth to the ground.
Clinging to her own fragments, inhaling them to suppress her power—that, too, was no longer necessary.
"...You are going, then?"
A faint voice from behind, just as she was about to step onto the field.
The woman who had paused mid-stride exhaled a plume of smoke and answered.
"I have to. My end has finally come."
"Yes. If you step forward now, you won't be able to stop yourself, will you?"
The prerogative to decide whether humanity would be annihilated was hers alone.
But even if she succeeded in stopping the enemy, she would never simply return to being a bystander.
Kindling, once set alight, would not cease until it burned away to nothing—and she knew that wielding this power was her final chance to carry out humanity's extinction herself.
"But, are you truly all right with this?"
That future had already been foretold by the prophet who appeared at her back. And yet, as if unable to let go of lingering attachment, the worry continued. Tasian let out a soft laugh and turned to glance at her.
The prophet, clutching a crystal ball in her hands, gazing with a sorrowful face at the future that was about to unfold.
"How long have we known each other, for you to be worrying about me?"
"Hyosung will be sad."
A tremor ran through her body. A flinch.
Barely a moment, but the prophet did not miss it.
That reaction proved that this fallen calamity, who had lived solely for her vow, could not treat the existence of the nemesis she had chosen as a trivial thing.
"Tasian. I'll ask you one more time."
If she stepped forward now, there would be no stopping.
Once this moment passed, she would become a calamity aimed at humanity—and that also meant she would manifest as his first trial, the trial for which he was building his strength to oppose her.
"Are you truly all right with this?"
"...I'll endure it."
And Tasian had already resolved herself to walk that path.
"I chose it. And it's the path that fool decided to walk."
If he had fallen before reaching this point, that would have been the end of it. But if he had arrived here unbroken, then she, too, had to be prepared to clash with him.
-Whoosh.
With that answer, her body burst into flame, and soon she soared into the sky to become a single streak of light.
And then, she plummeted.
This single piece of kindling, buried in the ash heap, began to burn in earnest upon this spot.
-Kwoong!!
At its end, the symbol of a fallen world descended upon the earth. The Kindling Dragon, Tasian Paleoi.
Now the last embers remaining in a body no different from ashes answered her will, and began to mercilessly incinerate the spores of the plague.
****
-Rumble... Kwoong!
The moment such a calamity began to rampage across the entire mountain range.
Compared to that, the fleeting, insignificant humans watched the spectacle from afar, and even the undead swarming nearby were helplessly swept away by the heat and debris.
-Kwaaaarrrung!!
Whether it was the incarnation of war who belatedly sensed the situation and approached, or the army of the dead she commanded—
to a dragon who could make mountains shudder and split the sky with a single movement, such things were easily trampled and crushed beneath her.
"Tasian......."
Only one thing here could stand against her.
A conglomerate of plague, imperfectly imitating an ultimate existence by borrowing the remains of a being just like her.
"Tasian Paleoi. You... were alive."
The Plague Dragon—Blight.
Crumbling helplessly under her onslaught, he frantically traced his memories, trying to recall her name.
Yes. Half a century ago, such a calamity had undoubtedly existed in this world.
Unlike his younger sibling who had followed the Hero, he had never seen her directly—but he had heard the news repeated endlessly: that her very existence had brought the Age of War to an end.
"Magnificent. That power, that presence......."
Above all else, her presence alone had quelled the madness of the humans who had been killing one another at the time. It had united them all under the simple pretext of fear and survival.
A being who moved the world simply by existing.
A part of the world itself, rightly called a small world with its own will—the finisher of all creation.
"If I could make that body's life force and power my own......."
The Plague Dragon, having come face to face with such a being, felt the lingering regrets of the dead that composed his mind sharpen, and he began to lunge at her.
"If I can make that power mine, the world that person worked to build will never crumble, no matter what!"
The powerlessness he had felt as a prosperous kingdom fell to an epidemic.
To create a world that would never collapse under any disaster, a kingdom of the dead—he would need the power of an absolute being like her.
-Crunch!
She bit down lightly on his neck, halting the desperate charge, and pressed his body down with her foreleg as she began to exert her power.
Even as an imperfectly constructed corpse, it was still unmistakably a being that could be called a dragon. It could not overwhelm her power, but it should at least be capable of resistance.
"Hey, brat. Do you know what a reverse scale is?"
Yet the reason he lost his strength from a mere bite to the neck was simple.
Even the supreme beings who stood at the pinnacle of all creation possessed one spot that could be called a weakness.
"My ancestors told me this. That when the Creator made the world, they also crafted a means to control the slaves they intended to use."
A single scale, the only one among a dragon's scales that grew reversed.
The moment that sole weakness was pressed by her fangs, convulsions wracked his body, and the spores composing his form began to scatter beyond his control.
"Heuheu, hahahaha!"
But even as convulsions seized him, what seeped from Blight's mouth was not a scream but exultation.
Along with it, he tried desperately to suppress the collapse of his ambushed body—but not to regenerate himself.
"A reverse scale? What does that matter! This body feels no pain to begin with!"
As he claimed, this body was merely an imitation, created by blending himself into the immense latent potential of a dragon's remains.
If the imitation had been perfect, striking his weakness would have halted his movements—but if it shattered, all he had to do was press the enemy with the shattered pieces.
-Scatter!
He pulled his decomposed body back together around his core as much as possible, then expelled that power toward her.
His spores slipped through the gaps in the scales covering her colossal body, responded to her life force, gnawed at flesh and blood, and swelled rapidly in scale—all to dominate a living dragon.
"No matter how great a being, as long as it lives, it cannot be free from disease."
And what he wielded now was the plague that had destroyed his own homeland.
That disease was an otherworldly sickness that did not naturally exist in this world, having flowed in through a tear in dimensions. Even great beings would lack perfect immunity to it.
No matter how much a being stood at the pinnacle of the world, that was still limited to this world. Her absoluteness would not extend to the otherworld.
"Tasian Paleoi!! You great threat to humanity!! I will consume you here and now and become an even greater existence...!"
"You talk too much."
-Whooosh!!
At that small mutter, flames erupted from the mouth that had bitten into his neck.
As Blight felt his body—his reverse scale bitten through—burning away, he began to voice his shuddering incomprehension at the phenomenon unfolding before him.
"H-how? My plague should have penetrated every corner of your body, and yet this much power...!"
As a living creature, even a dragon felt pain. Moreover, an otherworldly disease should have rotted her flesh to some extent, creating openings and perhaps giving the opponent an opening to counterattack.
"What does disease have to do with anything? This body has nothing left to burn anyway."
"Wha, what?"
"Can an ash heap catch a disease?"
What stood here was the Smoke Dragon.
Her body was not made of blood and flesh, but of smoke, scattered from ashes that now had nothing left that could be burned.
Even a corpse could serve as a vector for disease. But a body more ruined than that—one no different from a heap of ashes—had no substance left for any pathogen to infiltrate in the first place.
"Immune, to disease... Not even a corpse anymore, a body...?"
She had foreseen that the final embers left in such a ruined body would soon incinerate everything in her wake.
And yet, the calamity of pestilence now caught on the verge of being swept away felt no despair.
"Oh, oooh......."
Admiration born from the subconscious—no, an emotion that could be called yearning....
Yes. The being before him far transcended even the very limits of the ideal he had envisioned.
Even the dead could only raise corpses from their graves to leave their mark upon a ruined world. But so long as she had her will, even if she reached the end of her lifespan, she could forcibly prolong that life.
"So this... is a dragon."
Defying the inevitable fate of all living things. Even if the vessel containing her soul cracked, she could sustain herself by will alone, impervious to collapse.
To a scholar who had yearned for an absolute existence that nothing could ever bring down, it was an irresistible allure.
"Truly, dragons are magnificent..."
But such human sentiment.
To a calamity that split heaven and earth just by existing, it meant nothing at all.
-Kwaaaaaaah!!!!
From her mouth, hellfire at last erupted, and everything that composed his body began to be incinerated to fragments.
His bones, the spores bloated in their effort to form a body, the decaying mind that had used it all as a vessel—and beyond even that, everything that existed along the arc of her breath.
All of it.
****
-Pitter-patter.
Raindrops fell one by one upon the field where everything had ended.
Feeling the heat that had been searing his face cool under the chill carried by those drops, Marcus spent a long moment silently staring at the scene unfurled before him.
"C-Commander. Just... what in the world happened here?"
One by one, the soldiers beside him voiced their confusion.
They, too, could make no sense of the situation before them. Another calamity descending from the heavens to deal with the resurrected Great Calamity—and a landscape where everything had been set ablaze by the breath she unleashed......
-Shhhhh.
The raindrops turned into a fierce downpour, cooling the smoldering field—a thing they had never once experienced before.
"Truly..."
But Marcus felt a sense of déjà vu from this very situation.
The phenomenon where all moisture in the area evaporated from the heat and rose into the sky, condensing rapidly into cloud cover to form a rain front.
Though the resulting downpour was temporary, it had always erased the heat that should have lingered wherever she had passed.
"She truly... was alive."
Yes. It had rained that day, too.
After the fierce battle had run its course, the settling downpour had washed away all the superheated air and bloodshed of that day.
The difference was that, unlike that day when she had vanished without a trace, now she was revealing herself in her decayed form.
"Tasian Paleoi."
The nemesis of the last hero this world ever produced.
In this moment, shedding her shattered dragon body, she began to reveal her decayed form before the army of humanity.