116. Karma
116. Karma
A loophole in the contract, born from having nowhere left to retreat.
An outcome she herself could not have foreseen until her precognition confirmed it.
The moment she realized that moment had finally come, Airi gazed down at the scene below with a more complicated expression than ever before.
'Tasian, once something has already begun, the future cannot be changed.'
For a dragon, a contract is absolute—and because of that, it would no longer permit anything so fickle as a whim.
Even if she believed her current power could not annihilate humanity, she would still drive her body forward for the vow that bound her, reigning as an enemy of mankind until the very end.
"...Just a little more."
Though she knew such a future would unfold, Airi could not bring herself to accept this with cold detachment.
Because she knew the future that was coming—and yet, unable to stop it halfway, innocent people were fated to die by Tasian's hand.
And the companion who would awaken his power to prevent even a fraction of that sacrifice would have no choice but to make an enemy of her, striking first at humanity's armies.
"Just a little more... was there truly no better future?"
A future where the sacrifices were fewer, where her companion would not have to grieve—perhaps such a possibility existed somewhere.
But despite her attempts to search for that possibility, all the crystal ball showed was an opaque distortion with no clarity whatsoever.
It was only natural. No matter how one wielded the power of a god, the vessel that power inhabited was born a mere human.
Because that power was so feeble, those who could receive the blessings of prophecy had to be limited—and the future she pursued could only be built around him as its axis.
'...And because I am so powerless, I must choose the best I can manage in every single moment.'
When one cannot grasp everything perfectly, entertaining hypotheticals is the one thing a prophet must never do.
So Airi resolved to endure the sorrow he would feel and instead envision the ideal future that lay beyond.
A path where, after fully embracing his power, he would stop Tasian—becoming a hero who protected humanity and was reborn as a true savior...
"...Huh?"
A shift occurred in the crystal ball just as she was envisioning that future.
The moment she saw the previously opaque future gradually sharpen into clarity, Airi stopped thinking and urgently fixed her gaze upon it.
Had her desperate wish somehow revealed a new path?
Or had a Transcendent's whim... had Tasian, at this late hour, indulged in some utterly unforeseen caprice?
'No, this isn't that. This is...'
Whatever the reason, what had been observed was the future with the highest probability in the present circumstances.
-Bzzt, bzzzt.
And as Airi faced it, her expression soon began to drain of all color.
****
"Everyone, take up your weapons."
Meanwhile, at the scene where a downpour was still raging.
Marcus, the legion commander who had stepped forward into the gradually cooling aftermath, drew his sword and addressed the soldiers with a heavy voice.
Unlike the soldiers, who had frozen at the sudden turn of events, he looked like a man who had grasped the situation and steeled his resolve.
"Commander, but there's a person over there..."
"That is no person! You saw what just happened and still say that?!"
What had transpired only minutes before?
Humanity's army had been trampled by the dead, and at the end of it all, the White Knight—whom they could not stop—had embraced the dragon's heart and grown into a colossal calamity.
And everything had been burned away to nothing in the breath she unleashed.
Including his own brother, risen as one of the dead—and even the Red Knight's forces, who had belatedly detected the crisis and swarmed in after.
"That thing is a dragon! And not just any dragon—it's the very same one that ran rampant half a century ago, seeking to annihilate humanity!!"
"Commander, please calm down, I don't quite understand what you're..."
"What were we doing when the White Knight took the dragon's heart into herself?"
And Marcus was the only veteran here who had lived for more than half a century.
He knew the history they did not—had witnessed with his own two eyes the true nature of the disaster that had rampaged in that era.
"We could do nothing but stand by helplessly and watch him step forward. Even after reinforcing the army meant to protect humanity, all we could do against such a foe was watch!"
That being had torn through forgotten history and appeared before them once again.
And what's more, she had even cast aside her dragon's body and stood facing them at their own eye level—so how could they possibly stay still?
"The one who overwhelmed the very being that made us feel so powerless—is that woman right there! No, a monster wearing a woman's skin!!!"
Jang Cleo.
Though his actions could not be called righteous on humanity's behalf, in this moment Marcus understood with perfect clarity the feelings that had driven him to obsess over that idol of the past.
"That is why we must kill her now! Only now, when she is so weakened that she has abandoned her own flesh—there will be no other chance to slay this woman!"
Because the monster who had felled their idol still lived and breathed.
Because he believed they had to prevent the being who had reduced even the calamity that plunged them into despair to mere cinders—from returning to threaten humanity once more.
"Will you all just stand by and watch as that monster regains her strength and comes back as a threat to mankind?!"
There was no madness in his eyes—unlike when he had witnessed his brother's fall.
But perhaps that was precisely why his conviction reached them.
Accepting the will of the leader they had always believed in and followed, the soldiers at last grasped the gravity of the situation and began to draw their weapons.
"Everyone, reform the ranks!!"
"Follow the legion commander's orders!"
Yes. Their judgment may have been delayed, but apart from his personal feelings, the reasons to take up arms were more than sufficient.
Whoever the enemy was, whatever had driven her to stand before them—if she possessed the potential to neutralize a disaster they themselves could not handle...
And if such a being had come to them in a weakened state, having exhausted all her power—then striking her down while they still could was unquestionably the right thing to do.
"All units, ready for combat!!"
Thus, humanity's army gathered like mushrooms after the rain, reforming their battle lines.
They might not charge right this instant, but it would be soon.
Feeling the collective gaze of the crowd fixed upon her from behind their shields and hastily erected barricades, Tasian let out a dry laugh in the midst of the rain and looked down at her own hand.
'I've lived long enough to see some things. I thought there was nowhere lower to fall... and now even the worms I've trampled all my life are looking down on me.'
She no longer had the strength left even to maintain her true form.
Even if she loosed a breath now, it would not be Hellfire—at best, she could only spew a pyroclastic flow made of her own body's fragments.
So the battle ahead would be a desperate, grinding struggle without the overwhelming dominance of before—and if she survived to the end of that battle, the last one she would face would be him.
The successor chosen by her—and chosen by the clone of the child who had set this entire story in motion.
'Meeting my end as the evil dragon from some hero's tale... well, I suppose that's a fitting end for me.'
At the corner of Tasian's lips, as she sensed that flow of fate, a lighthearted smile she had never worn before began to form.
Yes, this was the end.
Once this moment passed, she would finally be liberated from the agony that had tormented her all this time.
'...You too.'
Yet despite that sense of liberation, in this moment Tasian felt the corners of her eyes growing hot.
She felt something—something the rain drenching her body could not cool—stirring the dying embers still smoldering within her heart.
'If I had given you my Reverse Scale that day... you too could have become such a being.'
The image of the child who had started this entire story.
Though she could not even properly distinguish the humans before her eyes, she felt the one existence she had tried so hard to remember clearly throughout her life—digging deep into her chest.
'I resented you.'
She had regretted picking up that human and raising her.
She had believed that all of it—the confusion she felt, the way she trampled humans in the end, the sudden whim that made her forcibly prolong her own life—all of it stemmed from that child.
Because if she had never become entangled with a human, she too could have left this world peacefully, like the other dragons.
Then she would never have had to think such tangled thoughts, never had to suffer the pain of regretting the choice she had made that day.
'Because you were human... because humans made me this way...'
But the truth was—she had known all along.
At the very least, she had long realized that all of it was nothing more than evasion—a way to turn away from the truth.
That she had grown attached to the child who would keep her company at the end of her life, and that she had fled because she did not want that child to see her crumbling—she had already known.
'So what I ought to feel toward you, a human, had to be resentment... I kept telling myself that, all this time.'
But how could the flow of time felt by a human who lives barely a hundred years possibly be the same as that felt by a dragon who lives ten thousand?
By the time she realized what her heart truly held, she had already committed the irreparable—and the life she had prolonged as a living corpse, unable to set things right, had only grown more agonizing.
More than a human's entire lifetime. More than the ten thousand years she had spent drifting emptily through this world.
She felt those mere fifty years spent dwelling on the sin she had committed—slowly, deeply, carving themselves into her heart.
'I won't admit it.'
But that time had felt so unbearably long that she had had more than enough opportunity to think.
To realize what name ought to be given to the feeling in her heart.
To know—at least—that the sentiment she held at the end of her life was, in truth, no different from what humans felt.
'I mustn't admit it. If I do, then I...'
And yet the reason she had always turned away from that answer—was because the past could not be changed.
Because she felt it in every moment: the knowledge that she had realized too late, and the truth that she had killed the child she had come to care for—that would never change.
'Because the moment I admit it... I'll find peace.'
And to drive the final nail into that coffin, before sending that child's body down the river, she had extracted what could be called a soul and refined it into a weapon.
Because she had been certain that if resentment and purpose endured even after death, they would surely reach her someday.
If the lingering regret that child carried could be passed on to a successor.
And if that successor, unbroken by the cruelty of this world, succeeded in reaching her—then she believed she could, even if only a little, settle her karma.
'Is it good?'
'Y-yes. It's delicious.'
The moment she recalled that successor, a memory of a meal they had once shared began to gradually surface in her mind.
So vivid that even she, who regarded humans as beneath notice, could not simply dismiss it with indifference.
A figure that rose more clearly than even that child she could never see again.
'You don't have to force yourself to be polite. I just threw together whatever was lying around.'
'No, I mean it. It's just... it reminds me of the meals my mother used to make. It's nice, you know?'
What must he think of her now?
Knowing her true identity, knowing the heart with which she had given him that weapon.
And seeing her now, trying to exterminate humans just like him—would he still be able to share the same kind of conversation they had that day?
'...Mother?'
'Yes, my mother from my original world. I guess, knowing I'll probably never see her again... it makes me appreciate your cooking more, Tachia.'
'.......'
'...Ahaha, was that a rude thing to say?'
'No. It's nothing.'
At the very least, there would be no more conversations like the one they had that day.
It was something she ought to simply let wash over her and move past—so why did one corner of her chest ache so sharply?
He was nothing more than a tool she had intended to use for her own purposes.
So why was it that every time she met him, she had always prepared a meal for him?
"...Just a little more."
She felt that question, in this moment, leading to yet another question.
What was the difference between the feeling she held for him—unforgotten even across time—and what she had felt for that child who started everything?
"If I had just been given... a little more time... would I have been able to understand... what this feeling toward you really was...?"
She had neither the time nor the leisure left to find the answer to that difference.
Even if her heart denied it, bound by the contract, her body was still driving itself forward in this very moment.
Resentment for what had passed. Regret for what she had realized too late.
Knowing all of it and accepting this fate nonetheless—that was the path she had chosen, the consequence of the karma she had resolved to embrace. She pressed forward, feeling it all.
—Thud!!!
Before that will could even take a single step.
Without ever knowing that someone else's malice could so ruthlessly cut it short.
"...Cough."
Yes. The dragon, now stripped of her majesty, never noticed.
That in this merciless world, the certainty that an individual's wish would be fulfilled was always shattered—vainly, pointlessly.
—Drip, drip.
Tasian, having failed to even register the attack that had struck her from behind, turned her trembling head toward her back.
The downpour, which had been cooling the heat of battle, was now gradually letting up.
Something had surged up from beneath the ground—where lava, born of molten earth, had cooled and begun to solidify—and driven the sword in its hand deep into her back.
It had pierced her Reverse Scale.
The place called a dragon's sole weakness.
—Shunk!!
As the blade that had precisely impaled that Reverse Scale was pulled free, the body that had been advancing toward humanity's army collapsed helplessly to the ground.
Humanity had not anticipated this sight either.
Despite having just barely reformed their lines, their bodies stiffened, and in the eyes staring at the scene, one after another, shock began to bloom.
"Wh-what is that? A survivor?"
"No, that's... an Undead!"
Indeed, what stood there was a single Undead.
Of the Undead Legion that had swarmed in all at once the moment dragon fought dragon—one among that legion, which they had thought completely annihilated, had barely maintained its form and succeeded in piercing the dragon's Reverse Scale.
It had pressed toward its goal with mana potent enough to withstand heat that should have reduced its entire body to ash, and with an obsession that bordered on transcendence.
"Mo... ther...."
Through the shattered gaps of its armor, white hair peeked out—hair so pale that even the congealed, rotting blood clinging to it seemed faint by comparison.
But even that blood, reacting to the mana she had been born with, was gradually transforming back into fresh crimson, dyeing her hair red.
"All... of it... was for my mother."
Her strength was returning.
The lingering regret that was the source of an Undead's power—now that she had come face to face with the existence that served as its focus, it was swelling uncontrollably.
"Yes... I... rose... for my... mother... I rose again... for my mother... for my mother, I..."
War's Red Knight—Annabel Britannia.
A woman who had vanished as an infant amidst the struggle for the royal succession, and who, after roaming the battlefields of the Age of War, had finally returned to her homeland alive.
Thus had she defined herself. And in this moment, meeting the existence that ignited her lingering attachment, she began to smile.
"Uheu... hahaha."
Yes. In this moment, Annabel recalled her other name.
The name she had used as a child, when she had been cast aside by her mother and roamed the war-torn lands—before she grew up and returned to her homeland.
"At la... st..."
"At la... st. I found... you. Motheeer...♡"
Tachia Piloi.
The last hero born of this world, and the incarnation of war who claimed more lives than anyone else during the Age of War.