The Owner of the Lair
I couldn't really say why I had suddenly become a dragon. I was confident I had lived an upright life, with nothing to prick my conscience. I gave the authors on Novelpia a hard time now and then, yes — but I still sent my coins, every last one, right on schedule. Even with a hand laid over my heart, I couldn't believe becoming a dragon was anyone's malice.
More than anything, I liked this body. I didn't fall ill at the slightest excuse, and I no longer had to scrape money together as if my life depended on it. It was a body granted true freedom: I could live however the mood took me.
Even sitting still, scent and sound reached me from far off and poured fresh information into my head in real time. Every living thing nearby was a grade beneath me. I had no particular evidence for that. I simply felt it to be true.
The dragon's body held far more than I had vaguely assumed. The scales were not merely hard — from the temperature around me I could read the blind spots my eyes never reached, and the scales themselves could pour out flame. The body was convenient past all measure.
There was nothing I particularly had to do. I slept when the mood took me, burned any intruder who drew near, and if hunger came, I hunted something and ate it. That was enough.
Perhaps it was the leisure. I took to wandering out to look at scenery I had never enjoyed as a human. Fierce beasts crowded the area, yet not a single monster had ever come at me head-on.
Today, too, I was curled asleep in the cave where I had first become a dragon when a presence I had never felt before registered at the entrance. No monster dared come this far. Most of them knew this was where I stayed, and my scent lay thick from the mouth of the cave all the way in.
A flicker of curiosity made me open the hearing I had kept shut.
"Wasn't this definitely a B-rank gate when they measured it?"
"It's definitely a B-rank gate. This is Kangcheoli's nest, isn't it...?"
"Even Kangcheoli doesn't put out heat like this."
Plain human speech. Korean, no less. What was this? Had they crossed into another world as Koreans, the same as I had?
I had meant to burn them the moment I knew who they were, but I needed more out of them first. At a human's pace, they still had a good five minutes before they reached me. I killed my presence, listened, and weighed what to do when they arrived.
"It's an Association-certified gate, so nothing should have gone wrong. Probably an enhanced breed."
"Enhanced or not, Kangcheoli is still Kangcheoli. What's so scary about a worm whose only trick is fire that you chickened out?"
"That asshole was running his mouth and got his ass handed to him by a fire spirit last time."
"Oh, for fuck's sake, that was because the supporter pulled some bullshit. That crazy bitch becomes a hunter and then gets scared of a monster and casts Slow on me."
Strip their trivial chatter down to what mattered, and it came to this. They really were people of Korea, and they called themselves hunters. Unlike the world I had come from, theirs was probably much like the hunter novels I used to read so often. Hunters existing did not surprise me. I was already a dragon. Was I going to be startled by something of that scale?
What did grate, among the things they said, was that this place was a gate. I thought I had lived here quite a while, and I had never once seen a Kangcheoli. I knew the old story — an imugi that fails to ascend into a dragon wraps its body in flame out of that ancient grudge and rages itself into a Kangcheoli. Yet in all the time I had lived here, I had not even seen a snake of comparable size.
Then was I, the one who had awakened in this place, the boss?
If I was the boss, so much the better. The standing rule was that a gate closed when its boss died. If some unrelated creature held that place and hunters killed it, I would vanish as well, without ever knowing why. Better that the boss be me. It was more reassuring.
While I set my thoughts in order, the hunters were nearly upon me, and I wondered how to receive them — then decided to keep it simple. They were burglars who had broken into a house. I was merely the owner. I would try speaking with them, and if I did not like what I heard, I would kill them.
I was no longer human.
We had been chattering only a moment ago. At the sight of the monster before us, every mouth shut.
From the fierce heat spilling out of the entrance we had expected a fairly strong Kangcheoli, but this was a different order of being entirely. The scales gleamed red. The horns were keen and vicious, nothing like the stag-antlers of an Eastern dragon, and vast wings rose from its back. This was no Eastern dragon. A Western dragon occupied the cave.
Among bosses, dragons stood at the very top. We were A-rank hunters with a name of sorts, but beside the dragon in front of us we were no different from frightened orcs. The mana was so thick that heat-haze shimmered right before our eyes. I thought I might be sick.
Why had power that immense only registered once we were on top of it? Had it suppressed its presence and its mana, waiting until we were fully inside? A dragon with intelligence of that order was a calamity.
My hands trembled on their own. I clenched them and glanced back. Soyeon, our healer, was already at the edge of fainting and no longer fit to count as fighting strength. Even the tank, so overflowing with confidence, had thrown his shield aside and curled in on himself in terror. The rest of the party had despaired before the dragon and given up on living.
This was finished. Even with everyone in their right minds, a single escape would have been a miracle — and already, every one of them had quit.
"What...?"
The dragon's jaws parted, and at the voice that came with them I forgot even my fear and stared blankly at the thing.
There was not a single record, to this day, of a monster speaking the human tongue. And it spoke that naturally? That fluently?
"Yes? Ah... yes!"
My mind spun taut. A hairline chance of survival seemed to show itself. The dragon before us looked willing to negotiate. There was a saying that even dragged into a tiger's den, you lived if you kept your wits. The trouble, of course, was that the den belonged to a dragon, and the one across from us was no tiger.
"Our purpose in coming here was simple reconnaissance. We had absolutely no intention of doing you harm."
"Yes. If we don't go back, the people above us will open a formal investigation. Wouldn't that become troublesome for you?"
My body shook of its own accord. The dragon had only shifted its presence a fraction, and I could not draw breath. Somehow I had to make it decide that simply letting us go was better than killing us.
"Yes — but you know how stubborn humankind is, don't you? We might be no threat to a dragon, but we would be a nuisance."
Even after I spoke, cold sweat soaked my back at the thought that I might have wounded its pride and it would kill us for it. My whole body throbbed as if I had a fever. Everyone but me had already lost consciousness and fainted.
The dragon seemed to think for a moment. In that silence, time weighed on me more heavily than any moment of my life so far.
"That's..."
"What do you mean by..."
The instant I heard those words, I understood. Ah. It never meant to let us live. Not from the start.
"That was—! We were talking about Kangcheoli. We never once thought of harming you."
I could no longer see an angle where talk would get me out alive. I would hit it with everything I had in a surprise attack, and if a gap opened, run with all of them. Even one of us had to survive and tell the world about the monster in this place.
The red dragon said nothing more. It only watched us with cold eyes.
Caught. It's reading my thoughts?!
At once I slammed every drop of mana into the sword in my hand and hurled it at the dragon's eye. The blade flew straight and vicious. The instant it came near the dragon, heat enough to stop the breath poured out, and the sword melted. A blade forged by a blacksmith hunter of the highest grade was gone in a single moment.
This was too much, however you looked at it. If it had at least breathed on us, I might have been able to accept it.
"Everyone, run!!!!!"
I screamed until my throat tore. My teammates were A-rank hunters even in their panic, and the moment I poured mana into the sword they had already finished preparing to flee. I drove every last scrap of mana left in my legs and ran.
The dragon's voice, coming from behind, was the last memory of my life.
Ground melted by the heat and boiling, air gone thick and hot — the aftermath of the enormous flame that had filled the cave a moment ago. The hunters who had stood inside were gone without a trace. Only the ash of something burned, and metal that had melted, remained.
If they had spoken honestly, I would at least have kept the choice to spare them somewhere in my head. I looked at the place where the vanished hunters had stood, turned my back, and went back to sleep.