Elegance
Rays of heat beyond even the temperature of the sun came crashing down to swallow the humans whole.
Faced with oncoming death, Baek Ha-rin's mind split time into ever-finer shards, ransacking memory for any way to live. It was the last frantic thrash a living thing makes at the edge of death — a whole life reeling past the eyes. Everything she had ever lived streaked through her head as she groped desperately for a way to survive, and the only thing that grew certain was that death could not be escaped.
In the end, Baek Ha-rin's survival instinct chose surrender.
Strength drained from the hand still clenched around a sword she had thought she would never release, and in the instant she accepted death, a miracle occurred. The back of a woman in shrine maiden's robes of white and crimson filled her sight, and a massive gate tore itself open, taking the dragon's breath head-on.
"Kh—!"
Merely spilling that breath away beyond the gate was already more than she could bear. Blood poured from every orifice of the shrine maiden's face, and the hand she had thrust out to unfold the gate was charred black. Even so, teeth clenched, still on her feet — she looked like a saintess.
But saintess or not, that breath was too much to endure, and little by little the gate began to collapse. Then, just as her body lurched hard and she was about to fall, a golden aura coiled around her, and the shrine maiden who had been going down stood straight once more.
"Well now... you've grown far stronger than I expected."
Another's voice spilled from the shrine maiden's lips, and the gate that had been dying swelled larger and stronger than before.
"Even drawing upon as much of my true body's power as I am able, it is a very near thing."
Golden mana reinforced the gate. Even so, in the end it could not withstand the red dragon's breath, and it shattered.
"I had no wish to use this. It would place too great a burden upon the child's body... but it seems I have no choice."
A small mirror had appeared in her hand at some point, and she held it out into the breath. Hand and mirror both ought to have melted away. Instead the mirror drank the breath down to the last without the slightest strain.
"Growth, too, must know moderation, if it is to be called growth at all..."
Watching the shrine maiden slip the red-hot mirror into a small gate, the dragon opened his mouth.
"And who are you?"
"If I told you I am a god who has borrowed this child's body for a little while, would you believe me?"
"And what business does a god have coming to a place like this?"
"I did not come. This child came of her own accord to beg my help, and I merely granted it."
The woman who had named herself a god smiled through the shrine maiden's body and faced the dragon without a trace of fear.
"Do not hate this child overmuch. We may have given her a push from behind, but approaching you thereafter was her judgment alone."
"I don't care whether some wench like that lives or dies. All that concerns me now is whether you can slake my thirst."
"Tsk, tsk... You say that, and yet this child has caught your interest, has she not?"
"Enough. Die."
As if to declare he would waste no more words, the dragon gathered in his maw a mana of an entirely different order from anything before.
"We are still in the midst of conversation, and yet what an impatient creature you are."
Looking troubled, the woman drew her golden mana up. It swirled about her body, dyeing black hair to gold, and the shrine maiden's robes began to change into a sumptuous kimono.
"Even so. It seems the title of god was no idle boast."
Even beholding a mana beyond all imagination pouring off the woman, the dragon watched her with the look of someone who had merely found an amusing toy.
"Must you truly fight now? Felling a me who is not yet complete would scarcely satisfy you."
At her words, the dragon stopped gathering his mana and looked at her.
"Keep this child at your side, and someday — when her talent comes into bloom — will you not wish to test yourself against me in my wholeness?"
"......"
"Nor I alone. Do you not wish to cross blades with the war gods of Japan?"
"How long?"
"Who can say? It will depend on how hard this child strives, will it not?"
Hiding hands that trembled uncontrollably behind her back, she addressed the dragon as if nothing were amiss.
"You are rather taken with this child yourself, are you not? Lies will not serve you. I may not look it, but I am a god, you know."
"Of course. I shall satisfy you, and then some."
The golden mana could be seen draining from the woman's body, little by little. The shrine maiden's flesh had likely reached the limit of what it could bear.
"It seems my time is nearly up."
With most of the golden mana gone and the color returned to her hair, the shrine maiden staggered and pitched forward.
"Remember. The grace period is one month."
The dragon wound his tail around the fallen woman and drew her to his side, and only then did he take notice of the rest of us.
Well. From that dragon's point of view, whether we existed or not made not the slightest difference.
Having once laid my life down completely, my head had cooled to a calm that surprised even me. My body, of course, would not stop shaking with terror — but I could judge the situation with a clear mind.
That dragon and the shrine maiden who saved us are connected somehow.
But what good did that do us? I was the one who had struck first at a dragon offering to talk, and dragged everyone down into danger with me. I wanted to slap that arrogant past self of mine across the face right then and there.
He seemed to have settled on what to do with us. The dragon turned eyes dyed a bloody crimson our way and spoke.
"Now then. We ought to finish the reckoning we started, shouldn't we?"
Just as I'd thought — he had no intention of letting any of us leave alive. Watching him wrap his body in mana, I forced mana into my own half-dead flesh for one last stand.
"Ghk—"
Shoving mana into a body already in ruins, I felt my pulverized organs tear apart even further. It didn't matter. To live through today, I burned away the whole of the future ahead of me. Wildly inefficient — but for the present, it was the best I had.
Lightning coiled around me once more, snapping and leaping wild in every direction. In speed, if in nothing else, I was faster than that dragon. Maybe, just maybe, a single chance to land a killing blow would come. If I could get the hunters behind me clear in that opening...
The strain on my trembling body grew worse. I didn't care. He was still off his guard. This was the moment. I loaded lightning into my legs and kicked off.
My vision changed in an instant. I leapt high and closed to right before the dragon's eyes in a single bound. My condition was far worse than I had guessed — a jump I could normally make without strain shattered the bones of both legs completely.
"Please—!"
I wrapped arm and sword in every last scrap of mana and lightning I had and hurled them at the dragon's eye. The joints and bones of my arm crunched and crumbled, the sensation horribly vivid, but stronger than the pain was the desperate prayer that the strike would land, and so I didn't feel it.
The sword flew with the speed of lightning, and an instant before it could touch that aloof dragon's eye, it froze solid and dropped with a dull clack.
"...Huh?"
"More useful than I thought."
A hollow little sound escaped me. I wasn't even sure it had come from my own mouth. What had just happened? My thoughts thrashed hard enough to split my skull, trying to make sense of it, and I understood nothing at all. The blow I had staked everything on had come to nothing.
Only then did the pain I had been forcing myself to ignore come crashing in, and the tears spilled over. I was afraid. I had been so sure I wouldn't die. Ever since I became an S-Rank hunter — as if I'd turned into the protagonist of some anime — a bright future had opened out before me, and somewhere along the way I had grown arrogant without even noticing.
My mana ran dry. The lightning wrapped around my body went out, and I began to fall.
"That was rather fun. Little gnat."
The dragon's last words reached me, and I felt my vision go dark.
It was my first time using the cold, but it served well enough. I wasn't as practiced with it as I was with flame, though that was a problem use would solve.
Gripping the frozen hunter in one hand, I looked down at the others charging in below with tears streaming, and loosed the cold once more. In place of the blazing flame that had always poured from between my scales, a chill bitter enough to freeze marrow erupted and locked the whole of the surroundings in ice. Forest and trees, the earth itself — and at last even the hunters still thrashing in their death throes — all of it froze solid before the cold, which had seemed ready to freeze the very sky, finally went still.
"Flame still wins on efficiency, I'll grant it that. But hmm... for savoring a little elegance, this is just right."
The world around me, frozen pure white, was as beautiful as a realm carved from crystal. The statues below, hunters frozen mid-desperation, pleased me especially.
"If they haven't shattered in a month or two, they might even live again."
I was curious whether they had frozen clean through to the bone and become nothing but lumps of ice, or whether they were merely something like frozen humans, so I deliberately left the statues unbroken. I'd heard, of course, that unless you drain all the blood when you freeze a person, the blood freezes, the vessels burst, and they die. That was their problem. Hardly mine.
Taking the woman coiled in my tail along with me, I stepped through the gate.