Episode 3: A Trip to North Korea
I shook the blood from my body as best I could and watched the gate knitting itself back together.
"Maybe I really should just wait for a gate break."
I hadn't settled on what I'd do once I got out, but I had a feeling something interesting would happen if I did. In the usual hunter stories, modern weapons don't work at all—but who was to say this world would play by the same rules? Since becoming a dragon I hadn't fought a single desperate battle, and I'd never had a chance to test what this body could truly do. At the very least, an S-Rank hunter ought to pose something of a threat to me.
The moment the dragon's instinct caught the scent of hunters, it caught like oil poured over dry kindling, and it showed no sign of burning out.
I was still smacking my lips at the gate when another thought crossed my mind. Did I really have to wait for it to open?
The gate before me had already taken considerable damage from the attacks I'd chained into it, and it was unstable. If I hit it once more with something strong enough to smash it outright, wouldn't it open? A crude, brute-force plan—but dragon greed has a way of offering the simplest solution. In the end there were only two outcomes. It would work, or it wouldn't.
No more reason to hesitate. No more reason to wait.
I drew a deep breath before the gate and tensed every muscle in my body. Mana began to boil up from my heart, and flame rippled between my scales. I dragged every last scrap of energy from within me and focused it, as if I meant to gather all the heat in the world. This would be on an entirely different level from the Breath I'd just unleashed.
I exhaled, and the mana and fire boiling in my mouth poured out with my breath.
CRACK—!!
The instant the Breath erupted, everything around me charred to ash-gray. In a world burning down to cinders, only the gate was still taking the flame. But the sound of something breaking grew louder and louder, until at last a tremendous explosion tore loose. Fire and mana tangled and canceled each other out, and a violent shockwave slammed through my whole body.
I wrapped myself in my wings at once, but it wasn't nearly enough. Little by little, my body began to slide backward.
Not yet. The gate still hasn't fully opened.
In the blast just now, part of the gate had collapsed—only for an instant, but I had seen it clearly with my own eyes. Buildings, and the world visible beyond them. If I left it like this, I would only be repeating what had already happened.
I kept pouring out Breath and wrung the mana in my heart to its limit. Forcing myself to ignore the throbbing in my chest, I fed still more mana into the flame. With a grinding crunch the gate's barrier crushed inward; the flow of mana through it collapsed completely, and the Breath began to punch through.
In the end the Breath shattered the barrier, and fragments of it fell away. The moment I passed through the wide-open breach, my body was sucked into the gate.
Beyond it, warping and buckling, lay a world I had once inhabited—and yet one entirely apart from this.
I had been sure I was close enough to a city that a building should have stood right there, but I came out somewhere that didn't even have a proper road, let alone a building. At least the transfer itself seemed to have worked. I spread my senses wide and searched for any human presence, then coiled my tail around my body and folded my wings tight.
I was exhausted. I had never pushed my stamina to its limit before, and my body was worn far past what I'd expected.
Resting for a while, I tried to think about what I actually wanted. I had lived decades as a dragon, and I had never once thought about it. I had simply done whatever I felt like each day, so setting a goal still didn't come naturally.
Did I even need to decide?
Would this place be any different? I was already a dragon. I had no obligation to fit myself to the human world. Right—I could live here exactly as I had inside the gate, as freely as I pleased. No need to overthink it. I was a dragon. I would take what I wanted, and if anyone tried to take what was mine, I would burn them. That, in the end, was my nature.
The tangle of thoughts cluttering my head cleared, and it felt as if a rotten tooth had finally come out. Once I was back in shape, maybe I would go for a swim in Heaven Lake on Mount Baekdu.
A dragon's recovery far surpassed what I had imagined. I had figured I would need about a day of rest, but after what felt like three hours my condition had returned. The heart I had overdrawn on mana was generating it without end, as if nothing had ever happened.
I spread my wings at once and climbed into the sky. High above, I looked over my surroundings. I seemed to have come out in some backcountry village deep in the mountains; there was hardly a proper building nearby.
To pin down where I was and read the terrain, mana was more convenient than my eyes. I closed them and spread a thin veil of mana around me. Like a bat's echolocation, the mana struck objects and bounced back, and my mind parsed the returns into something like a minimap. It had been useless inside the gate—mana vanished the instant it touched anything there—but out here it was an extremely useful technique.
Starting with what bounced back from nearby, I worked out my current position first.
"I had a bad feeling, but I never thought I'd come out in North Korea."
The roads were strangely half-finished, and even the buildings I could sense were far too shoddy, but North Korea had never crossed my mind.
"Well, isn't this for the best? Mount Baekdu's close. That's good enough."
I had business on Baekdu anyway. This worked out.
By the time a rough map to Mount Baekdu had sketched itself in my head, I felt an impact against my back. A string of dull booms rolled in, and the acrid stink of gunpowder stung my nose.
What vermin dares...
My concentration shattered by force, and anger surged up through the displeasure.
A roar heavy with mana shook the sky and detonated the shells screaming toward me in midair. I had half expected something like this the moment I realized it was North Korea, but I was still surprised by how quickly they attacked. Modern weapons, as I'd thought, didn't even leave a scratch.
No matter how strong a hunter was, a simple sword swing could never outmatch the firepower of modern artillery. And yet hunters were strong precisely because mana all but blunted the attacks of modern weapons. A creature low on mana would have taken serious damage from that barrage. Against me, overflowing with it, it did nothing.
The fighter circling nearby, waiting for an opening, was getting on my nerves.
Another roar, laden with mana enough to shake heaven and earth, set the fighter shuddering until it exploded. Before the black smoke staining the sky had even settled, I sensed something closing in from behind and swept my tail through it, knocking it from the air.
Something unpleasant clung stickily to my tail, and a moment later it caught fire.
This is... white phosphorus?
They said that once it caught, it burned you down to the bone. Certainly one of the more effective modern weapons against a monster that had come out of a gate.
Watching the fighters close in again to shoot me down, I began to radiate heat from my scales. The pilots, keeping just outside the reach of my tail and widening the gap with careful skill, only then seemed to realize something was wrong—faced with the flames rolling off my body.
Too late.
The instant they tried to bank and break away, the fire swallowed them. The flames burst outward from me like an explosion, spreading in a perfect sphere in a fraction of a second, and incinerated everything at once. The fighters that had been tightening and loosening their distance around me until a moment ago, and the tanks on the ground preparing to fire—things once called modern weapons—turned in an instant into unidentifiable molten metal.
A waste of time.
I roughly smothered the white phosphorus still burning on my tail with mana and put it out, then lashed my tail hard. A vicious sound of wind being cut rang out, and the phosphorus still clinging to it tore free.
Having already taken the first hit, I briefly considered burning all of North Korea and then going to Mount Baekdu to sweat out the aftermath—but that would only kill people who had done nothing, and I had no taste for it. Even if I felt nothing when I killed, that didn't mean I intended to commit a massacre for no reason. Of course, if they showed hostility or made themselves a nuisance, I would burn every last one of them. I simply had no desire to touch people who hadn't done anything yet.
If I stayed put like this, the same situation would only repeat. But I couldn't just leave, either. They still hadn't paid for striking first.
A good idea occurred to me, and I took to the air at once to carry it out. I climbed above the largest base nearby, high enough that their radar wouldn't catch me, and drew up the mana surging through me. I gathered the mana pouring from my body and the flames pulled from my scales, shaped them into dozens of spheres, and set them floating in the air. Great orbs, each packed full of crimson fire, shed a vicious light.
This would settle the bill for the first strike. I did sincerely hope every last one of them would live through it.
I drove the dozens of flame-wreathed spheres hovering in the air straight down.