Essence
I felt how utterly Hyeonmu's presence had changed, and layered mana over my throbbing claws. Driving them into his scales had wrecked my claws and hands; they ached so fiercely I half expected another few blows to snap the nails clean off.
For some reason, Hyeonmu had drawn back every drop of the water he had called. I couldn't begin to guess his intent, but I was certain of one thing — the fight from here would not be an easy one.
Green mana flowed over the whole of his body. A moment later he thrust the serpent's head forward and gave it a taunting flick. He had cast aside that sage's bearing and gone straight to provocation. It was absurd, and I liked it all the better.
Yes. When the blood is up, what room is there for pretense?
I spread my wings wide and flew. The serpent's head lashed out as I closed, and I smashed it aside with my claws, driving in at Hyeonmu's flank.
His scales were a formidable barrier in their own right. Slipping past a defense that could stop nearly any attack would have been the orthodox approach — but a fight like that hardly deserved the name.
I would chew through him, shell and all.
I slipped the foot he stamped down to pin me, drove my tail up between his legs, and struck his bulk skyward.
KRAANG!!
The impact rang through my tail, heavy as a blow against solid metal. I ignored it and heaved Hyeonmu off the ground. The weight suited that colossal frame, but I clenched my jaws and hurled him anyway.
"Graaaaah!"
Flung away on the heels of that shout, Hyeonmu seemed to lock up, if only for an instant, as though he couldn't believe he was airborne. I chased him and brought my claws down on the center of his shell, fire and mana poured into them to their limit.
The carapace was as hard as ever, and my claws and hand throbbed — but this time was different. I burned through the mana wrapped thick about him and gouged the shell that had looked as though it would never break.
"At last. My claws are biting in...!!"
I hammered the gouged shell without pause. Flame-wreathed claws and thick carapace crashed together again and again, and great shockwaves burst out one after another. The earth tore apart beneath them, roaring.
I had the serpent's head constricted in my tail and was mounted on the shell, breaking it apart, while Hyeonmu thrashed to throw me off — then, all at once, he went still.
I didn't know what he meant to do, but instinct told me an attack was coming. It didn't matter. Whatever he threw at me, however he struggled, I would smash him head-on. That was the essence of this fight.
The instant I moved to drive my claws deeper into the shell I had been gouging open, Hyeonmu — motionless until then — moved. He hauled together every scrap of mana he possessed. His shell, already more than half destroyed, blazed and let it all go: the greatest discharge he could muster, swallowing the two of us as it raised a mushroom cloud vast enough to have come from a nuclear blast.
Had I ever felt pain like this? Agony tore through me as if my whole body were being ripped open. The pain locked me stiff, and I fell from Hyeonmu's shell.
I thrashed my head and forced the frozen body to wake. It had been a dangerous attack — the first time I had felt my life truly threatened, and my body had locked because of it. And yet, somehow, my mind was clearer than it had ever been.
Hyeonmu hung before my eyes, breath ragged, blood spurting in fits from his shell, and he looked small. I checked that I could move without the slightest hindrance, then charged him at once.
He must have realized he was no match for me up close. He fired water, trying to open the distance, but every drop evaporated before it could even touch my scales.
Why? The fire and mana I thought I was using exactly as before had grown vastly stronger.
The distance closed in an instant. He thrust the serpent's head out in desperation, but it never became a real counter. I snatched the striking head with my claws and tore it off in my jaws. A wet crunch sounded in my mouth, and blood burst past my lips. The serpent's head ruptured between my teeth. I chewed it and swallowed.
The fishy tang of blood, and something cool, wrapped my body. The taste was rapture.
More. Let me eat more...!
Hyeonmu tried to retreat, hiding the tail where the devoured serpent head had been. I shoved my claws into his half-ruined shell and bit into the nape of his neck.
CRACK.
Scales no one had broken in thousands of years crumbled like brittle sweets. My flame-heated claws tore Hyeonmu's shell away at last and ravaged the flesh beneath.
He screamed and thrashed to shake me off, but the harder he struggled, the deeper my teeth and claws sank. Fragments of shell scattered, and the acrid stench of burning flesh spread through the cave.
When the teeth, working deeper by the inch, touched the bone of his neck, Hyeonmu understood. He was no match for the dragon before him.
From the very beginning, he had been prey.
He was certain that up until the dragon climbed onto his shell, he had still been an opponent capable of threatening it. But once the dragon took the blast of mana, everything about the beast changed at once. Its body grew strong enough to carve him apart with ease, and its fire swelled so vast that even the Vermilion Bird would have looked dim before this dragon.
The death he had dealt out to countless creatures had come for him at last. Before he knew it, neither stamina nor strength remained with which to resist, and his body collapsed in a heap. Each time that dragon bit down, his essence was sheared away in great pieces.
How could a fledgling — human once, and alive for only a few decades — be this mighty?
The last thing in his fading sight was the dragon, chewing without difficulty through the shell that no one had so much as scratched in thousands of years.
A monster.
I came back to myself in the middle of chewing Hyeonmu, mindless. Where he had been, nothing remained but shattered fragments of shell and crimson blood to say that Hyeonmu had stood there at all.
The gruesome sight came back to me, and with it the image of myself having lost all reason as I devoured him. Something in me had changed from the moment I took his explosion of mana. The body I had been sure would suffer a fatal wound was overflowing with strength instead, and the claws that once refused to sink in had crushed Hyeonmu's shell with ease.
I was still turning over the cause when the blood pooled on the ground rose into the air and began to draw together. Green mana coiled around it.
Not over yet?
Blood and mana, fully mingled, took the shape of a Hyeonmu just a little smaller than before.
"You were still alive?"
The puppet made of blood gave no answer.
"Dragon. In the moment before even my soul was eaten by you, I left behind the tiniest fragment of it. There is something I must see delivered to you."
It spoke only what it had to say, like a recorded message played back, and I listened.
"You are a special dragon. I do not speak of mere strength. Even I do not truly understand what you are. But in the tongue of the humans of this place, if you devour the masters of the Gates, you become the master of that Gate."
Master of the Gate. Did that mean I became that Gate's boss?
The puppet, midway through its fascinating speech, suddenly lifted its head and looked straight into my eyes.
"That is why I tried to stop you. I failed. You are far too dangerous a being. You swallowed even the Origin of a divine beast — my Origin — and in the end you took my soul as well."
"A vanquished loser has no right to add his voice, and for that I apologize. You... no. I will address you properly. One day, every being in this world will seek to kill you. You are that kind of existence."
With those words the puppet seethed, then burst with a pop and fell back into a handful of blood.
Every being in the world will try to kill me...
It still didn't feel real. And nothing would change because of it. I was a dragon, and a Gate boss. I had been hostile to humans from the very beginning. Nothing ahead of me would change either.
What nagged at me more than that was the fact that I had eaten Hyeonmu's soul and his Origin. I had lived for decades inside a Gate, but I had never experienced anything like this. Devouring monsters had never made me stronger, and I had never felt, as I had while eating Hyeonmu, that I was consuming an Origin.
I was still sunk in the question when the Gate began to tremble.
"Killing Hyeonmu — is that what's closing the Gate?"
If the Gate was closing, I would have to leave this place in a hurry. And yet, for some reason, instinct was shouting that there was no danger.
The green mana faded from the space Hyeonmu had spread, and the inside of the Gate began to change. It had become a cave again. I was looking over the interior when a familiar scent touched my nose, and I lifted my head toward the ceiling.
Where Hyeonmu's image had been painted across the cave ceiling, an ordinary natural ceiling stood instead, and the whole of the cave smelled of me.
The moment I spread my mana and took in my surroundings, I could no longer doubt it.
This was the inside of the Gate where I had originally been.