The Purifier Clan
“I can’t really leave my post right now….”
Atisha began her story slowly, with the words, “It started a few months ago….”
“The monsters around the village were found dead. At first, we thought it was just the usual territorial fighting monsters get up to….”
But that wasn’t the end of it. Hunters who went out hunting began coming back empty-handed more and more often, and strong monsters that even they couldn’t easily bring down were also being discovered as corpses.
By then, Atisha had realized something was very wrong. She put together an investigation team to look into the matter, and before long, the party she led found the source of the problem.
Or rather, it was strange that they hadn’t found it sooner.
A massive body wrapped in hard scales. Each time a pair of wings beat, it stirred up winds like a storm, and its sharp claws tore through prey’s hide with ease.
And crowning it all was the dark red flame flickering in its wide-open maw.
“We call it the Shadow of Krumo….”
“…Krumo?”
Why was that name coming up here all of a sudden?
Anyone who lived on the Ardina Continent knew the name Krumo. Of course they did—it was a name heard often enough even in childhood.
The black dragon from old stories, the one that had driven the Ardina Continent into an abyss of despair and mourning.
That dragon’s name was Krumo.
And the evil dragon Krumo had been slain by Sigrid, with help from Grasid.
Founding legends always tended to exaggerate a little, if only to legitimize power, but I knew for a fact that Krumo’s defeat at Sigrid’s hands had been no exaggeration, no lie.
So it was a name that should never have come out of Atisha’s mouth.
Why was the name of a dragon dead for hundreds of years suddenly appearing here?
Atisha caught the look in my eyes—the one asking for further explanation.
“If it had really been Krumo, this place would already be a ruin, so I’m sure it wasn’t the real thing….”
She’d come from Laxia, but it seemed she knew the story of Krumo too.
“Then why call it Krumo if you know that?”
“I didn’t say Krumo…. I said the Shadow of Krumo….”
“Same difference.”
Shadow of Krumo, or Krumo-something-or-other.
What mattered was why that name was coming up at all, not the words attached to it.
“It said so itself, with its own mouth…. But we still couldn’t bring ourselves to believe it, so that’s what we call it….”
Maybe Krumo had really come back to life.
But its power was nowhere near the Krumo of its prime.
If it had been, it would have been raging mad over its own death and rampaging through the Ardina Continent in an effort to destroy everything in sight.
It was different from the Krumo in the stories, but that didn’t mean it could be dismissed lightly. The power it possessed was formidable indeed.
Same, yet different.
That was why, Atisha explained, they had given it the name “Shadow of Krumo.”
“The Shadow of Krumo, huh.”
Hearing it in words alone didn’t really give me much of a sense for it.
Just because one horn had been cut off didn’t mean its eyes had gone bad too, so it was probably a thing worthy of its name.
I idly played with my long side bangs as I fell into thought.
“Is that why you can’t leave?”
“Mm…. If I leave, we might not be able to respond properly when that thing attacks….”
“I see.”
If it had that much power, wouldn’t it have attacked already?
More importantly, a village that would collapse if one person disappeared from it.
No matter how you looked at it, that was not a healthy structure.
As I grumbled to myself, a strange sense of déjà vu suddenly made me stop thinking for a moment.
…Huh. Why does this feel so familiar?
It felt a little like that country that had recently collapsed….
Ah. So that’s why it fell?
“I understand the situation.”
If I were an optimistic sort, I might have said something about trusting others, or that everything would be fine. But Atisha was clearly not an optimist, so those words would have had exactly zero effect.
And I had no interest in making some enthusiastic, all-purpose motivational speech either.
But Daeun seemed to have a slightly different opinion from the two of us.
“Wouldn’t it be fine if we just went and came back quickly?”
She cautiously raised her hand and offered her opinion.
And, naturally, her suggestion was rejected at light speed.
What if something happened—could she take responsibility for that, they asked.
I patted the dejected Daeun on the back, then turned to Atisha again.
“Then when could you leave?”
“Well…. I don’t think it’s possible until that thing disappears or sets up a nest somewhere else….”
In other words, they couldn’t leave until safety was firmly secured.
They’d fled Laxia in order to survive and settled on the Ardina Continent, so putting safety first was understandable.
Besides, we were the ones asking for help; we couldn’t exactly force them.
Still, this was their long-cherished wish, the dream they had waited and prayed for. Maybe it wasn’t quite a one-sided request after all.
But I still hadn’t given them any reason to believe I could actually make that wish come true.
If I pushed my position too hard in that state, they might just say, “I’ve changed my mind…. I’m not going….”
Atisha didn’t seem like she’d do that, but there was always the possibility.
Avoiding Daeun’s hands as they kept darting toward my head, I said, “Then we just need to get rid of it.”
“Huh…?”
“You said it wasn’t possible unless the Shadow of Krumo or whatever disappeared. Then if we get rid of it, isn’t the problem solved?”
Remove the cause, and the problem disappears.
Simple enough, wasn’t it?
But Atisha only blinked at me, as if she couldn’t quite grasp this easy solution.
“…Easy?”
Then she let out a long sigh, her face suddenly heavy with fatigue.
“It’s not as if we never tried to hunt down the shadow….”
Atisha tossed back the contents of her cup in one gulp.
She drank it as briskly as if it were liquor rather than tea.
Clink.
The hand that set the teacup back onto its saucer was rougher than before.
“To put it simply: we can’t. We don’t have the strength to capture that thing….”
For reasons I didn’t know, it still hadn’t attacked, but the demons also lacked the power to bring it down.
No progress, no retreat. Just a stagnant stalemate.
That was the current state of Krumo and the demons.
After hearing Atisha’s explanation, I said, “I’ll help.”
“You…?”
Atisha looked at me with obvious disbelief, so I lifted a finger.
Pink mana bloomed over the fingertip.
Tap.
With a flick of my finger, I snapped the teacup’s handle clean off.
“You colored mana…?”
Atisha stared at me in shock, her look full of distrust.
Before, her disbelief had been the innocent kind—the sort that said, You have that much ability? This time, her face was saying she simply couldn’t believe what she was seeing.
“So you weren’t just an arrogant brat after all….”
Muttering to herself, Atisha finally recovered her composure.
“So? Do I seem a little more promising now?”
“If a strong person like you is willing to help, then we’d welcome it….”
As expected, seeing once was better than hearing a hundred times.
While I nodded, recalling yet again that the old saying hadn’t been wrong, I felt someone tug on my sleeve.
Of course, it was Daeun.
“The Shadow of an evil dragon… Isn’t that way too dangerous? You said it yourself last time, Kana. Dragons aren’t easy to beat.”
“I said that?”
“B-before, with the rain buffalo….”
“Oh. I guess I did.”
Now that she mentioned it, I did vaguely remember having that conversation.
I might have put it a little differently, but the broad meaning was the same, so there was no need to correct it.
Seemingly crushed by the weight of the name Krumo, Daeun had been restless the entire time.
“If it were a real dragon, then yes.”
I’d need to see it myself to know for sure, but from what Atisha had said, it didn’t sound like a true dragon.
Besides, if it really had that much power, then Atisha and the other demons would have packed up and run long ago—or they’d already been annihilated.
“But isn’t it dangerous either way?”
“That’s true.”
I readily acknowledged Daeun’s point.
“But we can’t just keep waiting, can we?”
Were we supposed to sit on our hands and hope it picked some other place to nest? That was just gambling on luck.
We didn’t know when—or even whether—it would move on.
And waiting around in hopes of a stroke of luck wasn’t really my style.
Besides—
“I’ve got a question I want answered.”
To satisfy my curiosity, I’d have to face it myself.
It had called itself Krumo, which meant it might be capable of communication unlike the lower monsters. That made it worth trying to talk first.
If it refused to talk, well….
Once we had a conversation with our bodies, it would probably change its mind.
Tap, tap.
“Kana’s scary….”
While I absentmindedly tapped my scabbard, Daeun trembled and edged away from me.
…Should I show her what really scary looks like?
That thought flashed through my head and vanished almost immediately.
She was annoying when she overreacted, sure, but this wasn’t the time to crack down on her.
“Anything I should watch out for? Anything unusual?”
“I don’t know the details….”
Atisha shared what she’d learned through observation.
It could fly. It was unbelievably fast. It was wrapped in Magi. It couldn’t use magic. And so on.
Listening to her, I tilted my head.
“From the way you describe it, I’d believe you if you said it was a wyvern.”
A monster that could fly but couldn’t use magic, and looked like a dragon?
Wasn’t that just a wyvern?
But Atisha shook her head.
“It’s huge…. So huge it can’t even be compared to ordinary wyverns….”
“Hmm.”
“And it can breathe a blast….”
“Then it’s definitely not a wyvern.”
The breath was the dragon’s exclusive domain.
There was no way a mere draconic beast like a wyvern could breathe dragon fire.
It was hard to reconcile with a dragon because it couldn’t use magic, and hard to call it a wyvern because it could breathe a blast.
“I’ll know the details once I see it myself.”
I neatly organized the information Atisha had given me in my head.
“When are you going…?”
Unlike Daeun, Atisha didn’t try to stop me. Instead, she looked at me with a faint, almost hidden anticipation.
“Tomorrow.”
Strike while the iron’s hot.
It was better to get it over with quickly than drag things out.
“If that’s the plan, shouldn’t you do it today…?”
I ignored Atisha’s timid objection.