Stonehenge (2)
Stonehenge—the tomb where the dragons were sealed.
The subjugation force gathered at Stonehenge waited out the hours, each of them tending their weapons. The sun had long since set, and the night only grew deeper. As darkness began to settle, the knight order fired light cannons into the sky.
A flash.
Masses of light shot high overhead and tore open the dark. With the light sources the cannons had lofted into the heavens and the lightstone lamps planted across the ground, the area around Stonehenge blazed as bright as midday even in the depths of night.
How much time passed after that was hard to say.
A low, grinding thrum rolled through the earth.
Past midnight, the ground itself began to tremble. The stone pillars arrayed across the hill started to shake, and the shaking only grew more violent with every passing second. The force assembled at Stonehenge felt it in their bones. The moment had finally come.
Ten seconds.
Merlin whispered the count into Najin’s mind.
The instant she began—nine—cracks spidered across the pillars that formed the sealing formation.
Eight.
The cracks raced outward. They raced and raced until one pillar simply collapsed. The subjugation force frowned at the sight of the falling stone.
That had not been in any of the forecasts.
There had been moments in history when Stonehenge’s seal had weakened—but never a case where the pillars themselves shattered outright. Tension rippled through the knights as they registered the anomaly. Something was different. They all felt it.
Seven.
The pillars toppled one after another.
With heavy, dull crashes they went down, and fissures raced across the ground as well. Dust billowed upward. The earth began to split.
Six. Five. Four…
Nearly half the pillars had fallen. Beneath the violently shuddering earth—something pulsed. A vibration different from the tremors shaking the land. The sound of life stirring rolled through Stonehenge.
Three.
Something burst up from under the quaking ground. The thing that clawed free of the tomb was a skeletal hand of bare bone—yet the instant it touched open air, red blood and living flesh flooded over the pure white skeleton.
All of it happened in a single heartbeat.
Before a full second had passed, blood and flesh had filled out the bone, and scales had armored it over. It was less regeneration than time itself rewinding. A dragon’s claw, rolled back a full thousand years, slammed down into the earth.
Two.
The ground heaved. Every remaining pillar collapsed at once and the sealing formation shattered. The cracked earth caved inward, and a geyser of dust exploded skyward.
And then—
tearing straight up through that rising cloud of dirt—
One.
two dragons surged into the sky.
The moment the pair that had rocketed straight up unfurled their wings, a gale slammed down. The wind scoured the dust away in a single sweep. Knights staggered and gave ground. Shielding their faces against the blast, they looked up.
A red dragon sheathed in crimson scales.
A white dragon armored in pure snow-white.
Both of them looked down upon the earth from the high heavens. The subjugation force understood at once that this was nothing like the times, centuries ago, when the dragons had merely shown themselves through gaps in the seal. By every record, those beasts should still have been carrying their old wounds—yet these dragons bore none.
No scars on the wings. No patches of missing scale. Neither eye gouged out, and no half-severed sword-cut still carved into a neck. There was only one thing that could mean.
Complete resurrection. Perfect revival.
A monster out of the mythic age had clawed its way back across a thousand years. As if to announce that truth to the world, both dragons threw their jaws wide and loosed their cries.
————————————!
A beast-howl that shook the air itself. The roar of sky-born predators set the atmosphere shuddering. Every human with feet on the ground instinctively flinched and fell back.
But not everyone retreated.
“Huh. Shit.”
Red eyes—Roselyn Ascalo.
“That’s not even close to weakened, is it?”
“Doesn’t seem so. Not with the entire seal smashed to pieces.”
“I’ll second that.”
“Looks that way to me too.”
The remaining three White Horn adventurers answered her grumbling. They were rattled as well. This was nothing like the stories they’d been told. The pressure rolling off fully resurrected dragons was anything but ordinary.
“Hey, brat. What about you—”
Only one of them hadn’t answered.
The youth they called the New Star. The White Horns turned their eyes toward where the boy should have been standing.
Najin was already gone.
A sharp push of feet against dirt.
While everyone else was still crushed under the dragons’ presence, only Najin had moved a full step ahead of the rest. Roselyn saw him sprinting and barked out a laugh.
“Huh. Look at that bastard go.”
She tightened her grip on her twin blades and started running too.
In the end, she was a White Horn as well.
White Horns stood at the peak of Cambria, the City of Opportunity—and Cambria’s own proverb spoke to every adventurer in the city.
Adventure. Chase the gold. Seize the chance.
Success has always lived inside danger.
With Najin at the front, the White Horns broke into a run—to drag those sky-soaring dragons down, to risk everything and carve out a legend.
From the earliest ages, dragons had been distant things.
In the records of the old eras, humans treated them as little more than remote beings of the sky—something akin to a natural phenomenon, like the rising and setting of the sun. The reason was simple enough.
They could not be reached.
How was anyone supposed to close with a dragon wheeling high overhead? How was anyone supposed to wound one? How were creatures that lived on the ground supposed to defeat something that ruled the heavens?
So humanity feared dragons.
They simply regarded them as mysterious, terrifying beings.
But time moved on. Countless suns rose and fell, and age after age slipped into the backwaters of history. The primordial flame guttered out. The first age that had begun with dragons and giants was buried in the Abyss, and the age of myth met its final curtain at Arthur’s hand.
What arrived after that was the age of humanity.
In the human era King Arthur had thrown open, civilization advanced without end—and at last it found a way to hunt the beings of the sky. A method that did not require a peerless genius or a superhuman. The Imperial knights arrayed at Stonehenge were putting that method on display right now.
Creak. Griiind…
Working in teams of five, the Imperial knights hauled back the strings of the greatbows.
In the old days it had been the giants who hunted dragons—so these greatbows had been forged in imitation of giant weapons. Strung on each of them was a harpoon a full three meters long. Far too massive to call an arrow, but nothing less would pierce a dragon’s scales.
“Loose!”
At the command, the knights released. With deep, booming twangs, five harpoons rocketed toward the heavens. Dragon hunting always began by forcing the beasts lower.
The shafts screamed as they split the air.
And the dragons took flight. Dragons were arrogant by nature. Simply wheeling high and dodging forever did not suit their temper—so both of them dove straight for the ground.
One shaft scored a white dragon’s scales, but the white dragon ignored it and drove its charge home. The sheer mass of that enormous body, the crushing weight of the dive, was a threat to anything alive—
yet not even to Sword Seekers.
Former knight-commander and White Horn adventurer Richard Polschen drove his greatshield into the earth as the white dragon came on. Mana coiled around the shield at the same instant the dragon and the shield collided.
The deeply planted greatshield plowed furrows through the dirt as it was shoved backward, but Richard held. He absorbed the white dragon’s charge. The beast opened its jaws in clear displeasure, ready to vomit fire—
and then a crack like a breaking tree trunk.
White Horn adventurer Grisel Paramelt burst in from the white dragon’s flank and smashed its jaw shut with a swing of her halberd. The breath aborted as the jaws clapped together. Realizing none of them could face this alone, the White Horns coordinated—and the same was true on the red dragon’s side.
“Let’s go play with the red bastards.”
Red-eyed Roselyn Ascalo.
Former heretic inquisitor Bashen Corte.
The two of them paired off against the red dragon while Imperial knights supported them. Arrows flew. Weapons wreathed in mana flashed—yet none of it carried real weight. Everything simply bounced off dragon scale without force.
Only a proper strike would land. Without a blow that had fully gathered its power, no one was putting a wound on a dragon. So while each of them was calculating the exact instant for that one decisive hit and holding the dragons’ attention—
the white dragon beat its wings.
As the white dragon tried to climb back into the air, the subjugation force clicked their tongues and braced for the shock—only for something to whip out with a metallic rattle and coil around the dragon’s talons.
A chain?
Before the force could even process it, the white dragon surged upward. But this time it was not the only thing that rose. The chain wrapped around its talons snapped taut with a harsh rattle—
and someone kicked off the ground and leapt.
Twisting in midair, using the chain’s recoil, a figure rocketed into the sky as if performing some impossible circus stunt. No one was laughing at the result, though.
The boy holding the chain—Najin—landed on the dragon’s talons. He had mounted a dragon that had already climbed into unreachable air. And he did not stop there. Stepping on scales, Najin began to climb the white dragon’s body.
Racing along the back of a beast flying at high speed, he climbed with nothing but a chain and a single sword. The instincts he had forged hunting wyverns paid for themselves in that moment. In the span of a breath he was astride the white dragon’s back, and there he steadied his breathing.
Then—flash.
He lifted his sword high toward the heavens. Sword aura like a constellation wrapped the blade and blazed pure white. The sword he had raised as if to pierce the sky, he brought down in a single cut aimed below.
And for the first time since the battle began, dragon blood sprayed into the air.
There were gaps in a dragon’s scales. Always.
Especially on a white dragon, those gaps ran wide. Merlin had been right. At a glance the white dragon’s plating looked dense, but when he forced his eyes open, the seams leaped into view.
Najin jammed his blade into one of them.
Blood sprayed. Compared to the dragon’s bulk it was a tiny wound—but blood had flown. A smile tugged at the corner of Najin’s mouth. It worked. The sword went in. Which meant he could cut.
He tightened his grip and began to run along the dragon’s back. His blade raced the seams between scale and scale. The gaps were tiny, yet the tip of every cut he made found them with perfect accuracy and sliced into dragon hide.
Blood fountained again. Perhaps this time the wound was too large even for the white dragon to ignore. Sensing the passenger on its back, the beast twisted violently in midair, screaming and thrashing its wings.
Najin simply drove his sword deeper into the dragon’s back and used the buried blade as an anchor, riding out the white dragon’s frenzy. No matter how the beast wrenched and rolled, he did not fall.
Once you get on, never let go.
There’s no safer place than a dragon’s back.
That had been Merlin’s teaching, and Najin followed it to the letter. He moved by planting his blade into white scales as he went. His eyes were locked on the wing that grew from the white dragon’s spine.
Arthur tore a dragon’s wings and brought it down.
In that case—
I’ll just cut the wings off entirely.
So it could never fly again.
Butcher the back all he liked and he still would not kill a dragon. A dragon died only when you took its neck or drove a blade through its heart. To get that chance, he first had to put the beast on the ground.
That’s when the real fight starts.
Planting his sword as he went, Najin worked his way toward the joint of the white dragon’s wing. From here he would have to rip the scales free, tear the hide, and sever the bone beneath. Even for a Sword Seeker, the work was brutally hard.
Dragons resisted mana to an extreme degree, and dragon bone shrugged off almost any ordinary attack without so much as a scratch. Worse, even if you cut the flesh, it regenerated in moments.
But Najin had a method. Balancing on the thrashing white dragon’s back, he raised his sword. He steadied his breath and forced his eyes wide. His heart hammered, blood raced, and his sword aura flickered like a living star.
One strike. He drove the blade into a seam of scales—then twisted his wrist and wrenched the sword upward. White scales peeled free and scattered through the air.
Immediately, the second strike.
His tip carved a clean line through dragon hide. Blood welled as a straight gash opened. Staring hard at that single cut, Najin swallowed a breath—and never let it out again.
His blade blurred into afterimages. A sword swinging half a dozen times in a single second. The same way he had once cut down thousands of fire-arrows a witch had loosed, Najin forgot even to breathe and simply swung.
Scales flew.
Blood sprayed.
Hide tore open.
And what finally showed was the bone that ran into the wing joint. Najin brought his sword down on it the way a miner swings a pick. It was the bone-breaking sword form he had learned in the Chain Unit. From hunting wyverns he had learned that this method was simply more efficient at severing bone.
Faster than the flesh could climb back, faster than the dragon could regenerate, Najin’s blade moved. For every handspan of hide that tried to close, his tip cut ten.
『———————————!』
The white dragon screamed and thrashed like a mad thing, flipping its body through the air—yet Najin’s cuts never stopped. Using the sword buried in the wing joint as a pivot, he simply spun his body once and found his balance again.
At last one of the white dragon’s wings locked stiff. The rhythm of its flight collapsed, and its altitude began to plunge. Still astride the falling white dragon as it slowly lost the sky, Najin glanced toward the red dragon.
Something was wrong.
By the plan he and Merlin had discussed—by the course of the battle he had drawn in his head—the red dragon should have interfered by now. It had not. Why?
The moment he fixed his gaze on the red dragon, their eyes met.
The red dragon was watching him too. Even while trading blows with Roselyn and the other White Horns, its stare was locked straight on Najin. The instant those bestial eyes met his, Najin’s instincts rang a hard alarm.
Something.
Something was wrong.
A formless dread settled over him.
Before Najin could even begin to work out the reason, the red dragon roared. With a cry that shook heaven and earth, the red dragon surged into the sky.