Hero (3)
Viola Oldina did not bind her hair.
With her jet-black locks cascading free, she swung her sword.
Violet wore hers drawn into a single braid.
With that pure-white hair bound behind her, she struck the keys.
Najin looked at the Violet standing before him — or perhaps at Viola Oldina. Her hair was not one color. Half of it black, half pure white. Bound in a single braid, she held a sword.
"Well, either way doesn't really matter, does it?"
Either way was fine. She shrugged as if to say it was a trivial thing. At that, Najin nodded. Fair enough.
"I'll take the left."
"I'll take the right."
No long discussion was needed. Najin angled himself toward Ladon's left wing — already half-severed — while Viola gripped her sword and faced the right.
A brief silence.
As if to shatter it, the blue sky rippled. The sky, already a vivid blue, deepened by another shade. From that lake-like, undulating expanse a single raindrop fell with a soft plink — and Merlin's magic was complete.
Whoooosh!
A torrential downpour. The moment the rain struck Ladon, it froze with a sharp crack. Raindrops that seeped into the wounds Najin had torn open froze and forced those gashes wider. Ice, stained red with blood, bloomed across the dragon's body.
——————!
As Ladon's agonized roar echoed, Najin and Viola kicked off the ground.
The Dawn Star, composed of four stars.
The Fallen Star, composed of six.
Two constellations blazed, each in their own color.
Najin and Viola were swordsmen.
They knew how to cut what ordinary methods could not cut, and they possessed the skill to make that knowledge real.
Najin used the Triumphant Sword he had learned from the Helmeted Knight.
Viola used sword aura that resembled shattered glass.
While Merlin's magic held Ladon in place, the two relentlessly targeted its wings. The most orthodox method of hunting a dragon was to deprive it of flight.
Slash!
Blood sprayed. Relative to Ladon's size the blood loss was negligible, but to bring down something vast, one must begin with the small parts.
Crack!
Whenever Viola and Najin carved wounds into the wings, Merlin forced those wounds open. The frozen gashes would not close; Ladon's vaunted regenerative power was rendered useless. It thrashed and shrieked, but they were not so slow as to be caught by a half-frozen dragon's sluggish movements.
They stripped scales, drove blades in to widen the cuts, and sawed through bone and muscle.
The moment Ladon's tattered wings sagged, they did not miss the opening. Najin slid in and drove his sword into the left wing. Almost simultaneously, Viola drove in from the right and swung. Their strikes finished at nearly the same instant.
On one side, sword aura like a constellation flashed; on the other, sword aura that recalled a pane of glass shattered into pieces.
With a wet crack, the left wing was severed.
With a crystalline crash, the right wing was smashed.
Scarlet blood sprayed. With a fountain of blood and a heavy thud, Ladon's wings hit the ground. The moment both wings fell, Ladon screamed in agony.
"Now."
And—
"Now, Merlin."
The iceberg began to collapse.
With a deep rumble, the iceberg that Viola, Najin, and Ladon had stood upon crumbled. Merlin brought it down because they no longer needed such a platform.
A dragon that had lost its wings could not fly. That meant it was no longer free from falling. The creature once called master of the sky, stripped of its wings, was reduced to a mere beast.
The iceberg shattered and fell.
From hundreds of meters in the air, Ladon plummeted. Watching the falling dragon, Viola burst into laughter.
That dragon she had feared so deeply.
That monster that had seemed destined to torment her forever.
Seeing it crash toward the earth, she felt something like pure elation. She saw Ladon's eyes tremble. She saw fear take root in those yellow beast-eyes. So it was afraid of falling after all.
But Viola was not.
She was falling too — yet she felt no fear. She had already fallen more times than she could count. Having dropped and dropped again, she felt familiarity rather than terror in this situation.
And that familiarity let her take one more step forward.
Tap — she kicked off a falling chunk of ice and accelerated. Using fragment after fragment as footholds, she leapt again and again toward Ladon. Instead of resisting the fall, she simply accepted it. She received gravity not as some dreadful force dragging her down, but as a hand pushing her from behind.
BOOOOM!
Ladon hit first. When the colossal dragon struck the earth, the ground shook like an earthquake. Dust billowed sky-high, and a roar like a powder magazine detonating rolled out.
And through that chaos — tap.
Viola kicked off the last ice slab and leapt. Without slowing for an instant, she swung her sword at the fallen Ladon as if wielding a blunt weapon rather than a blade.
Crack.
She smashed the length of Ladon's spine. Its back caved in; with a sharp shatter, cracks raced outward. Blood geysers erupted and scales peeled free, flying high into the air.
Ladon convulsed hard. The body that had been trying to recover from the impact of the fall locked up.
"Najin!"
Shouting that, Viola put distance between herself and Ladon. She leapt high and looked up at the sky.
Stars were shining.
Challenge. Breakthrough. Indomitable will. And—
Dragonslayer.
Not in the night sky — the stars shone from a sword held by a human.
"······."
Hanging upside down from a falling glacier fragment, Najin had set his stance. He kicked off the ice. Boom — the ice could not withstand the impact and shattered to pieces. Amid swirling snow dust, like a single meteor, Najin shot toward Ladon.
First Horn.
The scales Viola had stripped away. The spine thus exposed. Toward that thick bone, Najin swung his sword.
Triumph.
A single strike steeped in the starlight of Dragonslayer bisected Ladon.
A sword stroke that tore flesh and muscle and split the spine.
As if cutting Ladon in two were not enough, a single line carved into the earth with a crack. Blood poured from the severed surfaces as Ladon let out its final moan.
What Ladon felt in its last moment was fear. Not the fear of dying and rising again with time — the fear of facing eternal death. A dragon that had lived far from death groaned in terror at death's approach.
Guoooooh······.
The drawn-out moan cut off with a sudden snap. Ladon met its death.
"Hah... haaah······."
Still in the stance of the swing atop Ladon's back, Najin gasped for breath. His breathing was ragged. The rebound of mimicking transcendence with a body that had not yet reached it crashed over him. His body toppled and fell from the dragon.
Viola caught the falling Najin.
"Oh my god, oh my god!"
She cried out in joy with him in her arms. She bounced in place, beaming.
"We really got it. We really did! An immortal dragon — how? You — how on earth did you do that? Really······."
Ah — belatedly she released Najin, stepped back, and smoothed her hair. As if embarrassed, she averted her eyes a little.
"······."
Turning her gaze that way, she unintentionally met Merlin's eyes — and Merlin was glaring at her wide-eyed, still frozen with both arms outstretched to catch the falling Najin.
Staring blankly.
The resentful look of a guide whose role had been stolen. That gaze was so heavy that Viola turned her head again.
"I told you, didn't I? I'm confident when it comes to dragon hunting."
Najin said, steadying his staggering body.
"How was it?"
"You're asking because you don't know?"
Viola laughed as if she couldn't believe it.
How was it — he was asking because he didn't know? It was magnificent. "Magnificent" didn't begin to cover it. Words that made her cheeks burn rose to her throat, but she couldn't bring herself to speak them; instead she burst out laughing.
"Really."
With the nightmare that had tormented her for so long finally gone, Viola could smile brighter than ever.
"Really, Najin. Truly, tha—"
Thank you — the moment she started to say it.
She felt a strange dissonance.
The nightmare that had tormented her for so long.
The dissonance struck the instant that phrase rose in her mind. She had fought Ladon for sixty-seven years — yet she felt as though she had done so for far longer, more than ten times that span.
Ladon's death. The resolution of lingering attachment. And the turning point.
Suddenly, she understood.
That this was a dream.
And she realized that for the past several hundred years, she had been repeating this dream.
Memories she had forgotten every month crashed over her like a wave. The repeated dreams flickered before her eyes like a lantern show. The bright smile on Viola's face hardened.
Her expression twisted, her pupils trembled, her breathing faltered—
"Ah······."
Viola Oldina sighed.
Violet smiled bitterly.
"So. That's how it was."
The eyes of Viola, beginning to wake from the dream, were somewhat hazy.
"That's what it was."
But only for a moment.
Viola closed her eyes and exhaled a long breath. When she opened them again after a slow, deep breath, she was smiling — a smile that was somehow at ease, somehow light.
"Well, thinking about it, it was too much like a fairy tale. When you're driven to the brink, a hero just happens to appear and save you? Reality doesn't work that way."
Ah — Violet sighed.
What a shame. Murmuring that, she lowered her head. When she looked up again, she wore an expression that looked ready to cry at any moment.
"······You."
"It's fine. Really, it's fine. Truly."
Violet shook her head.
Then she exhaled — whoo, haa — in succession, and rubbed the corners of her eyes with her sleeve.
"Hey, Najin?"
"Yes, Violet."
"What's this? Now that the hero's retired, you're calling me Violet? I like that. Anyway, Najin······."
Violet turned to look at him.
"Do you like walking in the rain?"
The moment she said it, rain suddenly began to pour — shaaaa. Not rain Merlin had made. For Violet, rain had always been a sanctuary, and the sound of rain a song that soothed her heart.
Because she wished for a sanctuary, the rain fell.
With Ladon gone, this dream belonged entirely to Violet.
"Well... I don't dislike it."
Looking at her faint smile — a smile that seemed ready to vanish at any moment — Najin nodded.
"Then shall we walk for a bit?"
Violet forced a smile.
"There's so much I want to talk about."