The Soldier's Way, the Hunter's Way
If there was one problem, it was the thing's sheer size. Choi Seungjun's power was close to infinite — but close was not the same as infinite.
In other words.
'So even Cut Prettily isn't the be-all and end-all.'
Say the signature skill I'd hurled at the thing out of nowhere had actually worked. Then what? How were we supposed to dispose of a dragon corpse that size — and the venomous blood that would come pouring out of it?
Choi Seungjun's power wasn't infinite either. After we put down the dragon in front of us, could he hold out until the military arrived to haul the carcass away? No — before any of that, if the dragon died here in the first place, its spilt blood would come flooding straight for the heart of the city.
Which meant the situation had to be brought under control first.
Going by size alone, this was a bulk people said could crumple every satellite city around the capital in a single sweep — or so the story went. That was how they framed it, but there were no satellite cities anywhere near here. Not really. This new city itself had collapsed during the Second Great Cataclysm and been rebuilt; there simply hadn't been time to rebuild the satellite towns on top of it.
A blessing in disguise, you could call it. Thanks to that, a rough plan had come together.
Long story short: we drop the thing outside the city. And kill it there.
A perfect plan.
So what exactly was wrong with it...?
Come on — a scheme this decent isn't half bad. Granted, Yeeun, the one who'd actually had to sit through the operation I cooked up, had seen fit to needle me over it. But I'd meant every word. It wasn't a bad plan.
The situation as it stood was neither good nor bad. Having a foothold at all was good. Keeping the city out of the line of fire wasn't bad either.
But.
My body was in no state to joke about. Full strength was impossibly far away, and a headache throbbed behind my eyes. Fortunately, the colossal dragon before us still hadn't stirred an inch — thanks to which my mana had recovered somewhat, though even that sat below thirty percent. I wasn't the type to burn mana recklessly, but honestly, that was cutting it razor-thin. Body reinforcement, and the signature skill on top of that — lay it all out, and there was plainly no margin to spare.
The suit wrecked in the fight against the ghoul chieftain was beyond salvaging, and so was the coat swallowed by the dragon-vein eruption. I'd thrown on the backup protective gear I kept from my active-duty equipment rotation, but it was strictly a case of better than nothing.
In a word: teetering.
Conversely, though, there were advantages too.
The first was the dragon's behavior. Colossal monsters are invariably dull to outside stimuli, and it was that way even now — ice platforms had materialized under its feet, and it couldn't be bothered to open its eyes. It was no exaggeration to say the first move was ours, no strings attached.
The second was this situation itself. I couldn't tell whether the summoning had succeeded or failed. Only this much was clear: the dragon's mana pressing in right before my eyes was roughly that of an S-Rank monster — and top of the line among those.
And then — an effect of the summoning ritual, perhaps? I could feel the colossal gate beneath its feet, blanketing the city's sky, connected to the beast. Like a guardian deity.
A guardian deity. The strongest vanguard the gate had chosen from among everything within it. Which meant the gate would pour every last drop of its remaining mana into supporting the beast from here on.
Heard that far, it sounds like a liability rather than an advantage — but it wasn't, necessarily. This wasn't inside the gate, after all. The gate's laws and environment would never turn hostile on us. No dragonkin or minions would appear to bar our way. All we had to factor in was the extra mana the gate added on top. For a fight against a guardian deity, conditions didn't come more luxurious than this.
The third was that these platforms were made of Choi Seungjun's power. In other words, there was no need to blow the footing ourselves to drop the thing outside the city — Choi Seungjun would lend a hand at the right moment. For my part, nothing but good news.
Among the spells recovered from Dr. Pyeong So-woon there were one or two that could help tear up terrain, true. But trying to crack ice laid down by Choi Seungjun with some half-baked borrowed spell was an egg swinging at a boulder. Either way, less work for us was something to be welcomed.
Weigh every condition together, and the odds were passable. At the very least, far better than the alternative — that bulk coming down inside the city.
"Ready?"
"Yes."
Even as she answered, Yeeun was fidgeting with the gas mask covering her face. She clearly hadn't gotten used to it yet. Well, no helping that. The Middle Eastern dragon breathes venom — and now that I'd decided to borrow Yeeun's hands, I couldn't just leave her exposed.
...Slowly, I steadied my breathing. Perhaps because the mask had been on from the start, I felt reasonably calm despite the colossal monster looming right in front of me. If I could rest up properly before taking my shot, I'd have felt easier about it — but that wasn't on the menu. Gripping the greatsword that had come through all this unscathed, I took a step forward.
A dragon. The monster king of legend. A being standing at the apex of countless living things, boasting overwhelming strength and mana. East or West, ancient or modern, the monster called a dragon has always lived up to its name.
And of all its traits, what has broken so many hunters is the dragon's scales. Each one said to outdo the hardness of a shield wrought of iron — the dragon's armor. Tens of thousands of such scales, like an endless rampart proclaiming the beast's boundless vitality. What method could bring down a fortress wall built of dragon scale?
Well. It's simple. No fool kills the soldier behind an iron shield by hacking at the shield until it breaks. The means Park Woochan employed were no different. Press down on the shield, and slide the edge beneath the scale into the flesh beyond. The soldier's way — and the hunter's.
And so. The next instant, what greeted the colossal dragon as it woke to searing pain was the sight of its own 'invincible' scales being torn loose and flung into the air.
UROOOOOOAR!!
Over that roar, Park Woochan's blade came streaking in. Structurally, the thing was closer to a wedge than a sword — and the wedge pried up under the scale. At the same moment, Park Woochan threw his entire body onto the weapon, riding that sense of his — viciously sharp where monsters were concerned — to shift his whole center of gravity.
KRAAAAK!!
The result: the scale famed as invincible peeled away from the dragon's body, limp as paper. 'Leverage' was far too gentle a word for so violent a motion — an absurd disproportion, his entire body spent to tear loose a single scale. Even so, the hunter had spent his opening move on prying free one scale of the colossal dragon.
Then —
KWA-DEDEDEK!!
At the dragon, still shaking off the fog, came steel at a dead sprint, baring its teeth. Park Woochan's favorite throwing weapons — the very stock he'd emptied out of his warehouse and handed over to Lee Yeeun.
...Among her peers, Yeeun's ability was in a class of its own. But it wasn't enough to mean anything against a monster that size. Both Park Woochan and Lee Yeeun knew that much. Which was why Yeeun's role was support, plain and simple: drive weapons into the spot where a scale had been stripped away, and wedge the gap open.
Honestly, even that would be a struggle without serious hardware. Less impenetrable than the scales, maybe, but a dragon's flesh was no pushover — let alone the flesh of a dragon this size, a bulk where even its hide amounted to a weapon in its own right.
And yet. Exactly — it came down to the quality of the weapons. Hardware good enough that a serving S-Rank hunter kept it as backup ordnance, hurled with telekinesis on the level of B-Rank. To slice into the flesh bared beneath the scales, that was plenty.
SPURT!!
Dragon blood geysered upward. A mere trickle of it. Of course, 'a trickle' was a word that only held true for a dragon of this caliber — the black blood came pouring out with the force of a river bursting its banks.
Needless to say, Park Woochan was already gone from the spot. More precisely: directly above the scale he'd just stripped. He wedged the greatsword under the second scale like a plane iron — and Shukuchi.
WOO-DEDEDEK!!
In an instant, two scales took wing.
ROOOOOAR!!!!
The colossal dragon roared. Not just pain — something beyond it. Fury. The dragon that had been idly swaying its tail moments ago finally shifted into full combat posture. Not that Park Woochan or Lee Yeeun had any way of knowing.
Into the spot where the second scale had been, a different throwing weapon sank home. It felt like pinning the gap between scales shut. Park Woochan landed, confirmed the sight — and clicked his tongue. Because he'd seen the ice touched by the dragon's venomous blood, spurted moments ago, melting away.
Not simple heat, surely.
'It's melting the mana.'
Mana poison, if one had to name it. Ice that Choi Seungjun himself was reinforcing in real time had melted, if only for an instant. Vicious stuff — worse than the ghoul chieftain. Clicking his tongue, Park Woochan reversed his grip on the greatsword.
At the same time —
KAGAGAGAK!!
He raked the fallen scale with the spikes fitted to his greatsword. The protection granted by One-Hit Faith was not shared with severed body parts — a fact learned through experiments on ghouls.
'Light, lightning, fire!'
At the same time, he checked the properties hammered into the spikes, in order of how strongly they answered. Given the state of his warehouse, lightning was what he had most of right now. The thought no sooner formed than Park Woochan pulled two vials from his warehouse and tossed them out — lumps of thunder, processed from the mana of lightning users. He caught one of them; Yeeun retrieved the other with her telekinesis. It would come in handy the next time she threw.
But there was no leisurely time to be enchanting weapons.
KRRRRRUMBLE!!
With pressure that shook the ground, disaster fell out of a clear sky. Only after leaping on near-pure reflex did Park Woochan grasp what had just happened.
'Motherfucker.'
A tail sweep — if it needed a name, that was it. The colossal dragon, roused by Park Woochan's offensive, had finally responded. The thunder that had torn the sky moments ago had been part of it. The dragon's tail, swung as if to scythe the earth itself, piled a wall of air up — and shattered it. A crushing weight, as though a vacuum had formed for an instant, and speed in inverse proportion to it. In a flash, destruction on the scale of a city cracked across the air.
And —
"Yeeun!!"
Park Woochan shouted it on reflex. Fat chance she'd hear him over that roar. But he couldn't not shout — because even though he'd timed his leap perfectly, the tail had closed the distance before he knew it, swinging to smash him head-on.
...Maybe it had intercepted in time with his leap. Maybe it had swung its tail a second time. It was nothing so tame. Even with physical ability rivaling A+ Rank, that tail couldn't be dodged — it was simply too enormous. In other words, 'I dodged it' had been nothing more than Park Woochan's own delusion. A full-power leap couldn't clear the dragon's tail, or its reach.
Fortunately, Yeeun's response was exactly right — meaning she didn't waste effort on something as inefficient as grabbing his body with telekinesis and hauling it clear.
Tap. His foot came down on empty air that should have held nothing. A platform of telekinesis — and a second leap. Only after two leaps did Park Woochan finally clear the tail's attack range...!
'Goddammit.'
Of course, the aftershock was another matter. A sucking wind. A dragon's whirlwind rearing up. Park Woochan's body was swept away in it.
And at the same moment — a golden gaze. The dragon's mana-laden eyes locked onto Park Woochan.
Found you.
The hell are you looking at, you little bastard?
Toward eyes that seemed to say exactly that, Park Woochan flicked his wrist lightly.
SHWAAAAAK!!
In the same breath, the dagger hidden up his sleeve flashed out — separate from the throwing weapons he'd handed over to Yeeun. Park Woochan had kept a few throwing weapons of his own. From his active days. A dagger that had once killed a dragon.
Kin-slaying. A weapon that has slain a dragon works wonders at slaying dragons. To some absolute law of myth, the colossal dragon's gaze reacted of its own accord.
Of course, a dinky little dagger like that could hardly wound a body like the dragon's. It would bite in better than most weapons — but the difference in scale was absolute. Even so, the way Ryu Jihee, daughter of a nightmare, flinches at a cup of milk, the dragon blinked — helpless, instinctive. In human terms, a mere startle. For Park Woochan, it was more than enough.
And so, the next instant, the dragon lost sight of Park Woochan entirely.
What Park Woochan did was simplicity itself: he let the chain fly, hurling it down toward the ground. His aim was sloppy. But —
KWADUK!!
Ice surged up from the ground, seized the weight, and hauled Park Woochan down by force. Use whatever can be used — Park Woochan's iron rule. Which was why he had no intention, at this point, of sparing Choi Seungjun's or Yeeun's cooperation. Not that he had the luxury to spare it anyway.
Mass is force. An offensive that seemed to say exactly that.
'Even with the coat, it wouldn't have changed much.'
It would have held for one hit. Two, maybe. Without it, every exchange was kill-or-be-killed — a graze meant death. This was no opponent you could take on aiming for a no-hit clear.
And yet. Unless it was a no-hit clear, it couldn't be brought down. Park Woochan was quietly certain of that. A body that size — the mass and reach that came with it. It gave them the advantage of being able to target the gaps between scales, but honestly, that helped little. Prying off a few scales was never going to turn a tide like this.
Park Woochan knew that too, of course. And yet he kept stubbornly going for the scales — because, as it happened, that was the tactic with the best odds.
It was simple. Think of a blue whale. To keep a creature that size alive, how much blood does the heart have to pump? How much power, how much time, to push blood to every corner of the body? Even with a Dragon Heart, it could be no easy feat. Myth, fantasy — none of it mattered. Anything alive has limits. Borrowing the power of mana changed nothing; if anything, the very fact that it had to borrow mana for those movements meant there was cost.
In short: strip the scales. Force the bleeding. And if its irritation and rage at us burned its reason away along the way, all the better. Death by exsanguination. When even a graze meant your life flashing before your eyes, ironically, the approach Park Woochan had chosen leaned toward a war of attrition.
Tch. Bait, a trap — if he could have started with the thing's strength already whittled down, would he have had breathing room? Indulging in an impossible luxury, Park Woochan slammed the vial down against the flat of his greatsword. The mana of thunder wrapped around the blade.
Four dragon-slaying daggers remained. Judging by how his senses went haywire all over again at the sight of the thing, he had about three Shukuchi attempts left in him. Accounting for the signature skill, two was the realistic limit — separate from mana, there was only so long his nerves could stay keen.
So. How to play it? The absurdity of having to force the dragon into a picture drawn only in his head. The Butcher slowly licked his dry lips.