The Dragon That Would Not Die
Steadying his breathing behind the gas mask, Park Woochan made his move.
Shhk!! Another dagger flew.
Dragon-slaying daggers, and only four of them left. He led his opening move with them, bold and unhesitating, sprinting for the opposite side of the beast — dragging the dragon's gaze with him as he charged straight for the gap between the scales he'd pried loose moments ago.
The cost-efficiency here was so deranged that every attempt to slip past its offense forced him to burn a Shukuchi step. Factored in, baiting its attention from the very start wasn't a bad call at all.
Of course, from a dragon's perspective, all it took was turning its head and swinging its tail. Along the arc of that sweeping tail, a canyon tore itself open across the frozen ground.
The gap was cruel. It was power that seemed designed to prove their standings as living creatures were several tiers apart.
And so—
Hup!
Humans learn. Humans adapt. Monsters are no different. A dragon's mana. A giant's physical strength. Just as countless monsters each bore their own distinct traits, the species called humanity was thoroughly specialized in exactly this: studying the enemy, and answering in kind.
His judgment here was no different.
The only weapon it can throw out on reflex is that tail.
So Park Woochan judged. One look at the thing's anatomy made it obvious. A body like a serpent stretched to absurd length, with four legs bolted on as an afterthought. To hold up a frame and weight that size, it couldn't carelessly commit its legs as weapons. A flaw born naturally of its very structure.
And—
If you can predict it, you can dodge it.
He stepped off a platform of telekinesis and jumped again. Two leaps carried him clear of the dragon's tail, and in the same breath he brought the wind mana crystal from his storage into play, scattering the gale that came crashing down on him.
Chisel and plane are spent. What was left was the nail and the saw, plus the blade and the counterweight. Strangling something that size with a chain was too absurd to even consider.
Which meant, this time—
Hah! The saw.
The saw blade, sheathed in thunderbolt mana, crackled to life. The scales loosened by the weapon Lee Yeeun had thrown — and the gaps between them — meshed with the teeth all too easily. Bracing a foot on the auxiliary handle, he forced power through it.
And then—
Shrrk!!
He muscled through the finer details with brute force, and the third scale came away.
────!!
A roar. Was it the pride of a beast called king of monsters, or a howl torn out by sheer pain? Either way, the dragon's cry rolled beneath the heavens once more.
The next moment—
Fssshhhh!!
The blood spurting from it vaporized on the spot. Legend had it that the blood shed by the Middle Eastern dragon was poison itself — scattering as a mist of pure toxicity, or birthing new venomous serpents from the spill. This time, it was the former.
Thanks to the gas mask, his airways took no real damage. The problem was—
Whish!
Almost in the same instant the mist sprayed out, telekinesis hauled back the chain he'd flung behind him. In terms of contact time, barely a second. And yet—
"This is why you don't buy cheap gear."
"What are you even saying right now?!"
"Yeeun, listen up and learn something. You don't cheap out on suits. Bespoke only. Made-to-measure, no exceptions."
Grumbling, Park Woochan splashed antidote over his arms. One second, that was all it had taken. But in that single second, the venom had already begun crawling up through his skin.
Contact-type, huh. With his usual loadout it wouldn't have mattered — unless he planned on rolling around inside a poison cloud. But his current backup gear left plenty to be desired.
...Slowly, the feeling returned to both arms. Tch. Park Woochan clicked his tongue without meaning to, and at the same time tossed an antidote pill into his mouth. Not to swallow — just insurance, in case. Backing off every time the thing spewed poison fog would only make the rest of this fight that much harder. He had no choice but to trust the pill held in his mouth and fight on, eating whatever damage came.
Same as always. He fought by trusting the defense woven into his suit and coat, tanking what he could. This time it just meant bracing against toxicity instead of the physical blows he couldn't have withstood anyway.
The real problem lay elsewhere. Lee Yeeun's reflexive pull had been impressively swift. But—
She'd opened up far too much distance. Enough, say, for the dragon's eyes to pick Park Woochan out.
The next moment, a sense of death flared — unmistakable, the kind even dulled senses couldn't miss.
"Yeeun!!"
In that instant, everyone did everything they could. Sensing the shift, Choi Seungjun wrapped Park Woochan and Lee Yeeun in walls of ice. Lee Yeeun piled her telekinesis on top, compressing the ice into something denser still. Park Woochan unlocked his storage and dumped out every antidote he had.
And upon those thorough defenses, the storm broke.
Had any weather satellite been watching the city at that moment, it would have marveled at the violence of the air's movement — an atmospheric current distinct enough to read from the stratosphere. Even the clouds hanging overhead were shredded and melted away, and the bare sky revealed at the end of it all felt almost bracingly clean.
But who could possibly have known? That the storm that had just torn through was nothing more than a single wingbeat.
It stood to reason. A body that enormous is dull to outside stimulus. A body that heavy can't carelessly swing its legs. So then — wings strong enough to bear that bulk, that weight... just how much force must they hold?
"Ugh...!" A groan tore out of Lee Yeeun. A gale that made him wonder whether a true storm could even match it — power that casually surpassed the full output of an A+ rank atmospheric manipulator he'd seen once. But if that had been all, there wouldn't have been much of a problem. After all, Choi Seungjun was here.
And so, the next moment, Lee Yeeun suddenly vomited black blood — a trace vivid enough to read even through the gas mask.
...Right. The great dragon's wingbeat had carried venom. Inhalation. Contact. Paralysis. Poisoning. A lethal toxin that corroded even mana itself — and the venom riding that wind had shattered Yeeun's ability. Her organs had begun convulsing on their own. A kind of backlash.
"Yeeun! That's enough — let go!"
It felt wrong to even say it, but Choi Seungjun wasn't here. Which, put another way, meant they could take full resupply from the ground — even now, in fact. Drink the antidotes and recovery potions, hunker down on defense, and they could do their job just fine. Which meant what mattered was Lee Yeeun's condition. That was Park Woochan's thinking as he urged her to pull out—
"Yeeun!"
"Teacher. I'm sorry, but my head is ringing. Just... quiet, please..."
Even so, Lee Yeeun refused to let go until the very end. Because of a sharp premonition.
...Choi Seungjun isn't here. He's only supporting them from long range. Naturally, his output and his precision can't match what he'd manage exercising his ability right in front of them. Of course, calling his talent the world's finest was never just decoration — even the level of support he was providing now was far beyond anything ordinary. But Lee Yeeun, lending her strength at this exact moment, could tell.
If I pull out here, it all comes down in an instant. They might block it — but they couldn't weather the aftermath. The moment that conclusion settled, she abandoned any thought of retreat. What mattered here, she was certain, was her homeroom teacher. And if so, then she too, as a hunter, had a duty to fulfill right here—
...Park Woochan could only stare, helpless, at the sight of her. No — he understood what she was thinking. He understood, but.
This is fucked.
He didn't feel the least bit good about it. And so—
"Yeeun. You got me once, so this makes us even."
"...Huh?"
The next moment, Park Woochan pulled off his own gas mask. Then he took the antidotes and recovery potions he'd laid out around them into his mouth. And—
Beyond the gas mask he gently eased from her face, he took in the girl's sweat-soaked features, contorted with pain.
Oh, no. I didn't want him to see this face. As that thought flickered through Lee Yeeun's pain-swamped mind, Park Woochan quietly pressed his lips to hers.
[Fuck.]
At the same time—
"Mmph—?!"
Was it the antidote and potion seeping past his lips, or simply the sheer suddenness of it all? Before she knew it, that sound had escaped her. But the reaction soon subsided — and with it, Lee Yeeun's thoughts drifted somewhere far away.
Huh? What's happening? No — wait. Of course. It's a medical procedure. Right, Teacher? Huh? Huh?! Wait, what do I do. No, this is my first. Hold on, is this even okay?! Well... I was in an unavoidable situation too, after all. Come to think of it, I did the exact same thing. Huh?! Wait, wasn't that completely perverted of me?! And Teacher's not supposed to do this!!
It's a medical procedure. But honestly — medical procedure or not, she couldn't really tell. If asked whether she hated it... she didn't think she did. It wasn't a situation she'd never imagined, so she was happy too, and—
The scales of her thoughts tipped in an instant. And the longer the kiss stretched on, the deeper the tilt grew. Lee Yeeun couldn't for the life of her work out how she was still holding her telekinesis together.
And then — almost the very moment Park Woochan pulled away, the wingbeats stopped.
"Oh—ah."
"I'm sure you've got plenty to say, but save it. Mask on!"
"Y-yes! Yes!"
Park Woochan fumbled his gas mask back into place. Watching his back, touching her own lips without quite realizing it, Lee Yeeun pulled her mask on with a trace of reluctance.
Silently, this time without a word, the ice wall lowered.
It's a somewhat irreverent thing to say, but for Park Woochan it was a brief moment of relief. Brief, of course, because of what unfolded before his eyes next.
Wings, flapping. A body that size. A weight that vast. That something so massive could fly at all — just what the hell was mana, anyway? Mana and magic aren't omnipotent. They move under specific laws. That was the stock phrase of every mana engineering major, but staring at the sight before him now, he couldn't help but dispute it. Really, now?
It looked ready to carve its shadow into the sky itself. In a city already dimmed by the ice walls, an untimely night fell — because the great dragon had taken flight. Its violently spread wings blotted out the sun. Literally a scene out of myth. It was a sight that admitted no other reading.
No wonder the wind had seemed far too strong for a mere wingbeat. It had been winding up to fly. Well, lifting a body that size would demand its fair share of warm-up.
With a small sigh from Park Woochan, the dragon opened its maw.
Mana, converging. A flow so dense that even someone with no mana sensitivity could have felt it. The genuine article — Dragon Breath. A torrent of mana unleashed by the king of monsters. Not some venom-laden exhale, but a mass of mana given form — the crowning strike among the dragon's countless weapons.
A cannon, if you liked. If that gaping maw was the barrel, the charged mana was the shell. Less than a second remained before the shell aimed at the ground came down.
And so, without a word, Park Woochan lowered his sword.
Good. He'd seen this coming from the start. No — it was only obvious, wasn't it? Look at the stage. Above the sky. Above the gate. Above that, the newly minted ceiling of ice. Two opponents — two humans, specks beside the great dragon. Push a bleed-out strategy in a situation like this, and what would a dragon think? The king of monsters — that violent, colossal beast?
Would it resolve to keep thrashing its tail until it swatted them? As if.
The answer was right in front of him. Wide-open ground. The optimal play a dragon could make here: take to the air, then pour its breath down onto the earth. The Middle Eastern dragon's breath was poison and flame, plus detonations of flammable gas. Given the time to loose it, no matter what ability the enemy brought, it could annihilate them for certain. Literally the optimal solution — which made it easy to predict.
Click.
A flash of insight rang through Park Woochan's skull. The board he'd envisioned had materialized into reality — and his next move was just as clear. Therefore—
Just before the dragon fired its breath, Park Woochan's greatsword cleaved the empty air.
Signature skill: Cut Prettily.
The instant the slash flashed, the dragon found itself staring up at the sky.
────?!
Sunlight poured down onto the ground. The wings that had shrouded the sun mere moments ago now hung fluttering, lifeless. Only then did the dragon understand. An invisible slash? A blade of air? Whichever it was — it had lost its wings. And as wingless creatures invariably do, the dragon was plummeting toward the earth.
KWAAAAAAH!!
The directionless Dragon Breath radiated into the sky. Mana compressed past any hope of containment — and with its wings severed clean off, the dragon couldn't even control its own body. Neither flying nor planted on the ground, it simply couldn't withstand the breath it had released, nor the recoil.
KUUUUNG!!
The dragon's bulk crashed onto the ice ceiling, shaking the mana-frozen floor. And at the same time, the floor that had borne its weight without complaint began to tilt. The shock of the impact? No — quite the opposite. Timed to the fall, Choi Seungjun, architect of the ice ceiling, tilted his mana-made structure on purpose.
A dragon, wings severed, falling. Unable to save even itself. The recoil of its unleashed breath. An ice floor tilting of its own accord. Every condition was in place.
Park Woochan had never had the power to shove a dragon that size out of the city. His ability was, at bottom, mana sensitivity — and his tactics, likewise, were thoroughly specialized in a hunter's tools of the trade. There was no technique in his arsenal that could move a mass like that. And so Park Woochan had reasoned: only one being on this battlefield could push the dragon's bulk out. The dragon itself.
The great dragon's body slid. Digging in its claws, thrashing its tail — nothing could grip the tilting ice, thanks to Choi Seungjun's exquisite manipulation. Every time the dragon drove its claws in, that patch reverted to pure mana. In the end, not a single instant of its struggling managed to slow its fall.
The atmosphere churned — partly the sheer bulk of the creature, and partly because the structure that had held the great dragon aloft was tilting wholesale. A truly surreal spectacle, a vista where the very concept of perspective seemed to dissolve. But even that spectacle soon reached its end. At last, the dragon's body cleared the city's airspace.
And—
Toward the dragon's bulk as it began its final fall beyond the city, Park Woochan launched himself. Right now, there was only one thing to do—
"DIE!!"
Certain of victory, Park Woochan's senses sharpened to a razor's edge. Signature skill: Cut Prettily. The supreme slash that had severed its wings now resonated with the dragon's mana. A clean horizontal cut. The moment the decisive blow flashed, splitting the dragon precisely in half from snout to tail—
...he had the distinct feeling of a soft snicker. Quite magnificent. A voice that sounded almost like praise.
...An inexplicable wrongness. A vision of something gone deeply wrong, slipping past his awareness before he knew it. Fortunately, he didn't need to dwell on it long. Because an alien mana had settled over the great dragon's freshly bisected corpse.
Healing magic. In a flash, Park Woochan pinned down its identity. On its own, that much would have been no problem. Cut Prettily — the name was laughable, but the slash itself literally recreated the performance of a demonic sword out of myth, and its aftermath was nothing to sneer at. The healing magic layered over the dragon's remains had been split top from bottom, exactly like the dragon.
But Park Woochan saw it. The two halves of the magic circle, moving of their own accord before his eyes. No — that wasn't quite it. This wasn't some outside mana forcibly stitching the severed spell back together. The two halves of the magic circle had, by chance, composed an entirely new spell.
Chance? As if. In this situation, at this very moment — where was there any room for chance to slip in? And so Park Woochan knew, with certainty. It was deliberate. Someone had just cast that healing magic. Someone who had likely observed this battle from beginning to end. Someone who had watched Park Woochan sever the great dragon's wings with his signature skill! And that someone had turned Park Woochan's own signature into an opening — engineered so that the instant Cut Prettily split the magic circle in two, it would reassemble into a new one!
No, what the actual fuck. What kind of trash-ass game is this—
The shock lasted an instant. The bisected healing magic formed a new spell. A curse Park Woochan himself had witnessed once before. The curse of damage transference — in other words, a curse that took the damage its target had just suffered and handed it off to someone else.
And so—
『───────!!!!』
One breath later, the great dragon — resurrected, having trampled straight over death itself — raised its roar to the heavens once more.
At the sheer absurdity of it, a hollow laugh spilled out of him before he knew it. Then, all at once, Park Woochan understood — because a realization with no theory and no basis behind it, impossibly vague, had brushed past him like a thunderbolt.
So that's it. So this is what Extra-standard rank means.
A short, hollow laugh — and the great dragon's tail lashed out at Park Woochan as he fell, dumbstruck.