The Great Duel (2)
Narinhuon spoke as if the whole thing delighted him.
"So dreams really are nothing but dreams. No matter how vivid the fantasy, it can't compare to the real thing."
Only when flesh met flesh did certain truths become real. He could feel his opponent's emotions. Her fighting spirit was alive. Their pulses hammered, and with every beat, the blood in their veins surged.
You stand at a crossroads.
Every battlefield is a crossroads — the fork that splits life from death. In a dream where such things were impossible, a true battlefield could not exist.
And now, Narinhuon stood upon one.
"Satisfying."
He shifted his gaze and took in the sight of Via.
"If I had one complaint, it would be that you brought along an inconvenient tail."
Treated as a mere appendage, Via answered coldly.
"You sought to tear the seed of an entire race out by the root. You will bear their hatred in full."
She was showing a cold fury unlike anything she had revealed before — a completely different creature from the woman of moments ago. Behind her smile, a thousand wrathful demons had been seething all along.
Narinhuon felt that killing intent radiating off her.
"Yes. That is righteous hatred."
He acknowledged its legitimacy. Just as he had once tried to exterminate the centaurs, so too did every centaur have the right to hate Narinhuon himself — and the right to act on that hatred.
"But this is not your turn."
A prior appointment held him. Something that came before accepting her hatred, before the annihilation of the centaurs — before anything else in the world.
"Today, no one interferes with this fight."
There was something he meant to take back from Vesta.
"You think I would simply stand by and watch?"
"I have prepared an opponent worthy of gold."
"That would be hard to find."
"Indeed. It was not easy."
Narinhuon stamped his foot — koom. His shadow stirred, came alive, and split its jaws wide open.
"A wolf?"
Somewhere in that instant, it had stopped being a shadow and become an enormous wolf — a colossal wolf-man. Even Via, who had fought countless battles across this land, had never laid eyes on a wolf so massive.
An undegraded wolf. Pureblood. Progenitor. In other words — a powerful spirit-body.
"What do you think? Seems more than a match for your Golden one, wouldn't you say?"
A beast's low growl wove itself into Via's breathing.
"Did you think a spirit-body would frighten me? That I would step aside?"
She would not. Narinhuon knew that much. Until he had met Vesta, the enemy he had marked as his true rival was the Golden one — Via.
He had joined the orc horde in order to kill her, devising strategy after strategy. His conduct back then had bordered on obsession. And obsession, if it cannot win the target's respect, will manufacture it by force if it must.
Narinhuon had never once looked down on the Golden warrior. Not a single time.
And it was precisely because of that that he sent his brother.
The wolf waited for Narinhuon's command, and Narinhuon gave his warning with utter sincerity.
[The moment you take that one for an ordinary centaur, your throat will be opened.]
The wolf howled long, as if in answer — then hurled itself at Via.
Narinhuon did not bother to predict the outcome. He turned his eyes to Vesta instead.
"Let us begin our fight."
Vesta did not answer. He was already holding his sword.
A heartbeat later, boy and wolf collided.
Deep in a pitch-black cavern, a black orc was making his way through the darkness.
The cavern was so vast that its ceiling could not be fathomed. It looked as though it could swallow any enormous thing whole.
A dragon, say. Even a fully grown dragon would have fit with room to spare.
Karakh was an orc who saw not the present, but the future. In that respect, he resembled Narinhuon.
"......"
Only, their views of the future differed. Narinhuon did not entertain the possibility of failure. To him, failure meant defeat, and defeat meant death. Thinking past that point was meaningless, and so there was no need to plan for failure at all.
For Karakh, on the other hand, the future was something that could fail at any moment.
He guarded against it. He prepared for it, meticulously.
A year ago, a certain orc horde discovered a dragon's lair.
A nest, and eggs, that had no business existing in these northern lands.
Judging the information beyond their capacity to handle, they had not grown greedy. They sold it — to an old orc named Silver Wolf.
With a dragon under our command, we could bring down the Elves' thousand-year kingdom.
The idea of wielding a dragon had existed for ages. It had merely been dismissed as a laughable fantasy.
When Silver Wolf heard the news, he surely recalled that fantasy — and shuddered, violently.
Together with a handful of orcs, he set about making the plan concrete.
Once the plan was complete, they killed every last information broker.
All to bury the location of the cavern.
Silver Wolf had not even told his partner, Karakh, where it lay. To Karakh, it had been an unforgivable treatment.
Because one had to prepare.
Karakh believed Narinhuon would see the plan through. But there was a slim chance of failure — and if that day came, he believed, he himself would have to step forward.
He simply could not accept the possibility that this enterprise might fail.
He had thrown every resource he had into finding the information. At least one of the orcs who knew the nest's location, he reasoned, had to still be alive.
"Here it is."
Arriving at the vast chamber, Karakh swept his surroundings. His eyes were useless; darkness lay thick as smoke.
But his nose — a sense of smell incomparable to any human's — blazed to life.
He tracked a strange scent, one he had never once caught before.
So this is a dragon's scent.
And it carried the gamy tang of a hatchling.
Skreee—
"So this is a dragon's whelp?"
Something like a lizard, or a bird. Perhaps because of its small size, there was nothing majestic about its appearance whatsoever.
This pathetic little thing was supposed to become the dragon that all creation fears?
The hatchling clacked and squawked at Karakh, wary and defensive.
Fwoosh—
It even breathed fire — a flame so feeble it could never kill a hardened warrior. If anything, it recalled the memory of a sword wreathed in fire, and that made Karakh's mood turn foul.
His face twisting, Karakh seized the hatchling by the neck and slammed it against the ground. The terrified whelp whimpered pitifully.
[Quiet.]
Squeak-squirm.
Karakh stomped down on the creature's fragile neck, putting his full weight behind it, and began to twist the bone. The dragon thrashed with a sound no healthy bone should make.
Even if he released it now, it would grow up with a crooked neck. Of course, he had no intention of letting it go.
[The plan must be completed.]
Karakh had failed to stop Vesta — and so he could not stop Narinhuon's duel either. But that changed nothing. The plan had to be seen through. If Narinhuon defeated Vesta, everything would proceed without a hitch.
But what if — what if — Narinhuon lost? The odds were vanishingly slim. Yet it was not something absolutely impossible.
Did they think he would stake the fate of his entire race on one individual's win or loss?
And so he had come. To take Narinhuon's place.
Feeling the hatchling's pointless struggling beneath his foot, Karakh declared:
[The dragon shall take flight, and the hour of the wolf shall return.]
"That would be inconvenient."
An unexpected voice. Karakh whipped his head around.
A human man. Judging by his build and armament, a warrior.
"You. How do you know of this place?"
"Someone had a loose tongue."
Karakh, hedging against his own failure, had entrusted the cavern's location to exactly one trusted subordinate — because unlike Narinhuon, he was a leader who understood the value of planning for defeat.
Something has gone very wrong.
An unpleasant sensation, like the feeling of a snare closing around his leg.
"You have learned information you were never meant to learn, human!"
Even as he ground the dragon's neck beneath his heel, Karakh leveled a threat at the man.
The human didn't so much as blink. He was a man well acquainted with killing intent.
"I can't allow your dragon to slaughter the centaurs to the last. That's not part of my plan. But the discord you've sown — that I'll take. Consider that war accepted."
"Who... who are you?"
"A son of war."
"...Spawn of the Empire!"
Those who claimed the god of war as their progenitor — the people of the Empire.
The human — Lycaon — leveled the blade he had prepared in advance and charged.
He had to block that attack. Karakh snatched for his curved blade with blinding speed.
That was the intention, at least.
But the hand that had always wielded his weapons was already gone, severed at the wrist. His stump flailed at empty air, and nothing more.
[No—]
Blood sprayed. Again and again, freely. No counterattack ever came.
Lycaon wiped the blood from his face and looked down at the hatchling. He nudged it with the tip of his boot.
Skreee.
It still lived, mercifully. Though its neck had been twisted crooked.
Soon enough, the mother dragon would find her broken child lying in the dark. Lycaon turned the thought over in his mind — what she would feel when she did.
She will not be able to laugh it off.
And if she couldn't — how far across the world would her fury reach?
"You know what I hope for? That your mother burns exactly half of this world to ash."
The cavern shuddered. Guessing the cause, Lycaon dragged the mutilated corpse along with him. Leaving the wailing hatchling behind him, he vanished into the darkness.
Before long—
A colossal dragon rose into the sky.