The Grendel Mountains (3)
When I first fought the maniac, I’d thought it would be easy.
Sure, he was strong—strong enough to deserve the title of the final-class fighter NPC—but in the end he wasn’t all that different from a top-tier fighter player, and if anything his movements were so straightforward that he was easier to handle than another ranked fighter of the same class.
No matter how high his stats were, he was still just an AI. If I stayed out of his fixed patterns and struck at the openings, he was easy enough to deal with.
But it didn’t take long for me to realize that I’d been wrong.
Phase 2 initiated.
Total HP: ■■■■■■□□□
Grendel Mountains Manic — “Mares” Lv.550(★★)
※Special Trait: Saint Beast Transformation — White Dragon
His first phase had been deliberately made weak.
And that was when I understood.
He was never really a Cheonma-class NPC at all. That was just a scam cooked up by the development team.
“Tch. This just got a lot more annoying.”
A dragon and a beastman half-blood.
When I saw the setting—this bastard being a half-blood who could transform into a beast—I should’ve been suspicious from the start.
He was already a dragon with absurd stats, and on top of that they’d given him the power to casually spew holy-element breath. They’d created a complete monster, a worst-case boss made specifically for demons.
Even though I could only use magic back then, it was still way too filthy a boss for demons to deal with.
That line had become a meme for a reason.
-Flash!
I still couldn’t teleport, but I could use a short-range blink. I wrapped my whole body in barriers and appeared in front of him.
“Hey. If you keep going like this, I’m going to kill you. You still want to keep going?”
I had no idea whether he even heard me.
Beastmen already lose their reason the moment they transform, and since this bastard was a dragon, he’d be even harder to control.
If he started rampaging hard enough to flatten the whole area, then I’d have to beat him until he was just short of death and then use the flat of my blade or something to knock him unconscious, no matter what it took.
“……Grrr.”
This guy—was he actually willing to listen now that he’d turned into a dragon?
-Goooooo……!
Then he drew in a deep breath and began gathering mana inside his body. Yeah, no doubt about it—he wasn’t trying to talk. He was about to use breath.
The Grendel Mountains are still too close.
A dragon of his level would shrug off ordinary magic, so in the end the only choice would be to smash him back with brute force again.
If that still didn’t work, then I’d have to use the Great Sage’s magic and force him down somehow.
I didn’t want to use it if I could help it, but the power was absolute. I should be able to subdue him without killing him.
“Kwooooooo……!”
What I was about to use was Giant-Slaying.
He’d transformed into a dragon with a giant-type trait, so the damage should go through nicely.
Let’s see who wins.
I clenched my fist and prepared to use Giant-Slaying.
-Thud!
“Hey! You brat! What the hell are you doing in that form again?”
“Grrrr……?”
“……?”
But then a voice rang out from the ground below.
It was an old man’s voice.
He sounded pretty old, but was there really someone living near the Grendel Mountains? As far as I knew, there wasn’t.
Who the hell was it?
“……Grrr.”
And the maniac, after hearing that voice, went quiet.
Just ten seconds ago he’d been ready to scorch this entire region with breath, and now he’d stopped just because of some old man’s words? Not even a child’s voice—an old man’s?
That kind of event had never happened in Novel Online.
Who on earth was he, to make that maniac…
“Kwooooooo……!”
“Damn it, of course he wouldn’t calm down!”
This time, the bastard flapped his massive wings and began climbing higher into the sky.
In the end I dropped straight to the ground, and then, unbelievably, that maniac turned back toward the Grendel Mountains, where the portal was.
“What?”
I stared blankly at the sight.
Just like that? I’d endured all kinds of misery while keeping this child’s body intact, and he’d resolved it that easily?
How the hell did he do that?
-Thud!
I returned to the train first.
“Sian-nim?! What was that just now? Wasn’t that a dragon? The White—”
“Shut up. I don’t know yet either.”
I told Rain to pipe down, because I needed to find out who had just spoken.
That mysterious voice that had calmed the maniac in an instant—and even made him retreat. The fact that it had carried all the way up into the sky meant it definitely wasn’t some ordinary person.
-Ssssssshhk……!
“Huh?”
But what was wrong with this train?
It had been running fine just a moment ago, but now it was making a strange sound and gradually slowing down.
-Bang!
“Sian-nim! Are you there?!”
Aria came running urgently from the far carriage.
Come to think of it, she’d been in the engine room—the place where this train’s engine was located.
She’d probably know what was going on.
“The, the magic stones inside here suddenly started smoking, and now they’re making weird noises and the train’s slowing down!”
“……Let’s go take a look.”
Hearing Aria’s explanation, I understood the situation well enough.
At a glance this train looked like a steam locomotive, but its engine power came from magic stones.
And those magic stones, once used up, would turn into ordinary rocks—but of course, if mana was injected into them again, they’d return to their original state.
Just now, that maniac transformed into a dragon and was about to fire breath.
That was probably the cause of the malfunction.
-Tzzzzzt!
“Ha. So the problem I expected really did happen.”
This was a problem that came with the difference between dragons and dragonkin.
In Louis’s case, breath was fired by generating vast amounts of mana in the dragon heart inside her body. But dragonkin were different when they used breath.
Dragonkin couldn’t generate as much mana at once as a dragon, so they had to gather the mana dispersed through nature and release it as breath.
The same was true for the dragon that the maniac had become.
Even if he wasn’t a dragonkin, he’d transformed into a dragon and his stats had shot up absurdly high, but he still retained the dragonkin trait, which meant he had to absorb the mana of the surrounding area before he could fire breath. That took time.
And to make things worse, when he sucked in the mana around him to fire that breath, any magic stones nearby would get drained as well. That was the annoying part.
“……Haa.”
As expected, all the magic stones had lost their color and turned gray.
I went to the storage compartment for the train’s magic stones, and not only the ones used by the engine but even the spare ones had all had their mana drained and wouldn’t budge.
That damned white lizard. He’d finally agreed to clear out of the mountains exactly the way I wanted, and now he was screwing that up too.
What am I supposed to do now?
At first glance it seemed like I could just slot in a new magic stone, but as far as I knew, this train used a specific dedicated type of stone.
So it wasn’t like any random magic stone would do. I’d need to find one of the exact same kind as the existing ones and replace them with that.
I was sure the staff would know, but the problem was that the staff weren’t here either…….
This was going nowhere.
“What happened? Why did it stop?”
“The mana source—the magic stones—got drained. There’s no way this train is moving in this state.”
That was the problem, plain and simple.
To get this train running again, I’d have to find magic stones of the same kind as the ones already being used.
And there were more than ten attributes, with hundreds of categories divided by size and mana capacity, which meant I’d have to find the exact right specification.
In the middle of a desert, no less.
……Should I just blow that maniac away with the whole mountain?
I was getting a little cranky.
Why was it that every bastard I wanted to stomp had some reason I couldn’t do it? If I didn’t need them for something, I would’ve killed them all by now.
But everyone had at least one reason to stay alive. Take the Demon King, for example.
-Clunk.
“Hey. Is the Turk fellow here?”
“Eh?”
Just as I was trying to swallow my irritation, somebody leaned on a walking stick and climbed aboard the stopped train.
It was the voice I’d heard a moment ago.
“Sian-nim, do you know this beastman?”
Rain tilted his head and pointed at the old man.
-Smack!
“Agh?!“
“What kind of way is that to speak to your elders, you brat! I’ve lived five hundred years longer than you! If your head isn’t even dry yet, you should be asking who he is instead!”
“You didn’t need to hit me for that, did you?!”
“These days the young ones don’t listen, so a beating’s good medicine. Hey, you! Want another taste of the staff?”
The old man struck Rain over the head with the wooden staff he’d been leaning on. I briefly wondered whether “your head isn’t even dry yet” meant the blood now trickling down Rain’s forehead because the old man had just whacked him, but whatever.
In any case, that mysterious old man standing in front of me…….
Could it really be the one I was thinking of?
Grendel Mountains Tomb Keeper — “Mars”
The old man in front of me appeared to be a tiger beastman.
He looked old, but the muscles under his clothes made it seem like he’d been built like a mountain in his youth.
Even now he was at least 190 centimeters tall.
……If he straightened his back, he looked like he’d easily top two meters.
“So, the Turk fellow isn’t here? I told him not to come up for the time being because our kid’s been touchy lately.”
“O-our kid? What are you talking about?”
Rain asked while clutching his throbbing head.
“That huge dragon from earlier, you idiot. He takes after his mother—wild as hell.”
“Then don’t tell me…… you’re……!”
Yes. That was exactly right.
This old man was the man from the maniac’s story—the one who married the White Dragon and fathered that bastard.
He’d been injured, sure, but he was the fighter who’d single-handedly subdued the White Dragon when it attacked the Grendel Mountains.
You could even call him the founder of the Heavenly Demon Divine Art.
As far as the story went, I was pretty sure all of the maniac’s techniques were inherited from his father.
“Shut up! My hearing’s already gone bad, and you’re yelling right into my ear!”
-Smack!
“Aaaagh?!”