Chapter 25
Plop.
A gaunt hand dipped into the shallow riverbank and closed around something.
A pretty little stone, glittering in the light.
Goreuk.
He held it up to the sky, looked it over from every angle, and tucked it into the leather pouch at his side.
Gobra win.
With this stone, he could beat Gabda from the neighboring tribe.
He would take back the stone of Gobra’s that had been stolen from him.
The young Gobra imagined that moment and happily splashed around in the water.
“We move. Deeper into the forest.”
But Gobra’s dream never came true.
Before the sun went down, when he returned to the tribe, the adults were rushing about in a panic.
“Where go?”
“Kundura. Humans came. Everyone died or was dragged away. We must flee.”
Gobra’s mother grabbed his small hand and led him along while carrying his baby sibling, who had not yet been weaned.
Kundura was a neighboring tribe. Humans had invaded there.
Then what about Gobra’s friend Gabda? Was he dead?
His father, a warrior, cleared a path ahead.
Gobra followed after him, holding onto his mother’s hand.
The other goblins were the same. All of them moved forward with frightened faces.
Gobra walked on in a daze.
He walked and walked, not even noticing when the leather pouch at his waist fell away.
After the tribe’s mass migration, one cold season after another passed.
The boy Gobra grew into a proper adult and became a warrior like his father.
“Gobra. Why use sword? Spear better. For hunting.”
“Spear breaks. Easy. Sword doesn’t break.”
Gobra answered his fellow warrior as he swung a crude, old sword.
During the last cold season, while hunting, he had happened upon the corpse of a dead human.
This sword had been taken from that corpse.
Compared with the wooden spear lashed together with bits of stone in his fellow warrior’s hand, this iron sword was better.
Even if he didn’t know how to use it, he just swung it. Gobra liked that.
More cold seasons passed.
“Gobra. Not mate?”
“No.”
He answered his younger sibling, who had become an adult before him, while swinging his sword.
“Many females. Want Gobra. Baby cute.”
“Not interested.”
His sibling had already found a mate and had a baby.
He smiled happily while nursing the baby in his arms.
Gobra was content so long as he could see that smile.
His old father and mother always complained, but Gobra still had no intention of taking a mate.
“G-Gobra! Big trouble! More humans!”
One day, a fellow warrior who had gone out to scout returned with blood streaming from his head.
All the scouts who had gone with him were dead.
The humans who had been appearing more and more often had finally caused an incident.
“We have to move. Deeper in.”
“We can’t. Beyond this lies the land of dragons. We’ll die.”
Among the warriors, Gobra was the strongest, and his word carried weight.
He tried to persuade the chief and the elders, but they only lowered their heads in silence.
Old cowards.
“Move first. Gobra will go. Gobra talks to dragon.”
“No! You’ll die!”
“If stay here, die too!”
Gobra shouted.
Goblins were weak. Small and not strong.
That was why they had to be cunning. Cruel. Intelligent. Only then could they survive.
But unlike the other tribes, Gobra’s tribe couldn’t do that. They ran every time.
The treacherous humans toyed with goblins.
Like strong humans taking weak humans and teaching them something, they killed goblins for sport.
It was much like when Gobra had learned hunting from his father.
How many tribes had vanished like that? How many times had he been forced to hide and watch?
Gobra wanted to kill the humans right then and there.
But he held back. There was too much to protect.
His old father and mother. His sibling and their family. Beyond that, the tribe itself.
That was why Gobra had become a warrior in the first place.
Goreuk.
In the season when white snow fell from a gray sky, while fighting dangerous monsters and sometimes evading them, Gobra finally reached the dragon’s cave after many days had passed.
“Not here?”
But the dragon had already left its nest.
Old traces remained, showing that many years had passed since it had gone.
He didn’t know why, but Gobra was relieved all the same.
He just had to go back to the tribe, lead everyone here, and settle them in this place.
“Wait. We live.”
And they would keep living after that too.
Gobra moved his battered, exhausted body.
The journey back to the tribe felt incredibly light.
But then.
······.
What was the sight before him?
All the crude houses had burned to the ground and turned to black ash.
Along with several human corpses.
Scattered everywhere, goblins lay on the ground, frozen cold and unmoving, their blood already gone dark.
Under the soft fall of white snow, not a single one of them was still breathing.
“No. No, no.”
Gobra ran.
He bit his lip as he sprinted toward his own home.
“Ah.”
Half burned and collapsed.
The moment he stepped through the entrance, he dropped to his knees and opened his mouth.
His old father was dead, his throat cut away, still clutching a crude spear.
Beside him, his sibling’s mate lay dead, limbs severed and twisted, curled up like a ball.
His old mother had died with many arrows lodged in her back.
His mother, cradling his sibling as if to shield them, had died with her tongue hanging out and her intestines spilling free.
Inside the belly that had been torn open by force, his sibling’s baby had been strangled to death by its own entrails.
He crawled forward, inspecting each body one by one, and lifted both hands in a daze.
His wounded hands, smeared with blood and flesh, trembled uncontrollably.
“Gobra definitely said. Move. Talk to dragon. Ask permission.”
So why.
“Didn’t move?”
Why in the world.
“Why. Why. Why! Whyyyyy―!!”
Was this a dream? If so, it was a nightmare.
It was so awful that when he woke up, he would surely smell that foul odor of soiling himself and feel the wetness down below.
For a grown adult, that would be a truly shameful thing.
So.
He wished it had been shame instead.
If all of this could be a dream, then he would endure any humiliation at all.
“Please. Give them back. Please...”
For the first time since he had been bitten by a beast as a child, tears came to his eyes.
They flowed and kept flowing until his vision blurred white.
Step-
Goreuk...!
Gobra, who had been stifling his sobs, jerked his head up.
A tiny sound, echoing in the white silence.
Someone. Someone was alive?
Gobra sprang to his feet and rushed out of the collapsed house.
And there he saw her.
A woman with hair as white as the world around her.
“Hum...an?”
It was a human in ragged clothes.
A human standing there with her eyes closed.
Just a human.
At least that was how she looked to Gobra’s yellow eyes.
Human. Human. Human. Human.
“Huuuuuuman―!!”
He screamed until his teeth ground together.
A fierce fury unlike anything he had ever felt in his life numbed his reason.
Clang-
He drew the sword at his waist.
Rusty and chipped, long since useless as a weapon, it was still a sword.
It was the only power Gobra had.
Thud!
He sprinted across the frozen ground and drove the sword into the human’s abdomen.
With the sound of flesh giving way, the human toppled backward.
“Die! Die! Die! Human!”
He yanked the sword free and mounted the fallen human, stabbing down on her without mercy.
Thud. Thud. Thud-
Red blood splattered everywhere, staining the white ground sticky and dark.
“Hah. Hah.”
After he had driven all his strength into that final blow, he panted for breath.
Human blood and flesh, mixed with his own sweat hot from exertion, rose in a thin haze of steam.
“Kihit.”
Gobra’s yellow eyes flew wide open.
He heard a sound he should never have heard.
“Heheheh. Hey, youuu. That’s kinda niceee, huh?”
The human with the sword lodged in her forehead was laughing as she spoke.
Her face, where bone and skin had been mashed together like mud, made a grotesque sound as she moved.
Goreuk?!
Gobra instinctively backed away, then looked up at the human as she slowly pushed herself to her feet.
She pulled the sword from her forehead and handed it back to Gobra as if nothing had happened.
By then, every wound on the human’s body had already begun to vanish.
“Here. Yours.”
·····.
Gobra was confused.
He had clearly thought she was a human.
But no human in the world laughed after getting a sword driven into their face like that.
Not even any living creature could do that.
So then that thing was...
“Not human.”
“Nope.”
Goreuk?
“Nope. Nope nope nope. I’m... I am human. Fuck. Am I? Not anymore?”
·····.
Suddenly, that not-human thing began twisting violently, as if seized by a fit.
It tossed aside Gobra’s sword, laughed and cried at the same time, and shoved its fingers into its ears.
It shouted like a mad thing, then in the next instant went docile and quiet.
It kept repeating that cycle over and over.
“Right. Not human. You’re not dying, are you? Your mind’s perfectly fine. This sucks. So I split it, but? Ah, that didn’t work either. Fuck. Dammit. What a useless piece of Jusu.”
Fear of the unknown surged through Gobra.
That thing was not human.
Keeping his eyes locked on it, he carefully moved and picked up the sword that had been thrown onto the ground.
“Huh? You okay?”
The snow-white head tilted to one side as it noticed him moving.
Gobra clenched his teeth and gripped the sword hilt harder.
He had to take revenge on the humans.
At the very least, he had to die fighting them.
He couldn’t waste his life here, thrown away meaninglessly to that white thing.
“Heh, hehehe. Hey, you still think you can kill me?”
Of course.
“Even now?”
With a strange gurgling sound, its right arm swelled.
It grew larger and larger until it changed shape entirely.
It was the head of a dragon.
The one Gobra had gone searching for...
Goreuk.
His hand around the sword trembled.
Even so, he kept staring the other thing down.
If he didn’t kill it, he would die.
No matter how strong or frightening it was, he would kill it. That was how he would live.
“Oh? Really?”
The moment he steeled himself, the snow-white thing sniffed the air and gasped, mouth falling open.
It was still an incomprehensible, bizarre life form.
“Wow!”
The dragon’s head melted away in an instant and disappeared.
The snow-white thing returned to its human shape and strode toward him.
Gobra, startled, plunged his sword forward with both hands.
Thud. It lodged in, and the rusty blade punched out through his back.
Even so, the snow-white thing only smiled and grabbed Gobra by both shoulders.
“Found you! I found you! Someone who doesn’t think I can’t be killed! The possibility of someone who can kill me!”
Blood ran from its closed eyes and dripped onto Gobra’s cheeks.
Was it... rejoicing?
“Hey, wanna be my familiar?”
Goreuk?
It sniffed at him again while speaking incomprehensible words.
“You hate humans, huh? Want to kill them? Want to get stronger?”
His body twitched.
Gobra swallowed hard, as if his thoughts had been read.
Then the snow-white thing smiled brilliantly, utterly innocent.
“I’ll help you.”
“If you become my familiar, you won’t die unless I do.”
“You can keep growing stronger by throwing your life away. You can kill all the humans.”
“Ah, you’re a goblin, right? That’s way too weak. This might be hard? Maybe? No, wait. Right, there was that thing?”
It spilled out a stream of words to itself, then suddenly shoved a hand into its own chest.
Out it pulled a beating heart. Gradually, it began to glow with a brilliant blue light.
Just looking at it made an unfathomable power press against him.
The snow-white thing held it out to Gobra and spoke.
In a very desperate voice. As though pleading.
“I’ll give you one of the selves I split off from. It’s Cool-headed. Eat this and become my familiar.”
So then.
“Become the sword that kills me someday.”
- Before becoming a familiar. In the cold season when loss was realized. Receiving a blue heart -
Crack!!
“Aaah?!“
Delta, stripped of Cynthia’s form, was flung back with a shriek of nonsense.
Something ink-black shot through the roof of the house and blasted up into the night sky.
“Gobra... uncle?”
Lee Seo-ah called out blankly to Gobra.
Through hair whipping in the wind from every direction, she could see Gobra holding a white greatsword bigger than himself.
Kiiiiriiriririrk-
Then metallic particles surged up from the belt around his waist and began to wrap around his body without leaving a gap.
Armor gleaming with a silver sheen.
A red cape fluttering behind him.
On the helmet he wore, a single red line swayed like a lock of hair.
To Lee Seo-ah, he looked just like...
Mobile Suit - Knight
Like a stern knight out of a fairy tale.
“Lee Seo-ah.”
A familiar voice came from inside the helmet.
A hand covered in cold metal lightly tapped Lee Seo-ah’s head.
“Don’t worry.”
Warmth like a wind over the open plain settled over her as he turned.
He rested the greatsword on his shoulder and looked beyond the roof hole overhead.
A nameless black shroud was steadily beginning to block out the moonlight.
“With no master now, Gobra will protect you.”
This time, absolutely. No matter what.
When the words he had not spoken drifted emptily through the air, the pitch-black water swallowed the house where they stood whole.