Dragon and Dragon
Dragon. Or, in other words, a dragon.
Ordinary people almost certainly believed they were nothing more than legendary beasts of the imagination—creatures that only ever showed up in movies and novels.
Probably more than 99.9 percent of the people in this world thought exactly that.
Even the ones who researched what this world called “science” would naturally have thought the same.
But they exist.
Because that would be me.
“Uuuugh… I hate P.E.”
“You need to move around a little. You study just fine—why are you such a disaster whenever your body has to do anything?”
“But still, but still! I just like using my head by myself better. Moving my body only makes me tired, and I never know when the results will even show up. With thinking, though, the answers usually come right away, you know? And it’s more fun that way too.”
“Well, I guess you can look at it like that. Everyone’s different. Still—are you planning on completely tanking your P.E. performance evaluations?”
“Tsk. Even if you get good grades, Siu, it’s not like you have anywhere to use them. You’re only going to school so you can live next to me like a normal person, right?”
“That’s true enough.”
I suppose someone might wonder why a creature from pure imagination would be living such an ordinary high-school life in human form.
I might be a dragon, but when you really get down to it, the age difference between me and Lee Ha-yan—who was currently grumbling about P.E. class right next to me—wasn’t all that big.
Lee Ha-yan was eighteen, a second-year in high school.
I was not suddenly a hundred and eighteen or anything ridiculous like that.
I was pretty much the same age, okay?
If I counted from the moment I first awakened my memories as year one… my real age might even be a little younger than Ha-yan’s.
We’d simply decided we were the same age because, back when we first met, our outward appearances had matched.
But that wasn’t the important part anyway.
After checking the class schedule stuck to the desk for tomorrow’s lessons, Ha-yan melted into a limp puddle of limbs and nestled herself straight into my arms.
There had been a time, back when she was still growing, when I used to be the one nestled in hers. Those days felt so distant now that I could barely remember them; the difference in our builds had become considerable.
Apparently the same thought had just crossed her mind, because she looked up at me with a sulky pout.
“Tch. You’re a dragon—did you really have to set your height this tall? Make it smaller! My neck hurts!!!”
“Why don’t you just grow a little more? If you’re going to keep clinging to my side, you ought to be a lot taller than average.”
“Grrr!! It’s not like I’m not growing because I don’t want to! And another thing! I’m not the short one! You’re the one who’s huge!! How are you already over 190 centimeters?!”
“Ahhh, is that so? Come on, that’s a little much. Asking someone whose height already shot up to shrink it back down is just cruel, don’t you think? Growing taller is way easier than shrinking, right?”
“Grrr!!!”
Having picked a fight with me only to end up exposing her own sore spot even more, Ha-yan started pounding on my chest with her small hands without mercy.
I instantly cast a spell and canceled out the pain the moment I felt it.
She might look cute, but her hands were surprisingly vicious. That part she had definitely inherited straight from her mother.
I felt nothing, but I still put on a show of suffering and lifted Ha-yan clean into the air.
I could have done it with magic, of course, but who knew what she would have said if I had.
I set her gently down on her own bed. The second she was there, she looked up at me with the purest, most innocent eyes, as if she had never lost her temper at all.
“Uuung… Are you going home to sleep tonight?”
“I have to drop by every once in a while. Mom always says a house without people falls apart faster.”
“Tsk. One spell would fix everything anyway. And… you said you didn’t like going home alone. It’s not like you actually live by yourself.”
She clearly didn’t like the idea of me leaving her behind.
She had shown this side of herself every now and then. Her belated adolescence seemed to be affecting not only her magical talent but her moods as well.
I just smiled softly, stroked her hair, and spoke.
“Don’t be like that. You already know, right? I like staying here better too.”
“…”
“Just put up with it for one day. One day. I’ll come early tomorrow. Okay? The second you open your eyes, I’ll be right in front of you.”
“Uuung…”
“Sleep well, then. See you tomorrow?”
“…Bye.”
We waved to each other, and I vanished from Ha-yan’s room at once.
I closed my eyes for a moment and opened them again to a familiar space.
The moment the building registered that I had entered, mana flooded every room and lit the lights bright. From the room right next door, a cool beauty appeared.
Dressed in a classic maid uniform, the long black-haired cool beauty bowed to me at a perfect ninety degrees and spoke with utmost politeness.
“You could have cooed and cuddled a little longer, you know. Returning this early feels a touch premature, doesn’t it?”
“Don’t say things you don’t mean.”
“Oh my? But I am a heartless homunculus, am I not?”
“Tsk. Nothing special happened, right?”
I had set out to make a maid, but I seemed to have made her personality a little too cool.
Years had already passed, and I still hadn’t gotten used to that ice-cold attitude of hers.
I casually changed my clothes with magic and walked deeper into the room. The maid I had named Rhea fell into step beside me and began her briefing on everything that had happened while I was gone.
“As expected, the search turned up nothing. We’ve scoured the entire planet for ten years without finding a single trace, so it truly seems Master is the only dragon left on Earth.”
“We already figured as much and kept going anyway. Next.”
“Just as you predicted, one of the promising coins crashed straight through the floor. The culprit appears to have fled to Europe. Before the collapse, however, every coin under Master’s name was converted to cash and invested into gold assets. We intend to leave it there for the time being. The sheer volume of money pouring into the gold market caused a few ripples, but that’s hardly our concern.”
“And the mages? Not that there’s anyone worth watching outside of the Antarctica crowd.”
“Everything is quiet. You may consider the situation unchanged from before.”
“I see… So that’s how it is. Business as usual, then—nothing out of the ordinary. The others are handling their work fine?”
“If they were human, who knows. But they are all creations of Master, after all. If a problem arose there, wouldn’t that mean the problem was with Master? Ah! There is one issue, though. The way Master can neither approach nor withdraw from the opposite sex and just keeps stringing things out forever—that particular look is an absolute carbon cop—”
Snap!
I couldn’t listen to another word. I flicked my fingers and sent Rhea straight back to the room she had come from.
“Haa… Yeah. I made her, so I guess I have to deal with her myself.”
Who else could I blame? Without any prior knowledge, I had created my first homunculus on nothing more than the casual thought that having a maid whose personality was the complete opposite of Ha-yan’s would keep life from getting boring.
And when I dug through the various records this world had on dragons, a great many of the details matched what I already felt and knew.
Magical power on a scale no human could ever reach. Born from an egg. An enormous true body that used Polymorph to take on a human appearance.
Maintaining a human form did eat up a fair amount of mana.
But even that was less than a speck of dust compared to the vast ocean of mana I possessed.
Discomfort? I couldn’t say there was none, but—
“Nngh. I need to stretch my wings out a bit. Everything feels too stiff to stand it.”
For me, simply bringing out my wings was enough to shake off a good portion of the fatigue.
I had been in human form from the very first moment my memories existed, after all.
And the famous dragon trait of loving gold? I was one hundred percent on board with that one.
In this world gold was practically the same as money, and between my foresight and my instincts I had already amassed an enormous fortune.
I had told Ha-yan almost everything about myself, but I had never told her the exact scale of my assets.
Just learning that this entire massive building belonged to me had left her staring into space for a whole week.
If I had told her the full capital figure, she probably would have stayed blank-faced for a month instead of a week.
Anyway.
I gave my freed wings a thorough shake and flopped face-first onto my enormous bed.
When I closed my eyes and listened to the outside world, I could hear the other homunculi—everyone except Rhea—bustling about, handling this and that.
A few of their conversations drifted into my ears.
“Haa. I’m on first-floor duty this time. Dealing with humans is such a pain.”
“Why? Just say you’re Master’s personal secretary and they all fall over themselves, don’t they? Plenty of them even ask what kind of person Master is.”
“I don’t know. Humans just… feel off to me. We don’t lie; we show everything as it is. Humans pack so many lies into their words.”
“Still, learn as much as you can. It can’t hurt. And watch what you say. Master’s most precious living being is one of those humans, you know?”
“Th-that much I know.”
Their footsteps faded again.
If I felt like it, I could have listened in even if those kids were on the opposite side of the planet, but I had no intention of doing so, and it wouldn’t have benefited me anyway.
I shifted from my face-down sprawl and sat up on the bed. A single photograph came into view.
Middle-school me, looking rather sour, and Ha-yan smiling just as brightly as she did now.
I offered a good-night greeting to the Ha-yan inside the photo and let sleep take me.
“Good night, Ha-yan.”
The moment I closed my eyes and opened them again, it was the next day.
I stood in front of a soundly sleeping Ha-yan.
In a soft voice I whispered to her once more.
“And good morning, Ha-yan. You said it yourself, right? Promises are meant to be kept.”