Dragons and New Facts
You could call it a sudden, unexpected encounter. Or maybe it was only unexpected to me — and everyone else had known all along.
With every step forward, my pride as a dragon felt like it was getting scraped raw, but there was nothing I could do about it.
I had learned that other mages, beyond Ha-yan and her mother, were active all across South Korea… and yet, after listening to the two of them talk, one thing was clear: the younger generation of mages had long since vanished from the country.
If those two had ever taken on successors and passed their magic down—
"DIIIIIE!!!"
"Ubbubububub!!! Ubbubub~!!!"
—then the Do Ji-yeon over there would already know how to cast spells the way Ha-yan and I did.
The image of Do Ji-yeon somehow ending up in my lair with Ha-yan and casually throwing magic around…
Whoa. Insane. Absolute worst-case scenario? That girl was already a force of nature. If she could use magic too? Choi Hoon's life would be in genuine danger — more than mine, honestly.
After finishing our conversation with the two of them, we were treated to a full traditional Korean banquet on the vast wooden floor of the hanok, complete with Korean beef bulgogi, and with stomachs fit to burst we made our way to the villa where we would be staying for the next few days.
About twenty minutes by car, then another ten minutes of walking uphill, and we stepped into a conifer forest thick with the scent of phytoncides — the kind of place you only expected to find in a nature preserve. Between the gently sloping clearings, a fairly large hanok building came into view.
We dumped our bags in a hurry, headed straight back outside, and under Do Ji-yeon's guidance threw ourselves into the private valley stream right in front of the building, diving into a stretch of pure fun.
Choi Hoon, hauled in by the scruff of his neck, was already swallowing stream water like it was coming out of a faucet. The trio, everyone but Ha-yan and me, flinched at the cold and still slowly edged their way in, starting to splash around.
"Ahhhh~~!! It's so cold…"
"I-I feel like my feet are going to crack. It's freezing."
"Korean valley water seems so much colder, doesn't it? There was a little stream near our house, but water this cold in summer…"
So the trio hadn't spent their whole lives locked away in the mage world — they had played in stream-like places before. Still, Korean mountain water ran on a completely different level of cold.
I hadn't been to many foreign ones myself, but from photos alone you could barely tell whether those overseas "valleys" were actual mountain gorges or just fancy creeks.
Toward the trio as they finally started wading in—
"Uyaaaah!!! Get in already!! You've all got spare clothes, so what are you standing around for!!!"
"Kyaaak!! U-Unnieee!! It's cold!!"
"Uhihik!!! Ihik!! Ihyaaak!!!"
The water Do Ji-yeon started flinging at Lily and Silvi naturally started hitting Ha-yan and me as well.
She was having a little too much fun, though, and for a second she completely lost control of where the spray was going. The last arc of water she threw drew a perfect curve through the air—
Shwaaaash!!!
Drip. Drip. Drip…
"Oof… Um… A-Are you okay? Ha-yan, your clothes… you're still in that dress…"
"…"
One of Ha-yan's favorite pieces — an expensive dress — was completely soaked through.
She had been about to stand up and go change, and that was the exact moment Do Ji-yeon let fly. Ha-yan had already been in up to her calves; in an instant the rest of her was drenched from head to toe.
Do Ji-yeon had started out just scooping water with her hands, then gotten even more carried away and grabbed some nearby tool to fling even bigger sheets of it. I was standing next to Ha-yan and still got half-soaked myself, so you can imagine the volume involved.
Anyway.
Standing beside her, I could feel Ha-yan's rage gauge climbing in real time. Mana was concentrating toward her head — I could sense it. She wasn't going to cast anything, but that much mana gathering was one of the clearest signs she was seriously pissed.
Without a word, without even wiping the water still dripping off her, she walked over to her bag at the water's edge, quietly found a hair tie inside, and pulled her long black hair back into a tight ponytail.
While she did that, I — and the trio, and Choi Hoon who was already half-dead from Ji-yeon, and finally Do Ji-yeon herself, the architect of this entire disaster — couldn't say a single word or move a muscle.
The moment Ha-yan finished tying her hair and turned around—
"S-Somebody save meeeee!!!!"
—Do Ji-yeon bolted upstream without so much as a glance back.
And I saw it with my own eyes: Ha-yan casting an acceleration spell on her feet and taking off after her.
I quietly fished Choi Hoon's corpse-like body out of the water where it was floating face-up and offered a silent prayer for Do Ji-yeon's well-being.
"Is she dead?"
"Don't even joke like that. I let her live."
"Is that what you call 'just' alive? Go a little easier next time. The kids got so scared they ran themselves past the point of exhaustion and all passed out."
"Don't pin this on Do Ji-yeon. Who went and made someone that mad? And the kids didn't pass out because of me — they wore themselves out playing and went in for a nap."
"That too. Choi Hoon was already half-dead because of Ji-yeon anyway… So, dinner's on them?"
"Yeah. They said if we want barbecue, there's plenty of meat in the restaurant-grade fridge, so help ourselves. That was Ji-yeon's last message to me before she died."
"You just said 'before she died' about Do Ji-yeon too."
"…"
The trio were "tired" and taking a nap. Choi Hoon had been worked over by Do Ji-yeon until he "passed out." Do Ji-yeon herself had been scolded by Ha-yan until her mind went blank and she was basically "unconscious."
While everyone else was out cold for their own reasons, I alone still had my wits about me — sitting on the living room sofa of the hanok, holding Ha-yan tightly against me, staring without much interest at whatever was playing on the TV.
It had only been a few hours, but my mind kept circling back to the two people we had met that morning.
If I can just put my finger on it a little more… maybe the other mages in South Korea, too…?
We had come to Gangwon-do to rest in the first place, but with things turning out like this, my head had gotten a little complicated.
It was the feeling of something just on the tip of my tongue — almost there, almost not.
Then I took a second to actually look at the situation we were in right now.
"This isn't really any different from being at home, is it?"
"What do you mean it isn't? At home I've got Rhea and Mom watching, so I can't even do—"
Smack. Smack!
"—this."
"…That, I will concede."
Ha-yan's anger seemed fully gone. She smiled brightly and gave both my cheeks a light peck, then beamed at me again.
For me, this was nothing but a fantastic situation.
I pulled my eyes off the white-noise TV and looked to the side. One entire wall was floor-to-ceiling glass. With a small bit of magic I nudged the sofa around to face outside, and there it was: a sky just starting to take on the colors of sunset, a dense wall of forest, and the feel of the wind slipping in through the trees. Small woodland animals and birds darted through the undergrowth at the edges of the view.
Is this not also good? The thought landed with absolute certainty. It was a perfect landscape.
Holding little Ha-yan quietly in my arms and enjoying the stillness, I started getting signals from my stomach. I hadn't been thrashing around as hard as the kids currently knocked out in their rooms, but I had jumped into the stream with them and splashed around for a good while, so hunger was arriving right on schedule.
Ha-yan, nestled against me, must have felt the rumble in my gut. She lifted her head, stared at me, and said,
"Hungry? Right — you were playing in the water with us from the middle on, too."
"I put in a solid amount of effort myself, you know? Plus… mm. Never mind. Anyway, I'm hungry."
"???"
For a second my mind wandered and I nearly blurted out something like, Maybe I'm hungrier because I spent time in that magic space with Grandfather and Grandmother? — and barely managed to swallow it. Dodging that and keeping it from Ha-yan was a genuine relief.
I spun the topic fast.
"We're staying about three nights and four days, right? Shouldn't the first night be a barbecue party?"
"Hehehe. Of course! With that much meat just sitting there, what else would we eat?"
Ha-yan shot up at my words and tore through every room in the building, waking the others. I watched her bounce from door to door for a moment, then headed for the kitchen.
And then, in the small hours of that night—
I finally couldn't take it anymore. I shouted Eureka under my breath and cast teleport.
Whoosh.
"Ah. Again. Why. Why on earth are you here. I told you not to come to the office when there's no work!!"
I cleanly ignored Rhea's wail — she had a chair set up at the entrance to my lair and a sheet mask plastered over her face — and walked straight inside. Even under the pack, her irritated expression was unmistakable, but I brushed past it and kept going.
A lot of the Homunculi looked startled by a sudden pre-dawn visit in the middle of a vacation, but I had something urgent to deal with first.
Even as I had drifted off to sleep next to Ha-yan without any trouble, something had still been itching in my chest — a knot that wouldn't quite dissolve. Like if I just adjusted one little thing, I would be able to read everything I had sensed from those two earlier.
And as a little extra seasoning on top of that: There's magic I don't know about? Me? A dragon? A nice little inferiority complex for flavor.
"Is Young Lady Ha-yan asleep? You told us not to bother you for these three nights and four days while you were off playing in Gangwon-do, did you not? Thanks to that I was enjoying a perfectly pleasant stretch of no company work, so why show up out of nowhere just to make my life difficult? Did watching me rest offend you that badly?"
"Ugh, stop. It's not like that. And you're the one who always shows up when I'm trying to rest and dumps company work on me — reverse the positions and it feels a little different, doesn't it?"
"Tch."
Rhea trailed after me, peeling off the sheet mask and straightening her clothes, still muttering complaints the whole way. I didn't have the bandwidth to care.
After demolishing a massive barbecue dinner, the fatigue from all that stream-splashing still hadn't been burned off by the afternoon nap, so we had decided to turn in early. I had settled into the room Do Ji-yeon had set aside for Ha-yan and me, held her close, and started sorting through the day — and that was when the solution to the tightness in my chest had finally clicked into place.
Looking at a situation like this, I really was a dragon who was good at magic, after all.
Those two had probably assumed I would never figure it out. That would have been true for an ordinary human.
But someone who could look at a flow of mana and immediately know how it moved and which spells were being used? It took me a little time, sure — but in the end I had pieced it together without even meaning to.
Without a word to Rhea, who was still padding along behind me, I went straight to the control computer for the mana-detection array at the center of the lair and started rewriting the software as fast as I could. Sensing that something serious was going on, Rhea fell quiet and simply watched.
About an hour later, when every change was finished, I took one long breath and restarted the controller.
Then—
Woooooooom~~~~!!!
With a deep, massive hum, the enormous roughly hundred-inch display in front of the computer — a world map that until now had only ever sparkled outside the Korean peninsula — began to light up.
Tick.
One.
Tick.
Two.
Tiktiktiktiktik!!!
Not at the density of other countries, no — but the points were unmistakably there.
Rhea's eyes went huge.
"W-What is this? Th-There were mages in our country too? For real? This many?"
When I zoomed in on the glittering points across the peninsula, a lot of them clustered around mountain valleys. One of those points sat near where Ha-yan was sleeping soundly right now — probably the traces of those two.
I dragged a chair over, dropped into it with a limp kind of exhaustion, and muttered to myself, staring blankly at the screen.
"So much for being a dragon… figuring this out only now…"
Today, of all days, dragon or not, my magical pride had spent the entire day getting thoroughly crumpled.