Did You Take Us for Saints?
Like a statue given leave to move, the Twisted Beast Rieksar—a lion wrought entirely of snow-white stone—broke into a charge.
Boom. Boom. Boom.
Each time those massive feet struck the earth, the ground shuddered under the beast's enormous weight. The man in the black suit answered at once. Four disks of flame formed in a blink and screamed toward Rieksar.
SKREEEEE—!
The disks raked across Rieksar like spinning sawblades, chewing through the rock-hard hide until black blood sprayed from the wounds. Rieksar, though, was no easy prey. As if the old claim—that its flesh rivaled a dragon's for sheer toughness—were no exaggeration at all, it weathered the assault and kept coming, then slammed a forepaw into the man in black.
The blow launched him like a cannon shell. He smashed through four walls before burying himself in the ground. An ordinary person would have been reduced to powdered bone, organs forced out through the mouth. The man in the black suit merely rose with a few scratches.
Being driven into the dirt, however, had clearly wounded something more fragile than his body. The blank expression he had worn until now twisted with hate.
"You dare—a cheap imitation of a beast—strike me!"
This time dozens of flame disks fused into one—a colossal wheel whose height rivaled the buildings around it. For all its size, the disk did not slow. If anything it spun faster, and the air itself shrieked as it was torn apart.
A direct hit would not leave Rieksar intact. Pale knew it. There was only one person he could call on.
"Capra!"
"For crying out loud, I know!"
Muttering that the man worked people far too hard, Capra threw himself in. He vaulted onto Rieksar's back and joined the fight, bringing the magic-nullifying sword up to guard the beast's front.
The enormous disk of flame met the blade. The disk's magic was so immense that the sword could not snuff it out at once. Between steel and fire, power crashed against power, and sparks burst in every direction. Capra was left in the heat. Flames licked his hands and face; living flesh seared, and the smell of cooking meat rose around him.
Set beside the dragon's breath that had nearly roasted him crisp the last time, the present crisis was a scratch.
"Hraaaaaah!!!"
He drove his strength into the hand on the hilt and at last split the giant disk clean in two. It shattered and scattered like a mirage. As if answering him, Rieksar charged the man in black again, leapt, and came down with both forepaws, crushing him into the earth.
BOOM!
The beast's weight, piled atop gravity itself, rang out like a bomb. Anyone watching would have sworn the man had been flattened into a strip of dried fish. Then the impossible happened. The forepaw pinning him began, slowly, to rise.
What lifted it were two enormous limbs sheathed in black scales. Each foot bore four toes tipped with hook-like claws, and they did not yield an inch to Rieksar's bulk or monstrous strength. They hurled the beast far across the ground instead.
What stepped out of the dust was the man in the black suit—both arms transformed into the forelimbs of a great dragon.
"So. You were the dragon we met before."
Seeing the man's nature laid bare, Pale spoke as if he had expected nothing else. Rekdos, startled, answered.
"A dragon? You're saying that thing is a dragon?"
"As you can see. A dragon took human shape and slipped in among us."
"Dragons can turn into people?"
"Becoming human in any biological sense is impossible. Changing one's appearance, though—that they can do as they please. Dragons are masters of magic."
A human mage could manage a change of outward looks well enough. But the greater the transformation, the more immense the mana and the more sophisticated the spell-formula required. Shrinking a dragon's vast body down to human size was something only a dragon could do.
"But why come here looking like a human?"
"Because even a dragon isn't invincible. However powerful, one dragon cannot beat an army alone. So he disguised himself."
"No. I mean, why would a dragon hide in a worthless little place like the Larks District?"
"Didn't he state his purpose himself, from the start?"
"Don't tell me... he's after Irok Dehaja's magic?"
Even so, the thought that a dragon had come in person left Rekdos unable to hide his shock.
"That's why I said it from the beginning. A power too great for the Rox to hold."
"..."
Meanwhile, the mere fact that the dragon had shown a fraction of his true form sent the battle lurching the other way. With nothing but the strength of his two arms, he nullified Rieksar's enormous frame and monstrous power. Dragon claws split the beast open in ragged lines until it was a mass of wounds, and the moment it began to lose in close combat—its own specialty—Rieksar was helpless.
Capra, still on its back, tried to do something, anything. Against those two draconic arms he was no help at all. Against anything that was not magic, his sword was useless. It bounced off the hard scales and failed even to leave a scratch.
"Tch... I still need more time."
For a moment, as the fight turned sharply against them, impatience showed on Pale's face. Then the composure returned. He stepped onto the field himself and called out, voice ringing.
"King of the Twisted Beasts, apex of all living things—dragon! I, Pale Dragonheart, demand your name!"
"A mere human, and you dare wish to know my name?"
"If something is going to kill me, I should at least know its name. Otherwise what would I have to say for myself in the next world?"
Amused by the boldness, the dragon smiled.
At the name Nexark, Pale understood. This was a dragon out of the history books. A thousand years ago Nexark had appeared in the capital of the Kingdom of Gobneu, raised a colossal volcano in the heart of the city, and destroyed it—earning the name Volcano Dragon, a monster of the worst kind. The nations of humanity had formed a coalition to hunt him down. The allied armies were swallowed by volcanic ash and died, and in the end Nexark had simply flown away and vanished.
A dragon of such power, known only from the histories, stood before them now.
"Then, Nexark! Why would great dragons covet the magic of a mere human—Irok Dehaja?"
"Because Irok Dehaja's magic ought, by rights, to belong to dragonkind."
"Why would a dragon claim ownership of a human's magic?"
"Because we dragons had a hand in completing it."
"What?"
The words hit Pale like a bomb going off. His ears rang.
"H-how? Dragons were involved in completing Irok Dehaja's magic?"
"Hah. From the look of you, you know nothing at all about Irok Dehaja. Well—he became something that can hardly be called human, so perhaps that is only natural."
Capra—Irok Dehaja himself—had been listening in on the exchange, and his face said he had no idea what any of this meant.
What is he even talking about...
In all his life he had never so much as seen a lizard, let alone a dragon. What was this nonsense about some dragon finishing his magic for him?
No matter how I turn it over, there really must be an evil twin of mine somewhere in this world.
He reached that conclusion with a hollow smile.
"The wisdom of us dragons went into the completion of Irok Dehaja's magic. Now that he is dead, that magic rightly belongs to us."
"Even if that were true, by human law the copyright of a spell belongs to the one who first completed it and put it to use. That person is Irok Dehaja, and he was human. The magic is therefore ours."
"Ha! You truly speak in total ignorance. How can you claim ownership of his magic when you know nothing about him?"
"And you, Nexark—you're saying you know him well?"
"Of course. I also know that your humankind owes him a debt."
"A debt?"
When Pale faltered again, Nexark sneered.
"Your kind owes him your very lives, and far from thanking him, you do not even know the fact. Ignorance, taken this far, is a sin."
"...It seems I'll have to make you spill everything you know."
"You've lost your mind."
"No. I've already bought enough time. Learn this, Nexark—talking too much is a sin of its own."
"What—"
In that instant a hideous pain seized Nexark's chest, and blood began to run from his mouth.
"This is—!"
"Armedium metal. To us humans it's a heavy-metal poisoning at worst. To you dragons, it is a poison that interferes with the nuclear fusion in the heart."
Armedium metal was a toxin that worked on dragons alone. No one fully understood the principle, but it meddled with the fusion reaction that powered their hearts and fatally degraded its efficiency. Poisoning a dragon with the alloy, however, was possible only in theory—the sort of thing one managed in a dream.
The problem was size. The larger the body, the greater the dose a poison required before it could take hold. A creature on a dragon's scale would need prolonged exposure to a high concentration of Armedium powder, and no dragon was going to stand there and watch that happen. The metal had therefore been judged useless in any real fight and was rarely used.
But if a dragon went out of its way to shrink itself down to something like human size, the story changed. Less mass meant weaker resistance, and the time required for the toxin to spread through the body shortened drastically. Suddenly it had battlefield value.
"When...? I kept my body warded with magic the entire time."
Nexark sounded as if he could not believe it. He had known perfectly well how dangerous Armedium was while he wore a human form, and he had kept a magical barrier around himself at all times. Then he remembered the single moment that protection had dropped.
"Don't tell me—!"
"Yes. When we threw you that fake iron ball, we packed Armedium powder inside it. You let your guard down for that one instant. This is the result."
"You—!!!"
"Tell me everything you know about Irok Dehaja, Nexark!"
Nexark roared, choked with rage. Pale, refusing to be outdone, shouted back with his resolve set hard.