A Dragon Is Surprisingly Cunning
Nexark's condition, poisoned by Armedium metal, was worse than it had first appeared.
He could not even maintain the single dragon arm he had only partially manifested, and it had reverted to a human limb. His face was bloodless, and his breath came in ragged pulls.
Pale did not miss the opening. He drove in. The dragon had crushed the right half of his summon Riekzar's face and torn the flank open until the guts spilled, and still Pale ordered the beast into one last charge. Marble-white and soaked black with blood, the colossal lion-shaped Twisted Beast launched that final rush at its master's command, and Nexark moved to meet it.
The poison denied him the monstrous strength that poured from a dragon's heart, but vast mana and magic still remained.
"I don't care for petty tricks, but..."
Riekzar's flesh was absurdly hard, a poor match for the fire magic Nexark favored. What made a dragon truly frightening, though, was not power alone. It was cunning—an intellect beyond the human, turned to magic of exquisite cruelty.
For an instant flame flared. The magical fire spread in a blink to a hundred meters around Nexark, then vanished between one eyeblink and the next. It washed over Riekzar and Capra as they charged, but it was only hot for a moment and left no mark, and Capra tilted her head, puzzled.
Then dizziness took her, and she staggered. Her breath caught. The harder she tried to draw air, the tighter her chest seized. Riekzar was no different. The beast that had been coming on like a breaking wave folded to the ground, and the earth cratered beneath it.
What Nexark had done was brutally simple. With one spell he had burned every trace of oxygen out of the surrounding air. Without oxygen a living thing cannot breathe, and that is deadlier than any poison. A dragon, however, carries an infinite source of energy in its heart and can endure a long while with no air at all. Armedium had sharply cut the heart's supply, but a human-sized body was not a dragon's bulk. Even the diminished output was no great trouble.
"First—the most troublesome of you is you."
Nexark decided to finish Capra where she lay gasping on the ground. The sword she carried nullified magic. He could not grasp what it was, and it was exceedingly dangerous. Without her, a Twisted Beast of Riekzar's level could have been dealt with by magic alone. In the end, her blade was the reason the dragon had been driven into a corner.
Even with no oxygen left, Nexark calmly raised a flame on his palm. Magic could do it because what magic made was not the same as the real. That difference was ordinarily named as magic's limit. Dragons, standing at magic's peak, turned the flaw inside out and brought forth what the world did not contain. No other being could imitate the act lightly. The wider magic's departure from reality, the more unstable the result, and the more mana it demanded—along with an exacting formula to bind it. It was a wonder no one but a dragon could copy: vast mana, and an intellect past humankind.
Against the counterattack, Pale drew his second stratagem.
"Rekdos! Now!"
While Pale and Capra had been buying time, the mage militia of the Larks Free Cooperative—broken apart by Nexark—had reformed and come on. The dragon had hurt the cooperative's soldiers badly. The mages they had barely scraped together numbered twenty at the outside. Even so, a formed line firing together was considerable firepower.
Iron-flame magic unfolded from the tips of their Magic Armament swords, and a volley of grenades poured toward Nexark. Boom. Boom. Boom.
"Don't be a nuisance. I'll kill the rest of you in a moment."
Nexark flicked a hand as if bored. That alone raised a wall of flame. The grenades cooked off in its heat and burst in empty air. But in the brief instant his attention slipped, something plunged out of the sky and fell upon him.
It had the shape of an enormous crow. Unlike any ordinary crow, it bore six wings and six eyes, and it was the size of a light aircraft.
It, too, was a Twisted Beast Pale had summoned, kin in that to Riekzar. Its name was Isavenger—a hidden card he had called before he ever met Nexark, and concealed overhead. Its talons raked a deep wound across the dragon's chest. Nexark twisted aside on instinct and avoided a killing blow, but the bleeding was severe, and the ground where he stood ran red. Even as it cut him, Isavenger snatched up Capra—unconscious from want of air—in its claws, climbed again, and returned to its master.
"Ready to surrender, Nexark? Surrender quietly, and I'll guarantee your life. I can't promise you human rights. You aren't human."
Pale smiled, easy and unhurried, at the wounded dragon. This was how Pale Dragonheart fought. From the opening move he set down the stones of victory one by one. By the time the battle began, the advantage had already leaned his way. It was an old art, the kind hidebound mages of an earlier age had favored, and one seldom found among modern mages who worshipped only firepower and ruin.
Nexark's body locked rigid again.
"Poison. Again..."
"There's hardly a Twisted Beast without venom. Isavenger's talons are coated in something quite lethal."
Twisted Beasts were so uniformly poisonous that almost none of them could be eaten. Even the breath they exhaled was endlessly harmful to humans. That was what they were.
"Pale Dragonheart, was it? I'll remember your name."
"Hardly any need. You'll be seeing plenty of me."
"That I—that I should have to borrow the strength of mere humans! I will not forget this humiliation!"
"Human strength?"
The words had barely left him when shells came screaming in from far off.
"Enemy attack! Raise the defensive magic!"
At Rekdos's order the cooperative's mages threw a barrier into the air to stop the shells, and explosions bloomed overhead. They could not catch every round. Several struck, burst, broke the formation, and threw up a wall of dust. In that brief gap Nexark hid himself and was gone.
"To think a dragon that proud would cooperate with humans."
Pale frowned as he understood the possibility he had missed. It had never occurred to him that an arrogant dragon would work with inferior humans. On the day he had first encountered the beast, unidentified mages had already been fighting the Larks Free Cooperative. His preconception of the dragon's boundless pride had made him call it coincidence. In truth, the dragon and the ones who had attacked the factory were on the same side. Looked at closely, it had been too precise to be chance, and it was not a thing he should have let pass.
"I'm still short on experience..."
The smile he gave was bitter with regret. Bringing down a fully grown ancient dragon of Nexark's caliber was extraordinarily hard to begin with. The beast had taken human form and been poisoned besides, barely able to use the power of its true body. To miss so perfect a chance—there was no telling what calamity it might become later. Regret, however, could not undo what was done. Pale began to seek his next move.
They had won, in that Nexark had been driven off, and still the mood around Rekdos and the Larks Free Cooperative was bleak with despair. Everything they had stockpiled for so long, for the freedom of the Larks district, had gone to ash. The weapons gathered through their smuggling with Zamir, the troops raised in secret for armed struggle—most of it had burned, and more than half the civilian buildings had burned with it. Before a victory made of nothing but wounds, Rekdos, leader of the Rox, could only sigh.
In the end he had no choice but to accept Pale's proposal. A long night of talk passed between them. The next day, an unexpected figure appeared at the cooperative's building.
A young-looking blonde girl in a red liturgical vestment embroidered with a golden cross stared at the people of the Larks Cooperative as if she were looking at insects. Pale met her with a smile.
"As expected of a Guardian Saint. You took a dragon's breath head-on and still look perfectly hale, Serzif."
"And you, boy, have a stubbornly long life. I was certain you'd be a smear of soot stuck to the ground."
She was the Guardian Saint Serzif, the opponent Pale had fought at the factory over the silver-white iron sphere. That fight had been cut short when the dragon appeared, and no conclusion had been reached. Realizing she had been caught in the same attack, Pale had judged she was at least not the dragon's ally, and called her. A tense three-way meeting began among Pale, Serzif, and Rekdos.
"Hand over the iron sphere in which Irok Dehaja's magic is sealed. It belongs to the Azurik Free Federation."
"Does it. Weren't you people of Azurik the ones who brought that ominous thing here in the first place?"
Serzif's tone looked down from above, and Rekdos, plainly offended, glared and pressed her. The air between them turned cold at once. Pale had no choice but to step in.
"Serzif, we have to join forces. Among those after the sphere are people in league with the dragon. Whatever they are, anyone who colludes with humanity's enemy cannot be tolerated."
"Hand over the sphere. Then everything is resolved. That object was originally in the keeping of us Guardian Saints."
"Ha! And why is something kept by such great Saints sitting in a place like this? You aren't very careful, are you."
Rekdos did not yield an inch. He needled her for her high-handed manner and gave no ground. Serzif looked ready to tear him apart with her eyes alone. He was not even a mage, and still he faced the Federation's strongest without retreating a step, perfectly composed.
Unexpectedly, it was Serzif who drew back first. She let out a sigh far too deep for her face, then changed her stance.
"Fine. This mess is our damned failure as Guardian Saints. Some wretch whose guts I ought to pickle—no. Enough. Very well. I will cooperate with you."
With that, the talk that had been jammed tight began to run like a flood. If Rekdos returned the iron sphere, Serzif would use her connections and political ties to raise the Larks Free Cooperative into an official channel for dialogue, and to provide humanitarian aid. That was the agreement.
It was possible because of what a Guardian Saint was. They were not merely one mage, or one soldier. They were symbols of the Azurik Free Federation's power, and as the Federation's protectors each of them carried the weight of a state institution. Serzif in particular was far older than she looked. She had given nearly a hundred years to the Federation, and her network was formidable. If she put her weight behind a thing, demands on the order of Rekdos's were easily met.
Pale, for his part, meant to take his own cut. Help Serzif home with the sphere, and she would pay him an enormous sum.
I took the job from Zamir, so by rights the sphere should go to her. But she hid the details of it from me as well. We're even.
From the start, Zamir had likely never seriously expected him to bring it to her. And with good reason. An iron sphere sealing Irok Dehaja's magic was not something a mere underworld thug could handle. Her real aim had probably been to use Pale, pure and simple, to protect the Larks district—her outlet for smuggling drugs.
She used me... Where did that woman get her information on the sphere in the first place? I'll have to ask once this is over.
He felt a private displeasure, but he himself was deeply interested in the thing called Irok Dehaja's magic, and so he chose to take the upside. Capra—Irok Dehaja himself—simply stood behind Pale with a vacant face in which no intelligence could be felt at all.
"Pale. That reminds me. What exactly is that doll of yours?"
"I'm not sure what you mean."
"Don't play dumb. I saw it clearly. Your doll took a dragon's breath head-on and stopped it."
Surviving a dragon's breath from the front was no easy thing unless one was a monster on the level of a Guardian Saint. If Capra had not been there, Pale would have been ash with no recourse.
"She's just a doll I happened to obtain."
While the political agreement between Rekdos and Serzif was drawn up, Pale met every suspicious look with a blank denial.
"Serzif. Do you have a moment?"
Pale stopped her as she walked the corridor.
"What business have you, calling me?"
"There's something I want to ask you."
"Hmph..."
Displeased, she looked him over from head to toe, then crooked a finger for him to follow. In a deserted, chilly passage she leaned on the wall with her arms folded.
"Well? What is it you so badly wish to know?"
"I want the truth of that day."
"The truth of that day?"
"Blood Christmas. The day a hundred thousand people died. The day the people precious to me died."
Pale's eyes burned with hatred. Hatred for his enemy, Irok Dehaja, had driven him so far as to revive the man as a doll, and still Capra remembered nothing. That was why he had decided to ask Serzif, who had faced Irok Dehaja on Blood Christmas and fought him.
If there was another hand behind the deaths of my family and my comrades... I'll give them a wretched end as well.
Before the pressure of that burning hatred, Serzif sighed and spoke.
"Nearly everything about Blood Christmas is classified. I can't tell you much."
"Then tell me only what you can."
"What do you want to know?"
"The arcane weapon the Guardian Saints were guarding. What was it?"
On Blood Christmas, Irok Dehaja had seized the arcane weapon the Guardian Saints were protecting and set it off in the heart of the city. The casualties came to a hundred and twenty thousand. Not only Pale but countless others wanted to know what that weapon was. The government answered with silence. From his very first question, Serzif sighed.
"I can't say. If I did, my neck might survive. Yours certainly wouldn't."
"...... Then what kind of man was Irok Dehaja?"
"Hmm... If you mean his character, I hardly know. We started fighting almost the moment we met."
She frowned, recalling it.
"Now that I think of it, he did say something."
"What did he say?"
"Slaves?"
The unexpected word made Pale frown in thought.
"What did he mean?"
"I don't know. The fight started right after."
"And in that fight the Guardian Saints and the Holy Paladins were wiped out?"
"Yes."
It was a memory that cut to the bone. She bit her lip and grimaced.
"I still don't understand how that was possible. Twelve Guardian Saints weren't enough—a hundred and forty-four Holy Paladins, brought down by a single mage."
He asked it again, stunned. The Guardian Saints were terrifying, but the Holy Paladins who assisted them were no light matter either. Disciples and personal guard of the Saints, they were outstanding mages, each with the potential to become a Guardian Saint—the ones who would succeed a Saint if one fell. A being that could annihilate twelve Saints and a hundred and forty-four Paladins in an instant... he could not even guess at such power.
"I'll say only this. No magic worked on that thing. We were overrun, one-sidedly."
"What magic was he using?"
"That, too, is classified."
"There certainly is a lot of classified material."
Serzif closed her mouth, unwilling to speak further on it. Pale asked something else.
"Then why is the iron sphere with the sealed magic here? Shouldn't the state be keeping it?"
"We Guardian Saints were keeping it."
"I'm asking why a thing like that washed up all the way out here."
"Think. Isn't it simple? A traitor appeared among us Guardian Saints."
"A traitor among the Guardian Saints?"
The words startled him again.
"The traitor fled with the things of Irok Dehaja that the Saints had in their keeping. Along the way he killed a number of the mages standing watch. The iron sphere is one of the things stolen then."
"...... You're surprisingly willing to tell me that."
"The state intends to announce it soon anyway. And..."
Pale was puzzled that her heavy mouth had opened so easily.
"In my own way, I'm paying a debt."
"A debt?"
"That great evil, which we Guardian Saints failed to stop—your family and your comrades stopped it with their lives. I don't know how they did it... In any case, as one who failed to stop him, I owe a debt."
"...... I see."
The sincerity she showed left his feelings a little tangled.
"Then who are the other mages after the sphere?"
"That, I don't know. The situation is far more chaotic than you think. Word of the sphere has gotten out, and the ones hunting it are beyond counting."
"I suppose so. The strongest magic in history. Mouths would water."
Perhaps not only factions at home, but foreign agents as well, were tangled in it.
"Then I have one last thing to ask."
"You really are a curious creature."
"Was Irok Dehaja truly Irok Dehaja?"
"What are you saying now?"
She reacted as if the question were nonsense.
"I investigated him myself. The government had erased a great deal, but I could still follow the rough trace of his life."
"And?"
"According to what I found, Irok Dehaja was a man who could not use magic. And his abilities were a long way from those of the strongest mage in history."
"In short, you're asking whether he was an impostor, or some third party? If that's it, there is no possibility at all."
She cut the question off cleanly.
"After your comrades and your family sacrificed themselves and Irok Dehaja was subdued, we faced him. We confirmed he was the one we had fought."
"I heard he denied his crimes."
"More precisely, he was not in his right mind. He was out of his senses almost constantly, and conversation was impossible. On the rare occasions he came back, he didn't even know where he was, and he raved."
"That's..."
"Damage to the brain from forcing magic past its limits, most likely. Well. He took on a nation and its army alone. It would have been stranger if he were normal."
Unexpectedly, she was not particularly curious about Irok Dehaja as a person.
"In any case, he was executed in the end, and the execution was carried out under the presidency of us Guardian Saints. He might have escaped by magic otherwise. It was only natural."
"Did he go to the gallows willingly?"
"Yes. We were ready to kill him with magic the instant he tried anything untoward, but he stood on the platform more quietly than expected."
"Did you hear his last words?"
"He did leave last words... Ah. Now that I think of it..."
She frowned. Pale asked.
"What is it?"
"No, it's just... Hah. I don't know."
"What is it, exactly?"
She had been speaking so flatly, and now she found it hard to go on. He kept pressing. She thought a long while, then said:
"The traitor I mentioned. It was him."
"The traitor what?"
"He was the one who heard Irok Dehaja's last words."
"...... And what were they?"
"I don't know. He never told anyone."
Pale's face said he could make no sense of it. He had come seeking to unravel the secret of Irok Dehaja, and he could only close the conversation carrying even more mysteries than before.