Beg and Beg Again (7)
Honestly, I never believed that even outstanding seamanship could be enough to steer this massive ship around the reefs.
But the world is full of people with outlandish talents—and games, especially, are packed with exaggerated stats like that.
“We’re into the Dragon’s Throat now!”
Just as I was coordinating with an adventurer who used a whip as her main weapon—slicing through the Dragon Tooth Soldiers she hauled up—that warning dropped.
Western Sea: Dragon’s Throat
❖ Corruption Drifted from the Sea
∎ Travel to the Dragon’s Throat
∎ Find and purify the source of impurity
Boom!
Along with the quest update came a lurch that instantly dragged up memories of canyon rafting I’d tried once before.
“This is seriously no joke!”
What had all those earlier tidal waves and squalls even been for? I’d heard the current was fast and figured, sure, fine—but I never imagined a ship this huge could get flung around like this.
“Damn it, this is a filthy mess to steer! Crazy sea!”
No—trying to steer in this was the crazier part, if you asked me.
Thinking that, I raised my sword. The violent swells were even launching Dragon Tooth Soldiers clear out of the water.
Slash!
A flying Chamgyeok shot past the barrier and carved through the Dragon Tooth Soldiers.
In exchange, my body nearly went over the side of the deck—until Dev screamed and grabbed the hem of my coat, and the Archmage seized my ankle and hauled me back so I could plant my feet again.
The ship still showed no sign of sinking, but it was thrashing like a roller coaster. I was genuinely about to throw up.
At least with the protective devices on, we didn’t have to thrash against the Dragon Tooth Soldiers the way we had earlier. That was some small mercy.
“The mages all look like they’re about to pass out—is the barrier still okay?!”
As Dev said, if the mages fainted, keeping the protective devices running would get hard. Every function aboard the ship ran on mana as fuel.
That was why there was a time limit, and why as many as twenty mages had come along. Beyond activating the right devices at the right moment, a mage’s purpose was to serve as a living spare battery.
“What we have now is running on mana stored in advance—no need to worry!”
Of course, they weren’t actively casting barriers from scratch right this second. The protective devices could still move on mana that had already been poured into them.
Still… once that charged mana ran dry, I had no idea what would happen.
It reminded me of those racing games where you have to hit the finish before the gauge empties. Even if I wasn’t the one driving.
“Not just the mages—the priests are all about to—waaagh!”
In the middle of that, a tremendous jolt made Dev lose his grip. His body skidded across the deck toward the sea.
“You idiot!”
The protective barrier only stopped attacks coming in from outside. It did nothing to stop something—or someone—going out.
In other words, if a person got thrown, they went straight into the ocean. The Inquisitor’s hand and mine shot out at once.
“Got him!”
“Hwaak!”
Like him or not, he was a companion. The Inquisitor got to Dev first, and I grabbed on after her and hauled him up. Dev made it back onto the deck.
“I—I’m alive.”
His ears, flopped limply back, seemed to advertise exactly how he’d felt a second ago. My heart had probably been pounding just as hard as his.
“Gyaaaaah!”
But it wasn’t time to relax.
Right after, one of the sailors fell from the mast and started plummeting toward the water.
Luckily he wasn’t being flung far out to sea, and the drop point was close to me. I could catch him.
Thok!
“Hwaaak!”
I lunged and snatched the falling man’s hand. My upper body went nearly halfway over the rail, but somehow I managed to grab the sailor.
“S-save me!”
“…Stop thrashing!”
Uwaaah. I was going over too!
Boom!
Before my body could follow him over—or before his wet hand could slip free—the ship tilted the other way by a hair’s breadth.
The jolt bounced the sailor’s body up, and I didn’t waste the chance.
I flung him back toward the deck. He might end up bruised or with something broken, but that still beat getting swallowed by that black sea.
“Hold on!”
Pain doesn’t kill the will to live. Before he could slide again, the sailor hastily grabbed onto something.
“Is this actually okay?!”
“If you’re not dead yet, it’s okay!”
I didn’t see anyone else who’d gone over. My stomach had flipped so hard my vision felt flipped with it.
Baramson was somehow still glued to the helm. Holding the wheel and adjusting course in this—he was one hell of a guy.
Or had he stuck adhesive under his shoes? Even allowing for that, his core strength had to be ridiculous.
“Dead ahead!”
Someone clinging to the mast shouted.
“Reef jutting out!”
Even without the cry, Baramson already seemed locked in a wrestling match with the helm… but ships don’t turn on a dime the way cars or motorcycles do.
“Damn it—looks like we’re going to hit that one!”
The protective devices could cover ordinary reefs, but the mana burned in the instant of impact was enormous. On top of the base upkeep, you paid extra mana to cancel out the shock of a collision.
That was exactly why we needed a captain like Baramson. If every scrap of mana we needed for the dragon’s attacks got spent on reefs instead, what was the point?
“Everyone hold on tight!”
Either way, for that reason, I couldn’t just stand there.
I grabbed a spare rope from one side of the ship, clutched a harpoon in my other hand, and started running.
There were too many obstacles for a straight sprint across the deck, so I chose the railing as my lane.
Sprinting along a narrow rail on a pitching ship sounded like pure insanity—but keeping my balance turned out to be surprisingly easy.
No wonder the Survival Instinct skill had recommended it. The fact that my gag reflex was climbing like mad was a bit of a shame, though.
“You! Catch the rope!”
“Eh?! A-ah! Are you insane!”
But I was already riding the tiger. I reached the bow and stepped out onto the prow. My body launched straight off the ship.
Kra-koom!
Beneath me, a black sea loud with thunder heaved and flung up gray foam.
“…?!”
“That crazy knight-sir!”
“Th-the sea!”
I forced my eyes wide and focused. Through the black water I could just make out a reef even blacker still. Strength flooded into the hand that held the harpoon.
“You!”
Whether Baramson had called me or not—well, even if he hadn’t, someone must have been thinking I was trying to die.
I knew it myself. This was more than a little suicidal.
But how was I supposed to know whether the mana spent on this reef would snowball later?
Maybe I’d lived through too many snowballs. When there was something I thought I could do, I just couldn’t stand back and leave it alone.
Tszzzzzzt!
Mana rushed into the harpoon in my hand. It felt like I was gripping a bolt of pure black lightning.
Whoosh!
And I drove it straight into the reef.
Kwaaang!
For an instant the sea punched open in a perfect circle, the water there blasted outward.
The reef that had been there shattered from the point the harpoon pierced through, splitting and crumbling down dozens of meters below.
“That lunatic bastard…!”
Gravity took my body. The water that had been shoved aside rushed back to fill the hole. The current was strong enough to drag the ship a little with it.
Splash!
Anyway, I went into the sea. Bubbles—dark, murky ones—poured from my mouth and filled a corner of the pitch-black field of view with cloudy air.
Sound went muffling-dead all at once, and faint scraps of old memories and regrets drifted through my head.
『The sun’s high already! Get up!』
『Son, want to go hiking?』
I missed my parents.
Fwoosh!
With a burst of spray, my deadened ears cleared. The rope I’d locked my grip on yanked taut and hauled my body up out of the water.
The flying foam looked painfully distant and dreamlike.
Thud!
My body slammed into the deck and brought a stinging ache with it. Even with my pain threshold turned down, this was definitely going to bruise.
“Are you alive, sir?!”
“Demon Knight! Are you all right!”
In the meantime, the two who’d reeled me up on the rope shoved their faces in close. Two young faces blotted out the sky.
“Cough.”
I was grateful they’d saved me, but first I needed the seawater out.
I coughed up what had gotten into my mouth. It was salty and sour. Some stomach acid had come up too, by the feel of it.
“You monster of a kid! You still alive?!”
Why was Baramson picking a fight now? Or—wait—was that not a fight, but praise?
Either way, I hoped that little suicide run had actually helped. My eyeballs were spinning.
I clung on with the two of them holding me so I wouldn’t get thrown off the ship, and squeezed my eyes shut for a moment. It felt like my semicircular canals had crawled out of my head and started breakdancing.
“…Anything else that needs smashing?”
“Shit—so that’s why you were so confident about dragon-hunting. You’ve got extra lives!”
I wish. If they were going to hand out spare lives, I’d prefer the logout kind.
“Sea Dragon!”
Then a sailor shouted that.
I cracked my eyes open and checked ahead. Beyond the bow, in the middle of a storm-lashed sea, a long body undulated and shimmered. Honestly, I’d taken it for a waterspout at first.
Kra-koom!
As if rain weren’t enough, thunder began hammering down over the water in a furious racket.
“We can kill that thing, right?!”
“Of course we can—shut your mouth!”
Baramson’s shout came back raw and furious. I answered on reflex, but inside I was nowhere near that sure.
Whoa. That thing is enormous. One hit from it and the barrier’s gone, isn’t it? Can we seriously drag it all the way to Gamak Bay? For real?
The raid was so realistic I was about to cry.
“Tell the mages to get the mana cannons ready to fire!”
“Waaagh—this insane priest!”
The Inquisitor hurled Dev into a hatch set into the deck. Brutal method—but nothing was faster or safer.
I staggered up to the bow. In the distance the dragon let out a keening cry, then turned its gaze our way.
“….”
The distance was great, yet somehow its face, the outline of its body, every line of its form, was unnervingly clear. For the root of all this, it was a monster so beautiful it felt almost tragic.
The scales, for instance—bright enough to shine even under a murky sky and black water. The two pairs of coral-colored horns rising straight from its brow. The fins, thin as wings or ornaments, glowing with a soft light.
And eyes like pearls looked at me. Or so it seemed.
The whiskers running down from beneath its snout fluttered and drifted.
“Th-that’s a dragon….”
“O Sea Dragon….”
For something we were supposed to kill, it was simply too mystical, too profound. Some of the sailors who had once worshipped such beings broke into sobs and lost their will to fight.
Even among the adventurers and mages who had never venerated the Sea Dragon, some were so overwhelmed they could only swallow their groans.
“Shit—snap out of it!”
Fwoosh!
But just as their hearts were about to break, Baramson ground out curses and lashed them into focus. Right after that, the surface near the dragon heaved up—and something else appeared.
Kwachik!
Something that had risen sank its jaws into the dragon’s nape. Beautiful scales cracked and burst with blood.
“Th-the dragon!”
What had bitten it was, absurdly, another dragon.
Smaller, yes—with scales of an ominous, muddy color, one black horn grotesquely twisted, its fins torn and split into something unsightly.
But it was a dragon all the same.
Suddenly I thought of the mural we’d seen in the mountain hold—the one that had shown an adult and a young one together.
“…I can feel impurity.”
“Has a dragon… fallen?”
Anyway—I’d already thought the larger one was too elegant, too lofty to be the culprit behind this whole mess. So the real criminal was this one, then.
??? │ ???
Just like with the Plague Fiend, a window crammed with question marks floated up again. That settled it. The thing we truly had to kill was that one.
Kyaaaaah!
In the meantime the Sea Dragon, bitten at the nape, screamed and thrashed until it flung the black dragon off—then dove straight into the sea.
The black dragon dove after it as if to pursue, and both bodies vanished from sight.
Just like that, we were left alone on a storm-beaten sea.
“…Head there.”
I narrowed my eyes, then snapped at Baramson at once.
He too had been overwhelmed by the dragon’s presence, but steering the ship was more urgent—he was already haranguing the sailors who’d barely recovered and somehow getting the vessel moving again.
“What?”
“I said go where the dragons came up.”
They only looked close because they were huge; the distance between us and them was still great. Even for an attack, we needed to close in on the place they’d been.
Besides, this might be for Baramson and the crew as much as for us.
I’d just realized it: for things that size to submerge, that area just now had to be free of reefs. Even if there had been any, once those two started fighting underwater, the reefs would almost certainly have been smashed to pieces.
If we had to wait for the dragons to surface again anyway, better there than in a reef field.
“…!”
Whatever he took from my words, Baramson’s eyes widened a little. Then he locked both hands on the helm.
“Everyone keep your heads on straight!”
The ship began cutting through the rapids again. The rough current tore groans out of us, but the vessel never stopped.
“…! The current’s easing!”
“So there weren’t any reefs inside the Dragon’s Throat….”
My prediction had been right. Where the dragons had been thrashing, the reefs truly were gone—or scarce.
At least, that was how it looked from Baramson’s and the sailors’ reactions. The current wouldn’t have weakened for no reason.
But weaker currents didn’t solve everything.
The dragons were still underwater, and even once they surfaced, a mountain of work remained before we could bombard them and lure them away.
“…! Below!”
Someone suddenly cried out in something close to a scream, and I reflexively looked over the side. Beneath the dark water, a darker shadow was sliding past us.
“Uh, uhhhhh!”
“Grab the rail!”
Then the surface rose on one side only—and the black dragon thrust its head up out of the sea. Of course, the price was that our ship nearly flipped.
Tak.
Feeling that, I knew we couldn’t waste this chance.
“Harpoon!”
I snapped at someone on the central deck. A blank-faced adventurer reflexively passed me a harpoon.
“Swing the main sail around and fire up the fair-wind device!”
Catching my intent, Baramson hurriedly prepared to turn the ship. A very wise choice.
“Fire now!”
On Baramson’s signal, a harpoon wrapped in black lightning flew.
Kwachik!
It punched straight through the black dragon’s scales and dug into its flesh. The anxiety that it might not even work dissolved in that instant.
Kieeeeeeh!
But the attack had landed almost too well. A cry far muddier and more spine-crawling than the Sea Dragon’s rolled through the air, and a pair of blood-red eyes turned on us.
If you thought those eyes were blazing with rage, it wouldn’t have been pure imagination.
“…Harpoon.”
“Sir, this is the right call, right?”
“Hand it over.”
Well—we were supposed to pull aggro from the start, weren’t we?
The original plan had been to beat it down with the ship’s artillery, but whether you go the long way or the short way, what matters is that you arrive.
This might even be better. Firing the mana cannons ate the mages’ mana too.
Spending that mana on the barrier and the fair-wind device instead was the path that kept us alive—no need to say it.
Kiii!
Whoosh!
Either way, I loosed a second shot. It cut the air and slammed into the black dragon’s body again.
I’d aimed for the head if I could, but the waves and a sudden surge of nausea threw off my aim; it buried itself in the nape instead.
Kyaaaargh!!!
Still, the aggro landed cleanly. The black dragon roared as if enraged and charged.
“Uwaaah!”
“It’s coming!”
The dragon stretched its long neck to swallow our ship whole. Of course its mouth wasn’t that big, so the real intent was more like sweeping the deck in one massive bite. Even that would have been enough to gulp down dozens of the humans packed on board.
But a target that huge had kindly come to us—we weren’t about to miss it.
Trusting the barrier, I hurled a harpoon at the dragon. Others followed my lead. Sailors and adventurers alike sent dozens of harpoons flying through the air.
Kyaaaak!
Bang!
The harpoons from me, the Inquisitor, and someone I didn’t know punched into the tender flesh of its mouth; the dragon’s charge skewed slightly. The barrier around the ship blazed brighter than it ever had and turned the beast aside.
“Uwaaagh! The ship’s rocking!”
At least the barrier formed at a distance from the hull, so a hit on it didn’t shake the ship itself. The waves, of course, were another matter—so we weren’t completely still.
A small tidal wave the dragon had raised washed over the outer plating and soaked the deck; people forced themselves to keep their balance and kept throwing harpoons.
Most attacks still just bounced off the scales. The Inquisitor, at least, was managing to crack them.
“…! The mana!”
“That single hit just burned through a quarter of the protective devices’ mana!”
Then that piece of bad news came from below.
Even after bringing the best captain we could find to minimize mana spent on reefs, the stores we’d been hoarding had just been torn out in one lump.
“Hold it somehow! We have to get back to Gamak Bay no matter what!”
But what else could we do? To live, we had to wring out every scrap of mana, keep the mana barrier up, and drive the ship forward with the fair-wind device as fast as it would go.
“…! From the sea!”
Misery never comes alone. From the shattered, fallen scale fragments, Dragon Tooth Soldiers were being born. One good harpoon each would handle them—but if they kept spawning like that, they’d be a pure nuisance.
Especially now, when we had to spare the barrier.
“Stop them! No matter what!”
“Don’t let them get close!”
The Nuckers had been so weak I’d worried the raid boss might be weak too—weak, my ass.
The environment was so hostile the difficulty had shot straight up. Watching those scales crack, I was sure that if the ground weren’t pitching under us, we could have dropped it in no time!
“Uhhhhh!!”
And then the sea itself heaved again. Fwoosh! The culprit that not only dumped more water over the deck but nearly rolled the ship onto its side needed no introduction.
Kyaaaaargh!
As if claiming revenge for earlier, the Sea Dragon sank its teeth into the black dragon’s nape. In a blink, a war of monsters had begun.
Raid or not—please, I begged at the tip of my tongue, leave us shrimp out of this and go fight your whale war somewhere else.