Even So (1)
We counted the casualties while the dragon towed the ship.
What we found was that the losses were few by any realistic measure—and still more than we had steeled ourselves for.
"The booze. Did you bring any?"
"Why would I haul something that heavy?"
"So you really don't have any?"
"Of course I do."
Two of them were Baramson's crew. Four more were former adventurers who had recruited their friends after claiming they owed me. Three were skilled sailors Dev had hunted down and hired.
Half the priests who had come from the temple had died from overusing their Holy Power, and on the mage side, two unlucky souls had cracked their heads open tumbling and thrashing about. One adventurer was missing as well.
Painful deaths, every one. What made it worse was that most hadn't fallen to wounds at all—they'd been swept away by the tidal wave without a sound, vanishing so completely there was nothing anyone could have done.
"Pour it."
The sailors scattered the drinking water they had brought just in case—the alcohol—across the sea. The adventurers joined them, and so did the priests who had managed to pull themselves together.
"Looks like that's how sailors hold a memorial."
Dev, who had slipped away for a moment, dropped heavily into the seat right beside me. His gaze wandered over the mages clustered around me, then tilted slightly my way.
"…The mage lord's internal injuries are deep—he'll need several days of rest. The Inquisitor is simply exhausted and asleep; she may wake today or tomorrow. At least neither of them is in danger of dying."
That was… better news than most. It still left me feeling worse for Baramson, who had lost men after being dragged into this mess for nothing.
"Hey—pour one for them, would you?"
Speak of the devil. Baramson chose that exact moment to ask me.
"If the dragon-slayer mourns them, the boys'll be glad."
I looked at the bottle he held out, then snatched it roughly.
Most of the people who were going to step forward already had. No one else was left at the prow to pour a drink. I was the last.
Still, standing there meekly tipping the bottle and letting it glug out felt wrong somehow. So I flung it.
Shhk!
My two-hander flashed free and split the bottle clean in half; the pieces dropped, and the liquor sprayed wide in every direction.
"My lord…"
"Hahaha! Now that's generous!"
"Whoa—that much, the dead bastards must've drunk it all in one gulp!"
"Receiving the dragon-slayer's liquor—take it as an honor, you lot!"
"If we could just see the dragon's head a bit…"
"Ah, you people, get lost already!"
Fortunately, no one took offense.
That was how the sailors' memorial—noise and all—came to an end.
The half-wrecked ship the dragon led us to was, by a strange coincidence, the very village we had stopped at once before.
Perhaps because of the water depth, the dragon halted at a certain point, but the creatures that had been hauling the ship stayed with us all the way to the beach. The battered vessel was set fully upright on the sand.
"W-what in the world…"
Villagers poured out with weapons and torches, the village chief—whose face I half-remembered—at their head. They were all so gaunt they didn't look particularly threatening.
"We're not dangerous people! We're not pirates!"
Our side was just as spent, though. A fight here would only pile on needless casualties.
Baramson was first off the ship and took the lead; Dev, reading my look, fell in with him. Having met Dev before, the villagers seemed to ease into negotiations almost at once.
Kiiiiii.
In the meantime, the dragon began to withdraw. Having stayed aboard nearly to the end, I was able to watch it go.
"…?"
And I received something as well.
An orb slipped from the dragon's mouth, crossed the empty air, and settled into my hand. Thump-thump. A faint vibration traveled up from the palm that held it.
…Hey, wait. You could talk?
I felt a truly peculiar sense of betrayal. Sure, talking was its own business, but—no. Just no.
…Fine, for now. If it had talked during the fight, I could have finished this so much more easily—but at least it waited until after. It had ferried us this far, too.
And above all, whatever this was, it had given me a reward. The problem was that no item description popped up, so I still had no idea what it actually was. Still.
The dragon slipped back beneath the sea. The night waters began to resume their proper shape.
"What does it mean that the sea no longer has a master?"
"Eat and become the next master! A cycle! This is a monumental discovery!"
"Aagh, the dragon's leaving—I haven't finished observing it!"
At once the mages beside me erupted like a dam bursting. They hadn't dared interrupt the exchange between me and the dragon, but the second it ended, chaos broke loose.
"A power gifted by a dragon—heavens… what even is that? A condensed mass of mana? Damn it, I want to study it!"
Some of them stared holes through the orb in my hand and the dragon's head. I'd been getting those looks the whole voyage, so it wasn't new—but it was still a burden.
"S-sir Knight…"
But my concept only walks the path of my way.
I ignored every stare and every word aimed my way and examined the pulsing orb.
Still no item description. Following the usual cliché and treating it like an egg ran straight into what the dragon had said.
It had called it a power, not an egg. No talk of entrusting a child to me, either.
More than that—vibration or not—I got none of that eerie sense of something alive. At the very least, it didn't seem like a living creature.
"Please, please—couldn't you show us just a little? Even a tiny bit would do!"
"Please, Sir Knight!"
"We'll return it unharmed!"
Yeah. No.
I shoved the orb straight into my inventory. It felt like adding another piece of toxic dead stock, but it beat leaving the thing out in front of the mages.
As I'd learned on the way back, the Magic Tower mages were—kindly put—pure scholars, and unkindly put, research-mad lunatics.
The classic eccentric academic type: the sort who lost all sense of fear the moment something interesting turned up. That was the personality we were dealing with.
For the record, that was also why the mages had been staring at me before we set sail. I had thought I'd earned their hatred for smashing three of their harpoons—turns out they just… wanted to study me.
And I only found that out because the mages told me themselves. More precisely…
"May we research you? We've wanted to study you since before we even set sail!"
"If the Archmage hadn't stopped us, we'd have proposed it much earlier! Please, just one drop of blood—no, wait, 5 ml—no, wait, 500 ml, please!"
"Would it be possible for you to sign the experimental roster just once… Ah, and please keep the fact that I made this offer a secret from the Archmage."
Roughly that kind of babbling was how I'd figured it out. Not a fact I had particularly wanted to know. I understood now why the Archmage had told them not to get involved with me.
"Please, please, just once—!"
Archmage, sir—what kind of war have you been fighting where I couldn't see it? What on earth did you do to keep these insane scholars under control?
Hoping the unconscious Archmage would wake as soon as possible, I leapt down from the ship.
"Demon Kniiiight—!"
The frail sticks—the mages—kept up their desperate cries, nowhere near catching me.
"My, my. Your popularity is something else."
I had barely reached land, nerves frayed, and found a place to sit when one of the sailors sauntered over, snickering. It was the former adventurer who had recruited his friends after claiming he owed me.
"Shut it."
"Haha. I never knew mages were such eccentrics. Not that I've ever met an adventurer who used to be a mage."
He chattered on as he plopped down near the rock I was sitting on. I'd thought only the mages had their guts hanging out of their mouths, but this one was no better.
"…Is that it? The dragon that harassed our ship?"
Then the former adventurer turned his eyes to the dragon's head I had dragged along. Split in half or not, a skull as tall as I was lay face-down on the sand, radiating presence.
Honestly, if it hadn't been so light, I would have cut off only a horn or a tooth and left the rest.
"Truly wretched."
Cut in half, brains and eyes spilled into the sea, every drop of blood drained, the muscle along the cross-section gone soft and limp—yes, it was a miserable sight. But what the former adventurer was pointing at probably wasn't only that.
"Too… wretched."
He had lost four friends today.
"Mind if I smoke?"
It was less a request for permission than a notice. The former adventurer lit a cigarette from somewhere I couldn't place.
As a former smoker, I was sorely tempted.
"Kid, I'm counting on you!"
"Leave it to me!"
Then, out of nowhere, I spotted someone sprinting across the village. Probably the runner headed to contact the people waiting at Gamak Bay.
"When we get back… you'll be getting a medal of merit again."
The former adventurer, watching the same thing I was, tossed the line out casually.
I had no idea. This hadn't been a commission through the Adventurers' Guild—would they even give one?
"The lord of the castle might summon you, too."
Oh… that sounded like a lot of trouble. I barely knew the local etiquette, and my concept wasn't exactly the type to put on airs for ceremonies.
What if I lost my temper and ended up on the run instead?
"Pff. Resolving enormous incidents one after another like this. If there were a Hero, I wonder if they'd be like you."
That one left me feeling a little strange.
Judging by his words, he didn't know the Inquisitor was the Hero—yet he had, unintentionally, landed surprisingly close to the truth.
"If you were the Hero… then the ones who died would have been people who fought alongside a Hero."
The nearly spent cigarette fell to the ground. Through the acrid scent, another cigarette was lifted and lit in its place.
No mercy with the chain-smoking. I turned my head away.
"…Hero or not, it doesn't matter. But if you can—keep making a name for yourself. So the families of the ones who died can take pride in it."
The cigarette held its ember, white smoke rising in a soft haze. It looked almost like incense.
"…What am I even saying. Forget what I just said. You've done more than enough. Get some rest."
As if a man who had just cursed me to keep getting tangled in disasters forever could turn around and speak kindly now.
I crossed my legs and didn't answer once. The former adventurer chuckled as if he had expected it and walked off.
What remained was the moon, the stars, and the sound of the waves.
Swaaaash.
I left the still-noisy village behind and quietly savored the loud silence. I could faintly hear Dev running this way and that, but that was none of my business.
My concept absolutely does not help!
"Ah—there he i—"
"I told you people to get lost! Do you want to die by the sword?!"
…Because of the mages, I was helping even less!
"Hey, get those mages out of here."
"Acting this vulgar just because their leader is gone—Magic Tower mages, honestly…"
"Did you just finish talking, priest?!"
Mercifully, others stepped in to hold the mages back. People who might have brought me something decided among themselves to simply leave me alone.
If that was on Baramson's orders, it was an excellent call.
Thanks to that, I would be able to think quite comfortably about my condition, what came next, and the questions this raid had left me with.
Slap, slap.
Watching the waves push in close, I checked my HP, fatigue, and the rest.
Everything was fine. Having slept about three hours on the way, my HP was full and my fatigue had dropped to around twenty.
The arm and ankle the Dragon Tooth Soldiers had bitten weren't wounded badly enough to trigger an injury penalty. They had healed enough that I probably didn't even need bandages.
The only real problem was that my stomach still felt off… but that was mostly seasickness. Time would fix it.
Compared to the tatters I'd been in back in Tatara, this was practically sweet.
Unlike me, the Archmage and the Inquisitor had completely collapsed—but as long as their lives weren't in danger, that was enough.
"……"
So the next things to worry about were the truth of the incident and the aftermath.
Honestly… was there even anything to worry about?
Of course I hadn't been without questions. But the dragon's final words had let me piece together quite a lot.
The cycle, my child, the talk of eating—my years as a fantasy reader had done the heavy lifting.
So if I roughly reconstructed the full story: the Sea Dragon and the black dragon had been parent and child; being eaten by one's offspring to pass on the seat of master was the cycle; and this incident had shattered that cycle.
Why it had fallen into corruption, I still didn't know—but there wasn't a scrap of a clue for that. I didn't particularly need to know, either.
If it was story-related, I'd be told later. If it wasn't, it was just self-satisfaction. Did I really need to know? I wasn't the type who couldn't rest until every last detail was accounted for.
What actually puzzled me more than the cause of all this was what came next.
For example: when would the corruption the black dragon had spread disappear? Would we have to find and wipe out every Dragon Tooth Soldier it might have spawned? Would this whole thing happen again?
Think of it as a gamer's mind worrying about whether there would be side quests. Even if any did appear, I was already locked into another quest—Baramson's—so I wouldn't be able to clear them anyway.
Ah, and the rewards mattered, too. The Sea Dragon had given me that strange orb, but that was from the dragon.
The actual payment—or the distribution of the dragon's corpse by contribution—was something I was very much concerned about.
If we had taken it on the coast, most of it would have gone to the Magic Tower and the castle lord… but as things stood, I figured my contribution was extremely high.
I wasn't asking to take everything. I just hoped they'd give me enough to forge a sword, at least. Whether a weapon could even be made from a dragon's corpse was another problem, but still.
"System."
All right. Last of all… time for the long-awaited talk about new skills. And, if we went a little further, about this game itself.
Putting it off any longer had hit its limit.
"Let's have a conversation, you and me."
Or, to put it more bluntly: let's stop lying to each other.