Chapter 356
I decided to render it exactly as “his head.” For dialogue quotes, I plan to use straight quotation marks, and for CSS, I plan to use the emojis included in the template as-is._TITLE: The Bone Dragon
The Bone Dragon.
It was larger still than the Earth Dragon. Where the Earth Dragon was a creature optimized for swampland, content to walk on all fours, the Bone Dragon was shaped like a true dragon—a dragon from which nothing had been taken but the flesh.
Watching it hang in the sky, Yujun tilted his head. I was sure they couldn't use magic. Could it fly without so much as moving its wings, simply by holding still? In the Tower of Infinity, where magic of every kind crowded the air, a sight like that was hardly strange.
The Bone Dragon dove for the players holding the front. As that colossal body plummeted, a tremendous blast of wind pressure rose, and a few of the smaller, lighter players were shoved back. That, however, could hardly be called an attack. It was nothing more than a natural phenomenon. The real strike came next.
As the Bone Dragon drew near the ground, a vast tide of wicked, stagnant, murky dark-blue energy erupted from its body. For all the spectacle of its arrival, the energy made almost no sound, seeping into the players in stealthy silence.
"Gyaaaaaah—!"
"It hurts! It hurts!"
"Damn it! This is— aaaagh!"
Not one player the energy touched failed to writhe in agony. The pain did not last. Every one of them who had been screaming died, and the battlefield sank into silence almost at once.
"Heh heh heh..."
"Foolish living things. Die but once, and you shall be our friends."
The liches laughed, a sound thick with ghostly malice, and raised the dead players as undead. Players watching from a little farther off stood with their mouths hanging open. The Bone Dragon began to climb into the sky again.
"It's coming! Run!"
"Is it headed this way?"
"Less talking, more run—"
The Bone Dragon hammered its bulk toward the ground once more, and the dark-blue energy spread. Players were quick studies. They read where it meant to land and opened the distance ahead of time, but the energy pouring off the Bone Dragon spread wider than before. Those who had not accounted for even that much stopped dead. From the instant the energy seeped in, they could only howl, as if screaming under a pain no words could hold.
"GRAAAAAAAAH—!"
Another roar from the Bone Dragon. Players who had never suffered a Dragon Roar at close range stiffened from head to toe, as anyone would have. It was an instinctive freeze, and fear is contagious. Packed together like barnacles in a crack of rock, the clustered players fell into chaos, and the more the Bone Dragon rampaged, the worse that chaos became.
Then a handful of the brave and the strong charged it. They could not pierce the thin membrane wrapping its entire body. In the very moment their dismay broke out of them, the energy of darkness spilled from the Bone Dragon, inevitable as ever.
"Guhhhk!"
"Fuck!"
All of it had happened in an instant. Yujun went to the Bone Dragon himself, his face set hard. Because of that single creature, players of the highest rank had crossed into the afterlife for nothing. They were not the sort who died so easily, and the power the Bone Dragon held had outstripped even his imagination. Before the situation could worsen any further, he had to bring it down, and quickly.
He took his place before its eyes with nothing in hand but a sword. Meeting those vacant, hollow eyes, Yujun felt that something was wrong. Is something controlling it? Undead were lifeless by nature, yet he had never seen one so utterly empty of will. Nor could he dismiss the Bone Dragon as merely special—there was a clumsiness even in its smallest movements.
Who's holding the reins hardly matters. Yujun poured Chaos into his sword and called on Super Concentration as well. Set beside the Bone Dragon, the Death Knight he had faced before was a firefly before the sun. If he met this thing with anything less than his full strength—if he let his guard slip—even his own life could be at risk.
The Bone Dragon turned on Yujun the same technique that had been working all along. No—it went further, and unleashed a Dragon Roar and the energy at the same time.
"GRAAAAAAAAAAH—!"
Had it known, by instinct, that Yujun was strong? A Dragon Roar erupted at a volume beyond any comparison with what had come before. Hearing it from point-blank range, Yujun furrowed his brow. For a heartbeat his mind nearly reeled, but the barrier and Equanimity let him seize hold of himself at once. Whenever the foul energy tried to breach the barrier and seep in, Touch of Healing purified it clean away.
As expected. I knew I could count on it.
Touch of Healing had never once betrayed his expectations. In that span, Yujun closed until the Bone Dragon filled his vision. A vibration shuddered through its body. It was preparing a breath, meaning to melt the irritating gnat before it.
Harp's breath was faster. The Bone Dragon's enormous skull vanished beneath it, and its face melted away completely.
But this was no moment to relax. The Bone Dragon was undead, and its body was immense. Give it even a little time, and it would restore itself completely.
Using the spell Fly, Yujun rose above the Bone Dragon and lifted his sword. A tremendous energy began to gather along the blade—Touch of Healing and Chaos, wound together. Touch of Healing was lethal to the undead, and with it mixed into the strike, he had every reason to expect the result he wanted.
From above, straight down. He dropped toward the earth, cleaving the Bone Dragon's body in two as he fell. The gigantic frame was severed clean through.
Yujun was not satisfied with that. Moving fast, he kept cutting, and Chaos and Touch of Healing sank in together, seeping into the bone itself. Regeneration was impossible.
And so the Bone Dragon met its end.
No. It would be truer to say that it returned to death.
Peace Contribution has increased by 50,000!
You acquire a Fruit of Evolution.
The reward for slaying the Bone Dragon was far too sweet. How sweet? Sweeter than swallowing an entire jar of honey in a single draught.
This. This is why you raid.
Honestly, it was almost embarrassing to call it a raid. He had brought the thing down in under three minutes, and he had done it alone.
Even on a night so dark that not a single star showed, there was not a player who failed to see Yujun strike the Bone Dragon down. Small wonder. The thing had been impossible to miss.
"That's a first-year player? Ha... I can feel the crisis coming on."
"I'd heard humans grow quickly, but by our people's measure, isn't that a newborn being that strong? Does that even make sense?"
"That's what I'm saying."
Players of other races let out empty laughs, too dumbfounded for words. The handful of Koreans present were no different.
"The pride of Korea! Shin Yujun!"
"Cut it out. You're giving me chills."
"Why not? I'm right, aren't I? The pride of Korea. The pride of humanity."
"Oh, come on, I said stop! I am genuinely embarrassed to be in the same party as you."
"I only said what was true. What's the problem..."
Masare, the Root of Darkness, could only manage a hollow laugh as she watched a Bone Dragon get dismantled so easily by a single man.
Even to my eyes, that Bone Dragon was nothing short of a monster. And he finished it in one pass? There was someone like that on the Continent?
She had once roamed the Continent actively enough. Lately, though, she had been buried in an underground dungeon, deep in research concerning spirits, and so she was rather ignorant of the latest news. She did not mix words with other players, either. She would sooner hold a conversation with a monster.
I was shut in that laboratory for three months at the outside... Had he been hiding somewhere?
Just then she caught the sound of the players murmuring among themselves. Masare was full of curiosity, and she always kept her ears open, so information about Shin Yujun began to settle into her mind.
What? A first-year? Then he was human?
She was a Root of Darkness born and raised on the Continent—more precisely, one that had come into being there—but she knew the players summoned from Earth well enough. That, too, she had learned out of curiosity. Beings called from another world were more than enough to stir her interest, and she had trailed humans before. She had killed them, of course. She had tortured them, too. They were strange, and she had wanted to know. In the course of it she had gathered all manner of stray facts about summoners from another world, including this: a player who had been in the Tower of Infinity for less than a year was called a first-year.
I don't believe it, no matter how I look. That human, a first-year...
She had lived through long ages, weathered hardship and storm without number, and witnessed rare sights beyond counting, and still she could not bring herself to believe the chatter rising around her now.
"Interesting. Truly interesting."
Masare murmured it to herself. It had been a long time since any player had stirred her interest this sharply. A chill slid through her—the sense that, so long as that human remained on the field, the undead legion would lose in the end. It was more than a feeling. A player capable of bringing down a Bone Dragon alone. The outcome was already decided. The undead legion had nothing in reserve that surpassed the Bone Dragon. In effect, the moment the Bone Dragon was annihilated, the war game was over.
Masare clicked her tongue, plainly disappointed.
I wanted to enjoy it a little longer.
To her, war was food. Negative emotions became her blood and her flesh and, in the end, her power. This was why she had grown stronger without a single pause from the day she was born. For Masare, a war that ended quickly was no good thing at all. And if the players won without ever falling to the great undead host, that would be nothing short of the worst scenario imaginable.
"Well then. Shall I see for myself just how good he is?"
Masare had at last resolved to move. She had meant, if she could help it, not to step forward until the very end, but with things as they stood she no longer had a choice. Even at this moment, that human of tremendous talent was hunting the undead alone, and entirely one-sidedly. With the Lich Lords and the Bone Dragon gone, not a single undead remained that could stop him for even an instant.
Masare, the Root of Darkness, drove her oppressive two-meter frame into a run, cutting straight across land that had been reduced to barren waste. She blew past the drab undead and planted plague in the players along her path. She, too, could spread plague, and if she seeded it in only a handful, it would propagate perfectly well on its own.
She was a being on an entirely different plane from the other Roots of Darkness. The virulence of her plague was beyond any comparison.