A Star Falls on the Dragon
Against a backdrop of endless snowfields and a sky thick with falling snow, the chase between Lethe and Karissa raged on.
'Ugh, damn it! She's disgustingly fast! Seriously!'
Riding atop Ran, Lethe gritted her teeth. Catching up was nearly impossible — Karissa moved with blistering agility, and the bitter cold hampered their visibility while dragging down their speed.
Desperate to cut off the dragon's escape, Lethe had even started raining holy meteors down along its flight path.
"You were laughing at us mere mortals a minute ago, and now you're running away with your tail between your legs!"
She tried taunting her, but Karissa didn't so much as acknowledge it.
'Tch.'
Lethe bit her knuckle, her face tight with anxiety. The radius of the deep freeze was steadily expanding. She could not allow that Dungeon Lord to slip away into another region.
'If this turns into a war of attrition, Ran's stamina will give out first.'
Lethe placed a hand on Ran's head and closed her eyes. Now — right this instant — was the moment to throw the dice.
Over Haste
Green light flared, and in an instant Ran's flight speed soared. The young dragon shot forward like a bolt of light and, in one clean strike, coiled around Karissa's tail.
[……!]
Karissa whipped her head around at the grip on her tail — and Lethe, who had already finished casting her white magic in a flash, spread her palm wide.
"Lethe Original — La Escrime"
The holy lance, stretched into the shape of a spinning drill, slammed dead center into Karissa's torso.
It didn't stop at punching through her scales — the rotation only accelerated, boring deeper and deeper into her body.
Karissa let out a scream of agony, her maw gaping wide.
Sssssaaaaaaah!
When a blizzard of pure-white frost blurred the world to white, Lethe's body froze solid. Even Ran, beneath her, was sheathed in ice.
[Hahaha! Serves you right!]
Karissa sneered.
Crack! Crack!
But in mere seconds, fractures spider-webbed across the ice imprisoning Lethe —
CRRAAASH!
Lethe burst free, flinging both arms wide. The moment she laid a hand on Ran's body as well, the ice melted away and the dragon was freed too.
By then, Karissa was already fleeing again, blood pouring freely from her mouth and torso.
"Ran! We almost have her! Just a little more—!"
But Ran's strength gave out first.
Wounds she could have healed endlessly, but stamina was another matter entirely. Ran, who had always felled every enemy with a single blast of holy breath, simply lacked experience against an opponent this stubborn.
"Ran!!"
[KHAHAHAHAHAHA!]
Karissa sheathed her wounds in ice and kept running. The more she roared, the fiercer the deep freeze grew. The cold reached over the mountain range toward warmer lands beyond, and the vast ocean was freezing over without end.
'There's no other way now!'
Lethe raised her hand skyward, index and middle fingers pressed together.
'Hit or miss—!'
"Lethe!!"
At the sudden voice calling her name, Lethe's head snapped around.
"Simon?!"
But the instant she cried his name, doubt crept in. There was no way he — a boy with no ability to fly — could have made it up here.
"!"
He was there.
WHOOOOOOOOOOSH—!
Two suns rose over the Eskyle mountain range.
Simon came into view, dragging a divinity as massive as the sun itself, riding atop something made of crackling sparks.
'Is that really Simon?'
She could scarcely believe her eyes. Despite being wreathed in surging currents and sparks, what Simon rode was a chariot woven of pure light — and pulling it was not a horse, but the bear divine beast, Akalion.
Akalion couldn't fly yet, but he possessed a levitation effect.
Which meant that chariot was—
'Sacred Beast Materialization!'
[You again, is it?!]
Karissa warily turned her attention to him as well.
"Watch this, Lethe!"
Simon grinned and pulled the reins of light.
"The true power of my Divine Beast Studies!"
The instant he tugged the reins, Simon's body rocketed forward like lightning. For a brief moment, his face flashed a dazed 'wha—?' And then—
VWOOOOOOOOOOM!
VWOOOOOOM!
He became a single streak of light, tearing through the air at phenomenal speed.
GYAAAH! GYAAAAAAH!
Simon's screams echoed across the sky like a refrain. Lethe shouted in panic.
"No, no! What are you doing?!"
"Y-you're going too fast, I can't control the spe— GYAAAAAAAAH!"
The divine-beast chariot careened entirely on its own — over to one mountain, then the mountain across the valley, sprinting out over the sea, then looping back toward Lethe and Karissa, over and over.
It was speed worthy of lightning itself, though it could hardly be called controlled.
[Hahahaha! So the Saintess can't control her power, and this one can't restrain his speed? How pathetic!]
Karissa, sizing up the situation, laughed loudly from above.
[Truly, it is an insult to think such beings claim to be—]
Her gloating voice cut off mid-sentence.
WHOOOOOOOOOM!
A gigantic sun was descending right above Karissa's head.
"Taking you down in one shot—"
Simon's eyes blazed from the chariot.
"IS POSSIBLE!!"
The sun enveloping the chariot compressed into a single searing bolt of light —
KWARRRRRRRRRRUM!
—and with a sound like the wrath of thunder, it became a lightning strike that hammered straight into Karissa's abdomen.
[K-CHAK!]
Karissa's body was dragged down at the speed of light and slammed into the ground. Sweat streamed down Lethe's forehead as she watched.
'A perfect hit!'
Simon poured out that single, desperately wrung-out blow — and then the Materialization came undone.
The white-and-black chariot split cleanly in half and reverted into two baby kittens. Akalion shrank back down to his small form as well.
Clutching all three divine beasts to his chest, Simon plummeted — and shouted toward Lethe.
"Now, Lethe!"
The chance of a lifetime.
Given the right setup, Lethe's firepower was among the most devastating of all the Saintesses.
"I know!"
She smiled brilliantly and swept both arms downward.
The heavens split apart, and from beyond them, bathed in radiance, a meteor larger than anything else in creation was coming down.
"L-Lethe?"
Simon's face went a little slack.
"I think you pulled out something a bit too big…!"
"DIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIEEE!"
With that venomous scream, the meteor fell.
[KHUUUUUUK!]
Karissa, forced to the ground by the lightning strike, lifted her head.
It looked like… like an entire planet was falling upon her.
The sky was being blotted out in real time, the space left to flee shrinking with every heartbeat. It was terrifying beyond words.
She tried to run, but between the impact and the residual sparks of the lightning still crackling across her body, her movements were sealed. She couldn't so much as twitch.
[GYAAAAAAAAAAAH!]
Karissa wrung out the last of her strength and fired her breath — and all it managed to freeze was a tiny sliver of the approaching meteor.
[I… I am…!]
Then the meteor was upon her, and everything around it bleached pure white.
[…the one who destroys…!]
Her body turned white, scattered, and vanished.
KWOOOOOOOOOOOOOM—!
Simon, floating thousands of meters in the sky, was blown away by the backdraft. The aftershock of the holy magic even raised something like a mushroom cloud into the air.
GOTCHA!
At that moment, someone seized Simon by the back of the neck from behind.
"Got you!"
"Lethe!"
Lethe shouted cheerfully, grinning. Ran had squeezed out the very last of her strength to fly — and snatched Simon out of the air as he was flung by the blast.
"HUP!"
With a heave of her arms, Lethe reeled Simon in all at once.
Safe aboard, Simon panted with a dazed expression while Lethe chuckled and thumped his exhausted shoulder.
"Not bad at all, I'd say."
"Just the basics."
Simon smiled wearily. In his arms, the two kittens and the little bear were fast asleep, breathing softly.
"The kittens' development and health are excellent, and judging by their transformation, they're ideal. Honestly, it's strange they couldn't transform before."
The materialization of the kitten divine beasts had left even Lethe, a Divine Beast Studies major, puzzled.
In truth, the two beasts had already grown to the threshold of materialization long ago. The missing key had been Fusion Awakening.
One white and one black — their appearances were complete opposites, easy to mistake, but they were twins born at the exact same moment. The power of a divine beast, too, had been split in half between them at birth.
Which meant the key to their awakening was for both of them to swallow the same mass of divinity at the same instant — inducing the simultaneous manifestation of their halved powers.
Until now, divinity had always been divided and fed to them one at a time, so neither Simon nor the kittens had ever grasped the trick. The Divine Beast Studies lessons in Eskyle, where the children began feeding the two cats from a single mass of divinity, had been the perfect catalyst.
Both of their powers had been needed to achieve a single materialization.
'…So that's what the fortune-telling grandmother in Kula meant by "cart."'
Simon smiled wryly. A chariot and a cart were hardly the same thing — but he could see how she might have read it that way.
And so the Dungeon Lord Karissa was utterly annihilated by Lethe's merciless offensive, and the dungeon atop the mountain range vanished along with her.
On a whim, Simon descended to the ground and gathered up a few fragments of Karissa's bones.
The deep freeze had ceased, and the blue sky so many had longed for spread overhead at last.
Kula regained its warm weather, the sea ice slowly melted, and the monsters that had abandoned their habitats to attack human settlements during the cold retreated back into the wilds.
"Then I'll be reporting to Efnel."
"You sure that's all right?"
"Yes."
By the ancient treaty, this Kinver Region was off-limits to interference from central Efnel — but the Karissa incident had spread damage into other territories, which opened the door to intervention.
Using her standing as a Saintess, Lethe contacted Efnel and reported the situation. On the Saintess's order, Efnel immediately dispatched Paladins, and the food they brought through subspace was enough to buy the residents some urgently needed relief.
The people of the Mizzenaci clan, who had sheltered the dungeon and kept Karissa's existence hidden, were all placed under arrest by the holy knights — as were those who had attached themselves to Karissa at the end.
The ordinary residents of Eskyle, however, were a murky case. They had known nothing of the Dungeon Lord or the dungeon, and had believed with all their hearts that this deep freeze was the Snow Woman's curse.
But a sin was a sin.
In the end, Efnel and the Grand Lord of the region agreed to banish the Mizzenaci from the Holy Federation.
"Well, honestly, it may be for the best."
Lethe said.
The mood had softened somewhat, but if the villagers stayed in Kula they might well face discrimination — so, in her judgment, starting a new life somewhere new was the better path.
"As a Saintess, I'll take responsibility and help them settle in the Neutral Zone."
"Yeah, I'm counting on you."
Meanwhile, the Lord of Kula — who had cooperated with Simon and Lethe and led the handling of the whole affair — wore the slightly hollow look of a man whose soul had briefly left his body.
Simon asked him whether the storybook that had come down through Eskyle was really true.
"Not all of it. But almost all of it is."
The young lord said this with his eyes closed.
"My father was one of those original adventurers."
"Ah…"
"It began as an endeavor to build a good life together — but far too many merchants and capitalists flooded into Kula, and everything fell to ruin. My father spent the rest of his life bowing his head toward the snow mountains, saying he had no face to show them."
The young lord clenched his fist.
"My father told me: all of it was our fault, and there was nothing to be done. Every time I saw that weakness in him, I raged. But even in the moment he closed his eyes for the last time, he died apologizing to the people of Eskyle."
"…"
"I despised him for it. And when Eskyle petitioned for a Priest to be sent, I answered with a policy of zero tolerance."
He raised his head and looked at the ceiling.
"Who is there left to blame? It was all our original sin."
Time passed.
The abnormally frozen sea thawed, and ships resumed their routes. Kula slowly recovered its old appearance, its old vitality.
Simon helped with restoring the town as well. In truth, cleaning up afterward had proven far more exhausting than infiltrating Eskyle or battling the ice dragon Karissa.
And so, while Simon was helping repair the fence at the edge of Kula—
"So this is where you've been hiding, our dear nephew."
Israfil, disguised as a merchant, arrived in Kula with a radiant smile.
In her hand, something glittered.