The Dragon of Tragedy
“Kueuhu.”
“When I first suggested selling the teeth I’ve collected at auction…”
The Tooth Fairy stared blankly at Rune.
“Just that?”
“Just that? Selling my own collection at auction from the start is absurd.”
A Tooth Fairy who hoarded teeth and then planned to auction them off for payment.
That was a sentence no true collector would ever utter.
To a collector, the collected item itself brought satisfaction.
Especially one who, to call himself a true collector, was genuinely sincere in gathering teeth.
“That’s more like a merchant than a collector, isn’t it?”
“……”
The Tooth Fairy couldn’t answer.
He had let the slip slip because he had underestimated the young hatchlings and let his guard down.
He had thought it would pass off as a silly gesture and a joke, but…
It didn’t land at all on this young darkness.
“Tsst!”
The Tooth Fairy’s expression twisted in his mind, revealing his true nature.
A grotesque, lecherous, wicked face.
“You tricked me, you sly one! You vile thing!”
The Tooth Fairy had imagined a childlike tantrum from the young hatchling.
But Rune laughed helplessly.
“Kueuhu?”
“You’re actually annoyed that you were tricked, even in this situation?”
“Y-you little!”
The Tooth Fairy stumbled over his pride, mocked by the pure faces of other young creatures who praised him.
He was not the type to admit his mistake so readily.
“You knew and kept quiet, didn’t you! I was tricked! The others must be in on it too!”
At those words, Rune calmly looked at the Tooth Fairy.
“Only I noticed. As you can see, the ones playing and laughing while gaming are all like that.”
The other ones were young dragons with scales and shells still soft.
They had no business joining in on such a shady affair.
Rune continued.
“There’s no need to make an awkward face. They’re just pure young ones.”
The Tooth Fairy choked back curses in his throat.
The hatchling right in front of him was, by far, the youngest among them.
He could not stand the feeling of shrinking into something petty and small before a young hatchling like this.
And because he was narrow-minded, he blurted out words he should never have spoken.
“The young have no sense of right or wrong, and their tempers are weak. Dragons or not, without parents, I’m just an animal.”
A sentence insulting anyone who heard it.
Rune looked at him with emotionless eyes.
“Keep going.”
There was no warmth in Rune’s gaze.
The black hedgehog-clad hatchling continued.
“I’ll decide whether I should save you.”
Internally terrified, the Tooth Fairy thought it was the Dragon’s Fear he had heard of.
He shouted defiantly.
“Hmph! Do you think killing someone is that easy? A hatchling with no blood on his head.”
Rune was puzzled.
What exactly was he relying on to act so arrogant?
After thinking for a moment, Rune came up with a plausible explanation.
“Maybe it’s because the other young ones reacted fairly calmly.”
Recalling the reactions of Amelia and Heungmi yesterday, it made sense.
They were the type who stuck together and didn’t harm outsiders lightly.
Reading the Tooth Fairy’s foolishness, Rune smiled coldly.
“You’re wrong. I should tell you what the price is.”
Slowly, black fog began to roll over the Tooth Fairy’s face.
Like a swarm of glossy black flies filling his vision.
His sight began to fade.
“@#$%@%!”
He couldn’t hear his own voice in the darkness.
An empty space with nothing.
Suddenly, the Tooth Fairy found himself thrown into it alone.
Snick.
The Tooth Fairy lowered his head to look at his hand.
No, that was what he thought.
He could see nothing, and could not feel his hand.
“This… this is the power of a hatchling who’s only lived a hundred years?”
That was impossible.
No, it could not be.
If someone had possessed this power since childhood and was a dragon, he should have been the ruler of the world long ago.
But he soon stopped feeling anything strange.
“U… uh…”
His senses became tangled.
As if his thoughts and memories were breaking into tiny pieces in the darkness.
The Tooth Fairy panted desperately.
He used his heightened senses and worked his mind at full speed to understand the situation.
His ruined senses twisted his mind even further.
Complete blocking of the senses had begun to contaminate his mind.
He could feel nothing.
Not even time.
He was undoubtedly trapped in eternal darkness as a dead body with only his mind alive.
The Tooth Fairy, to resist mental corruption, instinctively tried to measure time.
A day.
A week?
A month.
A year?
The Tooth Fairy, who sensed infinite time, soon realized he was about to lose his mind.
To regain his senses, he needed some kind of stimulation, but none was given.
That was when…
“You held out pretty well.”
A four-word sentence felt like light.
And the next moment, an astonishing voice came.
“It’s been five minutes already.”
“……”
Only five minutes.
In that time, the Tooth Fairy had experienced an eternity of time in absolute darkness.
“If I can’t live or die like this…”
For a spirit phantom, mental collapse led to changes in existence itself.
He didn’t know what kind of monster a broken mind would become.
He was afraid.
“Guh.”
The Tooth Fairy couldn’t hold on and pleaded.
“Just… just kill me…”
He soon didn’t even realize he had said that.
And after an eternity in the Tooth Fairy’s sense of time…
To the flowing, jumbled mind like paint mixing,
“Boom!”
Suddenly, appropriate light and warmth were felt.
“Hwa, hwaaah!”
Every sense was on fire, and he screamed.
The stimulation was painful enough to be unbearable.
As if each strand of cotton wool was sharpened into a blade, and excessive current flowed into its tip.
His forcibly shaped body and organs twisted without adapting.
“Uuuwek! Week! Kaak!”
The Tooth Fairy, like a fish taken out of water, gasped desperately.
When he opened his eyes, he was in darkness, but warmth and a vague sense of color density were felt.
“Kueeuu.”
“Playing with your mouth again?”
The black hedgehog-clad hatchling, arms crossed, looked at him.
“W-what did I say…?”
His memories had been forcibly twisted, and he barely pieced together the scene.
“A-ah.”
The Tooth Fairy rolled his eyes and felt true terror.
He was more terrified of facing this young hatchling than anyone else.
But Rune looked at the flustered Tooth Fairy with concern.
“Kue.”
“I expected strong mental immunity because you’ve lived long and travel between spaces. But you seem too afraid?”
That damned shadow race!
The impulse to mock him twisted inside him and vanished.
He didn’t want to endure the horrific things he thought he’d accept just to die.
The Tooth Fairy carefully tested the intention.
“W-would you… I mean, what will you do to me?”
The Tooth Fairy, trembling, asked. Rune answered with a hum.
“Kueu.”
“I have a few questions. Answer honestly, and I might show you mercy.”
The mercy the Tooth Fairy wanted was simply to leave this place.
As if reading his inner thoughts, Rune continued.
“But if there’s any falsehood like yesterday, you’ll feel the same state without warning.”
Whoosh.
The black pearl that had been thrown upward was now in Rune’s hand.
The Tooth Fairy swallowed saliva.
Swallow.
The experience of existence vanishing into nothingness was truly horrifying.
The gaunt, hair-standing Tooth Fairy lowered his head obediently.
“Wh-what do you want to know…?”
His speech was slurred from trembling, but he was also still not fully back in his senses.
Perhaps it was the shock of his spirit that might last his whole life.
Facing him, Rune spoke in a calm tone.
“Kuekue.”
“Then tell me what the demon race wanted.”
It wasn’t a difficult question.
Leparion, the demon, had said he would answer anything asked.
But he had warned it would be boring to say easily.
Thinking about it now, Rune felt a sudden surge of anger, wondering if he had sensed this.
But he answered with his head lowered in fear.
“To confirm if everyone is safe, and to remind them not to forget the promises…”
“Kue?”
“Just that?”
The Tooth Fairy sensed that Rune was suspicious.
Worried he might fall into the same situation as before, he shook his hands frantically.
“It’s true! I mean, it’s absolutely true! If I fall for a guy like me, I said I’d go take his soul right away… but…”
“……”
From Rune’s perspective, it was ridiculous.
“That bastard’s soul talk.”
He muttered “crazy guy” inside a few times and shook his head in thought.
“Mad dogs shouldn’t be provoked.”
It had been unavoidable then, but he was still a dangerous one.
Rune decided he needed to find the safest way to part ways and opened his mouth.
“……Kuk.”
“All right. Then the next question.”
Rune’s red eyes deepened.
“The race of the forest called ‘Lize.’ Do you know anything about the place where the Green Dragon lives?”
“T-that dragon… I couldn’t even approach…”
Rune had been staring fixedly and suddenly grabbed one of his front paws.
Then, dark fog began to wrap around the Tooth Fairy like a snake.
“Uwaaak! I’m sorry! I’m sorry!”
The Tooth Fairy writhed in spasms from the sensation of being wrapped like a snake, foam at his mouth.
Rune released the front paw he had grabbed.
The darkness hid his body and vanished.
“Kue.”
“Don’t lie. Speak the truth.”
Startled, the Tooth Fairy answered with a cold sweat.
“A-ah, I see. I, I’m sorry… I wasn’t telling a complete lie, but… I added a very tiny bit of falsehood…”
At those words, Rune thought.
“So it was a lie after all.”
This time he had simply poked lightly, but he had gotten a good hit.
Panting heavily, the Tooth Fairy opened his mouth with a face that looked like his heart would stop.
“As for Lize… when I was looking for it back then, the one who was a dragon…”
Rune’s eyelids trembled slightly.
To hide that, Rune closed his eyes and nodded.
“Kuekue.”
“It was true.”
The Tooth Fairy, wary, dug into his memories.
“It’s strange, but I remember it clearly. Even though he was a hatchling, he was already an adult dragon… yes. The Dragon of Tragedy.”
Lize.
The forest race child who only knew a short basic name was born as an adult dragon.
Younger than even Ferdikion.
The strange situation was likely related to the current Lord, as Christina had concluded.
The Tooth Fairy continued.
“Once we collect the teeth, we don’t care anymore, so unless there’s a trace of that dragon named Lize, we can’t find him… but…”
The Tooth Fairy trembled as if even his hands might betray him, worried Rune might not believe.
It didn’t look like acting at all.