Dragon-king
Dragon-king
Tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of deaths. The lines of possibility that slipped past him were countless; the openings he could exploit, agonizingly few. A single misstep meant death, and yet Aslan hurled himself forward.
Screech!
The bloodsword struck, sparks showering. The slash, wreathed in white flame, skittered off the scales without penetrating.
Before the blood spurting from the wrist and arm that gripped the hilt could even wet the floor, Aslan blinked.
'Save.'
Another few hundred deaths piled atop the rest, and Aslan advanced.
Every time that milky white trail carved an arc through the air, his offense was parried, and more of his own blood spilled. It streamed freely from his mouth, his nose, his eyes as he fought on.
He might die. No—he would die. In any other circumstance, Aslan would have fled to survive and plotted his next move. Now, he was fighting on the very edge of death.
Because there was no defeating a high priest without wounds. Without sacrifice.
Because a man could only grasp what lay beyond death by walking through it first.
His resolve—his refusal to lose anyone else—drove his blade and his body forward.
Kagagagak, clang!
A flurry of blows rained down at a speed beyond sight. He countered every attack by dying a thousand times in the span of a heartbeat. Each parry sent blood geysering from his wrist; it poured from his mouth, but he did not stop. Every blink brought a fresh flash of foresight.
Kaang!
A single strike. Aslan's purity bit into the Dragon-king's chest, carving through scale before skipping off with a dark crack left behind.
The Dragon-king scowled at the wound and snapped out a front kick. Aslan blocked with the bloodsword overlaying the stone blade and was sent flying. He tumbled across the floor, and as he rolled to a halt, the Dragon-king clicked his tongue.
That sword was no ordinary weapon.
It was a blade that cleaved the soul—a lethal poison to any priest.
Had it been a priest of any other god—one whose flesh was less unyielding than the Dragon-king's—it would have killed them several times over by now.
The reason the Dragon-king had survived Aslan's onslaught was simple: he was a priest who kept his soul sealed within the core of his chest.
But the more blows he suffered, the more his defenses eroded. With a low click of his tongue, the Dragon-king lunged again.
He hammered at Aslan with a torrent of punches, kicks, and sweeps of his tail. Through it all, Aslan endured.
'Burn everything you have right now. Push past the limit. If I truly mean to sacrifice myself, then dying here is acceptable.'
He had to win. Even as the volcanic heat turned his body sluggish and his failing brain slowly lost its functions, Aslan kept moving, kept thinking.
He danced atop a mountain of corpses—corpses he had piled up by the hundreds of thousands. The floor ran crimson with shed blood.
'Save.'
When Aslan's eyes flashed this time, the Dragon-king was finally driven back onto the defensive. He knocked the blade aside with the back of his hand, blocked a kick with his leg, and shattered Aslan's balance with a stomp—barely avoiding the blow.
'He's pushing me back. He's growing stronger, even now.'
The Dragon-king was alarmed. Warriors who grew fiercer the closer they came to death were not rare. Some could even steel themselves to the point of welcoming it.
But none of them had ever seized what lay beyond death itself the way Aslan did.
The Dragon-king gritted his teeth and roared.
"Then you will die here, Aslan!"
He met the threat head-on, sensing the danger. White light and ink-black darkness clashed in a maddening blur. With every impact, the mingled black and white scattered as sparks into the air around them.
If the fight continued like this, if Aslan kept pressing forward—he could win.
If Aslan had not been human, it might even have been possible.
Chelang!
But limits always arrived. Aslan's spent mind flickered for an instant, and his purity guttered out. The stone sword slipped from his grasp and embedded itself in the floor.
His exhausted brain could no longer form the word 'save.' He had no foresight left to give.
The moment his purity died, the Dragon-king's fist met the bloodsword—and shattered it into a thousand fragments.
Kaang-ng-ng-ng!
The bloodsword screamed its last cry. Blood-red shards of the blade scattered through the air. In the midst of it, Aslan realized his consciousness had blinked out for a fraction of a second.
Foresight was not omnipotence. No matter how clearly he could see, he could not dodge everything. The gap in power between him and the Dragon-king was simply that vast—and Aslan's weapon had been nowhere near intact.
The bloodsword lay in pieces. His fighting spirit had been severed. As if that were the signal, Aslan dropped to his knees.
Blood cascaded from his mouth, his nose, his eyes like a waterfall.
His vision blurred, swimming in the unending torrent of red.
He could feel the flow of blood rushing toward his head with terrible clarity. Death beckoned from a hand's breadth away.
His overheated brain flickered, on the verge of surrendering to the death bearing down on him.
All that remained of the bloodsword was the hilt—the sword Dmitri had wielded for so long. It slipped from Aslan's fingers and sank into the molten rock.
"...It is over, at last."
The Dragon-king's voice.
Aslan forced his nearly unresponsive head up and looked at him.
Aslan's desperate struggle—the countless slashes—had never truly landed.
Despite all those attempts, all that strife, Aslan had failed to reach the Dragon-king.
He had hammered endlessly at the shape of the future, honed his foresight into a razor's edge, and responded to every threat—but in the end, he was still human.
Aslan, who could not cast aside his humanity, could not defeat a high priest. Could not defeat the Dragon-king.
A high priest.
One who was fighting at full strength, without a shred of carelessness.
A high priest like that could not be brought down unless a miracle occurred.
And even if a miracle did occur, an ordinary person would never be allowed even a taste of its smallest fragment.
The same held true for Aslan—who had cut down countless priests and unraveled countless deaths.
His preparations had been lacking.
His strength had been insufficient.
His resolve had fallen short.
Aslan glared at the Dragon-king with clouded eyes, straining to move arms that only trembled uselessly, legs that refused to respond at all.
His head twitched and jerked as blood poured from his eyes, his nose, his mouth.
The pooling blood spread scarlet across the floor.
Even seeing Aslan in such a pitiful state, the Dragon-king did not approach.
He remained cautious to the very last, keeping his distance while settling into a stable stance.
Energy churned inside his gaping jaws. It coalesced into the shape of a breath attack.
A wide, radiant blast meant to scour and incinerate everything in its path.
The Dragon-king was being thorough, determined not to leave Aslan even the smallest opening.
Aslan watched helplessly as the Dragon-king moved to crown his death.
He had possessed the will.
He had possessed the fighting spirit.
He had possessed the skill, and the equipment.
Aslan lacked only one thing.
A miracle.
If there had been even a small miracle.
Even a weak miracle, too feeble to overturn the situation.
If a miracle had been there, Aslan could have won.
The breath erupted. It was a blast so potent that it not only charred everything around it black but melted it outright—even the lava parted to make way for its passage.
Aslan had no means to dodge that attack. No way to counter it.
But a miracle was not some convenient savior that appeared when called.
A miracle was only granted to those who refused to surrender, who fought ceaselessly against their fate.
Like right now.
Kwhaaaa!
The breath radiated outward, melting everything in its surroundings as it surged toward Aslan. In that instant, something erupted from the deep, molten rock and threw itself into its path.
It was a sword.
A bizarre sword, seemingly forged from the lava itself, dripping with molten metal.
A strange blade that melted endlessly yet never diminished in shape or size.
Its hilt was short, like that of a one-handed sword, but its blade was broad and long, like a greatsword's.
Liquid metal dripped from it, giving it the appearance of a unique and untouchable relic.
That sword split the breath and shielded Aslan. While the churning energy made lava leap and spray, scorching and melting the walls, the blade stood unscathed.
A sword that endured a breath powerful enough to crater the earth without a single crack marring its surface.
Aslan stared at it, dazed.
He could not comprehend what was happening. His abused brain was too exhausted to form a single thought, let alone a theory.
Only the Dragon-king recognized the sword.
"You... you would reveal yourself now, after all this time?!"
No one answered his shout, but the Dragon-king craned his neck upward, his face twisted with rage, as though the being who had sent the sword down was standing directly above them.
"Lord of Ten Thousand Weapons!"
He was furious. The Dragon-king, who had not shown even a sliver of emotion during the entire battle, was now seething.
Hearing the name 'Lord of Ten Thousand Weapons' within that fury, Aslan stirred, a memory surfacing.
A being vast enough to blanket an entire city. The progenitor of the dragon-kin.
The master smith who had forged all the weapons in the world, and whose sons had offered their father their first and final works.
A being who wielded an armory of ten thousand such offerings. A weapon of ten thousand weapons.
The God of Fire and Smithing.
Aslan repeated the name unconsciously. As it crossed his lips, a vision flickered into existence beyond the melting sword.
It was a dragon.
A dragon of crimson, so colossal it rivaled a city.
Larger than any city and taller than any mountain range, the dragon was soaring into the sky.
It flew over Aslan's head, close enough to brush the top of his scalp. His hair whipped wildly, and a faint trickle of vitality returned to his body.
Torn muscles and shattered bones knitted themselves. His heart and brain, nearly spent to the point of failure, regained their function.
The strength that returned was only enough to let him move a handful of times more—but Aslan reached out with it.
Where the vision had been, the sword now rested.
As if in a trance, Aslan extended his hand without thinking.
Following only the vague certainty that he had to do this, he closed his grip around the hilt.
A sword that should have melted his hand, fused flesh and molten metal together and crippled him.
A sword that would have done exactly that to any ordinary person who tried to hold it. Aslan grasped it, and before his flesh could burn and his bones could melt, his lips moved.
He murmured.
Words that came to him unbidden, surpassing all logic.
"Purity."
Fwoosh!
White fire flowed from the hilt in response. It ran along the blade, all the way to its tip.
That flowing flame—within the sublime fighting spirit of a single human being—tempered the sword.
"Aaaaslaaan!"
The Dragon-king bellowed as he charged. At that very moment, the weapon revealed itself within the white flame.
A fitting blade for the hero who had hammered and hammered, endlessly tempering his life until it had been forged into a single sword.
A circular shockwave blasted outward, hurling the Dragon-king back into the wall.
As the shockwave dissipated, a message slowly materialized before Aslan's eyes.
[Effect of Purity]
[Can sever the link between a god and their priest.]
[Will not extinguish so long as the wielder's fighting spirit remains.]
[Heart of Sorrow - Can cleave divinity and spirit bodies.]
[遺덉쓽 寃? - 踰좉퀬蟻뤰壬섎㈃ 洹룁臾댁뾿薏대뱺 踰㎌飮쀞蟻덇퀬, 擬대뼡 薏쇱뿉悠꺸遺?游ъ?吏? 懿딆뒿宥덈떎.]
[Becomes stronger the more it resonates with the divinity of an Ancient God.]
Through the broken string of text, divinity bled out. Slowly, that divine power stitched the characters back together.
Like a hammer pounding steel on an anvil, the letters were reassembled one by one.
What finally revealed itself was legible and clear.
[Effect of Purity]
[Can sever the link between a god and their priest.]
[Will not extinguish so long as the wielder's fighting spirit remains.]
[Heart of Sorrow - Can cleave divinity and spirit bodies.]
[Sword of Fire - If you will it to cut, it will cut anything, and it will never break, no matter the circumstance.]
[Becomes stronger the more it resonates with the divinity of an Ancient God.]
Beyond the message, the sword was beautiful.
As if wrought from platinum, its blade glistened in a purely white hue. The energy rippling across that sheen was the flame of purity itself.
The width of the blade was the breadth of a grown man's palm; its length was so great it looked almost unwieldable.
But the figure of Aslan rising to his feet beyond the system message was not the same.
He lifted the sword.
His arms still would not move properly. His legs still creaked. His head throbbed dully, and blood still trickled from his eyes and mouth.
"You dare, you dare...! Defeated as you are... you dare interfere so shamelessly, Lord of Ten Thousand Weapons!"
The Dragon-king, by contrast, was unscathed. His limbs were intact, and he had not permitted a single true cut to his body. He bore only cracks, not wounds.
The situation was still catastrophic. The molten heat bubbling around them was killing Aslan by the second.
But he would not retreat any further.
Because victory could not be seized without wounds. Without sacrifice.
Aslan watched the Dragon-king charge at him. The lava beneath the Dragon-king's feet parted; shockwaves from his supersonic dash ripped through the chamber.
A fist thrust toward him. A direct hit would be death. That much had not changed. It was no different from any moment before now.
But the result was different.
Aslan raised Purity.
The final blade forged by one of the Ancient Gods—the God of Smithing who had hammered the weapons of every deity, the father of all dragons, the Lord of Ten Thousand Weapons.
A divine relic tempered for the hero destined to save the world.
The one and only sword meant to kill an evil god.
Despite its aberrant design and the expectations bound within it, the blade was shockingly easy to wield. A god's sword in truth.
Holding that sword, Aslan opened his mouth as if to expel the heat filling his lungs, and he screamed.
"Aaaaaah!"
His limbs still wouldn't obey him properly. A single moment's lapse in concentration would mean death or collapse. This roar was a desperate cry to wring out every last scrap of strength he possessed.
Undeterred by the oppressive heat surging around it, pristine white light traced an arc—and split the ink-dark scales.
Crack. Crrrrack!
It carved through impossibly dense scales and grotesquely hardened machine-muscle, then burst clear through the scales on the opposite side.
Seogeok!
A wound on the Dragon-king's arm—an arm that had never before suffered even a scratch.
A body that had never been brought to its knees in a thousand years.
His left arm finally met its first agony and fell away. As the severed limb spun through the air, the Dragon-king's eyes flew wide.
A miracle as thin as a thread—so small that anyone else would have failed to grasp it.
The very moment that miracle shone, Aslan did not let it go.
A miracle had arrived, here and now.
The hero and the dragon collided for the last time.