The Dragon Who Hates Numbers
“Oh, Rai! It’s been a while.”
[Master…….]
“How’ve you been?”
When I tried to make small talk, Rai puffed out his cheeks and glared at me in clear displeasure.
A snake puffing out its cheeks. He really was getting too good at imitating humans.
[How could I possibly be fine! You went way too far! Throwing me at that stupid dragon and running off to live the easy life all by yourself!]
“What! The easy life? I’ve been barely surviving on nothing but sorrow every single day, you know?”
I shot back, but the words stung. Mostly because they were far too close to the truth.
[Liar! You sacrificed me like an offering and bought your own freedom! How could a master sell off their own spirit!]
“That’s not true!”
Anyone could see it was exactly what had happened, but I refused to admit it. If I did, Rai would only flap around in even greater outrage.
[Your face has been getting shinier and shinier by the day, Master!]
“You’re mistaken. Do you know how much I’ve been worrying about you? I couldn’t even sleep or eat properly……”
Mid-sentence, I glanced down at the rabbit meat in my hand and hastily wiped the grease from my mouth onto my clothes.
“Oh, right! I brought you a present!”
[You’re just trying to change the subject!]
“Rai, you said it yourself before. You wanted a new animal body with four legs. So I caught you a handsome wolf.”
Rai’s eyes lit up instantly, sparkling just like Magi’s.
[Really?]
“Of course!”
[I can trust you, right? You didn’t bring something weird again, did you, Master?]
Ever since that day, Rai’s body was still in ruins. The ugly, scorched, and withered form was the result of permanent corrosion from blocking the dragon’s breath inside the imperial palace. It was the kind of wound that would never heal on its own.
That was the power of a dragon’s breath, after all—widely considered the strongest attack on the continent.
In any case, Rai needed a completely new coating made from fresh materials. Since things had come to this, I had decided to make him a brand-new body. It was an incredibly tedious task, one I had been putting off for years, but if I wanted to soothe Rai’s deeply wounded pride, it had to be done.
“Something weird? When have I ever—”
[You brought back a salamander last time! It was barely any different from this body!]
“Wrong. It had four legs.”
[I don’t care! I hate it! You never understand how I feel, Master!]
Rai rejected every single new body candidate I brought him. He was exactly like a middle-school boy turning his nose up at every outfit his mother bought.
“You’re so picky.”
[Your taste is the weird one, Master! So where’s my new body? It’s not a polka-dotted wolf, is it?]
“Who even makes those? If one existed, I would’ve used it. Anyway, I left it in the cold storage…… Oh. Magi just went into that storage room. I don’t think I told him not to eat it yet, and it is technically yours.”
Rai whipped his head toward the back and shot off toward the storage room at lightning speed.
A moment later, the sounds of the two of them bickering echoed from inside. I took the opportunity to quickly finish off the rest of the rabbit meat before the noisy reptiles returned.
***
It was a good thing I had finished eating in a hurry.
Magi had insisted he didn’t want to eat alone and forced me to sit across from him while he began tearing into a raw ogre.
I had grown used to watching monsters get devoured whole, but that didn’t mean I could stomach eating while witnessing it.
Magi was noisily slurping up the ogre’s long, thick intestines like noodles.
In his dwarf form, no less.
How unsettling.
“Magi.”
“Hm? Why? Want a bite?”
“No, I’m good.”
I had no desire to accept that offer.
I wasn’t even curious where all of it was going.
“I wanted to ask you something. The storage room only had magic-related books. No spirit grimoires or anything else?”
“That’s all there is. It’s not like I collected them—Mom filled it up, so I don’t really know.”
“Hmm. You said this lair was a gift from your mom, right? I guess dragons have that kind of culture? Preparing for their child’s independence……”
“Probably not. My mom was really worried about me becoming independent. That’s why she stocked everything for me!”
That made sense. Magi was a somewhat lacking dragon, after all.
Even dragons loved their children the same way.
Watching Magi chew on an ogre’s finger like it was a squid leg, I thought to myself that my own tolerance had improved quite a bit.
“I even lied to the Dragon Lord, saying I’d only leave home once I turned five hundred even though I’m only four hundred. I told him I’d live with Mom for another hundred years and got scolded for it.”
“I thought dragons couldn’t lie?”
“Why? We’re pretty good at it.”
“I think I heard somewhere that dragons aren’t supposed to lie……”
“We just can’t break promises. Lying is fine!”
He said it with such confidence.
“Whenever we polymorph and wander around the human world, lying is basically all we do.”
“Ah, I see.”
“We just can’t make promises with humans! Mom always said trusting a human is something you only do when you want to die young.”
By that logic, Magi was doing everything his mother had told him not to. Keeping a human alive, bringing one into his lair, becoming friends with one, even making promises.
Honestly, this kid had so many openings that if I had any ill intentions, I could probably take advantage of them. It was obvious why young, relatively naive dragons like Magi often became easy prey for dragon slayers and ended up as footnotes in human legends.
Fortunately, I was far too safety-conscious to take that risk. Instead, I simply wiped the ogre blood from Magi’s mouth.
I could fully understand why his mother dragon didn’t want to let him go independent. The world was a dangerous place.
“By the way, Magi.”
I set down the book I had been reading and voiced the question that had suddenly occurred to me.
“Why are there so many magic theory books in the storage room? Dragons don’t need those, do they?”
“You mean the magic books?”
The book I had been reading out of boredom was fairly basic. At least, from the perspective of someone who had received a higher education.
Because it was magic-related, the content was somewhat complex for an ordinary person, but it was at the level children would learn at Drike Academy.
In other words, it seemed completely unnecessary for a dragon—the ancestor of magic itself.
“Those are the books I was studying.”
“……Who was?”
“Me!”
“But you’re a dragon?”
“Yeah, but I’m not very good at magic. That’s why.”
At first, I thought it was a joke—one of Magi’s unfunny attempts at humor.
“Puhaha!”
I laughed right in his face.
What nonsense!
“You’re polymorphed right now!”
“Yeah.”
“You teleported me here.”
“Yeah.”
“And you’re saying you can’t use magic?”
“Those are the only spells I know. Oh! There’s one more. Dimensional Storage Creation.”
This was absurd.
It was so absurd that for a moment, I forgot how to speak.
“So you’re saying……”
“That’s all.”
It was unbelievable, but Magi’s expression was completely sincere. What kind of fish-drowning nonsense was this?
“You’re actually a dragon, right?”
“I get that a lot.”
Magi continued calmly devouring the rest of the ogre, completely unbothered by my shock. His eyes were wide and round, and if he hadn’t been in dwarf form, the expression might have even been cute.
“Aren’t dragons supposed to use magic as naturally as breathing?”
“Probably? Most of them do.”
“……”
“But it’s too hard for me. I don’t get it.”
“Good grief.”
I had thought he was lacking, but this much?
Since when did dragons struggle with magic!
“At least for Polymorph and Teleport, Mom said they were essential, so I memorized the formulas while getting beaten. It took me twenty years just to memorize those!”
No, since when could you use magic just by memorizing it? If memorizing formulas was enough, wouldn’t everyone be able to do it?
“So you’re saying…… you can’t cast something like Fireball, but you can use Teleport?”
“Yeah!”
“That’s actually an incredible talent in its own way……”
Skipping the proper steps and casting high-level magic just by memorizing formulas meant that, at the very least, he possessed the basic talents of a dragon. An endless supply of mana in his heart, an innate sense for handling mana—those kinds of things.
If humans had to coax and soothe mana just to barely control it, dragons were born to dominate it. Those traits were physical, genetic factors, so of course he would have them.
Which meant what Magi lacked was……
“Mom keeps asking why I don’t understand it, but how am I supposed to understand something I don’t get? I just don’t like numbers.”
“Numbers……”
“She says I should be able to look at a formula and understand it automatically.”
“……”
“Mom and Dad can do it. But I can’t.”
“So you just memorized it?”
“It was so hard to memorize!”
I understood now.
It was becoming painfully clear that Magi’s intelligence was, in fact, below average. At least, for a dragon.
Dragons were practically all magical geniuses, famous for their exceptional intellect. They could perform mental calculations effortlessly and never forgot anything in their entire lives.
Dragons possessed such brilliant minds that forgetting was considered a blessing.
But Magi…… forgot things. Just like a human.
“Come here, Magi.”
“Hm?”
“Can you solve this formula?”
I opened the book to a page showing a third-class magic formula.
“I think I learned this……”
“You don’t remember?”
“I don’t know.”
“The Teleport spell you use every day is seventh-class magic, you know?”
“I know that much!”
From what I could see, Magi was in a peculiar state.
He could sing the national anthem but had no idea what the words meant. He had memorized the characters like pictures rather than understanding them as letters.
If basic magic was single-digit addition and subtraction, high-level magic was seven-digit multiplication and division. Magi needed to start from the beginning and actually understand addition, but instead, he had given up on it entirely and flopped over.
Perhaps to other dragons, someone like Magi was so far below their level that they simply didn’t know how to teach him. It would be like asking a genius to teach a toddler.
Maybe dragons were never meant to be taught in the first place. They were supposed to awaken and understand everything on their own.
“Magi……”
“Why are you looking at me with the same eyes as Mom? Jeanie?”
“Do I look that pitiful?”
“Yeah.”
What a waste of talent.
He had been born with a dragon’s magical aptitude, yet his brain was only at a human level!
This kid was going to need education tailored to a much lower level.
Though putting him in a human academy was out of the question……
Wait. This might actually work.
“Magi. Want me to teach you magic?”