The Dragon That Drinks Uranium (4)
The Dragon That Drinks Uranium (4)
I sat down heavily on the stone floor halfway up Pitchblende Mountain to catch my breath for a moment.
[I do believe you are the only crazy bitch in the entirety of the Arens Continent who would climb a mountain in the dead of night, Master.]
And it was not just any hike. It was a climb up a steep, treacherous peak. One moment of distraction and a fatal fall was all but guaranteed.
The place I was climbing now was a summit called Falling Dragon Peak. By my standards, it held an object that qualified as a fortuitous encounter.
"Hoo."
My break ended with a single Mana Cigarette. I resumed the climb.
[Current natural radiation concentration is 2.14 Sieverts.]
The radiation exposure on Pitchblende Mountain increased the higher one climbed. As the name suggested, it was an ore deposit containing a massive body of uraninite.
[Current natural radiation concentration is 3.29 Sieverts.]
No modern person is ignorant of the dangers of radiation exposure.
Even a single Sievert causes nausea and full-body weakness. If someone took a dose approaching 4 Sieverts, they would have a fifty percent chance of living on a one-month clock from that point onward.
The current concentration was dangerous for a human body. The absence of people up here compared to the actively mined lower slopes was no mystery.
"Huff, haah."
Gasping for breath, I finally reached the summit.
The constant dry heaving was not solely due to the radiation. I had run from far below to here as if using the Shukuchi Technique, to the point where I could taste sweetness inside my mouth.
[But why did you come here?]
I kept silent, even at the Hardcover Book's question. I cut off Flame Speech with it and instead replayed my conversation with Vermel in my head.
— Go find me a fortuitous encounter.
"They're using me to handle leftovers."
No, wait. I was not a person, so was that why they made me handle leftovers?
Chewing on that bitter thought, I looked around for any suspicious rocks. Before long, I discovered a cave in a bizarrely shaped rock formation, large enough for a single person to enter, where two stones seemed pressed against each other.
[Wow, there was a cave in a place like this.]
An ominous energy surged out from the crevice. If I had brought a Geiger Counter here, it would have been clicking like mad.
A fantasy-world Chernobyl stood before my eyes.
I squeezed my body through the gap, and a fairly large interior revealed itself. A path appeared to stretch deep into the depths below.
[The surroundings are completely filled with pitchblende.]
From the point where the silver veins ended, a festival of black ore began. The further I walked, the more I saw yellowish-hued stones that I kicked underfoot.
I gathered suitably sized chunks of them and put them into my pocket. No matter how much I took, it would be insufficient to run a Manhattan Project, but that did not matter.
"How stuffy. I'm dying."
After walking for a while, breathing became uncomfortable. An ordinary lighter could barely hold a flame, so I used a Fire Magic Scroll as a torch and pressed on.
I did not know how long I walked like that.
-Drip, drip.
Somewhere, the sound of water dripping echoed. I moved my steps in that direction, and breathing became markedly easier.
[Strange. Given the nature of an enclosed cave space, the oxygen concentration should not change because of something like this....]
"It means oxygen is being supplied from somewhere."
[Is that even possible?]
It was not entirely impossible. Water could fundamentally collect oxygen, after all.
— Once you enter the cave where the Radiation Dragon is, it'll gradually get harder to breathe. When that happens, move in the direction the wind is blowing from, and you'll meet the beast.
Truly helpful advice. I recalled Vermel's words once more and navigated the horizontal cave at maximum speed.
Panting, I checked my watch: 1:58 AM. To meet the creature that appeared exactly at 2 o'clock, I had to reach the location of the shrine as fast as possible.
[Two o'clock.]
"I'm not late."
The scenery spread before me was dreamlike. The space was so beautiful one could call it a scene from a fairy tale.
The stalagmites and stalactites glowed with fluorescence in the darkness, as if coated with tritium. And nesting there, bathed in the luminous glow of those stalactites, was—
[Good heavens. A glow-in-the-dark dinosaur!]
A dragon the size of an apartment building lay asleep. Its scales were made of steel, and patches across its body glowed the same color as the stalactites.
Around the luminous dragon, four Iron Drakes were likewise deep in slumber. They were all plated with gold. Exactly the same model as the drakes I had seen at the entrance ceremony.
"It has been a while since a guest came to this place."
While I was briefly entranced by the majestic forms of the dragon and drakes, my back was seized.
"Shall I have a look at your face and see who you are?"
The voice was a girl's tone, leisurely and tinged with mischief. A strange noise was mixed into that tone. Beyond that, there was even the sound of something dragging along the ground.
When I turned around, no one was there. I reflexively realized that the girl in question had moved to the front.
"Over here, right here."
The girl smiled softly, stroking the sleeping dragon's head.
She wore a pure-white priestess robe. From the first moment I saw her, her eyes were gently closed. I hurriedly scanned her features.
Horn-like protrusions jutted from both temporal lobes, and both of them looked as if they had been cleanly severed by something. Moreover, beneath her side-slit priestess robe, a tail swayed gently, dragging along the floor.
Severed horns, a tail like an iron mace, eyes that remained closed at rest.
From the three conditions Vermel had given me, deducing her identity was not difficult.
"Are you the Radiation Dragon?"
"So you do know of me?"
There was a story in the Creation Myth.
Long ago, there was a pitiful dragon who waged war against the Goddess's authority, was cursed, and became bound to this Pitchblende Mountain.
The girl opened her mouth slightly, as if a little surprised.
"Strictly speaking, my current self is a shabby half. My original body is right behind me."
As expected.
— She cursed humans and elves and waged war against the Goddess. As the price of her defeat, her main body was taken, and she was imprisoned in the human form she so utterly despised.
The girl's statement matched exactly what Vermel had told me. It seemed I had come to the right place after all.
Radiation Dragon Jormungand.
I had heard she valued recompense above any other creature in the world. For me, who liked relationships built on equal exchange, she was the ideal trading partner.
"So."
The girl opened her eyes and asked.
"What does a compatriot want, to have come all the way here?"
**
Aether had vanished without a trace or a word.
"Huh?"
Staring at the empty bed by the window, Rote blanked out for a while.
No matter how she thought about it, she felt like she was dreaming. After all, there was no way Aether would just suddenly disappear.
"W-where did she go?"
Like a child trying to find a lost toy, Rote paced around, tracking Aether's whereabouts.
She searched every corner of the house, including the hallways and rooms. She even made a round of the garden to check if Aether was strolling in the inner courtyard. But nowhere could she find any trace that Aether was or ever had been there.
Her mind went blank as paper.
Why, suddenly, now? It was all so abrupt and out of nowhere.
"She'll come back on her own... right?"
Rote returned to her room and decided to wait. The ticking of the clock hands grated on her nerves more than usual today.
Sleep was completely out of the question now.
Her already complicated thoughts tangled up like a knotted spool of thread. Not only had her father unexpectedly named her the next head of the family, but she had also been asked to carry on the legacy of a secret Magic Art the family was developing.
For the highly responsible Rote, it was a heavy burden. Setting aside the succession issue, she had no confidence in developing a Fire Magic with such enormous explosive power.
She had keenly felt the difference in talent from Aether while developing Flare. And Rote sensed intuitively that the research her father was conducting this time would be far more difficult than a mere Flare.
Could she do it well?
Her head had not been working properly all day from dwelling on such thoughts. Rote chewed at her fingernails and resolved to organize her thoughts while waiting for Aether to return.
Before she knew it, over an hour had passed. Her friend still had not come back.
"Where on earth did she go?"
This would not do. She could not sleep anyway, so she decided to go searching herself.
The Saliere County was a well-ordered city. Compared to other regions, the nighttime crime rate was low and there was no curfew, but that did not guarantee Aether's safety.
That was because of natural disasters.
According to the weather forecast, the rainy season would begin at the earliest today, or at the latest by tomorrow. It was the most unwelcome of uninvited guests, storming the Saliere Territory every summer, causing a bout of flooding, and then fleeing.
Every time that happened, Pitchblende Mountain was swept by earth and slowly crumbled. It was a dangerous place due to rockfalls even in normal times, but during the rainy season, it became utterly hopeless.
"Right, Pitchblende Mountain."
Recollecting the position of the mountain Aether had been staring at right before bed, Rote clapped her hands together as if struck by a realization.
"She was definitely looking at Falling Dragon Peak!"
The thought was brief. She must have gone near there for sure. From the nostalgic look in Aether's eyes and the conversation at dinner, Rote could roughly deduce her whereabouts.
Rote threw on her robe, wrote a note in case her family worried, and jumped out the second-story window. Aether was making her worry out of nowhere.
"When I find her, I'm going to hit her once."
Rote pulled a small scroll from her pocket.
If she used a scroll containing Air Magic, it was possible to leap several meters in a single stride. Infusing mana into the emergency Shukuchi Technique scroll, Rote shot out at once toward Pitchblende Mountain.
Though it was called a mountain of stone, the lowlands were forest. Trees planted by Rote's father to minimize flood damage held the soil firm.
— It's fucking steep.
"That voice...."
The speech pattern, the tone, even the parts where the accent fell were identical.
It was unmistakably Aether.
Rote memorized the direction the sound came from and ran at her maximum speed. A human silhouette fell across the densely packed fir trees.
"Hey! If you're in a place like this...!"
Rote, who had yelled at the blurry shadow, soon slammed the brakes on her hastened steps.
"Wh-what."
A girl approached through the absolute darkness in response to her words.
Her hair was pure white.