Home Visit (5)
"Krruluk!"
The gulroks came boiling out of the mushroom colony. They seemed to possess a fair measure of intelligence—crude weapons hung from their hands, and a few had even thrown together something like armor.
Worse still, they understood the concept of formation. Shield-bearers with mushroom-shell shields formed the front rank, while behind them spearmen armed with long harpoons stood in ordered rows.
And farther back loomed warrior-caste individuals, towering conspicuously above the rest. The higher castes, by all appearances, carried strength on the level of a Grade-5 species or better.
"Arf! Arf!"
Vitten was the first to charge. The man had four legs at the moment, mind you—four—and he tore straight across the plain and slammed into the gulrok front line with the headlong momentum of a boar stampede.
CRUNCH!
Half a dozen gulroks went airborne along with their burst mushroom shields.
Srudal plunged through the broken line next. He swung his enormous two-hander as deftly as a needle, delicately harvesting heads one clean stroke at a time.
The next runner was Shaka.
"Hahaha, die!"
"Krruk!"
Before Shaka's psychic ability, the gulroks couldn't so much as twitch. She cut the frozen creatures down without mercy, mowing them like sheaves of straw.
And freezing them wasn't all she did. The moment a gulrok so much as met her eyes, it plunged into a berserk frenzy and lashed out at anything that moved, friend and foe alike.
Thalia saw no need to step forward herself. She guarded my side, and whenever one of the creatures strayed too close, she cut it down with swordplay swift as a lightning bolt.
Since her return from the imperial capital, her skill had improved by leaps and bounds. There was no excess in her movements, and mana spilled overflowing from her blade.
The depth of her mana, her mastery of technique, the bite of her sword aura—in every respect, it was plain that she stood at the very threshold of Grand Master.
And Laszlo...
"Hyaah!"
His battle cry was the loudest of anyone's.
"Krruuk!"
The gulrok was no pushover either. It weathered Laszlo's attack on raw toughness, and the wounds his sword opened healed over in moments, sealed shut by fungal threads.
While he grappled with the one, others piled in to join the fray.
"Ghk!"
A thick cudgel slammed hard into Laszlo's flank. He staggered back, unable to shake off the shock, and the gulroks seized the opening to rain down blows at random. Every time he turned a club aside, his gaunt upper body wobbled as though it might fold clean in two.
"Shall I intervene?" Thalia asked.
I watched a bead of sweat trace down the line of Laszlo's jaw. At the crossroads of life and death, his fighting spirit burned brighter still. His blue eyes flickered like will-o'-the-wisps.
"...Let's watch a little longer."
I could feel the surrounding mana answering Laszlo's will. The flow of the air was changing.
Laszlo was a prodigy of the immortals—a child blessed by mana itself.
Mana had whispered ceaselessly at his ear: you are special; Awoken abilities are nothing at all.
All he had ever needed to do was listen.
— My child.
The Dao is not something one sets out to find.
For the Dao has already found you.
His master's teaching flashed through his mind. The raging wind gave off a low, thrumming hum, and the qi of the air coiled around Laszlo's body and wheeled about him, plain for the eye to see.
Laszlo moved with the wind, nimble and light. The gulrok could not begin to match his speed. Overwhelming joy broke across the boy's face.
From the look of it, the boy was a natural fit for the Wind Spirit Arts. Thanks to my Cold Yin Severed Meridians, even casting a technique came hedged with restrictions—whereas this kid, unlike anyone I'd ever known, had apparently gone and won the constitution lottery on top of everything else.
"...Remarkable."
Curiosity had surfaced in Thalia's voice.
"He most certainly had no Awoken Ability before."
She turned to me. "Is it a discipline akin to yours, Lord Iden?"
She meant: did he possess some inexplicable, game-breaking Awoken Ability like mine?
"He does. He'll be worth watching from here on."
Once the officer-grade members cut loose, the gulroks could hold no longer. They abandoned hundreds of corpses in their attempt to withdraw.
I laid Blazing Sky Flame across every route they might flee through. The mushroom colony roared up in flames and swallowed what few remained whole.
"It astonishes me that gulroks should command an organization of this caliber. Today's findings alone would be more than enough to turn the academic world on its head."
Srudal seemed beside himself. He fished out pen and paper and scribbled away in a frenzy, the pen shaft looking one squeeze from snapping in his grip.
"Young Master! Young Master Iden!"
Laszlo was in an even greater state of excitement.
"I—I think I finally understand why you picked me!"
The boy was drunk on the euphoria of having opened his eyes to the Dao for the very first time.
"Saw that. You fight well."
I gave him a smile. No wonder he was beside himself—how much heartache must he have swallowed all this time? Everyone around him was Awakened but him; how could dark thoughts not have crept in?
"Haha... worthless little things."
Shaka looked to have tipped slightly over the edge into madness. She had just put down fifty-odd gulroks in a row, all on her own.
A psychic sensitivity is a double-edged sword. To drive others mad, you must first be mad yourself. The deranged idea of plunging gulroks into berserk frenzies had come straight out of her head.
Just how horrifying does an idea have to be to break a monster's mind? Hence the tongue flicking out over a face painted in blood.
"A grand victory, I'd say. Though they were nothing but small fry."
Vitten had released his transformation.
"Save the self-congratulations. The real thing will be deeper in."
The Seventh Grand Master.
There was no way Ivan Esterzy had descended into the Underworld over nothing more than Grade-5 monsters.
"Vitten, can you take point?"
"Arf!"
Vitten had turned back into a dog somewhere along the way. He set off at a stride full of conviction, until at last he came to a stop before a mound of dung piled high as a hill—hardened like fossil, voided so very long ago.
"Don't tell me this is earth dragon dung?"
We all craned our necks to look up at Srudal. In a moment like this, the only soul worth trusting was Srudal—knight and ecologist both. He crouched to the ground and gingerly prodded through the mound with the tip of his sword.
"I cannot say for certain, but it appears beyond doubt to be the byproduct of some colossal creature rivaling a dragon."
It looked that way to me too. You hardly needed to be an ecologist to notice the sheer girth of the thing.
"Dragons, however, seldom consume enough organic matter to relieve themselves at all. They can live on absorbed mana alone."
"Then why is this here...?"
"It must have been left with no choice but to eat something."
"Squeak!"
Ruby answered from my shoulder. For some reason, the little cry sounded utterly forlorn.
We hurried on. The mushroom colony unrolled without end, and between its stretches the gulroks massed their forces and came at us several times more.
The peskier the gulroks grew, the more dung mounds littered the way—and the stronger my hunch became that we were closing in on the place we sought.
We had just reached the mouth of a gorge so deep it made the eyes water when we ran headlong into a host of more than a thousand gulroks.
It was the largest army we had met yet, and remarkably well armed besides. Squint, and you could almost mistake them for an army of humankind.
Then it happened.
"Squeeeak—!"
Ruby hopped down from my shoulder.
"Ruby...?"
All at once his body swelled to a monstrous size. He had released the shrinking technique under his own power, and now he came thundering toward the gorge, boom, boom, boom.
"Everyone, cover Ruby!"
A moment later I realized what an absurd order that was.
The presence of a magma dragon was nothing short of a natural disaster. The thousand-odd gulroks lost their will to fight before Ruby had even reached them.
"G-grrruk?!"
The dragon's vast bulk ground dozens of gulroks into the dirt. Beside that, Vitten's charge had been a passing breeze.
Shattering the gulrok battle square to splinters, Ruby plunged into the gorge. The cliff face sheared away by his body came tumbling down in landslides.
"Watch your heads!"
Thalia's warning cracked through the air like a whip.
BOOOM—!
In an instant, pouring earth blotted the sky black above our heads. Borrowing the wind's strength, I shoved the tumbling rocks far off to the side.
"Lord Iden...!"
Laszlo stood beside me, mouth hanging wide open.
"You saw it, didn't you."
He nodded, stiff as a board. The boy had opened his eyes to the wind attribute mere seconds ago.
Anyone else would have felt nothing more than a vague stirring of mana. But in his eyes, there must have been a dragon made of wind.
We climbed over the rock piles and entered the basin deeper within. The basin appeared to be the gulroks' main stronghold—crude structures stood packed together beyond counting, and...
"It is the earth dragon's carcass!"
But that wasn't the important part. An earth dragon—no, a colossal dragon stretching well past thirty meters—lay sprawled across the basin. It had been dead so long that its bones had bleached down to bare white skeleton.
KRAAAAAR—!
Ruby loosed a muffled, anguished roar. Then he set about hammering the gulroks' homes to pieces with his forepaws and tail, wild and unrelenting. I had never once seen him this furious.
"...Time to take out the trash, then."
Shaka's eyes were gleaming yellow. I didn't need psychic sensing to know what she felt. Ruby's grief came through, vivid and unmistakable.
"I will hold the line of retreat."
Thalia finally unleashed her Awoken Ability. A shroud of deathly mist claimed the gorge's narrow pass in thick, suffocating billows.
Once we pooled our strength and swept the gulroks clean away, Ruby shrank back down all on his own, without borrowing a shred of my power.
How was such a thing even possible? Had he absorbed the technique I used through sheer instinct alone?
Far too many secrets were nested in that little body. Ruby, a tiny lizard once more, made straight for a pond cradled within the great dragon's remains.
The pond had run dry; in place of water it was filled with minerals that must once have been called a dragon's hoard. The filth the gulroks secreted had robbed them of their luster and left them faded and dull.
Ruby dove in and went sliding across the hoard as though swimming.
"..."
I stood at the edge of the pond and watched him in silence.
The dragon's hoard was neither Oradium nor Doomsteel. Nothing more than glittering pebbles.
But to Ruby, those pebbles were worth more than any treasure. In his memory, this place must once have shone far, far brighter than it did now.
"Lord Iden," Srudal said. "Look above you."
One of the earth dragon's ribs arched across the sky above the pond. It had been snapped clean through at its midpoint—and the cross-section was far too smooth.
"Sword-qi, then."
"Yes. The handiwork of a Grand Master."
And no middling Grand Master, either. Someone capable of landing a killing blow on a mature dragon thirty meters and more in length. Felling a dragon at the height of its power was unthinkable for anyone who had not ascended to the Immortal Realm itself.
"Could it have been Sir Ivan Esterzy?"
"Further study will be required, I believe. As I understand it, the genealogists are combing through the camp even now. Records may yet come to light there—or additional camps may yet be discovered."
My own guess ran something like this: long ago, someone brought the earth dragon down. The dragon vein lost its strength, and the gulroks spread their dominion along with the mushroom colony. And once he could no longer guard the hoard, Ruby must have chosen to leave the nest.
"Ruby."
"Squeak."
He sidled quietly back to my side.
"It's time for us to leave this place."
We were nowhere near ready to spend a night out here. Knowing how the gulroks swarmed, we would have to reinforce the camp's defenses as well.
"I'll give you time. Go take one last look around."
"Squeak!"
Ruby seemed to recover a little of his spirit. While he was gone, I turned the earth dragon's carcass over with my eyes a while longer.
The unknown combatant had not stopped at the rib. The scars carved into the bones alone told of a battle of staggering scale.
"Shall we take the gemstones?" Thalia asked.
"Leave them be."
I had no intention of marring Ruby's memories for the sake of a pocketful of coin.
We were on the point of moving out when Ruby came running back and clamped his teeth on my trouser leg.
"Squeeeak—!"
He wanted to lead me somewhere, that much was clear. I signaled Vitten with a glance.
He led us to a ruin that dwarfed the other smashed gulrok homesteads. By my best guess, it was where whatever passed for their chieftain had lived.
"What could possibly be in here?"
Gulroks had no habit of collecting valuables, nor hands skilled enough to produce anything resembling fine craftsmanship. Worth salvaging from a ruin like this...
"Lord Iden!"
Vitten's voice suddenly shot up into a shriek.
"There's something like this tucked in the back corner!"
Held aloft in his hand was an egg the size of my head.