The Path to Ascension (4)
Once the meal was over, Zaktar led me up onto the fortress walls, where lizardman warriors stood their watch with Korvash's Harpoons in hand.
"Two months ago, Ogrmar marched an army against us. The losses among my brothers were heavy, but thanks to the harpoons we barely managed to drive him off. Since then, he has shut himself inside King Ksilak's palace to recover."
"Then we'll just have to drag him back out of that palace."
"It will not be easy. He is a very cunning creature."
Cheep—!
Ruby, perched on my shoulder, made her displeasure known. I ran my hand slowly down her back in consolation.
"That last battle, we were simply lucky. Had that Magma Breath struck the fortress dead-on, there would be nothing left standing here at all."
A dragon's breath only grew stronger with age. The breath of an elder dragon could wipe a fortress off the map without so much as trying.
"Do you have a plan?"
"Our entire strategy is to bury as many harpoons in his hide as we possibly can. To speak honestly, before you joined us I did not hold out much hope."
"You don't even know what I'm capable of."
"I do not. But I know for certain that you are stronger than I am."
That took me a little by surprise. And here I'd thought I was keeping my presence well hidden. So this was what Srudal had meant about lizardmen being natural-born hunters?
No wonder the man had been so generous to me from the moment we met. All this time, he'd been quietly brimming with the hope that I would help him bring down a dragon.
Not that I could complain. He had, after all, agreed to my condition that the dragon's heart be handed over to me.
On top of that, the lizardman Royal Guard was leveled high enough to rival the Frost Knights or the Steel Guard. My own knights were under Thalia's command back home in any case. Unless I meant to strip soldiers away from her, these lizards here were the strongest force I could put into the field.
"Zaktar."
"What is it, Srudal?"
"The truth is, there's something I've been keeping from you. Now that we're in the same boat, I'd like to come clean about it."
"A secret the shaman has kept until now... that is enough to frighten me."
"I'm a dragon tamer."
"What...?"
Zaktar pushed back, plainly failing to follow.
"See this lizard here?"
I pointed at Ruby sitting on my shoulder. She let out a single squeak — for all the world like a performer about to take the stage.
"This is her true form."
I flung Ruby straight out over the wall. She turned a practiced somersault in midair and, in a burst of dazzling light, returned to her original shape.
Zaktar's eyes bulged in shock. A colossal magma dragon, all of twenty-five meters from snout to tail, lifted her head and roared.
"A magma dragon!"
"A dragon's appeared!"
The guards came swarming at a run. Zaktar tore the mace from his belt, and the guardsmen dropped to one knee, leveling their Korvash's Harpoons at Ruby.
"Hold!"
Zaktar flung out a hand to stop them.
"That dragon is not Ogrmar."
Even as he said it, Zaktar sounded like a man who couldn't quite believe his own words. His gaze had settled on the saddle strapped across Ruby's back. He stared hard at it, then spoke in a hoarse voice.
"Taming a dragon... is that truly a thing that can be done?"
"You said it yourself, didn't you? A dragon is nothing more than a lizard with a big body."
"But..."
Zaktar couldn't force the words out.
"...This is a sight I could not have dreamed of."
His entire body was trembling, shiver after shiver running through it.
"From here on, even greater things are coming, Zaktar. So brace yourself."
I gave him a smile.
Here was the plan I had proposed. First, we would march boldly into the lizardman kingdom with Ruby leading the way.
King Ksilak had named Zaktar the ringleader of a rebellion — and the gravest crime laid at his feet was blasphemy.
And now that convicted blasphemer had made his grand return, parading before him the very sacred being he had supposedly defiled.
"Be gone, old and cowardly god!"
Zaktar clenched both fists and bellowed at the top of his lungs.
"We have had our fill of demons and of Ogrmar alike! The age of the young and mighty Lady Ruby has come!"
KRRRAAAAAAH—!
Ruby loosed a thunderous roar, as if in full agreement.
The lizardmen were a race that worshipped dragons. So the obvious answer was to turn Ruby into the new headliner.
The faith of Ruby beat the faith of Ogrmar on every count. Our Ruby had zero interest in lizardman children, and she fought demons free of charge.
"Lady Ruby... does not devour children?"
The lizardmen murmured in bewilderment.
"Then what reason is there left to believe in Ogrmar?"
That was the correct answer.
Zaktar's army entered the rattled lizardman cities without shedding a drop of blood, and with every city they left behind, his ranks had doubled.
The punitive columns King Ksilak dispatched could only gape at the sight of Ruby's majesty. They had been ordered to punish a traitor — no one had told them to kill a god.
We drove forward at a relentless pace until, at last, we had the lizardman capital surrounded.
"The old god must step aside!"
"Step aside!"
The lizardman legions blanketing the plain roared in one voice, the sound rolling across the field. The garrison atop the walls had lost the will to resist — they weren't even holding their banners up.
"...So the rumors were true."
"The traitor truly walks beside a great one."
The lizardmen had been forced to feed countless of their own kin to Ogrmar day after day to keep his appetite satisfied. Morale was a thing that had never had room to exist here.
At this point, Ogrmar would have no choice but to come out himself. It must have been a cushy run for him all these years — worshipped as a god without so much as lifting a finger.
But the situation had changed. Left alone, this would not end with a simple lost battle. His standing as a god was in danger of being uprooted root and branch.
Before long, the capital's gates began to grind slowly open. A lizardman of rock-solid build was heaving the five-meter stone doors apart on raw strength alone.
He pushed the gates aside without the slightest sign of strain, then began walking toward us, unhurried.
"That's him. That's Ogrmar."
Killing intent poured off Zaktar in waves. Ogrmar strolled up at his leisure and came to a stop a good thirty paces away.
"If you insects have something to say, come close and say it to my face."
Ogrmar crooked a finger at Zaktar. Zaktar stepped boldly forward, mace in hand, and I followed at his back.
Up close, Ogrmar looked perfectly ordinary — no different from any common lizardman warrior. Unremarkable features, standard-issue armor, a mace worn smooth with use, scales dulled like faded cloth.
If one thing set him apart, it was the eyes. A terrifyingly immense mana, churned together with madness, kindled a red glow deep within them.
"Ah, if it isn't the captain of the Royal Guard."
Ogrmar folded his hands behind his back and chuckled.
"I should have seen long ago that your vaunted loyalty amounted to no more than this."
Zaktar glared at him, lips pressed into a hard line.
"Though I cannot imagine where you dug up that mongrel of a dragon. She doesn't look fully grown. Do you truly believe that thing could stand in for me?"
"Stand in for you?"
Zaktar snorted.
"You are nothing but a parasite latched onto our race. A parasite is not replaced. It is exterminated."
"How arrogant you've grown in my absence, Zaktar."
"And your tongue has grown longer in mine, you wretched spawn of Korvash."
"Zukash, was it not? Your son. A clever-eyed little thing, that one. What a talker he was — he never once cowered before me."
Dread crept over me.
"He was quite delicious."
Ogrmar flicked his red tongue.
"You who offered up your own flesh and blood to set an example for your people — look at you now, fallen to a mere traitor. What would your dead son say if he saw such a father?"
"Ogrmar—!"
Zaktar released a lion's roar that felt like it was raking his own guts out. His eyes rolled back white as he launched himself forward.
My dread had been dead-on. When I first heard that King Ksilak had given his own child to a dragon as a sacrifice, I had denounced the man as out of his mind.
The look on Zaktar's face in that moment had never left me. The story had never been King Ksilak's — it was Zaktar's own. Zaktar had turned his own son into a dragon's meal. The feeling on his face then had been the bloodied grief of a father who had buried his child with his own two hands.
"Die!"
Zaktar swung his mace in a huge, roaring arc. Ogrmar burst into mad laughter and slipped the blow with insulting ease.
He was every bit as cunning as his reputation promised. He knew perfectly well that if Zaktar fell, the army before him would evaporate like a mirage.
That was why he had come out in person to bait Zaktar.
What he hadn't counted on was me. Even while trading words with Zaktar, he never once glanced my way. He was treating me as if I flat-out did not exist.
Quaking Wind Slash
I thrust my staff forward.
Fwoooosh—! A blade of vacuum shrieked through the air ahead of me. Forged from the core of an air elemental, my staff had superb synergy with wind-attribute sorcery.
"What the—?!"
Ogrmar instinctively threw up a hand to shield his face. The Quaking Wind Slash sheared his wrist clean off. And in the instant he staggered from the shock, Zaktar's mace came crashing in.
WHAM. His right shoulder caved inward. With the crunch of snapping bone, his collarbone buckled.
"Ghk — you filthy vermin!"
Ogrmar's body swelled, radiating white light. When the glare faded, the lizardman warrior was gone — in his place loomed a colossal dragon closing on forty meters from nose to tail, baring his full, terrible majesty.
The dragon's bulk was a landscape of scars. Fresh wounds from moments ago, yes — but carved across the whole of his body were countless marks left by the heroes who had challenged him across thousands of years.
"Loose!"
Zaktar bellowed. The harpooners waiting behind us fired their Korvash's Harpoons. Amid shrieking cracks of ruptured air, blood-red shafts thudded one after another into the dragon's massive frame.
"GRAAAARGH!"
Ogrmar thrashed in agony. The shafts loosed from Korvash's Harpoons were nearly as long as I was tall. Fired with the force of a Master-grade item, harpoons that vicious should have left no body whole.
Yet Ogrmar did not go down. He was a first-rate monster that belonged in mythology. Far from felling him, our assault had done nothing but fan his rage.
"You insects."
Magma began to seep from his jaws.
"Magma Breath!"
"Find cover! Now!"
The lizardmen broke and scattered in blind terror.
"Behold the wrath of a god!!"
"Ruby!"
I cried out, throwing a barrier wide. In the same heartbeat, Ogrmar's jaws split open and a river of magma came gushing out — and Ruby dashed forward to take the breath head-on with her own body.
"Wh-what is this?"
What else? A flame-immunity shield.
Ruby had no need to actually beat Ogrmar. For a body of pure fire attribute, simply soaking up the breath was a tidy profit all on its own.
Ogrmar panicked — but he could not shut his mouth. A breath, it seemed, could not be cut off midstream. And as the wretch convulsed, heaving up mouthful after mouthful of magma, Ruby's tail reached over and, with elegant ease, put his jaw back where it belonged.
— The Northern Grand Duke's Daoist Arts Are No Joke | Episode 100 —