To the Evil Dragon's Nest #3
“Hah… hah…”
Several hours had passed since Adonis began his aimless trek through the mountains. He sank onto the dirt and gasped for breath. After cutting down so many beasts and monsters, exhaustion was inevitable.
In his right hand he clutched a blood-soaked bone, its end splintered into jagged points—torn from the body of a four-legged beast whose neck he had snapped. He had taken so many lives in so short a time that only the faint recollection of “some four-legged creature” remained.
Adonis looked down at his blood-drenched arm—he hadn’t even thought to wipe it clean—and sighed. Being in the heart of the mountains at this hour of night, in a place crawling with monsters and beasts, was no different from screaming for something to come kill him.
Yet the reek of blood rising from his body and the surroundings was, unintentionally, protecting him. The metallic stench of blood and dead flesh was so overpowering that neither monsters nor beasts dared draw near.
After catching his breath for a moment, Adonis quickly dug into the earth with both hands. Every time he scooped up a fistful of soil, the outline of a deep pit took clearer shape. Once he had hollowed out a hole large enough to lie in, he reached for the wolf hide he had bundled like a dumpling, its ends gathered and tied.
When the hide on the ground unfurled with a soft rustle, several dusty skins tumbled free. He spread them across the bottom of the pit, then gathered fallen branches beside it and kindled a fire. Fortune or misfortune—he wasn’t sure which. Trees wounded and toppled in his battles with monsters and beasts lay everywhere, making firewood absurdly easy to collect.
Adonis stared blankly at the crackling logs casting their ruddy glow, then picked up one of the hides and climbed into the pit. Layered with several animal skins, it was surprisingly warm and soft.
This was definitely the mountain guarded at its front by a great pine. As Adonis closed his eyes and dozed, game screens flickered one by one through his mind. Trees ringing the map like walls of stone. Multiple tiers, yet only a single path for entry, and a jagged stone rampart standing as if to bar the way before the trees. Even that one oddly shaped rock nestled among them.
“Ah!”
The moment the thread of thought touched that strangely formed stone, Adonis cried out without thinking. Archimedes himself would gladly have shouted Eureka. He forced his body—flushed with the excitement of realization—to settle, and slowly regulated his breathing. He needed sleep. Whether by instinct or habit, if he slept while holding onto a thread of tension, he would wake the instant a dangerous presence drew near. That was why he could even consider sleeping in the heart of these perilous mountains.
Fortunately, he managed to sleep without incident until the sun rose. The mountain air at night was quite chilly, but the fire and the hides saw him through without trouble.
“Mmm…”
At dawn, as the sun began to rise in a pale wash of light, Adonis stretched while still lying down and opened his eyes with satisfaction. Even the still-chilly morning air felt wonderfully refreshing. He finally had a clear sense of where to search.
Let’s get moving.
He gathered the hides he’d laid on the ground, shook off the sand, and stacked them neatly atop the wolf pelt. Then, just as before, he gathered the ends, rolled them up, and slung the bundle over his left shoulder. With another clue now clear in his mind, his steps felt light; he climbed the mountain as if he were flying. Day after day of brushing against danger had gradually honed him. Unintentionally, Adonis was slowly learning how to handle his body in the wild.
“Oh?”
As he climbed and searched the mountain, he entered a stretch where the trees grew especially dense. Just as he had expected, large, jagged stones were laid out like walls, and he let out an involuntary murmur of admiration. Delighted that his hypothesis had proven correct, he deliberately stepped inside.
He wasn’t simply trying to climb higher; he was searching for a stone of particularly strange shape. Beneath that stone lay the entrance to the Evil Dragon’s nest.
Rather than examining each of the packed stones one by one, Adonis looked for anything that broke the harmony. The stones that formed the rampart were all equally rough and uneven, yet they stood at the same height. That was why the word “stone wall” suited them so well. Had their heights varied, one would have called them a mere pile of rocks rather than a wall.
Nothing here.
Confirming that this section held no unusually angular stone, Adonis pressed forward. Passing through a fairly wide corridor—unlike the game—he emerged into another space enclosed by stone walls. Trees and grasses rooted naturally here and there. Combined with the surrounding ramparts, the place looked almost like a garden, he thought.
Nothing here either.
After scanning the walls from end to end, Adonis heaved a disappointed sigh and moved on to the next area. Another wide passage, another broad chamber. Only the arrangement of the trees differed; the scenery that greeted him was the same. Looking, touching. Stepping back to take in the whole view. He searched every space in what felt like a four-by-four grid of chambers, yet found nothing unusual. The place itself was peculiar, but it wasn’t the peculiarity he sought.
Despair and the fear that he might have been wrong weighed heavily on his shoulders. Even so, he could not abandon that slender thread of hope, so he examined the walls once more, inch by inch. Wondering if the texture might differ, he ran his hands over every stone and strained his eyes for any sense of wrongness.
Fortunately, no beasts or monsters lurked inside the stone walls, and those outside showed no sign of entering, so he had a fair amount of leeway. If he used the interior as a base and hunted in the vicinity, he could hold out for days. Having reached that conclusion, he slept in one of the middle chambers. The sun had nearly set, so rest was in order.
He spent a fairly comfortable night under animal skins, then rose to examine the walls again. It might have been futile, but he fanned the hope that it had to be here. Thanks to that, his concentration reached its absolute peak—sharp enough to track even a single ant crawling across the dirt.
He examined the walls until exhaustion claimed him, slept, woke and examined them again, hunting in between. Days of the same routine might well have worn anyone down, yet Adonis’s eyes still sparkled with hope.
Found it.
His blood-caked hands were probing one of the stone walls when Adonis’s eyes flared. They were fierce enough to bury a man without a second thought. And no wonder—he had spotted a tiny engraving near the base of one section of the wall. A design that looked exactly like a simplified carving of a dragon.
“Hoo…”
Adonis pressed a hand to his hammering heart, steadied his breath, and surveyed the tall, solid mass of stone. It was a wall dividing chamber from chamber; if he had the strength, he ought to be able to push it. After all, his body was that of a Hero, raised under the Goddess’s blessing.
Adonis regulated his breathing, then planted himself squarely before the wall. He raised both arms, set them against the stone, and began to push with everything he had. His face flushed scarlet from the effort; his feet sank deep into the dirt as if he were sinking into a swamp.
The wall did not budge. It stood as immovable as a giant tree with roots driven deep into the earth.
And yet—
As Adonis’s arms poured on relentless force, the great stone mass at last began to groan. It sounded like some massive beast growling low in its throat. Little by little, ever so slightly, it yielded. Even as the wall fought to hold its place, it could not stop the tide. A hairline gap widened to the width of a finger joint, then an arm, then roughly the height of an average man. In other words, space enough for a standing person to slip through had opened.
“It’s really here…”
Adonis stared, mouth hanging open, at the staircase that had appeared square in the middle of the scraped-out gap. He had clung to hope and fought until he found what he sought—and precisely because of that, he stood dumbfounded, caught in a daze of disbelief.
Still, he couldn’t stand there forever in a blank stupor. At last he set his foot on the descending stairs. The earthen steps were far sturdier than they looked, giving a sense of solidity as if solid steel had been set into the ground.
One step. Then another.
After a long descent through the pitch-dark stairway, Adonis’s foot finally met hard stone flooring—not earth, but smoothly dressed stone. One would normally expect dirt beneath soil; this was utterly unnatural. Of course, the hidden staircase beneath the wall had already been unnatural enough, but the stone floor was no less so.
Unable to see ahead, he kept one hand on the side wall as he advanced, more alert than he had been even while coming down the stairs. Fearing a sudden drop, he tapped carefully with his toes. His progress was painfully slow, but his safety was absolute.
“Huh?”
Moreover, though he had not intended it, the outlines of the dark cave began to resolve with surprising clarity. Even in a cavern that admitted not a single ray of light, his eyes were adjusting. A ceiling and walls as smooth as if carved from stone, and an uneven stone floor—Adonis let out that soft “huh” without meaning to. As a result, he walked as unhindered as if he were on a well-paved road… until he came upon a vast cavern large enough to swallow several villages whole, and something blacker even than the dark cave itself.
"Why have you come to this place?"
While Adonis was still wondering how he might descend farther, a woman’s voice—honed to a razor’s edge—rang through the cave. It was so thick with fury that there was no room left to notice its beauty.
Semiramis.
Adonis recalled the name of the Evil Dragon he had only ever seen in text and swallowed hard. Then, slowly, he parted his lips.
“I have come to ask for your help.”
"A human, asking me? And a Hero, no less? What a farce! You come to kill me, yet you have the gall to speak so shamelessly!"
The woman—or rather, something that wore a woman’s voice—roared. In the heart of that pitch-black mass, a pair of eyes the color of dark blood flared, and in the same instant the entire cavern blazed with light, as bright as a yellow fluorescent lamp switching on in a dark room.
I can see clearly.
In the cavern now lit as bright as day, Adonis clenched his fists as he looked upon the thing that had been coiled in the shadows. Dark crimson scales and eyes. A body both vast and sleek. The Evil Dragon he had only ever seen through a screen was right before him.
An oppressive weight that would have cowed even a Hero who had felled the Demon King clamped down on his entire body. If he charged in under the pretense of hunting the Evil Dragon, he would be reduced to ash without ever landing a blow. He did not know how to draw the holy sword, and he had no party members to cover his back.
Yet Adonis had one card that might persuade that Evil Dragon—Semiramis. At a glance it sounded absurd, the sort of thing that invited automatic disbelief, but for the Semiramis he had seen and heard of, it just might work. A single word.
“I… I wanted a child too!”
Child.
The moment that word left his lips, the trembling of the cavern ceased.