The Suspicious Pinkie (5)
"Hello, Priestess. Sorry to bother you so late."
I showed up at the infirmary with Hindrastar slung over my shoulder, and Priestess Maya rose from her seat.
"She's an applicant for this Special Cadet selection. She said her stomach hurts."
"Lay her down over here."
I laid Hindrastar on the cot, and Priestess Maya began administering Divine Healing. As a golden radiance of holy power wrapped around her abdomen, Hindrastar slowly opened her eyes.
"Ugh... What the hell happened... I was sure he was alone..."
"Didn't it ever strike you as weird that it took the two of us to do that to you in the first place? You think a guy like that would be any different just because he's by himself?"
"Goddammit..."
A single tear rolled from Hindrastar's tightly shut eyes.
"I was gonna get revenge for what you did to me... and I got wrecked again..."
"That's why I warned you."
"Fucking hell..."
Priestess Maya returned to her desk, and I spoke quietly to Hindrastar.
"You've got two options now."
"What are they..."
"First: you caused trouble again, so you, Blondie, and I sit down for a three-way confrontation."
"Eek!? No! I'd rather die than do that!!"
Hindrastar thrashed so hard the cot's legs creaked as if they might snap at any moment.
"Calm down. I said there were two options."
"What's the second one, then."
"The second is you become an academy student."
"What?"
Hindrastar stared at me with a look that said she had not understood a single word.
"And I'm supposed to do what, exactly?"
"You posed as an applicant so you could stick to the daughter of the Zenobi Trading Company as her close-protection detail. That's how you got in here, isn't it?"
"That's right."
"Right now, you've got the best scores of anyone in the pool. Keep this up and you'll be selected as a Special Cadet and enrolled at the academy. That's what I want you to do. Wipe the slate clean. All of it."
"What? Wipe it?"
Hindrastar squawked at the top of her lungs.
"I can never wipe that! You're telling me to forget that humiliation?! Ow, ow, ow..."
She tried to bolt upright, but the pain hadn't faded yet; she clutched her stomach and groaned.
"Then I guess it's the first option after all..."
"GRAAAAH! You bastard! Ugh, my stomach..."
"You've already got the picture. You can never get revenge on us. And."
I cut off her attempt to argue and kept going.
"Back then, we were under orders to kill you. Considering the damage you did to the Human Alliance, you ought to be grateful you even survived. Anyone listening would think the two of us had just barged into some perfectly innocent nest."
"So... what do you want me to do, then... Become an academy student?"
"That's right."
"What the hell do you even get out of that?"
A massive gain, actually.
A Polymorphed dragon typically far exceeds ordinary human capabilities. If a talent like that graduated from our academy, the Second Princess would surely be pleased — and she would keep Kirlin on as Academy Principal.
"Choose. Three-way confrontation, or academy graduation. There is no third option. I refuse any refusal to choose."
"I'll do it! Fine, I'll do it! I'll do that much...!"
Whether from rage or shame, a sob had crept into the tail end of her scream.
"Fuck, fuck, fuck... I caused a little chaos, and that's a crime worth falling this far...?"
Unlike me — who was having an absolutely wonderful time — Hindrastar streamed tears and bawled in earnest.
"Why the hell did my dragon-life have to go so completely off the rails..."
A very long time ago.
In a deep mountain valley, there lived a young dragon named Hindrastar, freshly independent. The only things around were jagged rock spires and dim-witted trolls and ogres, and Hindrastar was bored out of her mind.
I'm supposed to live like this for tens of thousands of years? Isn't there anything fun to do?
As she was loafing around with that thought, someone came calling at her nest.
At first she took them for humans, but unlike humans, they had horns on their heads, rather like a ram's. They introduced themselves as the Demon Tribe, and explained that they had risen under the banner of the Demon King — a hero of unmatched caliber — to wage a holy war to reclaim a continent unjustly occupied by humans.
"What's a war?"
"It is when great numbers of people divide into sides and fight."
"Ohh, is that so...?"
Curiosity stirred. Hindrastar stroked her chin with the tip of her tail and sank into thought.
"Please aid us, O great White Dragon Hindrastar!"
The demons prostrated themselves flat against the ground.
"Should you agree to cooperate, the Demon King has proposed various rewards."
And with that they rattled off gold coins, treasures, the largest palace, and so on. But those were vulgar things only short-lived mortals would care about. Hindrastar was hooked solely on this thing called war.
So the demons and everyone else pick sides and fight, and they want me in on it too? Now that sounds like fun.
"I'll do it."
And so Hindrastar joined the great war that would later be called the Four-Year War.
The Demon King leapt for joy at her arrival. It did not last long.
"Why in the world have you returned without annihilating them?!"
He had clearly told her to go to a battlefield and wipe out the Human Alliance's army, and Hindrastar had come back empty-handed. The Demon King was furious.
"If I kill them all, the war ends too fast. I don't want that."
"We didn't bring you here for fun! We brought you to win as quickly as possible and liberate the continent!"
"Then I'll just leave?"
"No, that's not— I mean..."
Even after that, Hindrastar paid the Demon King's high command no mind whatsoever. She wandered from one great battlefield to the next, snickering at the sight of entire armies toppling over in shock at her appearance.
The demons would cheer when Hindrastar showed up — and then, the moment they heard a Dragon Roar that made no distinction between friend and foe, they would join the mindless rout right along with everyone else. She would snap her wings open and fire off a breath, and friend and foe alike would turn tail without a backward glance, scrambling over each other to flee. It was just too entertaining.
Compared to the tedious days in her mountain-valley nest, war was an overwhelmingly potent shot of dopamine. In the end, Imperial Intelligence's analysis — that Hindrastar had joined the war purely to raise hell — had been dead on.
That span of a little under two years was the finest stretch of Hindrastar's entire dragon-life.
But it all came to an end the moment the Empire issued a certain special ops unit the order to eliminate her.
The worst two-man special ops unit imaginable: blond-haired Linus and mop-haired Dian.
Dragons are remarkably stubborn, and in whatever field happens to catch their interest, they display an obsession bordering on compulsion. That deranged special ops pair was even worse. Just when she was sure she'd shaken them, they would pop out of nowhere. In places she thought they would never reach, they would already be waiting.
After months of this, Hindrastar finally gave up on the pointless game of tag and decided to go into hiding for a while. That decision came immediately after Linus and Dian forcibly tamed wild wyverns on the spot, mounted them, and tried to slip into her blind spot to climb onto her back.
Hindrastar spotted them at the last possible instant and unleashed a Dragon Roar; the terrified wyverns veered off and fled into the distance. And then, unbelievably, that lunatic Dian leapt off his wyvern and went into free fall, tumbling upside down toward Hindrastar's back. Fortunately a sudden gust of wind sent him veering past her body, and he plummeted toward the ground. Linus then beat the fleeing wyvern savagely with the same club he'd used to tame it, forced it into a turn, and caught Dian just before he hit the earth.
Witnessing that, Hindrastar felt fear for the first time in her life, and without a word to the Demon King, she went into seclusion for a considerable stretch.
After a long stretch in hiding, Hindrastar's chaos-sowing instinct flared up again, and she couldn't stand it anymore. Humans, unlike dragons, have short lives and forget things just as quickly. By now, they've probably given up.
"You fucking precious lizard brat! You vanish without a word, then slink back in from god knows where like—!"
The Demon King was so furious he was practically throwing his life away, pouring out a torrent of abuse — until his senior staff clamped a hand over his mouth and issued Hindrastar a new mission. They wanted her to intercept the rear of a Human Alliance noble army that had recently suffered a crushing defeat and was in retreat.
Now that sounds fun.
"I'll do it."
And there, Hindrastar finally walked into an ambush by Linus and Dian, got beaten to the brink of death, and only barely escaped with her life in a desperate flight.
But Hindrastar's ordeal was not yet over.
The dragon elders, having learned that she had not only recklessly meddled in the squabbles of lesser beings but had gotten thoroughly thrashed for her trouble, handed down a punishment. That punishment was to Polymorph her into a human — with a binding restriction that she could never return to her true form.
"You are unworthy to live in the form of a dragon! For the next thousand years, you shall dwell in that shape and repent!"
And so Hindrastar was forcibly banished to the human world. Needing to eat, she joined the outfit where you could earn money with violence — and the one that paid the most in that business: the Leblanc Mercenary Corps.
Living as a mercenary, Hindrastar did dream of revenge. But Linus had already become the Hero of the Continent, someone she could not even approach, and that bastard Dian had vanished without a trace — dead, for all she knew.
Then recently she took a job escorting some rich human's daughter to an exam, posing as an applicant — and at the academy she arrived at, she ran into Dian.
Humans, they said, declined with age incomparably faster than dragons. Ten years had already passed, and looking at him playing professor with no need to exert himself, surely his physical abilities were in decline. On top of that, the blond was clearly nowhere in sight. At last, Hindrastar had been about to take her revenge for ten years ago.
What Hindrastar had failed to grasp, however, was that even if humans died faster than dragons, they did not rapidly waste away in a mere ten years. With Dian's fist in her collar and his knee driven into her stomach, the world going black, Hindrastar had no choice but to admit she had completely misread the situation.
This isn't how it was supposed to go.... Why does everything always go sideways the moment I get mixed up with this bastard?!
And now Dian was telling her to become an academy student.
At this rate — at this rate, I'll never return to being a dragon. I'll actually turn into a human for real!
Meanwhile, Priestess Maya's Patient Log read as follows.
Professor Dian visited the infirmary in the middle of the night, carrying a woman who appeared to be a minor and had fainted from abdominal pain.
Clear ligature marks on the neck. Considerable bruising on the lower abdomen. A violent impact is suspected.
When Professor Dian remarked to the patient to the effect of, "We did that to you together back then, so why wouldn't I be able to do it alone," the patient replied, "I got done again this time." Exact meaning unknown.
The patient shouted, "I absolutely cannot erase it," while continually clutching her stomach. After Professor Dian continued speaking, the patient replied through tears, "I'll do it. Fine, I'll do it." She then lay down and sobbed for some time.