The Sewer Rat Dragon
Whoosh.
Thud.
“What the—?! That’s Legion!”
Canteas, having just touched down, nearly jumped out of his skin at the sight of Legion.
And for good reason. By dragon law, Legion should have been annihilated long ago.
Dragons were often erased under the law, but the crime Legion had committed was unique even among them.
Betrayal of his own kind.
Legion had sold information on his kin to a duke-class demon. The dragons that fell under the demon’s control had gone on to wound countless others of their race.
For selling his own people to a demon, Legion had been marked for destruction under dragon law.
“Canteas… it’s been a long time.”
“How the hell are you still alive?”
Canteas tilted his head, baffled.
Legion simply could not be alive. When the kin he had sold were puppeted by the demon, how many dragons had tried to kill him themselves? Even without the law, the odds were high that some other dragon would have finished him off.
“He’s alive thanks to me.”
“Do-ha, thanks to you??”
“Yeah.”
Back then, Do-ha had pretended to fly into a rage, claiming Legion had sold his information to the demons as well, and had even staged the scene of killing him in front of the other dragons.
In truth it had been a fake crafted by Emilton. Do-ha had melted the body down before the dragons could examine it properly.
Of course the dragons had wanted to argue the point, but what could they do? The Absolute Being, Baek Do-ha, had annihilated him in a fit of fury.
“So why did you save him?”
Had there really been a need to keep Legion alive? He was strong, yes—but only with the natural strength every dragon was born with. He wasn’t so specially powerful that it was worth deceiving the entire dragon race to spare him.
Besides, wasn’t he the one they called the Sewer Rat of the dragons?
The nickname came from the way he used his dragon identity to swindle people, a habit so vile that some of his own kin had gone past dislike into outright loathing.
How it worked was simple. Hungry? He would walk into a restaurant, devour every scrap of food in the place, and walk out without paying. When the stunned owner came chasing after him, he would shift just his face into dragon form and scare the man off.
All because he couldn’t be bothered to settle a bill. How petty—and how thoroughly it shamed every dragon alive.
No wonder his kin had already despised him.
“At the time, this bastard knew where Lucifer was.”
Back when they had been scouring the world for the Demon Kings, Legion—thanks to the information he had sold the demons—was the only one who knew Lucifer’s location.
And he had been about to be executed by the dragons before he could even open his mouth. So Do-ha had saved him.
“Hey, Legion. When you think about it, I’m the one who saved your life. So why have you been running from me?”
“Because you came looking to kill me!”
“Me? Kill you?”
“?”
Do-ha tilted his head. Legion tilted his right back.
“Did you sell my information to the demons or something?”
“As if I’d do something that stupid! I wouldn’t even get a clean death…”
“Then I have no reason to kill you.”
“Huh…? You… weren’t hunting dragons to wipe them out?”
“No?”
Where exactly had this misunderstanding started? More importantly—why did he think that in the first place?
“What made you jump to that conclusion?”
“Because Depnius betrayed us.”
The one once called the next Dragon Lord had sided with the Demon God Cult and turned traitor. He had killed Tunrad, friend of the Absolute Being, and nearly killed Dimerof as well.
Given that, Legion had assumed Do-ha’s rage toward dragons would be sky-high.
“Don’t tell me… the reason the dragons all vanished…”
“That’s right. Because of you.”
The moment word spread that Depnius had killed Tunrad, every dragon in existence had gone into hiding at once. None of them could handle a Baek Do-ha whose eyes had turned red with fury.
Who was Baek Do-ha, after all?
The Absolute Being who fought gods. The one who trespassed into the divine realm. The sword that killed gods.
“And a raving lunatic. A complete bastard. A tyrant who never repays kindness but always settles every grudge!”
“You looking to die? Listening to you, every single word is an insult.”
“Ah… th-that was a slip of the tongue…”
Wham!
A single fist to the skull left Legion trembling from head to toe. It had been only one punch, yet he could have sworn his head was splitting open.
“Hold on… when Depnius betrayed us, I’d already crossed into the Demon Realm and all contact was cut off. So how were they hiding because of me?”
How had the dragons even known? Every living soul—even his own friends—had believed he died fighting the Demon God. So how had the dragons known enough to hide?
“Damn it! Because if it was you, Baek Do-ha, of course you’d still be alive!”
Dragons did not possess superior intellect for nothing. After contact was lost, they had gathered and debated whether Baek Do-ha was dead or not.
In the end, every single dragon had reached the same conclusion.
Baek Do-ha is absolutely not dead.
No matter how they ran the numbers, no matter what calculations they tried, they decided that even if he had been defeated, there was no way he had actually died.
“I was only eavesdropping from hiding, but the other dragons all came to the exact same calculation when they talked.”
“You snuck into the Dragon Sanctum? I go to the trouble of saving your life and you try this hard to get yourself killed.”
The Dragon Sanctum was the place where every dragon gathered to deliberate or handle urgent matters. Built thousands of years ago by hundreds of dwarves pressed into service, it was breathtakingly beautiful and imposing.
It was also layered with hundreds of protective spells. The mere attempt to enter as an intruder would trigger an instant magical bombardment that erased the offender from existence.
“You destroyed those protective spells once before, remember?”
“I did?”
Do-ha cocked his head.
Huh? Had that happened?
“You smash everything in sight, so of course you don’t remember the little things.”
“You being sarcastic? Want me to twist that neck of yours too?”
“Haha, I only meant to say your achievements are truly magnificent.”
Legion hastily plastered on a smile.
As expected. That mad emperor’s personality hadn’t changed one bit.
“You know… a long time ago, you decided to run some experiment and made a field on a high mountain peak. Some dragon who didn’t know any better went and built a nest there…”
“Ah! I remember now.”
Do-ha clapped his hands.
He had once obtained a seedling of a Ten-Thousand-Year He Shou Wu from the Moorim. Rumor had it that planting the seedling at high altitude would let it accumulate dense energy in mere decades instead of ten thousand years, so he had prepared a field for the experiment.
Then some deranged dragon had flown in, flattened the entire field, and turned it into its own lair.
“You lost it and stormed the Sanctum, blasting every protective spell to pieces…”
“I remember. Ahh, good times.”
“Good times my ass… a-anyway, when they put up new protective spells afterward, gaps appeared all over the place. That’s how I could get in.”
“Typical rat. You’ve always been good at finding holes.”
“Could you maybe not call me a rat…”
“What.”
“Never mind.”
When Do-ha fixed him with a look, Legion quickly averted his eyes.
They hadn’t met in decades—why was the man still this terrifying?
“Now talk.”
“Why I came looking for you?”
“Yeah.”
“I wanted to ask you something.”
Legion was an information broker. The Beggars’ Sect of the dragon world—or their Haomen. He wandered everywhere gathering every scrap of news he could find.
He didn’t know everything, of course, but he heard most things worth hearing. There was a reason a demon had sought him out to buy information in the first place.
“You’re not about to demand the locations of the other dragons, are you…?”
I knew it!
I knew this would happen!
He wants to round up every dragon and slaughter them all!
“Haa… just spare me, at least.”
“……No.”
Do-ha narrowed his eyes at Legion.
Wow.
Even in a situation like this, the first thing he thought of was selling out his comrades… while begging for his own life.
“Damn it, say that kind of thing sooner! Now I look like the bad guy!”
“You don’t look like the bad guy. You are trash.”
“……Ahem. I simply have a strong survival instinct.”
“I also have a strong survival instinct, which is why I begged Do-ha for my life—but I never sold out my comrades the way you do.”
Arms folded, Canteas looked at Legion with pure contempt.
How could a dragon be this filthy?
“What comrades does a lich like you even have?! Is there some lich club I don’t know about?!”
“Where are my comrades? Right here!”
Thump.
Canteas planted a hand on Do-ha’s shoulder.
“And Dimerof, Emilton, Je-woo, Selenia! They’re my comrades and my friends!”
“Friends, he says. A former prisoner talking big.”
“Oh-ho… fine. Looks like I’ll be adding one more dragon to the list today.”
At Legion’s provocation, Canteas bristled. The two had never gotten along, and true to form they were already squabbling.
“Save the fighting for later. Information first.”
“……What do you want to know?”
“Not long ago I ran into the Demon God Cult, the Demonic Cult, and the Blood Cult all at once.”
“I know. I heard the Blood Demon died.”
“At the time there was someone—I don’t know which side he belonged to—who was roughly on the same level as me in my prime. Weaker than my prime, but close.”
“Come on, don’t joke.”
Legion snorted at Do-ha’s words.
On par with the Absolute Being in his prime? Aside from the gods themselves, no such being existed in this world.
No—there was one.
The current emperor, Dimerof.
But none among the enemy factions. The idea was absurd.
“I’m not joking. Have you heard any new rumors?”
“……You’re saying someone like that actually existed?”
“Yeah. That’s why I came looking for you.”
“…….”
Reading Do-ha’s expression, Legion realized this was no joke and furrowed his brow.
If he was asking this seriously, then the opponent really had been that strong. For a hostile force to possess someone of that caliber…
“I haven’t heard a thing.”
“Hmm… that so?”
“I’m not hiding anything. I genuinely don’t know. If anything, I want to know.”
Do-ha studied Legion’s face and nodded. The expression left no doubt—he truly knew nothing.
“Do you know a name?”
“No.”
“Appearance?”
“Mm… if a lion turned into a person, he’d look something like that. Blond curly hair, sharp eyes. Solid build, a little over two meters tall.”
“…….”
Hearing the description, Legion’s head tilted for a moment.
The details were too vague to pin down easily, yet something flickered through his mind.
Someone as strong as the Absolute Being, with a lion-like presence, and curly blond hair—only one being came to mind.
“Did he… look like this?”
Zzzzt.
Legion wove an illusion and shaped a figure into existence.
“Yeah, that’s him! That’s the bastard!”
“…….”
When Do-ha clapped his hands in recognition, Legion’s pupils began to tremble violently—far worse than the first time they had met.
“What? Who is he?”
“……The Dragon Lord of the ancient era. And the only one who ever rose to the seat of the Dragon God.”
An Ancient Dragon—and the sole being to have ascended all the way to godhood.