See? Easy as Pie.
"And you're telling me that's actually true?"
"Well, you'll just have to trust me once and see, won't you? It's not like we're in any danger from all the way over here."
They were in the final stretch of the negotiation.
Having heard about the drake's shocking sex life, the border guard had laid down one condition of his own.
Since they'd conveniently brought the carriage along, he wanted to verify for himself whether a drake really was so easily beguiled by it.
And so the horses and cargo were unloaded, and the empty carriage was left abandoned in the middle of the forest where the drake had last been sighted.
"I scraped together every last coin I had, and borrowed it, and this is what happens..."
"Don't take it too hard. You did promise to compensate me for the carriage the moment the verification was complete, remember?"
"And do not forget that if the drake crushes it with anything other than its hips, the compensation is off the table!"
The guard had declared with great bravado that if Rian's claim turned out to be a lie, the whole affair would end as nothing more than a mishap where a man lost his carriage.
Even under this pressure, Rian merely shrugged with easy confidence.
"Then I'll pay you back out of my own pocket."
Leaving the carriage behind, Rian's party and the guard climbed up a tree some distance away and hid themselves.
Perched on a branch thick with leaves, they held their breath and kept watch over the carriage. Until the drake emerged, there was nothing to do but wait, and the pointless time slipped away mercilessly.
"Whew. What in the world am I even doing..."
"Shh! It's coming this way."
"Hm?"
At the announcement that a drake was approaching, the guard swept his gaze around, but the forest lay in perfect stillness. Not the slightest stir reached his senses, and a sudden swell of indignation rose in his chest.
"If you didn't want to hear me complain, you could've said so—!"
"If you don't want a drake to wreck your backside, keep it down."
The guard's mouth, opening to spit out his retort, was forcibly clamped shut by Rian's hand.
He was just about to protest—what do you think you're doing—when—
Thwaaang-!
A lizard bigger than any ancient tree burst up from beneath the earth.
The drake's wings had withered away, replaced by a habit of burrowing through the ground with its hard-scaled forehead. That was the main reason drakes so rarely left witnesses behind.
"Krawaaaaark!"
The drake let out a roar so thunderous it left a ringing in their ears. The moment its hind legs touched the ground, the earth convulsed violently.
"Hkk...!"
The shockwave nearly threw Rama from the branch, but Rian snatched her body into his arms in an instant.
"Th-thank you!"
"It's hardly an ideal setting, but escort duty is always in effect, so rest assured."
"Yes...! Agh!"
"Where does it hurt, my lady?"
"N-no, nothing hurts. I just felt a sudden chill for some reason."
"You must be quite cold. Shall I lend you my coat?"
"Oh, thank you... ahn!"
The chill washed over Rama's body yet again.
Not a soul realized that its source was the holy power quietly seeping from Rian's Iron Sword.
"Krawaaaaark!"
Meanwhile, the drake that had erupted so dramatically onto the surface caught sight of the carriage.
To the drake's eyes, the carriage's plump rear end looked utterly delectable. It began to drool with excitement, but something about the carriage left abandoned in the middle of the forest struck it as odd, and it warily scanned its surroundings.
The moment the drake confirmed that the forest was exactly as it always was, it made its move. It lifted its forelegs and set them gently atop the carriage's canvas, then pushed its lower body into the wagon bed.
It seemed to start moving its hips slowly at first—then before long it was shaking them in a state of pure self-forgetting trance.
"Fraana, good heavens!"
"You see? What did I tell you?"
"I—I see it! I deeply regret ever doubting you."
"I do hope that's not all you intend to offer as an apology?"
"Ugh... Fine. For mocking you, and in consideration of your service in sharing this valuable intelligence, I shall repay the compensation double!"
"Pleasure doing business with you!"
Rian, thoroughly pleased with how the deal had landed, was stripping the guard of concession after concession. The sheer depravity of his smile was nothing short of demonic, and the merchant women who had taken him on as their escort felt a chill of dread creep over their hearts.
"Now that the verification is finished, shall we head back?"
"One moment, please. I still have work to do here."
"What more could you possibly have to tell me?"
"The most crucial piece of information yet. But to understand it, you'll first have to wait for the drake to, ah, finish its business."
"You mean I must keep watching that horrific spectacle...?"
The guard wanted nothing more than to never witness the drake satisfy its lust on a carriage. The urge to turn back and leave burned in him like a furnace—until he caught sight of the playfulness draining from Rian's eyes, and gave up on the idea.
Curiosity about what scheme that sly old serpent was hiding added its own weight to his decision.
"Just what exactly are you planning to tell me?"
"Most people don't even know that drakes go absolutely wild for carriages, do they? Think of this as the next step beyond that bit of knowledge."
"The next step?"
"In a word: just keep watching, and you'll understand everything."
Time passed, and by the time the drake's act had ripened to a certain point, Rian—the only one who had been observing the situation with any real attention—rested his hand atop the Iron Sword.
"Gwaaaark!"
Then, as if he had been waiting for that exact moment, he leapt down from the tree and drew his blade.
The others, given no warning of Rian's sudden move, cried out in alarm and confusion.
"Lord Aaron!"
"It's dangerous!"
"I don't know what you think you're doing, but this is reckless!"
"Just sit tight and watch. Trust me."
The drake, having gloriously finished relieving its lust on the carriage, turned its head at the commotion nearby.
For a heartbeat it was flustered by the ferocious momentum of the human charging straight at it—then it swung its tail in response.
The drake's tail bristled with spikes like needles; a direct hit would riddle a man's body with holes. Dodging it meant retreating backward, but Rian didn't stop. He kept running.
"Dodge it!"
"Kyaahh!"
"Do you have a death wish?!"
One went pale with terror, one buried their face in both hands, one's face contorted in horror. Their reactions were all different, but every one of them was imagining the same future.
Rian, crushed beneath the drake's tail, dying a hideous, mangled death.
"Honestly, just you wait and see..."
The drake's tail was inches from his body.
Rian kicked off the earth and leapt high into the air.
The drake, having anticipated this, twisted its body mid-swing, redirecting the tail's path. Thanks to his hair-trigger timing on the jump, the tail wouldn't land a clean blow—but he had drifted squarely into the range of those needle-sharp scales.
The drake's scales raked across Rian's skin, meant to carve out countless gashes.
That was how it should have been. But somehow, the scales merely slid past his flesh.
"A truth known neither to humans—nor even to drakes themselves: immediately after climax, a drake's scales soften, if only for a moment!"
Foreknowledge is everything.
Having proven that truth with his own body, Rian swung his sword in mid-air.
The blade sank into the drake's throat—a place that should have been utterly impenetrable behind hardened scales. Even though it was the unsharpened Iron Sword, it split the soft flesh smoothly and drove deep inside.
"Kra—...! Shieeeek!"
It severed even the vocal cords mid-scream, until nothing remained but the sound of wind.
With a single stroke, Rian had cut through the drake's neck. He flicked the blood from his blade and slid it back into its sheath, and in the same instant the drake collapsed to the ground in a graceless heap, its life spent.
"Did you all see that? Use a carriage like this, and even a drake is easy pickings!"
The sheer ruthlessness of striking down an enemy at its most defenseless, in the depths of its post-climax haze. It was a textbook specimen of a bastard move—yet the guard found himself utterly unable to think of Rian as a cunning schemer.
The fearlessness with which he'd stood before a drake without a trace of intimidation, the precision of severing its head with a single stroke—and on top of it all, that extraordinary depth of knowledge. The man's every quality was in perfect harmony, and it inspired genuine awe.
Though I daresay he could have cut its throat just fine without any carriage at all...
The thought that this might be overestimating the man crossed his mind, and he folded the hypothesis away before it could take root.
Even so, the fact remained unchanged: this man had felled a drake alone. And so the guard knelt before his one and only hope, bowing in reverence.
"Since I've caught your drake for you as well, five times the compensation will do nicely!"
A hope grounded in a very practical financial sensibility.
Not far from the scene where Rian stood, behind the shelter of a tree.
There stood a dragonkin woman—the wings at her back belonged to a dragon, wings no drake had ever possessed.
She poked her face out from beside the tree and gazed at Rian, long and unblinking.
"Ah......"
The red-haired woman let out nothing but that single breath of wonder, without moving so much as a muscle.
Perched on her shoulder sat the dragon she'd lived with in the cave, shrunk down to a tiny size.
The dragon began circling around her, whispering in her ear.
"What are you doing just standing there? Didn't you say that man is the human you've been searching for all this time!"
"......"
"Don't tell me you weren't ready to atone after all."
She had come here to beg forgiveness, yet now that he stood before her eyes, she was so nervous that not a single word would come. That was the only explanation the dragon could find.
After all, asking for pardon was no easy thing—not after a conflict that had festered for a full eight years.
He was just about to advise her that, this time at least, it would be kinder to both heart and mind to be satisfied with merely seeing him and go home—when the woman, who had held her silence to the very last, suddenly began to spill out the same words like a bursting waterfall.
"My master is amazing♡ My master is amazing♡ My master is amazing♡ My master is amazing♡ My master is amazing♡ My master is amazing♡ My master is amazing♡ My master is amazing♡"
The woman poured out her feelings as passionately as the fiery red hair on her head.
It hadn't been nerves at all. Her love for her former master was simply a case of the most advanced severity.