Chapter 16: Earth Dragon and Assistant Professor

Chapter 16:
Earth Dragon and Assistant Professor

“I’LL BE HONEST, I came all this way to investigate Samari because I heard Master Zairein was living in seclusion somewhere in the region and wanted to offer any assistance he might require,” Mister Speria said from his place by the fire.

My desire to sleep had completely dissipated. I could only stare at him with wide-open eyes.

“Well…” Speria scratched his head, ashamed. “I actually hoped to get some help from him, but I ended up having to turn around.”

Semau Speria—this good-natured, bespectacled man—was the disciple of the crazy Luvel Zairein, who summoned me with the intent of destroying the world.

I did recall Zairein’s author bio saying that he served as an honorary professor at a spellcrafting academy. At that time, I’d only thought, Damn elite!

Augh…and Mister Speria had introduced himself as an assistant professor at an academy when we met, so I should have noticed the connection earlier.

Jeez, it really was the right decision not to use Luvel Zairein as my name.

But could the splendid, sensible, and cultured Mister Speria really be a disciple of that bastard Zairein? That was ridiculous. I couldn’t simply swallow such an absurd statement. This had to be one of those instances where the student overcame the master. You know, like, “Psh, his scholarly achievements? Forgettable.”

Nevertheless, to think that Mister Speria came all the way to Samari to get Zairein’s help… Sorry, Mister, but that idiot’s just a skeleton in a cave. There’s no way he could help you.

While I was shocked at the revelation of this relationship, I was simultaneously relieved by a tangential epiphany. If the man in front of me really was Zairein’s student, then I could finally dismiss the possibility that it had been several hundred years since the time of Zairein’s death. To tell you the truth, because I’d only encountered skeletons up to this point, I had been seriously concerned that civilization might have collapsed.

I didn’t know how long ago Mister Speria had studied under Zairein, but he seemed to be in his mid-forties, though it was possible he was younger. So calculating backward from that, was the summoning time lag maybe thirty years, at most?

There were so many questions I wanted to ask, but I was pretty sure it would be a bad idea to reveal my identity as the “Sorcerer King” to a denizen of this world. Yup…bad, bad, bad, no matter how I looked at it. My designated fate was to destroy the world, and I also recalled a section in Zairein’s testament describing how prior Sorcerer Kings had been killed.

I had to hide my true identity. It was the sensible thing to do. If it got out that I was the Sorcerer King, I would be arrested even if I hadn’t done anything.

However, in that case, what kind of questions could I ask?

While I was trying to think through all of this, Mister Speria prepared his sleeping bag and conked out. He habitually went to sleep early to avoid being assaulted by the monkeys at daybreak. I’d just save my questions for a later date. After all, it seemed it would take us a few more days to escape the miasma, so I would be accompanying him at least until then.

I came to that conclusion, lay on the floor, and was about to pull the blanket over me…but Gol anticipated my actions and pulled the blanket up to my shoulders before I could. This soothing gesture had remained the same even after her transformation. My eyes followed my partner’s hands and stopped at the area around her wrists.

“That reminds me. You’re wearing those strange bracelets…” I said.

The second Goltarou turned into Gol, she’d suddenly acquired some curious cuffs on her arms and legs. The same mysterious design was inscribed on each. She’d had no such accessories when she was Goltarou. Well, given the multitude of strange changes she underwent when she turned from a mannequin into a beautiful elf goddess, these bracelets and anklets were small potatoes.

“It’s just…I feel like I’ve seen them somewhere before…”

But where could that have been? As I stared at the bracelets, a vision popped into my head.

Ah, right. I remembered. They were on that corpse I discovered at the bottom of the hole in the back garden in the basin—the victim sacrificed to summon the Sorcerer King. The corroded shackles on her limbs had been about the same size as these cuffs…

“Oof…” I could no longer withstand my drowsiness and let out a long yawn. My thoughts gradually began to stagnate, a thick cloud covering my mind. I knew exactly why I was so tired. Wrapped in a blanket and snuggled by Gol, I was unbelievably comfortable. Her warmth and softness were too relaxing to resist, and they soon lured me to the cusp of dreamland.

Gol’s mysterious heating function was sinful, making me fall asleep so quickly. I was helpless in the face of this warmth. And just like that, I sank deep to the bottom of a sea of slumber.

I woke the next morning totally refreshed. After a breakfast of bread and dried fruit, accompanied by an herbal tea provided by Mister Speria, we set off westward.

The early morning air was chilly. Our footsteps echoed on the hard stone road. Notably, there were only two pairs of footsteps: mine and Mister Speria’s. Gol didn’t make any sound at all, walking silently like a cat.

After some time on the road, I became concerned. The Earth miasma seemed thicker than it had yesterday. The landscape ahead was stained deep brown. Was it so dark before?

“Can miasma thicken this much overnight?” I asked. Please teach me, Speria-sensei!

“No… Or, a slight change in density, yes, but such a clear and drastic shift within such a short period of time is unheard of. That is strange…” Mister Speria seemed concerned by this phenomenon as well. After he answered me, he became quiet, sunk deep in thought.

I slowly looked around us. As a matter of fact, I was concerned about something else as well. “There aren’t any monkeys, either…”

Not a single monkey had shown up all day. We were well past the point when they should have been popping up all over the place. The area around the shrine had been similarly lifeless, but there, monkey corpses had been strewn about. There was no such carnage in evidence here. Up until sunset the day before, monkeys lurked everywhere until they were dispatched by Gol’s axe kicks.

Why were there suddenly none this morning? Could they have been scared off by Gol’s kicks? There was a non-zero chance that was the case. The monkeys were unexpectedly clever, so at times they would hang back if they realized they were at a clear disadvantage. For example, if I decided to have lunch after one of Gol’s one-sided massacres, not a single monkey would appear, even if I continued to loiter around for a few hours.

This was also the reason I slept so nonchalantly in Gol’s arms. In a given area, the deterrent effect of Gol’s bloodbaths lasted for a day or so. Though since we’d been continually moving locations, I hadn’t really been able to study the monkeys’ self-preservation instinct. I did have evidence to suggest it existed—if it didn’t, the pile of corpses by the shrine would’ve been much larger. Also, if the Greek statues had to exterminate swarms of monkeys every day, there would have been fresher corpses in the piles instead of only skeletons.

QED: These monkeys wouldn’t approach anyone who clearly overpowered them.

However, by the time we reached the settlement the day before, the nearby monkeys had mostly returned to their burrows for the night. As such, Gol had only kicked two or three local monkeys to death. Such a low kill count shouldn’t have had any effect on the monkeys’ behavior.

So why were they gone…? Something was wrong.

Mister Speria continued in silence, wearing a troubled look. He was likely pondering the same questions I was.

For her part, Gol didn’t seem concerned. She walked behind me just as always, seeming to be in a perfectly good mood. Because I turned to check on her, Gol drew her face close. I was reflected in her ruby eyes, which glittered as if she expected something.

On closer inspection, Gol’s long ears were also fluttering. I’d noticed before that her ears moved like that whenever she was in a good mood—usually the result of something I had said, or a compliment I gave her.

“You’re in good spirits. Am I just worrying over nothing…?” I wondered aloud.

Welp. I turned back around and continued leading us on our way. If Gol was so chipper, I didn’t think we had anything to worry about.

The auburn expanse was as vast and barren as usual. Although I considered it a wasteland, it wasn’t completely flat; rocks and cliffs provided some difference in elevation. Then again, the natural shelters in this area weren’t that tall. As such, although the haze from the miasma blurred the landscape, our ability to survey was fairly good.

At that moment, a strong west wind blew, causing me to close my eyes for a second. When I opened them back up, something strange had happened.

“Eh…?”

Frankly, I doubted my eyes. An enormous black object the size of a mountain had appeared in front of us. It really was titanic…like, in a class of its own. To tell you the truth, because it was so large, I couldn’t grasp its true enormity. It easily towered over a ten-story building.

Furthermore, this object was slowly moving.

It was a dragon, an immense quadruped with five massive horns lancing out from its face and forehead, its body armored in scales as thick as bedrock. At a glance, it looked like a carnivorous five-horned triceratops with the body of a black lizard.

It definitely felt evil.

The dragon hadn’t noticed our presence…or, I didn’t think it had. It placidly crossed the way ahead of us. Why hadn’t we detected this stupidly huge creature until it got so close, even in such an open, high-visibility area?

And hey, wait. What was up with Gol’s mysterious danger radar?

Gol suddenly jumped in front of me. There was panic in her movements. Had she really not sensed the leviathan until now?

At the same time, I heard Mister Speria mumble beside me. “The ancient Earth Dragon… I-It can’t be… Impossible…” His complexion was awful. Sweat poured down his brow as he muttered, his eyes wide. “Did it create the Earth miasma…? But why here of all places…? Does that mean it moved its habitat this far south in such a short time frame? It couldn’t be… But in that case, this… Right, this isn’t darkness, but Earth—”

Mister Speria was clearly disturbed, swallowed up in a whirlwind of thoughts. This was a frequent affliction of intellectuals. I knew I had to bring him back to reality.

“Speria!”

My call caused him to jump a bit, and he turned to me suddenly, as if he had realized something. “Nemaki, quickly! Hold back Goretaru! We must not provoke that dragon!”

I obeyed and anxiously leapt on top of Gol.

Whoa, her waist was thin! More importantly, I hugged Gol’s delicate middle and took a deep breath. Going by her stance, Gol had been about to lunge right at the dragon. Mister Speria’s warning was spot on. I made it just in time.

Hm? For some reason, Gol’s entire body became weak and limp in my arms… Hey, was she okay?

At that point, the three of us quickly took cover behind a rock. This whole situation was throwing me for a loop. To think that Mister Speria would be so rattled that he fell into a trance.

For my part, I believe I had matured quite a bit since I first got spooked by monkeys covered in scales. I guess, in a sense, I owed those simian devils my gratitude, even if their defiance of biology continued to beat on my sanity.

Or maybe I felt this ancient Earth Dragon was so unfathomable, so disconnected from any reality I knew, that it was simply beyond my ability to understand, and as such, I was calm. This carnivorous, super dreadnought-class triceradragon was too anomalous to comprehend, let alone fear.

As I held my breath in the rock’s shadow, I peeked at the dragon.

Ack! Gol had left the basket on the ground in the middle of the road. We’d be in trouble if the dragon spotted it. Ugh, no, I had to rephrase—Gol wasn’t in the wrong. Any responsibility for my partner’s carelessness lay on me, her creator.

As I was wracked with guilt over trivial matters, Mister Speria whispered, “Listen well. We’ll make it out of here. But we absolutely cannot hope to defeat that beast. It is the ancient Earth Dragon, a being who exists outside of reason. It cannot be killed, no matter how strong Goretaru is.”

Cannot be killed? What do you mean, Assistant Professor Speria?

“Seriously? Is it immortal…?”

Mister Speria thought for a bit before shaking his head. “It’s difficult to call it immortal, per se… Let’s say, at the very least, there are no records of an ancient dragon ever being completely eradicated. These four dragons are the pillars of the world. It’s said that they’re the only beings that persisted after the destruction of the ancient world.” He swallowed and continued. “As you’ve just witnessed, that dragon managed to overcome Goretaru’s Surface Detection and blend into the Earth miasma. It is half spirit. Its physical body is here, but that means nothing.”

Pl-please don’t suddenly say something so philosophical, Speria-sensei. I was a bad student.

But our conversation ended there. We held our breaths and waited for the enormous body of the ancient Earth Dragon to pass.

Ah. Hey, stop, Gol. Don’t squirm. Be a good girl. I tightened my embrace around her.

Time passed. My arms began to tire…

I could still sense the ancient Earth Dragon’s absurdly large presence just on the other side of the rock. Did this monster not intend to leave? It was almost like it was loitering, or trying to find something.

Nonetheless, whatever it was doing didn’t matter. We had been forced into a battle of attrition. More precisely, my arms were starting to give out.

Ugh, this damn lizard’s a public nuisance! Can you please hurry up and leave?

It was at the moment when my exhausted soul cursed the beast that a sudden chill ran down my back.

I was in the air.

Gol had wrapped her arms around me and leapt into the sky with frightful momentum. For a moment, wind pressure buffeted me to the bone. Suddenly, my surroundings had changed from earth and ground to clear blue sky.

When I looked down, the auburn land far below was interrupted by the enormous back of the black Earth Dragon. I was several tens of meters up in the air, held within Gol’s embrace.

Then I looked at the hiding spot we had just left and words failed me.

I couldn’t believe my eyes. The land was wounded, marred by a gorge of devastation. It looked like something huge had bulled through it, leaving a deep, dark trench in the ground in its wake. The sickly brown Earth miasma swirled down the length of this black furrow.

“What the heck happened…?” I muttered, stupefied by the destruction beneath me.

Immediately after, I realized something and shuddered. What happened to Mister Speria? He had been standing next to me, right there in that spot, before it was cleaved out of existence…

Blood and warmth drained from my body. My abdomen, from my stomach to my entrails, was frozen solid. Yet at the same time, my heart beat violently, as if it would burst out of my chest. It was like it was trying to force blood into closed vessels.

I can’t deny that until that moment, I had overestimated our capabilities. To be fair, together we were nearly peerless. My Gol was the strongest thing I’d ever seen. I was certain she could face anything—like that unnerving black demon we fought right after exiting the basin, which gave off an absurd sense of danger, yet which my partner annihilated with one hit. Even in the unlikely case that Gol was targeted by some strange spell, I could use NTR to protect her.

And for what it was worth, my title was still the “Sorcerer King”—the evil king who was the grand high boss of mana beasts. This absurdly large five-horned lizard had to be a mana beast…or so I’d hoped.

I was mistaken about the nature of our relationship.

Firstly, the ancient Earth Dragon was not a being of this dimension. Mister Speria had said that the ancient dragons were the four pillars of the world, and pillars are, as you know, a unit by which to enumerate gods.

Secondly, I had learned from Luvel Zairein’s testament that in the past, Sorcerer Kings had been murdered, assassinated, and executed. Conversely, Mister Speria had also said that there were no records of the ancient Earth Dragon—or any entity like it—ever being eradicated.

So you see, in truth, the ancient dragon was of a considerably higher rank than the Sorcerer King.

The curtain opened to reveal a hopeless fight to the death.