Viola Ordina could not kill Ladon.
After fighting him for so many years, she had come to see him as an unkillable being, an entity so vast that he could engulf her entire world.
Ordinarily, that perception might prevent Viola from killing Ladon, but it could not make him stronger. This world, however, was formed from Viola's mental image. If that was how she saw him, Ladon truly became such a being.
A dream that had repeated for no less than 560 years.
Within Viola's dream, Ladon had continued to grow. As a result, he had become an enormous being that could not be fought through ordinary means.
Simply because Viola believed him to be.
“If her own perceptions are reflected in this world...”
Then the solution was simple, too.
“We just have to reduce the importance Ladon holds in her life.”
She needed something else to focus on, so that fighting Ladon would no longer be everything. But what should that something else be? The clue was already there.
On rainy days, Violet played the piano in an old tavern. It was her modest hobby, a tiny refuge she had created to preserve herself. Najin added his own weight to it.
It was neither difficult nor complicated.
All he did was play alongside her, listen to her stories, and share his impressions of their performances. For Violet, that was enough. Najin's prediction proved right, and Ladon shrank with each passing day.
And in time, the final day arrived.
Najin stood at the very end of the score, where the repeat sign would be. In his hand was not a violin, but a sword.
“We've made it this far, but Viola Ordina still can't defeat Ladon, can she?”
“No, I don't think so. What she wants isn't to overcome anything or transcend herself. She wants a peaceful everyday life.”
“Exactly. And if a hero who has protected other people's everyday lives for sixty-seven years wants one of her own...”
SHING!
Najin drew his sword.
“Shouldn't we at least grant her that wish?”
It was a hero's duty to fight great trials and protect the lives of ordinary people. Then who protected the hero's life? Najin answered that question by drawing his sword.
He would. He himself, and no one else.
No rain fell on the Kingdom of Kassel today. Beneath the warm sunlight, Najin raised his sword. Merlin smiled as she brushed back her hair, its blue strands glinting in the sun.
“Then what's left is simple, isn't it?”
“It is.”
CRASH!
The sky began to break.
“Kill Ladon. So the ‘simplest method’ I mentioned at the start turns out to be the right answer?”
“The answer was always fixed. The problem was how to get there.”
The sky broke, cracks spreading across it.
The pane of glass shattered, and Ladon revealed himself. Looking at him, Najin curled his lips into a smile.
“Now that we've worked through it properly...”
He was less than a quarter of the size he had been when they first saw him.
Of course, he was still enormous.
“I can cut him down.”
But not too enormous to cut.
DING, DONG, DING...
As Ladon appeared, bells rang through the streets. But Viola Ordina did not appear. The bells rang louder and more violently.
DONG!
No matter how the bells pealed, Viola did not show herself. The hero who had protected this country for sixty-seven years did not come. By then, the citizens sensed the danger and began to flee. Screaming, they ran to get as far from Ladon as possible.
And Najin...
TAP.
He took a step in the opposite direction. While everyone tried to get away from Ladon, Najin stepped toward him. A hero was someone who did not run when everyone else fled.
Najin stood before the walls surrounding the kingdom.
At the very forefront, he glared at Ladon.
Najin had promised Violet that, for today at least, he would be a hero in her place.
He was a knight. And a knight must always keep his promises. How could someone who broke a promise call himself a knight? What he had to do, then, was already decided.
“Merlin.”
“Yes.”
“Let's go.”
Dawnstar.
The star that heralded the end of night shone.
2.
Though he had shrunk, Ladon was still a powerful dragon. As the fact that he had held a transcendent being's life captive for sixty-seven years demonstrated, he was a being on par with one.
Moreover, dragons were fundamentally immortal.
Unable to be killed through ordinary means, they resurrected again and again. Even if an overwhelmingly powerful foe hacked them apart, no matter how finely they were cut to pieces, a dragon would inevitably return to life with time.
Thus, dragons could not be killed.
That was a truth and a rule of this world.
'Truth, rules, the natural order.'
Turning those words over in his mind, Najin gripped his sword.
The world had decreed it impossible, but Najin possessed the power to disregard that rule. When he looked up, his stars were shining in the sky.
Challenge, dragonslaying, breakthrough, Indomitable.
One of them glittered especially brightly. It was the star of dragonslaying, which Najin had earned by accomplishing the contradiction of killing an undying dragon. Once, pointing to that star, Merlin had told him that its uses were limited, but when that particular situation arose, it would shine more brilliantly than anything else.
Merlin had been right. Najin felt the starlight enveloping his body. A vast gulf lay between him and Ladon, but the light shone to let him cross it. What he needed at this moment was not coolheaded judgment.
Only certainty.
Confidence in himself.
Realizing that Viola was not coming, Ladon began to move. A beat of his enormous wings whipped up a storm. Stalls in the streets shattered and flew away, and uprooted trees soared into the sky.
Before the raging tempest, Najin stamped down hard.
THUD!
With his foot driven into the earth, he steadied his breathing.
His glare was fixed on Ladon.
The evil dragon's jaws gaped wide, and flames condensed within them. Breath, a dragon's simplest and most powerful weapon. The fire gathering in Ladon's maw brought a blazing sun to mind.
If Najin took those flames head-on, he would melt away without leaving a trace. Had he been here alone, he would have attempted a somewhat complicated means of countering that Breath...
“Merlin.”
Now, there was no need.
Merlin was at his side. She had begun preparing the spell before he even called her name, and the moment he did, she completed it.
A Seventh-Circle spell.
She was currently a Sixth-Circle mage, yet she manifested a Seventh-Circle spell with astonishing ease. This time, she did not even borrow Najin's stars. Merlin knew how to cast higher-level magic without enough circles, and she had done similar things repeatedly since before becoming a transcendent being.
She interlocked her six circles to form a single enormous ring. That took the place of the seventh circle.
Najin did not know what spell she had created. Even if an archmage had been here—even Cypria Gachevska, master of the Platinum Tower, who had studied every spell in history—they could not have identified Merlin's magic.
For what Merlin wielded was her own unique magic, refined by her for her use alone, which only she could command.
A glimmer.
The instant the spell was complete, bluish ripples shimmered around Najin's body. He did not know what the spell did, but he was not particularly curious, either.
What he had asked Merlin for was a way to withstand the Breath.
If she had cast a spell without saying anything, all he needed to do was trust her magic.
Najin firmly settled into his stance, trusting Merlin.
And Ladon breathed fire.
Flames fell, staining the sky crimson. A wave of fire that burned everything it touched surged toward Najin. The moment it reached him, steam rose with a hiss.
HISSSSS!
Steam born from the meeting of water and fire.
Merlin's spell protected Najin's body. Even before a dragon's Breath, he did not melt. Far from melting, he could not even feel the heat. Thanks to that, he was able to complete his technique undisturbed.
Just as the walls were about to melt beneath Ladon's flames, Najin thrust his spear toward the sky.
Battering Ram.
It pierced the steam. It pierced the flames. Najin's view, obscured by fire and steam, cleared in an instant. As a vast hole opened in the wave of fire, a storm swept through.
KRRRRRRAK!
Battering Ram, fired toward the sky with his feet planted on the ground. A streak of light soared upward, piercing everything in its path, and struck Ladon's jaw.
CRACK!
Ladon's maw snapped upward. As an added benefit, his mouth was forced shut in the process, cutting off his Breath.
They had exchanged a blow. That was enough for each to recognize the other. Lowering his head from where it had been thrown back, Ladon glared at Najin. His yellow, slit-pupiled beast's eyes stared at him.
Najin flicked his spear tip toward Ladon.
“Come down.”
No matter how many times you breathe fire from up there, it won't reach me. Come down. Try to claw me and tear into me with those hard talons, that tail, or those jaws.
Otherwise, I'll drag you down by force.
3.
A dragon's hard scales and immortality contributed to how difficult it was to fight, but the most fundamental reason was that dragons flew.
Ladon hovered hundreds of meters above the ground.
Najin could use Battering Ram and Triumphant Return, but he could not deliver their full force to an enemy hundreds of meters away. Krünbel or Alderan might have been capable of it, but Najin was not yet as strong as they were.
Thus, to inflict meaningful damage on Ladon, he first needed to close the distance. The conventional approach would have been to send up hot-air balloons or artifact-built flying craft to use as footholds.
[“Huh? Why would you need those?”]
That was what Merlin had said when Najin looked into such means while preparing to slay Ladon.
[“What do you mean, why? I have to close the distance first, don't I? I can jump a few dozen meters, but hundreds of meters is a bit much.”]
[“No, I'm asking why you'd need anything like that.”]
Tilting her head, she pointed at herself.
[“Have you forgotten who's beside you? I told you. In this dream, at least, you can rely on me.”]
Merlin had shrugged as she spoke.
[“Why settle for footholds?”]
[“I can make you an entire path.”]
As if to prove those had not been empty words, Merlin raised her hand toward Ladon now.
“Some worthless thing thinks it can look down on me.”
She frowned.
With her hand extended toward Ladon, she snapped her fingers.
SNAP!
In that instant, the vast sky stretching behind Ladon rippled like a lake.
Over the past month, Merlin had regularly made rain fall on the Kingdom of Kassel. That had not merely been an act of bringing rain; it had also been a process of suffusing the sky with her own mana.
The sky rippled like a blue lake.
Merlin wrung out all the mana she had infused into it. A mage prioritized efficiency and must not waste even a grain of mana. She recycled the mana that had gone to waste over the past month.
Eight overlapping rings in the sky blazed with light.
Eighth-Circle magic: Submersion.
The sky fell. That was the only way Najin could describe what he saw. As though a piece of the blue sky had simply broken off, it fell toward Ladon. Only when it struck the dragon did Najin realize it was not the sky that had fallen.
It was water. An immense volume of water.
A column of water pouring down like a waterfall swallowed Ladon. Unable to withstand its full mass, his wings rang with the sounds of bones breaking and muscles tearing.
CRACK, CRRRRACK!
Dragon scales were highly resistant to magic, but what was breaking his bones and tearing his muscles now was pure physical force. The mass and weight of the water pouring down like a waterfall crushed Ladon beneath it.
Then came a tap.
TAP.
Merlin lightly touched her shoe to the ground. That alone drew six circles upon it. The moment a single drop from the falling torrent bounced onto those circles...
Sixth-Circle magic: Brinicle.
The water froze. Ice that began with a single droplet started spreading through the moisture in the air.
CRACK!
The waterfall that had swallowed Ladon began to freeze. It took only a few seconds for all of it to turn to ice.
An enormous mass of ice reaching from the ground to the sky.
Trapped within it, Ladon struggled and broke the ice, but his progress was slow. Far too slow. Frost had formed in the gaps between his scales, making his movements excessively sluggish.
Pointing to the ice, Merlin smiled triumphantly.
“Who am I?”
“A great archmage with eleven stars...”
“Not that.”
Merlin gave Najin a light push on the back.
“Right now, I'm your guide. And a guide's job is to make a path. Isn't that right?”
“It is.”
“What are you doing? Start running.”
Merlin smiled.
“I can't stand that insolent fucking beast looking down on me, so hurry up and knock it out of the sky.”
A path completed in a rather physical sense.
Najin began to run along that path of ice, which reached all the way to Ladon high in the sky.
