Chapter 101
“But we should get to work before that.”
“Hahaha! Quite right, quite right. I can't pretend I didn't hear Sid's request!”
Fortunately, the dragon's attention shifted to Flare.
“Let us have a look, little descendant.”
“Eek, Young Master...!”
“Ack, don't hug me so tightly!”
Because Flare was right beside him, Akion felt as if his body might physically burst, but anyway.
“Hmm, hmm-hmm. Your musculoskeletal density is already approaching that of a dragon.”
“The hemolytic components in your blood are also more concentrated.”
“Your strength... Hoo-hoo, it seems you are well versed in both martial arts and magic.”
“Y-you're not going to attack me...?”
“Come on, I came here to be examined. I can't breathe, so let me go.”
Still, while the three dragons continued their close examination,
Flare relaxed her strength since not a single act of harm had occurred.
“Ho-ho! I don't believe it!”
The dragons, who had examined her methodically one thing at a time, withdrew their gazes with hearty laughter.
“To be honest, when I first heard it, I doubted my ears. You mean dragon blood manifested strongly again from the mixed bloodline of Pendragon and that Hero fellow?”
“Ho-ho, we should have called it impossible. It ought to have kept diluting... How did it manifest again now of all times?”
“Why, perhaps a new dragon hatchling will be born in the next generation!”
A great being whose very existence made it hard to breathe, and whose every movement made the air tremble.
“Child, you truly are close to becoming a dragon now. Congratulations!”
“Heehee, before long, we may welcome you as one of our kind.”
“Work a little harder! You might become a dragon within a few decades, at least!”
“I... into a mighty dragon....”
Even after being acknowledged by such beings... Flare felt strangely unsettled.
What was a dragon?
One of the greatest physical forces created by the Heavenly Lord,
nearly impossible to kill, to the point that over ten thousand years saw more dragons end their own lives than be murdered,
and a transcendent existence whose magic had reached realms where magical ranks were no longer necessary?
“It's all thanks to that waterbed Akion made, is it not? Come to think of it, descendant of Elena! Whenever our Sid spoke of you, he was always boasting about you.”
“It was so adorable, watching her act like a young lady in love. Ho-ho-ho!”
“Tell these old folks how you managed to win her over—”
- Kraaack!!!
“Guh-huh?!”
“When have I ever done such a thing?!!!”
But seeing such esteemed beings all get knocked sprawling by the Tower Master's full-force dropkick was kind of pathetic.
- KABOOM!!!
Even that knockdown sent the cave shaking wildly, given the three dragons' massive bodies and mass... as if it might collapse.
Akion and Flare could only cling tightly to each other and shiver.
“You little brat, Sid! Now that you're two thousand years old, have you thrown respect for your elders out the window?!”
“We took care of you all the way until you became an adult... Sob!”
“Blinded by love, you've become a beast who doesn't even know gratitude, Sid!”
“This was supposed to be a gathering to conduct a detailed examination of Flare in the first place, so why are you suddenly bringing up something between me and Akion?!!!”
The problem was that it was merely a light quarrel between people who were like family.
“Well, you're of marriageable age now....”
“I thought it was about time you had some hatchlings. And if you're going to do it, shouldn't it be with someone you love?”
“When I was your age, I already had two children, a son and a daughter—”
- Kraaang!!
“Aaaagh! That had feeling behind it!!!”
“You're spouting nonsense in front of the children. How could it not have feeling behind it, you old geezers?!!!”
Amid the chaos, Akion realized two things.
‘So the Tower Master's name is Sid.’
The first was the Tower Master's real name, Sid, which was cuter than he had expected.
The fact that the Tower Master let him call her “Tower Master” instead of using her name,
perhaps it was because she didn't want to be called by that cute name.
“We went to such trouble to summon you for an important matter, and you would torment two mere mortal children this much just to tease me?!!!”
“Nngh. She wasn't a child who talked back like this when she was young.”
“Hmph, now that she's two thousand years old, she contradicts everything we say.”
“This uncle didn't raise you like this!”
The second was that, by dragon standards, the Tower Master was in her early twenties.
Dragons lived for ten thousand years, so that made sense... but being confronted with the reality of it so directly made Akion feel as if he was about to lose his mind.
“Sigh. An old fellow like me ought to be the one to yield. Very well, I'll accommodate you.”
Light burst from the oldest-looking white-scaled dragon, and he shrank,
while the other dragons gradually reduced their sizes to match.
- Pop!
“Nngh. It's been a long time since I've had a human body. It feels strange....”
And as the dazzling light vanished, an old man with white horns and a tail appeared.
“Ho-ho, it's been a long time since I've taken human form.”
“I used to travel around in bodies like these long ago. What memories! Ho-ho-ho!”
Then a handsome middle-aged noblewoman and a bearded adventurer appeared behind him.
What they had in common was that, like the old man, they had dragon horns and tails.
“My name is Asterion.”
“Ah.”
The old dragon was the first among them to reveal his name.
“Flare Pendragon Asterion... Your maternal family borrowed my name.”
He also revealed that he was the godfather of Flare's maternal family, House Asterion.
*
- Click.
Attendants whose arrival went unnoticed came rushing into the cave,
“Child, is the tea not good? These are precious tea leaves brought from beyond the eastern sea.”
“It is something even the Imperial Palace rarely gets to enjoy... Thank you.”
They swiftly arranged refreshments on the table, and tea time began in an instant.
Amid all this, Akion could not take his eyes off the attendants.
“Is being unable to take your eyes off pretty things a common trait among males?”
“They are all beautiful, but....”
The dragon's maids were all lovely young women as beautiful as statues.
Every one of them looked exactly alike, as if they had been copied.
“May I ask what species they belong to? Their joints also seem somewhat unnatural for living creatures.”
“Ho-ho. You have a keen eye.”
And unlike human joints, their articulation was somewhat direct, yet smooth in every direction.
“Automata. Spherical-jointed autonomous golems that operate on their own when given commands.”
“Oh....”
“They possess artificial intelligence and understand simple commands, such as preparing tea. I made that mechanical body by accident while trying to provide a replacement for one of my cherished subordinates after he lost an arm. Ho-ho-ho!”
Robots!
Cyborgs!
With physical AI on top of that!
Robot workers, which had shaken up the industrial world before Akion's death.
Two technologies meant for that purpose had actually been realized in the hands of an old dragon named Asterion!
“Then what method did you use to train them?”
“Hmm?”
“Did you award points for proper behavior, for instance? I was wondering whether you posed questions, awarded points for correct answers, and deducted points for wrong ones to guide the reasoning of the AI... no, the artificial intelligence.”
“Ah? You mean intelligence training. I used such methods in the early stages, but... I realized there were limits, since it would somehow keep generating errors.”
And Asterion felt both surprised and impressed that Akion had completely grasped the method he had used.
“In the end, I artificially recreated the human brain.”
“You mean you copied it?”
“No. More precisely, I suppose you could call it a fake brain....”
How could a human barely over twenty know something like this?
At the Academy... Professor Asterion was in the position of suddenly encountering a PhD in the same field somewhere.
And that field was one Asterion alone had studied!
“Do you know that the human brain consists of more than eighty billion tiny living organisms, all connected to one another by tens of thousands of links?”
“I know there are cells that supply energy in roughly similar numbers. And that, thanks to them, a network of more than one hundred trillion connections is formed as well.”
But whenever Asterion brought up one thing he had discovered, didn't Akion answer with ten?!
It had been a long time since Asterion had experienced a moment this thrilling in his several-thousand-year life.
“Then we can speak the same language! I recreated those tiny units in exactly the same way within an imperceptibly tiny world inside a high-quality magic-stone core! That's why it is artificial intelligence.”
“Since inference processing and storage occur in the same place, bottlenecks would be reduced, and mana efficiency would be improved dramatically as well.”
From Asterion's perspective, the moment Akion heard him, he had accurately identified the problems and recognized that using Solution A would improve B.
“Correct. As Sid said, you truly understand magi-engineering perfectly.”
“Pardon?”
But here, this was magi-engineering.
Asterion had been realizing it through fragments of lost magi-engineering.
“No, judging by his reaction, he doesn't even seem to realize that he's delving into magi-engineering himself....”
“Lord Asterion. It seems this child is figuring it all out on his own without knowing magi-engineering at all. Isn't that right, Xeros?”
“Lady Karena is right. The fact that he understood everything the moment he heard fragments of the old master's research....”
Akion had inadvertently become a genius of magi-engineering.
Asterion, Karena in the guise of a noblewoman, and Xeros, a dragon who looked like an adventurer uncle,
all three dragons stared at Akion with shining eyes.
“This is a prodigy. No, perhaps he should be considered the greatest genius in human history!”
“Oh, come on, it's nothing like that.”
In reality, Akion had merely been applying science and engineering.
He had only mentioned what he knew about AI, yet they were treating him like a genius, leaving him at a loss.
“I was just looking at that golem's arm and thinking of something like a prosthetic arm....”
“Ho-ho, with a brain that astonishing, you were thinking of nothing more than a prosthetic arm?”
Of course, he had been excited by the talk of AI, but what Akion was actually interested in was a prosthetic arm.
“Yes. My fiancée's father lost his arm.”
“Huh.”
It was because he had thought of Duke Volkov, Arctic Volkov.
Even with one arm, he still performed his duties as a lance master... but surely, life was terribly inconvenient for someone missing an arm.
“You mean that woman possessed by the demon of the North.”
“Hmm. I heard an old human slew it splendidly with a single spear.”
Besides, this was a romance-fantasy medieval world.
Accidents involving severed limbs were more common than one might think. There had even been an actual accident at Akion's workshop.
That time, the nearby treatment center had resolved it quickly,
but many people also lost limbs because holy healing could not be performed in time, as with Volkov.
“Really, for that reason?”
“Other than that, there wouldn't be much use for it, even in automated factories, except in dangerous fields.”
Besides, he gave that answer because labor costs were currently cheaper. Anyway.
“Ho-ho-ho....”
“For all that brilliant intellect....”
“You would use it merely to take care of people?”
To the three dragons... that answer made Akion look like a saint.
To think he would use technology understood by that brilliant mind to improve everyone's daily lives instead of developing weapons?
“There must be a reason the Heavenly Lord granted you the sign....”
Asterion looked at the glowing sign on the back of his left hand.
Was the Heavenly Lord not one who saw through every person's character?
Since such a being had granted him a portion of their power... all the dragons acknowledged him and nodded.
“He is more than worthy as a husband for Sid and Flare—”
- Kraaang!!
“Guh!”
“Don't talk nonsense.”
He was about to give Akion a passing grade, but the Tower Master hit him again. Anyway.
Akion resolved that someday he would have to give that Tower Master a good scolding....
“Child. No, Akion. I shall regard you as my equal and ask you one question.”
“That is far too much honor for me... Anyway, please ask your question.”
Asterion asked Akion something he was genuinely curious about.
“What do you consider a powerful weapon?”
“Pardon?”
Just how far could a genius like this go in cruelty?
After living nearly ten thousand years, Asterion had witnessed the full extent of how cruel intelligent beings could become.
“Old man!”
“Of course, I mean only in your imagination. Only in your imagination. Just imagine how much blood would flow if it were actually built.”
Despite the Tower Master's scolding, Asterion fixed his gleaming slit pupils on Akion.
“You needn't explain the principles. Just tell me how you think it would work. If it would be difficult to build, I shall cast illusion magic to turn your idea into a tangible vision.”
- Rustle!
“Old man, how can you say that after casting magic on him?!”
What violent means could this genius possibly think of?
Naturally, Akion had never even considered anything like this. They were suddenly going to cast magic that would instantly materialize his imagination?
Unfortunately, the question before him had contained the keyword “powerful weapon”....
Akion could not stop his train of thought.
And the knowledge Akion summoned was one thousand kilograms of antimatter.
- Beeeeeeeeeeeee─!
“……….”
The instant it detonated, everything within a radius of several hundred kilometers would vaporize,
its heat would punch a hole straight through the planet's atmosphere,
shake the crust beneath the planet, triggering massive earthquakes and tsunamis,
and, with an enormous amount of dust hurled into the sky blocking even the sunlight, plunge the world into a nuclear winter: a one-ton antimatter bomb.
“Ah.”
“Gasp.”
The temperature at the center?
It would soar to a level at which even the temperature at the Sun's core would seem laughable.
The protons and neutrons making up matter would melt down and break apart into quarks and gluons.
“Y-young master. Just what is this magic...?”
“It's not magic. It's just... of all things, I happened to think of antimatter.”
In its aftermath... even a dragon would not emerge unscathed.
After confronting an overwhelming violence enough to make his several-thousand-year life seem insignificant,
Asterion did his best to keep looking at Akion, even as his pupils shook violently.
“You are....”
Bearer of the Heavenly Lord's sign,
a human who had grasped the essence of magi-engineering on his own,
and who, even if only as a theoretical possibility... knew how to employ violence at its ultimate extreme?
“Who... are you?”
Akion, after all, was effectively saying that he possessed the skills to do such things....
yet would wield them without holding back solely for the ordinary safety of the beings he had created.
“An agent of the Heavenly Lord...?”
“Akion... Is there some great destiny you were supposed to conceal from me?”
“Me??”
Asterion, the three dragons, and even the Tower Master—
all the dragons began trembling in fear and awe.