Chapter 109
“Huh? Heh heh, I suppose our young Executor thought I would refuse.”
Akion had tracked down Asterion and Xeros.
The two were looking down over the sunset-bathed capital from the bell tower atop a cathedral.
“It’s fine. The boy fulfilled his duty. He passed away asking that his heart be used somewhere meaningful.”
“So you mean this is meaningful?”
Asterion, filled with melancholy rather than his usual solemn or kindly-grandfather demeanor, nodded.
“Oh, if you put it that way, will the Executor understand? The elder did speak indirectly, but in any case, he means to say, ‘Do as you please.’”
“How dare a youngster barely four thousand years old presume to judge me as he pleases?”
“So was I wrong? You eight-thousand-year-old geezer.”
Akion stared blankly at the bickering dragons.
To reassure Akion, Asterion cleared his throat and smiled benevolently.
“Do not worry, young Executor. I am merely a father conveying my boy’s final wish….”
But Asterion seemed to want something beyond the golem Akion had made.
“What I would ask, as I said before, is that you grant that golem the power to serve as a guardian. Sirius murmured at the final moment that he had no regrets after trading himself for the lives of hundreds of thousands of elves.”
Perhaps he wanted to fulfill his dead son’s dream, even belatedly.
Asterion’s words were stained with regret.
“And furthermore, young Executor… no, Akion Enesis. With your learning, you could raise my golem technology to a higher plane. Please grant this old man’s final wish.”
“A guardian, using your son’s heart….”
A dragon who had wanted to become a hero but failed had become one by taking his enemy down with him,
and now he wanted Akion to use the Dragonheart left behind to create something like a hero?
Akion hit the brakes a little at that.
“Ah. You had another concern as well.”
Only then did Asterion remember.
That Akion hated for his knowledge to spiral into excessive violence.
“Executor. If you do not mind… tell me what led you to think of such a thing.”
Of course, Asterion did not really know why Akion was so worried.
He genuinely wanted to understand why Akion was acting this way.
“If you are worried the story might leak outside, I swear upon this sigil.”
“Do you know what this is?”
“To some extent. Is it something related to contracts that grants them binding force?”
And he had willingly said he would stake his own life for that purpose.
Having seen that dragons kept their promises, Akion raised his left hand with a sigh.
- Kiiing…!
“I will tell you. However, the moment this is abused without my permission, Elder Asterion’s life will….”
“Take it gladly. My Dragonheart as well.”
“Elder?! Isn’t that a bit excessive?!”
Xeros, watching from the side, was flustered.
He wondered if staking his own Dragonheart along with his life was not taking things a little too far.
“Xeros. You know as well as I do that there is no faster way to advance than developing techniques for killing someone…. The Executor is wary of knowledge being used that way.”
But eight thousand years of experience had not gone to waste; Asterion quickly noticed why Akion was holding back.
- Snap!
“Just in case, I will cast a mind-link spell so that we can receive each other’s thoughts. Now, tell me.”
“Yes.”
And the moment Asterion cast the spell,
- Rat-a-tat-tat!!
- Fwoooosh… KABOOM!!!
engineering knowledge that had existed in Akion’s previous life flooded wildly into his mind.
Specifically, knowledge specialized for war.
“……”
Guns, cannons, machine guns, tanks, flamethrowers, rockets, missiles, torpedoes, battleships, aircraft carriers, drones, white phosphorus bombs, cluster bombs, biochemical gases, and so on.
A battlefield where a life could be casually expended as nothing more than one soldier.
“…………….”
An appalling state of affairs in which engineering and scientific technologies specialized in killing humans were poured out to kill one another,
perpetuating nothing but a chain of hatred.
World War I, World War II.
The Korean War, wars in the Middle East, and countless civil wars.
Scientific and engineering technologies different from the way Akion used them… filled solely with the malice of wanting to kill people,
“Gasp.”
“Elder?”
Asterion involuntarily sucked in a breath.
A one-ton antimatter bomb?
Its power and brutality were tremendous, but… the situation Akion showed him, like a real history, was no less horrifying.
No, this was real history!
At this point, Asterion realized.
‘An otherworlder!!’
Akion’s true identity was someone who had crossed over from another world and been reincarnated.
‘Hell… He’s someone who experienced hell….’
And here came another spoonful of misunderstanding.
Asterion assumed Akion had directly or indirectly experienced all these wars.
That thought was conveyed to Akion in its entirety through the mind-link spell,
“Uh… not all of them.”
Akion scratched his head and denied it with a breezy tone.
Drones had only begun serving as weapons of war around the time he crossed over.
- Plop!
- Tremble…!
Of course, because the mind-link spell happened to break at precisely the right time,
Asterion misunderstood him again.
“Not all of them…?”
Akion was an otherworlder who had directly experienced countless wars,
and that was why he showed something close to hatred in his rejection of war.
“I understand. I understand. So that is why you tried to distance yourself from violence.”
“Uh, I think you may be misunderstanding something….”
The very technologies that had made his precious people explode and die before his eyes.
Why would someone who knew how to handle them go to the trouble of being reincarnated here by Cheonju’s will,
and devote himself solely to enriching everyday life?
And yet he had made the Spiral Spear and Holy Light Sword?
If one looked closely, weren’t their applications extremely limited?
They were specialized only for clearing out harmful creatures!
“Forgive me for calling you immature without understanding the depth of your intentions.”
“No, really. I think you’re misunderstanding me─.”
“Executor, I shall follow your wishes. I will withdraw my request that you create a guardian using my son’s heart. It was my mistake to make such an unreasonable request of someone who has suffered such tragedy─.”
“E-Executor. What on earth did Elder Asterion see to become this frightened?!”
“I said that’s not it!!”
Akion had to work up quite a sweat calming the frightened Asterion.
* * *
So what did they decide to do with Sirius’s Dragonheart?
“Are you really all right with this?”
“I’m fine.”
Even so, they decided to turn it into a golem.
They could have used it as material for some component, but Akion also had several things to gain from this golem development project.
First,
“We should be able to advance prosthetic-body technology during the process.”
Prosthetic-body technology, which he had been eyeing for a while now.
Technology that could help people with disabilities, such as Duke Volkov, who had lost an arm, return to society.
“Heh heh heh….”
“Why are you laughing so darkly?”
“Because I’m so proud of Akion.”
“You’re going to cover─ Whoa, whoa! Calm down, Sid. Are you trying to kill your uncle?”
Since amputating one of the four limbs was apparently a common occurrence in this world, Akion thought there would be plenty of uses for it.
And second,
“I wanted to make a robot.”
Robots were cool.
Akion’s dream in his previous life had been to become a roboticist in the first place.
That was why he had fallen out with his parents in his previous life and lived apart from them.
“Ro…bot?”
“Please think of it as a golem made through engineering.”
“Hmm. Robot, you say. Robot. It has a nice ring to it.”
Since the opportunity had finally come,
he wanted to fulfill his past-life dream here while also establishing prosthetic-body technology.
He could put limits on its learning to prevent lethal use and use an AI robot more practically, couldn’t he?
“Before that, let’s study.”
Of course, that meant he would have to pour even more engineering knowledge into those who would build it with him.
Akion happily picked up the chalk first.
*
Any field of engineering requires an enormous amount of knowledge to build even a single machine.
Robots were no exception.
“Mass moment of inertia…?”
“And what in the world is a hollow shaft?”
Even setting aside the artificial-intelligence mana core in charge of the AI brain and the signaling system, which could be left to magic,
he ruthlessly pushed the fundamentals of science and every kind of mechanics taught in the second semester all the way up to the application level.
Kinematics, multibody dynamics, solid mechanics for the materials used in robot components, and thermodynamics for managing the Dragonheart’s thermal energy.
“Good grief.”
Having sat through all of Akion’s crash courses,
Asterion felt his head grow hot for the first time in ages.
“Humans… had been keeping this all to themselves?”
“Heh heh, and even now you insist my words were exaggerated?”
In a good way, that is.
Domains judged only by instinct were being expressed through equations,
phenomena understood only by feel were being defined by a single formula,
and most phenomena could be predicted within an extremely narrow margin of error.
- Brrrrr…!!
“Huh? Elder, why are you trembling like that…?”
“Come to think of it, Lady Carena and Lord Xeros are reacting similarly.”
After living such long lives, most dragons became easily excited by new stimuli.
“You’re saying only little children like Flare knew about this stuff?!”
“This is so much fun!!!”
“Why!! Were!! You the only ones!! Who got to hear it?!!!”
“Waaah!! Don’t pinch Goldie’s cheeks!!!”
“Phew, I barely dodged that.”
They complained that it was unfair for only the children to attend such an enjoyable lecture.
If the students taking Introduction to Basic Science II this semester heard this, they would foam at the mouth and tell them to stop talking nonsense,
but these were dragons who possessed the brains of archmages by default.
“This is exhilarating…! I never thought studying would become fun again after living for four thousand years!”
“Heh heh heh, I’m old enough now that I shouldn’t be acting so undignified….”
“Then why did you pinch Goldie’s cheeks?”
“……”
“Answer me.”
They understood everything the instant they heard it—for Akion, they were graduate-school-optimized talents.
Of course, that did not mean Akion intended to drag such amazing dragons into graduate school.
There was ultimately a limit to the knowledge he could provide,
and since this was his trump card, he planned to release it to the dragons little by little, enough to leave them wanting more.
“But I can attend indefinitely.”
“Damn it, this is the first time I’ve ever envied Sid…!!”
“S-Sid. Come over here. Just for one day, disguise yourself as me so I can audit the class instead─.”
The three dragons, who had thought they would never again have reason to feel jealous after returning to the mortal world,
now found themselves jealous of Sid, whom they had raised like a child.
*
So, how did the golem construction turn out?
- Crackle crackle!
“Hee hee, Goldie didn’t know you could weld mithril too!”
“I didn’t know either.”
They poured money into it without holding back, starting with the basic frame.
Because the biggest sponsors of this ‘state-of-the-art artificial-intelligence golem—Dragonbot—using a Dragonheart as its engine and fuel tank’ project were….
- Boom!!
“Tell me if you need more.”
“Haha! I put some in too. I even added other precious metals, just in case!”
Asterion and Xeros, who were deeply connected to that Dragonheart.
And the two of them were so wealthy that even the word billionaire was insufficient.
They had brought boxes upon boxes of all kinds of precious metals, including mithril ingots.
“……Just how much mithril could there be in Elders Asterion and Xeros’s lairs?”
“Are you trying to get a chunk too, Sis?”
“Yeah. I think they’d seriously give me one.”
Their staggering financial power was enough to shake even Aicirel, who normally desired nothing except Akion’s exclusive attention!
Aicirel accidentally voiced one thought aloud.
“Could it be that… dragons control the Imperial economy?”
The thought that the dragons, like Big Brother, held the Imperial economy in their grasp.
Carena, who had been watching the mithril welding, heard this and said,
“Curious?”
“Gasp. No, I’m not.”
“It isn’t a secret. Hmm, though I should only tell you approximately….”
She tried to satisfy Aicirel’s curiosity without greatly undermining some dragons’ penchant for secrecy….
The answer she gave was,
“Only partly, but… dragons probably own six-tenths of the merchant capital on this continent.”
“Gasp.”
“Hieeek.”
Sixty percent of the merchant capital on the continent belonged to dragons.
Both Aicirel and Goldie, who had happened to overhear, had to suck in a breath.
Akion, beloved by some of those dragons?
- Whiiiiir~!
“Hmm. I wanted to try something like Boston Energetics.”
With high-end materials being poured out without limit, he was machining robot parts to his heart’s content.
What Akion envisioned was a robot capable of freely changing direction in any orientation.
Something like the physical AI robots made by Boston Energetics, a company owned by South Korea’s Daehyun Motors.
The problem was….
“Ugh.”
Akion knew the engineering theories used in them well enough.
The problem was that the core technologies were probably corporate secrets.
There was no way Akion could know them, and even if he looked at the patents, he did not know how to implement them; here, he would have to solve everything through sheer trial and error.
Of course, that was because the latest robot Akion had seen was at that stage,
but how many futuristic robots had he seen in various media?
“Should I change course…?”
Should he switch entirely to a robot equipped with muscles like a human’s?
To do that, he would need to find someone well versed in human anatomy, and that much should not be difficult.
But wouldn’t replicating the human musculoskeletal system exactly be a challenge on an entirely different level from that of ordinary robots?
“Hmm? It’s possible. That child over there operates by imitating human muscles too.”
“Huh.”
But there was one very close by.
The humanoid, ball-jointed golem Asterion always brought with him.
“You fixed only the joints with a compound connection of alchemy and magic, and the arms and legs are driven by mimicking human tendons and muscles.”
“Oh.”
“I never told you why there is a mana core in the head as well. After analyzing bipedal sapient lifeforms like humans for thousands of years… I found that the human brain performs quite a lot of functions. So I added another mana core inside the head to serve as an auxiliary brain.”
“Oh…!”
And in some respects, it was actually a more advanced stage than Akion had reached in his previous life.
An AI responsible for thought and an AI directly responsible for movement operated in one body as if they were one?
And while equipped with a body structure resembling a human’s?
“But its output used to be insufficient… with this actuator you made, it might be able to produce overwhelming power.”
“For combat?”
“Unfortunately, for combat. In accordance with your wishes, I suppose there’s no need to put it in─.”
“Let’s put it in, shall we?”
“Hmm?”
Even now, its strength and running speed were overwhelmingly greater than Akion’s.
Asterion himself had lamented that it was only about as strong as a beginner Expert-ranked knight… but the fact that a golem could produce that level of performance in the first place was already absurd.
But if they added Akion-made joint motors,
the mithril alloy for which they had already developed all the know-how while making the holy-bone steel,
and the AI algorithm training methods Akion had studied alongside control engineering, all crammed in,
“The artificial-intelligence core is finished.”
“Phew, even a small Dragonheart is still a Dragonheart.”
“Whew, it feels like my brain’s on fire from doing precision work for the first time in ages.”
And a Dragonheart core into which dragons unmatched in magic had painstakingly engraved the neural structure, one neuron at a time?
- Clank, whummm…!
When Akion finally fitted the Dragonheart into the chest cavity, where it would connect to the entire body’s circuitry,
“Oh dear. How did things end up like this….”
what stood completed was a hero robot with a dragon’s head, more than 20 centimeters taller than Akion.
How had it ended up like this?
“Isn’t this cooler?”
“A cool transforming hero robot? What kind of stupid-ass idea is this for the robot we’re making with my son’s Dragonheart!!”
“Let’s do it right now!!”
“Ah.”
Come to think of it, Akion’s otaku self-interest had contributed a spoonful,
and Asterion and Xeros, excited by it, had joined in, causing the design to undergo a dramatic transformation.
- Ziiiiing….
The reproachful looks of the people around them watching this were stinging,
“Ahem, let’s activate it tomorrow, shall we?”
They needed to rest for now.
“Hmm. Let’s do as Akion says. Come, Elders, you should go in too.”
“Hoooo, after doing this for nearly several weeks without sleeping… I suppose I really am getting old.”
“Xeros, what nonsense are you spouting? Even this elder sister doesn’t complain.”
Since they had poured far too many resources into the project, as the dragons said… Akion had honestly been barely keeping up with his academy work.
He would be better off resting today so he could deal with the tasks he had put off.
As everyone left the laboratory, just as Akion had suggested,
- Sparkle!
“Hmm?”
The Saintess turned her head at holy power that had flared up momentarily in two places.
“Saint? Did you not feel something?”
“What? Feel what? That we worked hard?”
“Mmm, no.”
One was Akion.
More precisely, the sigil on the back of Akion’s hand.
And the other was….
“Hmm….”
From the chest of the highly mechanical golem called Dragonbot, with a dragon’s head.
There was a Dragonheart there, overflowing with mana, but since it had originally contained not a speck of holy power… it was suspicious, but,
“Hmm, I must have imagined it.”
Thinking she was tired and had imagined it, the Saintess followed after Akion.
- Thrum, thrum, thrum….
- Nod….
Without knowing what had already begun happening to Dragonbot.