Chapter 5
“Understood.”
Luri no longer tried to stop the stubborn Ferda.
She had expected him to refuse after issuing such a firm warning, but he chose to follow Ferda’s wishes without protest.
After Ferda finished eating, Luri led the way.
She headed for an open area in the garden.
“I’ll have to touch you for a moment.”
Luri, who had been so reluctant to grab him, said she would take hold of Ferda.
“Go ahead.”
“Then.”
Luri grabbed Ferda by his clothes.
At that moment, the fiercely blazing sun disappeared.
Something blocked Ferda’s vision.
It was an enormous wing.
A pair of wings sprouted from Luri’s back.
The wings beat powerfully toward the ground, and she shot into the air.
Whoom—!
Gravity vanished, and air resistance tormented Ferda.
It would not have been strange if he had vomited up the breakfast he had just eaten at any moment.
Ferda swallowed and endured the changes in air pressure and the wind resistance.
His dizziness and pain lasted only a moment.
“We’ve arrived.”
Hearing Luri’s voice, Ferda opened his eyes.
The scenery spread out before him had changed in an instant.
They had flown to the very summit of the mountain.
‘Only three seconds by my subjective sense of time. Did we reach the summit in that interval?’
It was not teleportation magic; if she could cover that distance through sheer speed, she was the fastest among the dragon spawns.
‘No, she might even be the fastest among dragons.’
As Ferda stared blankly at Luri, lost in thought,
“I’m not the one you should be looking at.”
“What?”
“Look below.”
“Ah, right.”
Ferda turned his head and looked down.
He looked down at the eastern side of the summit of the lonely mountain.
A colorless plain stretched out below.
‘The Land of Demons.’
A land completely corrupted when the Demon King died.
He could see something writhing there.
‘Monsters.’
Monsters.
Invaders from the continent that had continued to pour in ever since the Demon King’s birth.
No one knew where these creatures came from or how they were made, even by the time Ferda killed Valdrowa.
The only thing known was that their purpose was the same as the Demon King’s 150 years ago.
‘To create a land where nothing but death remains.’
To annihilate and rule over every living thing.
And what Ferda was watching were the monsters rising from the East.
‘As expected of the East, the monsters are enormous.’
They were truly gigantic.
Crawling out of the Land of Demons, which could not be purified, they boasted an overwhelming size.
They were large enough to topple a fortress simply by rolling over.
They were disasters on a scale beyond anything humans could handle.
Amid the drab colors of despair, a single flame nearly the color of pure red billowed.
No, looking again, it was not a flame.
‘The Red Dragon, Valdrowa.’
The one who would become Ferda’s fiancé was fighting there.
Valdrowa was as large as the other dragons.
However, compared to the monster she faced, she was only half its size.
Though she was vastly outmatched in bulk, Valdrowa was no easy opponent.
Ruuuumble!
The monster and Valdrowa collided.
Despite the enormous difference in size, she did not yield an inch.
Instead, the air rippled violently.
The wave swept through the forest and reached even the high mountain where Ferda stood.
“Ugh……”
It stiffened Ferda’s body.
An ordinary person might have assumed it was simply because he was frightened, but the cause here was clear.
The dragon’s mana had mingled with the wave and pierced through his skin.
‘Dragon Fear…… I suppose.’
The power he felt was on an entirely different level from the Dragon Fear Luri had unleashed.
Even knowing it was not aimed at him, he felt as though Valdrowa herself were staring at him.
‘So that is a Red Dragon.’
A sense of helplessness on an entirely different level from anything he had felt as an Archmage swept through his body.
Valdrowa’s battle continued.
Crunch! Crack!
An avatar of power and master of fire.
The Red Tyrant’s battle was overwhelming.
She stripped away the monster’s thick hide with her sharp claws.
With her long snout and teeth, she severed the monster’s blood vessels and tendons.
She moved so nimbly that the monster flailing in desperation looked clumsy.
She relentlessly targeted its blind spots, leaving it no opening.
Strength, speed, and an innate combat sense.
-Kieeeek!
With every tendon severed, the monster could no longer resist and collapsed.
It would have died if she simply left it there.
But Valdrowa’s violence did not stop.
Crack—! Crack—!
Her claws pierced the monster’s belly and tore it wide open.
Even from afar, Ferda could see the monster’s purple blood and green entrails.
At the same time, Valdrowa’s belly swelled greatly.
A vivid red light shone fiercely through the white scales of her belly.
‘Fire Breath.’
Fwoooosh!
The Red Dragon’s breath, said to be more powerful than the flames of hell, burned the monster from within.
-Kieeeek!
The monster let out a scream of agony.
But that cry soon fell silent as well.
Crimson flames gushed violently from every hole pierced through the monster’s body.
Its insides were cooked through and through, then began to turn to ash and scatter.
Its form became ash and smoke, and on the land where only curses had settled, the Red Tyrant alone stood.
-Kroaaah!
Valdrowa’s roar reverberated thunderously and shook everything.
“Gah!”
Ferda could endure no longer and collapsed on the spot.
‘As expected…… did Dragon Roar truly possess this much power?’
It was the sensation of being overwhelmed by a dragon, something he had never felt even as an Archmage.
His hands and feet trembled, and his teeth chattered.
Ferda was rendered utterly powerless.
“This is the true form of the one who will become your consort.”
Luri crouched down beside him and looked down at Ferda.
“A Red Dragon’s blood contains ferocious murderous intent—the essence of the evil dragon, as you humans call it. That is her nature, not her temperament.”
Luri emphasized the word “nature.”
Ferda knew why she spoke that way.
‘Nature cannot be changed.’
An evil dragon would remain an evil dragon forever.
Her murderous intent could not be removed, and there was no guarantee it would never touch Ferda.
“A Red Dragon cannot live without destruction. If you remain by my mistress’s side, you must be prepared every day for your back to break like a shrimp’s.”
Luri’s expressionless gaze seemed to ask,
Do you finally realize what a shallow decision you made?
‘There’s no denying that her power provokes fear.’
Even from afar, her gaze was so vivid that it felt as though it had bored into his mind.
It was an unavoidable and undeniable fact.
‘But I’m not afraid.’
Her gaze existed in Ferda’s mind, but so did Valdrowa’s emotions.
The emotions she had felt in response to what she saw helped him understand all of her actions up to now.
‘She does those things for the sake of this world.’
Because she loved this world, she hid her true form,
and hunted monsters herself to protect what she loved.
‘She is an evil dragon.’
Yet at the same time, she was a knight with a noble heart and the continent’s guardian dragon.
She was an ascetic striving toward an ideal that could never be reached.
“Truly……”
And so, the emotion of fear was transformed into wonder.
“Magnificent.”
Light shone in Ferda’s eyes.
He was smiling.
* * *
Luri hated humans.
With dragon’s blood flowing through her veins, she ought to harbor such feelings.
Yet her master, Valdrowa, loved those beneath her.
‘And was hurt by them.’
Ever since the incident involving the Third Prince’s assassination, Luri’s hatred of humans had grown even deeper than that of other dragon spawns.
Because she hated them more than anyone, she understood the gap between humans and dragons better than anyone, and she understood what she hated.
So she already knew what happened when an ordinary human saw a Red Dragon with his own eyes.
‘He brought it on himself.’
Ferda had said he wanted to see.
Luri had thoroughly warned him, even trying to dissuade him.
Though she had flown while holding Ferda to take him away before the battle ended!
She thought she had done enough to stop him.
Up to that point, things had gone according to Luri’s expectations.
Ferda, who had watched the scene, merely stared at it blankly.
He was trembling before the Dragon Fear of an entirely different caliber.
‘A typical situation.’
That face would gradually change into one of fear,
and soon he would blame himself for his presumption and beg for his life.
‘By then, my mistress will understand as well.’
That humans and dragons could never become one.
She thought he was moving as she had predicted, but that was not the case.
“Truly…… magnificent.”
An absurd remark burst from Ferda’s mouth.
Luri turned her head, wondering if she had heard incorrectly.
But she was even more shocked as she turned.
‘Is he smiling?’
She could not understand.
How could he smile while watching that merciless sight of something being torn apart and burned?
Shouldn’t he be afraid that he, too, might meet such a fleeting fate?
‘No way…….’
At that moment, a realization struck Luri’s mind like thunder and lightning.
Why this man could remain so composed even after becoming Valdrowa’s fiancé.
And why he could smile like this in such a situation.
‘If it’s “that,” everything makes sense.’
‘What a crazy masochist.’
It was the moment Luri’s disgust toward Ferda deepened even further.
* * *
That day, Ferda lay in bed, unable to move a muscle.
He had been struck by Dragon Fear and exposed to the Roar as well.
It was a situation in which an ordinary human could not remain sane.
Conversely, Ferda’s body was ruined precisely because he had remained sane.
‘Can I really not move?’
Just in case, he tried to twitch a hand.
Instead, his toes wriggled.
When he tried to blink, his thumb flapped,
and when he twitched his mouth, his nostrils flared.
‘I suppose it’s no use.’
It was a miracle that his mind was still clear at all.
The best he could do was lie quietly and lose himself in thought.
‘Looks like I’m going to lose an entire day.’
He needed every moment to focus on breaking through the circle, yet he had to lie here like this.
‘Why did I want to see that in the first place?’
The reason Ferda had wanted to see it.
It had been an instinct that perhaps the battle would give him the answer.
‘So was that instinct right?’
That was what he had to find out now.
Ferda decided to go over everything he had witnessed once more.
He returned to the moment he had arrived at the summit.
He recalled the smell of the air he had breathed, the temperature against his skin, and even the feel of the uneven gravel beneath his toes.
He vividly recalled everything.
Within the world of imagination he had created, he lowered his gaze and recalled his battle with her as well.
It had not been the battle of the notorious evil dragon,
‘It was a noble battle waged by a noble red knight.’
She was the one who would soon become Ferda’s consort.
At that moment, he felt something stirring in his lower abdomen.
‘This is…….’
Ferda knew this sensation well.
It was the upheaval he had felt when he was expelled from the Rosnova family.
‘A Red Circle is forming.’
A Red Circle formed through emotional upheaval.
Since Ferda had been trying to create a Blue Circle, he should naturally have rejected this.
‘Strange.’
Yet Ferda did not.
He had sensed that this Red Circle was different in nature.
‘This emotion isn’t caused by anger or a desire for revenge.’
It was an upheaval caused by an emotion different from the one he had felt before.
That emotion possessed potential no less than anger and the desire for revenge.
‘I felt this while imagining the way Valdrowa fought.’
It was the same even now.
As he thought of Valdrowa, the circuit gradually took clearer shape.
Was this not why he had thought he needed to see Valdrowa fight?
‘If so…….’
Perhaps this was the answer.
Ferda no longer hesitated.
He focused on his feelings for Valdrowa.
The awe he had felt, and her bearing.
He shaped his vague feelings into words, organizing and intensifying them.
The mana circuit whirled violently.
The dizzying rotational force grew stronger and stronger, trying to swallow Ferda like a storm-tossed sea.
But Ferda was a man who had already reached the rank of Archmage through a Red Circle.
He delicately controlled the vortex created by the upheaval.
He gathered what threatened to fly apart, compressed it, and shaped it.
At last, he drew a single circle.
‘A circle.’
At the same time, as he felt the lingering relief and exhilaration, he examined the source of this emotion once more.
‘It wasn’t based on hatred or a desire for revenge.’
That meant there would be no identical future, and no identical mistakes.
‘Done.’
Ferda rejoiced at that realization.
Ferda’s nostrils flared.