Chapter 22

[22] What on earth did she do?

The next day.

I started my morning with a video call with Sia.

[Did you sleep well, Oppa?]

She was rubbing her eyes, so she must have just woken up. Even so, she looked beautiful.

“I slept well, thanks to the way you listened to me yesterday, Sia.”

[I’m glad.]

The warmth in Sia’s voice melted my heart.

At first, I’d thought it would be best not to tell her about the villains if I could help it. But the more I thought about it, the more I felt I’d done the right thing by telling her right away.

If I hadn’t, I might have spent the night worrying about when and how to bring it up—and hardly slept at all.

“Sia, are you… okay?”

She hadn’t seemed to be doing very well before we ended the call last night, so I asked carefully, worried about her.

[Me? Of course I’m okay!]

But Sia sounded almost too okay.

As if she hadn’t heard a thing from me yesterday.

That only made me more worried.

“Are you sure you’re all right?”

[Of course. I already got revenge for you.]

“Revenge? They’re already dead.”

Was there any way to get revenge on dead villains?

Besides, I hadn’t told Sia anything about who they were.

With her abilities, she could probably find out their identities somehow… but even for a dragon like Sia, getting revenge on people who were already dead would be difficult, wouldn’t it?

When I looked confused, Sia’s eyes widened and her mouth fell open, as if she’d just let something slip.

But only for a moment.

She quickly returned to her usual expression and said:

[In my dream, I mean. It was just a dream.]

She said she’d given them such a scolding in her dream that they’d cried their eyes out, then threw a cute little punch into the air and went, “Hyah!”

In her dream…?

For some reason, I had an uneasy feeling.

It didn’t seem like that was what she’d meant to say.

Anyway.

There was no point in discussing this any further, so I changed the subject.

“I’m going to see Rokan later.”

[Grandpa?]

“Yeah. I need to give him the footage from the gate. I’ll show it to him and get his feedback. There are a few things I want to ask him about, too.”

I needed feedback based on the footage from my wearable camera. I also wanted to ask him about the aurora-colored sword aura I’d been able to use, however briefly.

So taking the camera to Rokan was already on my schedule.

But then—

[Can I watch it with you?]

“Of course. But I need to talk to your grandfather for a bit first. Can you wait just a little?”

[…Is it something I’m not supposed to know?]

Sia’s expression changed. She seemed to think I was hiding something from her.

She was half right.

There was a part of the footage I didn’t want Sia to see, and I’d planned to ask Rokan to erase it.

If it had been footage from a regular camera, I could’ve deleted it myself. But the wearable camera Sia had specially modified might only raise her suspicions if I tried to edit it clumsily.

“What could I possibly hide from you, Sia? It’s nothing like that, so don’t worry.”

After reassuring her, I kept the call going for a long time, chatting about everyday things instead of heavy topics like the gate or aura.

“All right, Sia. I’ll see you later. I’ll call you soon.”

[Okay!]

After ending the call, I grabbed the camera and headed to Rokan’s lair.

“Welcome.”

As soon as I arrived, Rokan greeted me warmly.

“Shasha told me more or less what happened. She said something serious happened yesterday.”

“Yes. I’ll explain everything inside.”

After a brief greeting, I gave Rokan a quick account of what had happened at the gate.

Once I’d finished, I said, “I have one favor to ask.”

“A favor?”

“It’s nothing major. I’d like you to erase part of this footage so cleanly that there’s no trace of it. I thought you’d be better at it than I would.”

I explained why I wanted to edit the video.

The villains had said something insulting about Sia just before they died. It could hurt her to hear it, so I asked if he could remove that part.

Rokan sat quietly, lost in thought after hearing me. A little while later, he gave me his answer.

“I don’t think you should.”

“…Pardon?”

To my surprise, Rokan refused.

I’d assumed he’d want that part erased as much as I did. After all, the footage clearly showed human criminals insulting his granddaughter.

Why did he think it was better to leave it in?

When I stared at him, puzzled, Rokan continued as if he’d expected that reaction.

“Even if we erase that part, it’s only a matter of time before Shasha finds out. Besides…”

Rokan gave me a knowing smile.

“I think seeing it might actually make Shasha happier.”

…Seeing it would make her happier?

No matter how I looked at it, there didn’t seem to be anything in that footage Sia would enjoy.

Still, since he was so sure, he must have had his reasons.

For now, I decided to do as Rokan suggested.

“Shasha must be waiting. Let’s go.”

In the end, I stood in front of the enormous screen without having erased the part I’d planned to remove.

As soon as Rokan connected the call, Sia appeared on the big screen.

[Oppa! Grandpa!]

It had been less than ten minutes since I’d last spoken with her, but Sia greeted me as if we hadn’t seen each other in ages.

“Good. Have you eaten yet?”

[I’ll eat later! What about you and Grandpa?]

“Same here. What about you, Minjun?”

“I’ll probably eat later too. If you’re both free, why don’t we have a meal together?”

Our small talk was brief.

It was time to get to the point.

Rokan put the footage I’d given him up on the screen and shared it with Sia.

“Please watch it and give us your honest feedback. Don’t hold back.”

We skipped the parts without any fighting and played the first encounter with the Antmen.

Neither Sia nor Rokan said a word. They focused on the footage and the flow of mana captured in it.

As they watched with serious expressions, Sia was the first to speak.

[Grandpa, I know he’s my Oppa, but doesn’t he seem like a real genius?]

“He does. His rate of growth is remarkable.”

I hadn’t really noticed it at the time, but the dragons seemed to see it differently.

“Your talent is almost wasted, Minjun. If you’d been born a dragon from the start…”

Rokan stopped mid-sentence. He flinched and waved a hand.

“No, I shouldn’t have said that. Forget what I just said.”

Even though it didn’t seem like such a strange thing to say, Rokan apologized as if he’d misspoken, then turned his attention back to the footage.

After studying it for a long while, Rokan told me what he’d noticed.

“Watching you use a sword this time, I couldn’t help thinking you looked like a hatchling wearing a human’s skin.”

“Pardon?”

Maybe it was just me, but there seemed to be an unusual number of cryptic comments today that I couldn’t make sense of.

Seeing my confusion, Rokan explained further.

“I mean that although you’re human, the way you use a sword looks more like a dragon’s than a human’s.”

“Could you explain that in a little more detail?”

[Oppa, let me explain.]

Sia seemed eager to add something, so she spoke up.

According to her, human swordsmanship and dragon swordsmanship were fundamentally different.

Humans wielded swords for one of two reasons: to protect what they cherished, or to take something precious from someone else.

As a result, a human’s sword carried all kinds of powerful emotions: sorrow, desperation, yearning, honor, greed, and more.

Dragons were different.

Born as the mightiest beings on earth, dragons had no need to wield swords to protect themselves or plunder someone else.

Why bother with a sword when they could simply use their Dragon Words?

That was why dragons wielded swords purely for amusement—nothing more, nothing less.

Their swords, then, didn’t carry the intense emotions found in human swordsmanship.

Instead, they carried something else.

A sense of ease: the knowledge that they could achieve what they wanted without resorting to wielding a sword as crudely as humans did. And from that ease came a certain nobility.

[To put Grandpa’s words another way, he felt the dragons’ characteristic ease and nobility in your swordsmanship, Oppa.]

“Exactly. And yet your sword also carries powerful human emotions. The two shouldn’t be able to coexist, which is what I can’t make sense of.”

The more I listened, the more confused I felt.

[Hmm. You still look like you don’t understand, Oppa.]

Sia had hit the nail on the head.

“This is a little embarrassing, but you’re right. Honestly, I don’t understand what you’re saying at all.”

I pretended to clutch my head and told Sia it was giving me a headache.

The more I learned, the more tangled everything seemed to get.

“I thought as much.” Rokan gently placed a hand on my shoulder. “Just remember what I said. You’ll understand it naturally in time, so don’t worry.”

“Yes. I’ll keep that in mind.”

“Let’s leave it there and move on.”

There was something more important to discuss.

I skipped ahead to the second clash with the Antmen, where I faced off against the villains.

The footage showed me panicking at the Antmen’s overwhelming numbers, then scraping together my strength to get through the situation. It continued to the moment the villains attacked me when my strength had nearly run out.

Then came the moment I found myself wielding the aurora-colored sword aura as I faced imminent death.

The instant the aura began to ripple from the sword in my bloodied hand—

Rokan paused the footage.

Then he said, “Minjun.”

His voice was calm.

But it was so unnaturally calm that those words alone gave me goosebumps.

“What on earth did you do?”

I didn’t know exactly what that aurora-colored sword aura was, but it certainly seemed like some kind of achievement.

I’d thought Rokan would be happy for me and congratulate me on it.

For some reason, though, he didn’t look happy at all.

“I’m not sure myself. The only thing I can think of is that when the aura appeared, I felt an overwhelming urge to survive and make it back alive.”

I was startled at first, but I calmly explained what I thought.

The most likely explanation was that my will to survive had allowed me to summon the aura, but I didn’t know for certain.

That was why I’d wanted to ask him about it in the first place.

But instead of answering my question, Rokan swallowed hard and wore a complicated expression I couldn’t read.

Then he said:

“…Let’s take a short break.”

Perhaps he had a headache. Rokan left us and went into his study.

What on earth was going on?

**

As soon as he staggered back into his study, Rokan squeezed his eyes shut and sighed.

After reading the energy of Minjun’s soul, Rokan had long known that there was something extraordinary about him.

But…

Even knowing that, this is still startling.

An aurora-colored sword aura.

When Minjun first brought it up, Rokan had been skeptical.

Thinking it over calmly, he’d concluded that Minjun couldn’t possibly have controlled such immense power at his current level. It seemed more likely that he’d seen an illusion while going berserk.

But, astonishingly, Minjun had been telling the truth.

He really had wielded a strange sword aura that brought an aurora to mind.

And the other dragons who had settled on Earth probably didn’t know what the aura was, either.

Even Sia had looked as if she’d never seen it before.

But Rokan knew.

He knew what the power Minjun had wielded was—and what kind of being had once used it.

A secret ancient text, accessible only to the Dragon Lords of each generation, contained this passage:

<…He wielded a strange sword aura reminiscent of the aurora, and captured everyone’s attention. Gifted in many fields besides swordsmanship, he possessed enough strength to overwhelm not only humans like himself, but our entire clan. (Omitted) He was friendly toward our clan, but it was our fate to regard him as a threat. He was, * ***.>

It was a story that had once stirred up the entire continent tens of thousands of years ago, but which humans now treated as a common legend.

*** …

If that happened, Minjun would become a monster who could no longer be called human.

Yet for the dragons, it wasn’t a legend. It was history—a tale passed down about a certain man.

Remembering that passage from the ancient text, Rokan sighed again.

For now, sighing was all he could do.

“How could you have recreated even that?”

Of course, compared to what the man in the record had wielded, Minjun’s sword aura was nowhere near as powerful.

But one thing was certain.

If Minjun ever learned to wield that sword aura as skillfully as the being whose very name was forbidden to mention, he would command a power so great that even Rokan, an ancient dragon, could be overwhelmed by it.

But…

That power had to remain sealed, at least until Minjun could properly control the power of a dragon.

Otherwise, the power would consume him.

And then Minjun would become a monster who could no longer be called human.