When he opened his eyes, it was dark and pitch black all around.
Even in the darkness, Klad, whose eyes were bright, calmly examined his surroundings without panicking. Seeing that he couldn’t even see his own hand right in front of his nose, it didn’t seem to be simple darkness.
Klad slowly clenched and opened his invisible hand. He felt nothing.
“……”
Was this what it felt like to be buried in darkness? Though it would be natural to feel anxious in this mysterious darkness, Klad instead felt a sense of stability.
He felt that it didn’t matter at all what the identity of this darkness was.
Step.
Klad walked without hesitation on a path where he couldn’t see an inch ahead.
Step step.
Since he couldn’t see ahead, nothing was clear—whether he was walking properly along a path, or whether there even was a path here. Yet Klad moved his feet without hesitation.
After walking for a while, the shapes of his surroundings began to faintly come into view in the darkness. Guessing that he had arrived at the end of the path, Klad stopped in place.
It was a place familiar to Klad.
The space beneath the underground prison of Duke West’s castle. The place where he had stayed for the past few hundred years.
“……”
As he silently gazed at that place, the blurred form of a dragon bound in chains and roaring appeared faintly over the darkness.
Knowing it was merely a hallucination, Klad frowned and waved his hand. At Klad’s gesture, the dragon’s phantom scattered like smoke and disappeared.
‘…It’s quiet.’
There was once a time when quietness was natural. He didn’t know how long it had been since silence felt this awkward.
Klad settled down in one corner where he always used to sit.
About 500 years ago, Klad woke from sleep after finishing a sleep cycle that lasted a hundred years. It wasn’t a planned schedule. He simply naturally opened his eyes upon feeling a flaw in the grand magic circle his father had created.
Long, long ago, in an era when the relationship between dragons and humans was relatively amicable, Klad’s parents had been friends with the first Hero who established the House of Duke West. They had voluntarily drawn a powerful protective magic circle there when the first Hero built the ducal castle, and it had firmly protected the ducal house until now, thousands of years later.
To think that such a magic circle had been damaged—beyond being unbelievable, it was unpleasant. To dare break a magic circle that was like a keepsake of his parents. Though dragons didn’t have deep familial bonds unlike humans, carrying the displeasure that the dragon’s honor had fallen, Klad rushed to the ducal castle in one breath. Perhaps he wanted to hold the House of Duke West responsible for not properly maintaining the magic circle.
However, upon actually arriving at the ducal castle, he couldn’t do anything.
There were no humans left in the empire who remembered him.
Not a single one.
For humans with short lifespans, a dragon’s sleep cycle was too long. He wanted to vent his anger at the disappeared targets of revenge by trampling and destroying the House of Duke West they left behind, but he couldn’t even do that because of the covenant. If he acted rashly and it was revealed that a dragon who couldn’t attack them because of the covenant had appeared, it was obvious he would be exploited by members of the House of Duke West.
That day, Klad felt the emotion of futility for the first time. He didn’t want to do anything. No, he couldn’t do anything.
In the end, instead of seeking out the detestable humans of West, Klad descended into the basement of the ducal castle. To this very place where Klad was now standing.
The dragon’s magic circle was down here. Klad replenished the magic power of the magic stones that had been depleted while defending against the shock. Though some functions would be damaged because he hadn’t repaired the twisted magic circle, since he had replenished the magic power, the remaining functions including protecting the ducal castle would work properly.
It wasn’t for the House of Duke West. He just did it because he wanted to feel for longer the sense of stability he felt when he was here.
Whether it was because of the dragon’s magic power spread throughout the entire basement of the ducal house, or because of the magic circle that hummed faintly, this darkness felt comfortable. The fact that he was in a place where he could collapse Duke West’s castle at any time became a comfort to his heart.
If by any chance he went mad, he would indiscriminately pour out attack magic, and the first thing to collapse under the mad dragon’s tyranny would be the ducal castle. Since the attacks poured out without targeting a specific target while not in his right mind, even if members of the House of Duke West got caught up in that situation, it wouldn’t count as breaking the covenant.
Thinking such thoughts, Klad didn’t leave that place. Though he hadn’t entered a sleep cycle, he just sat still in that spot.
Waiting in the darkness for the day he would go mad.
“……”
It felt as if he had returned to that time.
Even after 500 years passed, he hadn’t gone mad. It was a time during which countless humans would have died and been born repeatedly, but for Klad, who was a dragon, it wasn’t that long a time.
Let’s wait just a little longer. Let’s endure just a little more. Repeating the same day while telling himself that, one day about 500 years after hiding in this place, change came to Klad.
Klad raised his head toward the ceiling, recalling that day.
Pop—
As if it had been waiting for Klad to raise his head, a hole opened in the ceiling. Through it, faint light poured down and dug into the darkness.
Klad frowned and turned his gaze to follow the light.
Where his gaze reached, there were clear blue eyes without a speck of dust.
“Master!”
“…Hup!”
At the sudden cry, Klad gasped and opened his eyes. What he saw before his eyes was not blue eyes but Ainel’s flustered expression.
After blinking two or three times, Klad understood what the earlier form had been.
‘…Of all things, I’m even having dreams.’
Dragons don’t dream. Dragons only sleep when entering a sleep cycle. Once they sleep, they fall into a deep slumber that continues for hundreds of years, so there’s no opportunity to dream.
Among dragons who hide among humans and enjoy the amusement of pretending to be human, there are occasionally some who imitate the act of sleeping, but that’s just closing their eyes and pretending to sleep—they rarely actually fall asleep.
So that must be why Ainel was looking at him with such a surprised face. A dragon who shouldn’t sleep had fallen asleep, even dreaming.
“Are you alright?”
“I’m fine. It’s because of the covenant.”
“Don’t you need to enter a sleep cycle?”
“It’s not that serious.”
“You’re not forcing yourself to hold on because of the Hero, are you?”
Klad didn’t answer.
Since the pain from breaking the covenant couldn’t be healed even with recovery magic, expecting natural recovery through long sleep was the best method, but it wasn’t absolutely necessary.
This wasn’t the first time Klad had broken the covenant. Hundreds of years ago, when he inflicted a fatal wound on a member of the House of Duke West, he suffered even worse pain but endured for nearly a hundred years before sleeping. Since this time the intensity was weaker, he judged he could sufficiently recover even while awake. Even in the unlikely event that he inflicted a fatal wound on Duke West, he could endure for a hundred years after that before sleeping.
So continuing to hold on without entering a sleep cycle like this couldn’t be said to be for Jake’s sake. Though it might look like he was delaying sleep to match Jake’s human lifespan, that was a misunderstanding. He was simply enduring because he could endure. When there was still work that needed to be finished, he couldn’t irresponsibly just leave to go sleep.
“Why were you looking for me?”
“I found this on the Hero’s robe.”
What Ainel held out was a fragment of something that looked crushed as if pressed down.
“What is this?”
Klad held up the black fragment and examined it against the artificial sun he had created above Jake’s head. The fragment was so pitch black that even when held up to the light, it didn’t sparkle and emitted a sinister aura.
Flinch.
As the fragment got closer, Jake’s fingers, which had shown no movement all along, trembled faintly.
‘Is he reacting to this?’
When he brought the fragment closer to Jake, the movement of his fingers grew slightly larger. With a feeling that he shouldn’t bring this close to Jake, Klad moved a step away from Jake.
“…Is it demonic energy?”
When he repeatedly pressed and rubbed the fragment, demonic energy was faintly felt from within. As if demonic energy was stored inside it.
“I do feel demonic energy, but to check properly, I think we’d need to break it.”
“That won’t do. If we break it, it’ll be hard to analyze what this is.”
Ainel nodded as if in agreement.
“If the cause of the Hero’s collapse is related to this, it would be better to analyze it even if it takes some time, rather than breaking it.”
For such a suspicious-looking object to have come from his possession, even if it wasn’t directly related to the cause of Jake’s collapse, it was clear it wasn’t something beneficial to humans.
Klad frowned and pressed down hard on the fragment. Between the faintly felt demonic energy, he felt something else. Something less harmful than demonic energy, yet somehow unpleasant feeling… something strange……
“…The Lord God’s power.”
Klad, who realized what the earlier aura was, frowned even more deeply than when he had felt the demonic energy from the fragment. It wasn’t strange for Jake, a former Hero, to possess an object where divine power could be felt. However, if demonic energy could also be felt from that object where divine power was felt, the story was different.
And Klad had heard about an object that showed a similar phenomenon to this.
Duke West’s Black Sphere.
This fragment was certainly the same type of thing as that.
