Chapter 322

Two dragons, black scales gleaming, each let out a roaring bellow.

Calamity, apocalypse, the end... if words like that ever took on physical form, they'd surely look something like that.

Almost at the same moment, the two dragons shook off the opponents they'd been fighting and shot up into the sky.

Then two pairs of red eyes took each other in.

[......]

[......]

The two of them looked at each other for only an instant.

No words passed between them, no small signal of any kind.

They simply, briefly, looked at each other.

That alone was enough.

— BWOOOOOOOOOO!!!

— Come... forth!

Venus raised her single great horn like a spear and let out a cry filled with rage and shock, while Juno — gathering rock, lava, and crystal endlessly out of the ground to swell its body larger — bellowed back, breathing fire.

[GRAAAAAAH!!!]

As if to answer them, the two dragons hurled themselves at their opponents once more.

The one with its horn intact went for Venus; the one with part of its horn cut away went for Juno.

The dragon with the intact horn — Yu Ji-hyeok — dodged Venus's horn smoothly as she thrust it at him like a lance, and threw himself in close to grapple her.

His agility, combined with the fact that he knew Venus's weak points and the techniques to exploit them, looked like it was giving him a comfortable edge — until Venus, leaning on her sheer raw strength and durability, started handling him with a practiced touch.

— Krgh, gaaah...!!! You — you...!!!

Minerva, by contrast, was deftly running Juno into the ground.

Unlike Yu Ji-hyeok, Minerva had hundreds — thousands — of years of accumulated experience to draw on. Above all, the Juno currently facing her wasn't the main body but only a clone.

That said, she was clearly still dealing with some lingering aftereffect — she landed small cuts on Juno but couldn't make a clean, finishing strike connect.

And watching their battle from a distance, Han Su-yeong had no choice but to stand there with a blank look on her face.

"My god...."

The instant she saw it, only one thing came to mind.

Natural disaster.

They were, literally, natural disasters made flesh.

This was the moment when she realized, all over again, exactly why the Seven Calamities were called humanity's gravest threat.

"Kyaaaaak!"

"Eeeeek!"

The screams coming from below made her glance down.

There, the subordinates of Venus and Juno lay scattered, dying horribly from nothing more than the spillover of the four-way battle above them.

They'd lost any will to fight, and they were running every which way in a panic.

For a moment Han Su-yeong watched them stumbling around as if they didn't even know which way to flee, then turned her head away as if she didn't care.

There was no reason to spare any mercy for enemies, and in the middle of all this she was already on edge from picking off the few subordinates still capable of flight who came at her.

"Not getting swept up in this is the best I can manage...."

She murmured the words after reducing a harpy that had lunged at her to ash in an instant.

In truth, if she hadn't been able to use a flight spell, and on top of that hadn't had the ring and buckler Yu Ji-hyeok had given her, she wouldn't have been in a meaningfully different situation from the underlings down below.

"......"

Three Seven Calamities.

And one human carrying the power of the Seven Calamities.

The scene the four of them were painting felt impossibly unreal to Han Su-yeong.

Ahriman — when that thing told me about the moment, could it have meant... right now? And if it really is....

She'd worried that thread that far when she shook her head sharply back and forth, biting at her lower lip.

Then, as if scolding herself for letting such a foul thought surface, she clapped both palms hard against her own cheeks.

"Hahh...."

Looking again at that scene that still didn't feel real, she drew in a slow breath and let it out.

It looked almost like she was steadying her own resolve.

How long passed that way she couldn't have said.

"All right."

She gave Rauné, perched stiff on her shoulder, a single stroke on the head and nodded.

She had her own work still to do.

[Khh....]

A throbbing pain shot through me, and I let a cold groan slip out before I could help it.

I didn't have to look down to know exactly what was happening at the spot where my heart had been pierced.

[...More to the point, what a wise move it was to keep storing power up steadily all this time.]

I gave Sbeungali a small nod at that.

He was right — it was easy enough to imagine what would have happened if I hadn't been stockpiling.

— Storage Battery (Growth)

Allows the user to accumulate and store surplus mana, energy, and force flowing within the body.

When stored, it shifts into various forms depending on the user's nature.

Ever since I'd swallowed Margo's, Sbeungali's, and Minerva's power, my total volume of mana, energy, and strength had gone far beyond what any normal human — or for that matter, most beings — could match.

And after I'd consumed Minerva's heart, even though it came with long stretches of pain, I'd ended up able to wring out mana almost without limit.

…And neither I, nor Minerva, nor Sbeungali was going to let that kind of opportunity just pass by.

I'd kept storing that power away, over and over, using the Storage Battery I'd picked up from Lee Myung-jun a long time back.

It was, for all practical purposes, a trump card — so I'd wanted to keep it for the absolute last resort if I could….

But if I hadn't had it, I would have either died with my heart pierced through, or ended up in a state where fighting was no longer possible.

Still….

None of us had expected the stockpile to manifest in this particular form.

I'd been thinking it would probably just come out as a mix of Minerva's power and Sbeungali's power layered together.

[Khh...!]

As if trying to fill the hole punched through my heart, the thorn growth packed into the center of my chest squirmed restlessly, like it had a will of its own.

Every time it did, the pain made my movements sluggish, and Venus, with the cunning and persistence of someone who wasn't about to let an opening like that slide, kept driving for those gaps.

[Mm... fall back, you.]

In the middle of it, Minerva slipped in a word of advice.

[From what I can see, she's about to spit out a high-pressure jet of water. Put a little distance between you and the force drops to almost nothing — but up close, it can slice even my scales open.]

I threw myself backwards on her advice.

A heartbeat later, jets of water erupted from the gaps between Venus's scales.

Sure enough, just as she'd said — at close range it could have torn me up badly.

[GRAAAAAAH!!!]

I unleashed a breath in retaliation, but if you measured pure durability alone, Venus stood overwhelmingly at the top even among the Seven Calamities, and I couldn't put a real wound on her.

[Krrrrr…….]

Ordinary methods weren't going to be enough to land a fatal blow on her, that much was clear.

I'd have to seize a decisive opening or strike at her weak point.

But Venus had experience and craft to rival even Minerva's, and she wasn't about to leave that kind of opening lying around for me.

Which meant only one method was left.

But—

Not now.

Right. Now wasn't the time.

It would be hard to find an opening to use Venus's weak point — the harpoon — and more than that, even if I broke her down here and pinned her, I had no margin left to seal her away.

One was one thing, but the idea that I could suppress and seal two Seven Calamities at once was wildly optimistic.

…I had one chance.

And it was a chance Ji-na — that kid — had risked her life to obtain and entrusted whole to me.

There was no way I could spend it casually in what amounted to a gamble.

I'd settled on the call — push Venus and Juno back the orthodox way, steady, no shortcuts — when:

— BWOOOOOOOOOO!!!

Venus suddenly twisted her body as if on guard.

I kept the distance between us and quickly scanned the area, and figured out who she'd flinched at almost instantly.

Milited.

Still — disgustingly — wearing that female form, the thing seemed to have been quietly poaching control of the water Venus had spilled out, and it was now putting on a fairly impressive show of force.

Not too close, not too far either, it looked back and forth between me and Venus and broke into a grinning smile.

"I came to help a comrade — was that an imposition?"

The thing that flashed through my mind in that instant was Minerva's warning never to trust Milited.

I was about to unleash a breath at it with a clear get the hell out of here attached when something slammed hard against my wing.

[Krrgh!?]

— Stay. …Still. You… livestock… filth…!!!

To my surprise, the one who'd hit me was Juno.

Don't tell me it brought Minerva down — I shot a look that way, only to find Juno still there as well.

A clone.

The short word flashed through my head.

Even at the cost of overextending, it clearly meant to drop one of us first.

I twisted to throw off the Juno that had its grip on my wing and was trying to drag me down toward the ground — and that was when:

In the same instant, a chain came whipping in from somewhere and snared itself around my neck.

"Ahahaha."

And the one holding the other end of that chain — Milited — broke into laughter as it looked at me.

"When else would a chance like this come around?"

It, no — she shrugged her shoulders as if to ask what the issue was.

"Venus and Juno, both! A glittering little army you don't see twice in a lifetime! And I, you see, am hardly fool enough to let a chance that came running to my doorstep slip away."

I tried to break the chain choking my neck, but it kept biting deeper into the flesh, stubborn.

Watching me thrash, Milited went on smirking, delighted with herself, and crooned at me in that mocking tone.

"I know how strong you are. So this body, you see, came rather thoroughly prepared to stab you in the back."

Short of severing your own neck, this chain isn't coming off easily.

With that, she gripped the chain in both hands and started hauling on it.

Venus, Juno, and Milited.

With three Seven Calamities pinning me down at once, there was no clever way out — not even for me.

I was being dragged helplessly toward the ground, still thrashing for any way to break free, when:

[…Hah.]

Minerva let out a quiet sigh.

In a calm, steady voice, she said to me:

[You. I'll borrow a little of your strength for a moment.]

The instant the words left her, I felt the stockpiled mana inside me drain away at startling speed.

It wasn't flowing into Milited or Juno.

The mana coming out of my body right now was all heading into the shadow — to Minerva.

[And….]

She hesitated, then murmured with what sounded like hard-won resolve.

[I shall trust, without doubt, that you of all people can persuade the past me.]

With that, she began emerging from the shadow.

It was the moment a third dragon stepped into view.

No one had seen it coming.

Not Venus, not Juno, not Milited — not even Yu Ji-hyeok, the master of that shadow.

That Minerva had half-fused with the Henir's Shadow parasitically attached to Yu Ji-hyeok and now held the reins.

That because of this, in addition to her original strength, she could also use the abilities of the shadow.

That among those abilities were the power to give shadows physical force and, beyond Shadow Swamp, the ability to produce a doppelgänger.

That a shadow naturally takes on the form of its host body.

That right now, the host body — Yu Ji-hyeok — was in the form of a dragon.

That because of that, the doppelgänger she produced could take exactly the same shape.

Minerva was the only one who knew any of this.

[Krrrrr….]

The thing was made of only two colors.

Black and deep crimson.

Its eyes — the only part that bore color — sparked with sharp, glittering light.

— Wh. At…!?

Before anyone could react to the sudden gatecrasher's appearance, the golem's body — which had been crushing down on the dragon's wing — was sliced clean in two.

Before Juno could mount any real response, its body had been shattered to pieces, and only when the agony followed up by tearing through to its main body did it manage a screaming wail of pain.

— BWOOOOOOOOO!!!

It was the same for Venus — no escape from those sharp fangs and claws.

With her flank completely exposed, she let out a stricken cry as her back was torn open.

But the dragon, as if even that cry grated on its ears, breathed out a stream of black flame straight into the hideous wound spread across her back.

— BWOOOOOOOOOO!!!

In an instant, flames were rising all across Venus's body. She thrashed wildly, in agony, then began retching up boiling foam and sank straight down into the water.

Realizing she'd retreated into her own domain, Minerva cut off her breath and turned her gaze on Yu Ji-hyeok.

More precisely, she was looking at Milited — the one who had dared to throw a chain around Yu Ji-hyeok's neck.

"…Huh."

Milited muttered the syllable and blinked.

Just — just a moment ago, this side had the advantage…?

She was still muttering when the clinking of metal made her snap her gaze back over with a jolt.

There, Yu Ji-hyeok was half-sprawled, still with the chain looped around his neck.

And looking more closely, the shadow dragon had a chain around its neck, too.

Right. Of course.

Looking at that, Milited finally understood, and broke into a grin.

"…Right, right. To think you'd been hiding a trump card like this! But — a shadow follows the shape of its host, doesn't it! Try anything funny and I'll choke the life right out of you, so don't go moving around for nothing! This chain is my own body woven together with Juno's crystals — …!?"

In the middle of her triumphant little outburst, Milited stopped as she watched Yu Ji-hyeok snap the chain looped around his neck like it was nothing.

"Uh….."

[……]

[……]

Realizing only now that two dragons were staring straight at her, Milited took an involuntary half-step back.

"Uh, um… so."

How on earth did it come to this.

That was what she was thinking when she turned an aggrieved look on Yu Ji-hyeok and said:

"A chance to — to defend myself, please…."

As if they didn't need to hear another word, both dragons opened their jaws and let breath pour out.

The two streams swallowed up the spot where Milited had been standing in an instant.