Dragon And Justice

“…………By the way, Naruhito. How many times have you nearly died since coming to this city?”

Drako murmured as she sat deeply in her chair and crossed her long legs.

Though she had changed into the form of a girl, her eyes were no different from her usual adult form. Her arrogant attitude suited her strangely well.

“Eh? Ah, um…”

Tooyama began counting on his fingers.

Thinking about it, he felt like he had encountered nothing but danger since coming here, but if asked how many times he had nearly died—

“About three or four times?”

The recent fierce battle with the white snake woman, the trouble with the knight order, the battle with Stolu, and then his encounter with Drako.

Thinking about it calmly, that was bad. Tooyama suddenly reflected on his own adventure.

“Oh, I see. I. See. I heard about it, but you also fought with the Angel Church, did you not? I heard from Faran that you fought one swing of the sword called the finest in the Angel Church.”

Her blue eyes reflected the girl with pale-blue hair.

“The finest…? Ah—”

“………………Tooyama, what is it?”

Stolu, standing beside Tooyama, quietly tilted her gaze at him.

“No, I just remembered you were actually pretty amazing too.”

“Heh. ‘Just remembered’ is unnecessary, dis. My inquisitor-dono.”

Stolu smiled softly. Her pale-blue ponytail, like flowing water, swayed with the movement of her body.

“…………………”

Drako stared silently at Stolu as she smiled at Tooyama.

“Hm?”

Something was wrong. This time Drako had gone silent. Until moments ago, the atmosphere had somehow been nice, but now it had started getting worse in a different way.

I don’t understand anything anymore. Tooyama gave up on the ideal of a cozy first day after moving in.

“My inquisitor, is it? Knight, you seem to have quite a thick face. Fukaka, such is the karma of humans.”

“With fear and respect, most noble Hoarding Dragon-sama, you whom we knights admire, I ask: what are you trying to say?”

Both of their voices were calm.

Drako’s voice had a grandeur reminiscent of the bottom of a tranquil sea.

Stolu’s voice had the loveliness of morning dew that appears only in the early morning.

“Hah, it is obvious. You tried to lay hands on my friend, and yet you seem rather accustomed to being near him. I heard from my maid. Apparently, you nearly killed Naruhito. With your petty grave good and cheap sacrament.”

The sea easily began to storm.

The dragon’s voice and tone were calm, but they contained an irresistible force.

“Ah…”

Tooyama remembered. The fact he had somehow swallowed down. Stolu Pula, the fact that she had nearly killed him.

Well, certainly, he had accepted it mostly by momentum, but now that he thought about it—

“Come to think of it, Stolu, you were my enemy at first.”

Calm down. Respond calmly.

While cold sweat poured down because Drako’s voice was growing lower and lower, Tooyama worked hard to behave on the surface as if nothing bothered him.

“……I do think I did something wrong, dis. At that time, my field of vision was far too narrow, dis.”

“Intelligence… No way.”

“I will get angry, dis.”

Stolu was being smart. In other words, this situation was close to a crisis.

“Fukaka, you are rather close, I see.”

“—”

“Whoa.”

That crisis suddenly laughed.

With just that, a pressure with mass assaulted Stolu and Tooyama. It was the absurd presence allowed only to dragons, higher life-forms.

Her vertically split irises, her blue dragon eyes, had narrowed smoothly.

“Ah, Naruhito, be at ease. This is not directed at you. I know. I know that you dislike petty jealousy.”

The pressure against Tooyama vanished as if it had never existed. The pressure as though his chest had been held down, the numbness in his hands, all of it disappeared.

Drako’s face changed easily, bright and cheerful like an ordinary girl laughing.

“—You seem to be greatly favored by the dragon, inquisitor-dono?”

“Shut up.”

Though still breaking into cold sweat, Stolu joked and turned her gaze toward Tooyama.

The fact that she still had a fair amount of composure even while being glared at by a dragon made her quite something. Tooyama once again understood the caliber of the First Knight.

Stolu too was special—

“Knight, I will speak plainly. How brazen of you to stay near him after nearly killing my friend.”

While playing with her well-maintained fingernails, the dragon’s eyes caught the knight and did not let go.

“Most noble Hoarding Dragon, what are you trying to say?”

The knight’s eyes, like a clear lake, also reflected the dragon and did not waver.

“I am saying it is unpleasant. I repeat, this is not jealousy. The fact that you are strangely close to Naruhito, and the fact that Naruhito places a strange trust in you, have nothing to do with it. It is not jealousy. It is not.”

“Ehh…”

Really? Drako’s words made one want to ask that, but the atmosphere was not one where she could be teased.

“Unpleasant, you say. In that case, with all due fear, dragon, may I also speak to you as the inquisitor’s attendant?”

“Oh, very well. I shall permit it in recognition of your spirit, remaining calm even while receiving my pressure.”

While facing the dragon’s quiet anger head-on, Stolu remained calm.

Her pale-blue eyes peeked faintly through slightly narrowed eyelids.

“Dragon, if you say you dislike how I responded to the Dragon Slayer upon first meeting, then what about you?”

“…………What?”

The density of Drako’s anger grew thick and oppressive.

“No, as a friend, yes, as merely a friend, I understand very well that you are worried about my inquisitor. Certainly, as you say, I did once try to kill him.”

While tapping the polished wooden floor with the sole of her boot, Stolu stroked the leaf of a small ornamental plant on the table.

Her slender finger pressed the leaf, slid along it, and flicked its tip.

“Then—”

“However, dragon. Are you not the same?”

The knight interrupted the dragon’s words.

Stolu tilted her head, and her ponytail moved smoothly like flowing water, swaying with a soft rustle.

“……………What did you say?”

Tap, tap, tap. Tap tap—. The movement of Drako’s index finger tapping the table stopped.

“The black-haired adventurer slave. You too should have tried to kill him. We are the same, are we not?”

A small, amused sound rang in Stolu’s throat.

Before long, her pale-blue eyes had grown muddy. They were like eyes mixed with the mud and algae settled at the bottom of a reservoir deep in the mountains.

“U-um, Stolu? Stolu-san? Your face, your face is, uh, somehow very scar—”

Something was bad. Tooyama called out to Stolu—

“Inquisitor-dono, right now, this is a conversation between me and Dragon-sama.”

“Ah, yes.”

Stolu smiled brightly. No, that was wrong. She was not smiling. Her eyelids, closed in a bright smile, opened slightly, revealing eyes like a ditch.

It was that face Drako and the Dragon of Human Knowledge sometimes made, the one where they smiled, but when you looked closely, they were not smiling at all.

There was something that left even Tooyama unable to say anything.

It was scary, so he stopped talking.

“Dragon-sama, you and I are the same. Only our positions differ slightly. You as a friend, and I as an attendant. We are both worried about the Dragon Slayer.”

The foolish girl had carried karma from the moment she was born.

A system of the species, which had passed continuously through humans, through the human race, and manifested at the turning points of eras.

One of seven systems, severe and powerful, and therefore narrow-minded as well: “Justice.”

“I too am worried. Dragon, you did once try to kill my inquisitor. You, whose original nature contains violence and domination as desires, are fixated on my inquisitor. Yes, from the perspective of one entrusted with guarding him, you are a splendid threat.”

The foolish girl had found her own justice within the Church. To accomplish it and protect it was absolute and unchanging, the only thing she could believe in within this cruel and vague world.

And before long, the girl became the Church’s finest sword, and her justice was formed even harder and more twisted.

The vessel of Justice. All juveniles throughout history had been eroded from within like this and ultimately became the system.

Because of her foolishness, the erosion of Justice had been relatively slow, but someday, Stolu Pula too would completely become a vessel of “Justice”—

—or so it should have been.

“I have a duty. I cannot afford to lose my inquisitor.”

Straightforwardly, ah, and yet with muddy eyes from which something inside oozed like sediment, the knight stared at the dragon.

“……Are you saying I would harm Naruhito?”

“I believe that is indeed Your Grace’s, a dragon’s, true nature. Because you are certainly… not human.”

Stolu’s words, released after a slight hesitation, reached the dragon.

The silence lasted only a few seconds, but to Tooyama, it was an absurdly long silence.

It was a stillness where even the stagnant air in the room seemed about to make audible the sound of itself flowing, as though saying it did not want to be in this room.

“………………A nostalgic scent. I wonder which dragon’s memory this is.”

It was a calm voice.

The dragon’s soft gaze seemed to look at Stolu, but in truth, it was as though she were looking at something much farther away.

The gaze of a higher life-form that had lived for eternity was fundamentally different from that of humans.

“……What do you mean?”

Stolu raised her brows, and the muddiness disappeared from her eyes as though Drako’s unexpectedly calm reaction had robbed her of her venom.

“Girl knight, you have barked well. Ah, I know of you. The dragon blood flowing within me stirs, you see. A vessel of ‘Justice,’ a juvenile.”

Dragons were creatures who repeated the deaths and revivals of their seven lives.

They were creatures who touched many things within the cycle of repeated destruction and rebirth.

Within that repetition, they sometimes mixed with the lives of dragons that had already perished.

During the ancient Great War, among the group that hunted even dragons, there must also have been that generation’s “Justice.”

The vivid memories of dragon hunting had been inherited even by the newest dragon, the Hoarding Dragon, Alice Dral Flaretail.

“A safety valve for humans, a symbol of a role passed down continuously through many eras and many humans. Fukaka, this time, how very, well, impudently decent you have grown.”

“What are you talking about?”

At Stolu’s words, Drako laughed proudly.

“I am talking about you, juvenile of Justice. In the old memories, all of them were blind and foolish. But I am saying you are different. Ah, but there was one similar one long ago as well…”

“As a knight, there is no greater joy than hearing stories of ancient dragons.”

“Hah, how clever you speak. Blindly seeking justice, carrying it out, and in the end rotting away as a doll of justice. Ah, as you say, I am not human. But the same is true of you, is it not? Something beyond human, vessel of Justice.”

At the dragon’s words, every movement of Stolu stopped.

The blue dragon eyes wavered and stirred like a volcano erupting at the bottom of the deep sea.

“You are not human. A mortal body with an immortal soul. A law of this world itself, passed down through countless bodies. One of the rules of this star, sharing its origin with us. Something like that nearly killed my friend.”

They were the same.

As Stolu said, though the two of them were different existences, they resembled each other.

In this world, they were those who bore roles, beings whose destinies had been decided.

“It is unpleasant. Ah, it is unpleasant. How dare you show your face beside my friend? If Naruhito were not here, I would like to burn you to ash. How dare you lay hands on my friend?”

That was precisely why the dragon was angry.

A great existence that even a dragon might not be able to control had pointed its fangs at her friend.

The fact that she could not be there. The fact that her friend might have died somewhere beyond her reach.

Obsession.

Dragons strongly hated having their treasures touched.

Alice Dral Flaretail. Golden flames flickered in her eyes. They resembled sparks flashing in the dark night within her blue eyes.

Golden flames, which followed the dragon’s will and burned away what displeased her and what was worthless, wrapped around Alice’s golden hair.

“Drako!”

This was bad. This was seriously bad.

Tooyama tried to stop the dragon—

“—Certainly, I did once try to kill him. Under the Church’s justice, as the right thing to do.”

There was no need.

Because before Tooyama’s words could arrive, a pale-blue breeze danced.

Ping.

Tooyama opened his eyes wide. In his vision appeared the familiar message, along with—

Dragons. Because they were far too mighty, the world had prepared several counters against them.

Items discovered in the Kingdom that carried the possibility of killing dragons, “Drifting Dragon Objects,” and—

—the sight of a knight cutting away a dragon’s flames with a cheap sword sold for five large copper coins at a bargain market for adventurers.

“As you say, something lives inside me. That is my malignance. Since long ago, I have lived by entrusting good and evil to it. Without thinking, without doubting, I cut down many things.”

The sword was scorched, its tip melted, and yet the knight’s sword handled even the dragon’s flames.

One of the counters against “dragons” prepared by the Church. That was Stolu Pula’s role.

“There is no guarantee that blade will not turn toward my friend. You cannot control yourself. I can tell. You are a drawn blade, the law called Justice itself. Someday, without fail, you will fall into Justice.”

The dragon’s memories knew. All the bearers of Justice throughout history had fallen completely into vessels.

Over many generations, Justice had twisted and twisted into ugliness, and Alice had seen it within the inherited memories of dragons.

Such a thing was beside her friend. Impatience. What irritated Alice was such an all-too-human emotion.

“……The words of you, a dragon, are surely correct. I understand that, from your perspective, you dislike me and cannot trust me. And I understand that there is something deep inside this body that even I myself do not understand.”

The foolish girl had been born carrying karma. That someday, without fail, she would be replaced by something nesting inside her.

She had known that it was her inescapable destiny, so she had looked away. Foolishly and directly, she had averted her eyes toward other things, and blindly followed the justice before her.

Slowly, still foolish, still looking away, she would rot into “Justice.”

That had been Stolu Pula’s original destiny.

It should have been. But that was no longer true.

“In that case—”

“Even so.”

Tooyama Naruhito’s ego, that flawed ego advancing according to its desires, that ego which would never be complete, was influenced by many things. Therefore, that ego violated many people.

“—Even so, I am ‘Tooyama Naruhito’s sword.’ I decided that myself. My justice now lies within his sheath.”

“I will decide for myself. Never again will I entrust my choices to others, or to anything other than myself.”

She was no longer the Church’s sword of justice.

Like Tooyama Naruhito, she was a mass of self-desire, one of those who carved out their own life, moved forward, and violated the world.

Not even a dragon could change Stolu’s choice anymore.

“…………I do not like it, unseen one. Those words, whose depths even dragon eyes cannot see through. Haah, truly, why do only troublesome ones like that old dragon and you draw near Naruhito?”

Drako narrowed her eyes and wrinkled her brow.

She worried, worried; the dragon worried.

Ah, if she had remained bored, if she had remained as herself, if she had remained as an unchanging creature, as a dragon itself, she surely would not have suffered like this.

By strange coincidence, at this moment, just as the words of “luck” writhing somewhere had said, the dragon was changing.

The expanding ego had even reached the dragon—

“Knight.”

“Yes.”

“Then the same is true of me. I am a dragon. No matter how far I go, I am not the same existence as you mortals. In this body, violence and domination swirl as my karma. However—”

Drako. Alice. The name given to the Hoarding Dragon as Tooyama Naruhito’s friend.

Ah, from the moment she accepted that, the dragon had already become strange.

“Even so, I am Naruhito’s friend. Friends are not things to dominate.”

Dragons followed only their own rules. Now, the Hoarding Dragon’s rules had overcome even the rules of the creature called a dragon.

Understanding others without relying on violence and domination was now Drako’s rule.

“…………You truly have changed, Hoarding Dragon-sama.”

“You are one to talk, juvenile of Justice.”

Dragon and Justice met.

One was a higher life-form. An extraordinary life in which a concept of the world itself had taken the shape of a living creature.

The other was a singularity born from within humans. An immune system born to establish the survival of the living creature called human, chosen by the star.

And yet, helplessly, both of them were now far removed from the forms they should have had.

“……The one who changed you was my friend, was it?”

“The one who changed you was my inquisitor too, was he not?”

Blue eyes and pale-blue eyes.

What each reflected was a man with stubbornly unruly black hair. A tiny man who had been trying to gloss over the situation for a while now by pretending to drink water from an empty cup over and over.

“Fukaka.”

“Fufufu.”

The beautiful dragon and knight laughed at the same time. Each kept the other in their field of vision.

“Scary.”

Eh, what is this? The two of them are laughing and not moving.

The voice slipped out unintentionally. Tooyama finally pulled the water pitcher toward himself and poured water.

“Good. I do not like it, but you have the qualifications. Tell me your name.”

“Stolu, Stolu Pula. The Church’s First Sword, no, now I am the sword of the inquisitor, Tooyama Naruhito, dis.”

The knight answered the dragon’s softened words.

The dragon frowned for a while, sighed deeply, and then nodded several times in small motions.

“Stolu, I shall wait for judgment for a while. If you will subdue that essence of yours as Naruhito’s sword, then I may be willing to overlook you.”

“I thank the merciful dragon. However, please be at ease. I will not hurt my inquisitor.”

She bent at the waist and placed her right hand over the left side of her chest in a knightly salute.

Stolu turned her gaze toward Tooyama.

“……That ‘my inquisitor’ is something you should stop.”

The dragon murmured quietly.

“Hehe, it is a fact.”

The knight smiled.

Drako, who apparently disliked that, became expressionless.

“Hah? Then Naruhito is my Dragon Slayer too, you know?”

“…………That is unfair, dis.”

“What kind of dominance battle is this?”

Tooyama unintentionally let the words slip out.

Thinking about it a little, both women here had once nearly killed him.

It was a strange fate. His goal, the place he had to reach—he had thought he had disposed of everything and everyone who obstructed that.

Even if he was alone, even if he stayed alone, he had decided he would go there. And yet, before he knew it, look at this.

“Stolu, in deference to Naruhito, who defeated you and put a collar on you, I shall overlook you for a while. But know the proper distance. You are not a friend, but Naruhito’s sword. I repeat, this is not jealousy.”

“Yes, as a sword, by his side. I have no intention of mistaking that, dis, great Hoarding Dragon, Flaretail-sama.”

“I do not recall permitting you to call my name, Stolu.”

“My apologies, Hoarding Dragon-sama.”

Before him were that flashy golden armor bastard and the damn idiot knight. Their first meetings had been the worst, but after talking to them, both were actually rather good people.

Those people, though their words were harsh, were at least not killing each other and were standing before him.

“……It wasn’t wrong, huh?”

Life was a series of choices. Tooyama remembered the contents of a book he had read long ago.

He was not confident that every single one of the many choices he had made so far had been a perfect answer worth one hundred points.

But surely, he had no regrets. Tooyama had chosen. Following his desires, he had made every decision himself.

Deciding for oneself and choosing for oneself. Surely, for people, that was important.

“Drako, sorry. Thanks for worrying about me. But Stolu is one of my people, chosen by me. It’ll be fine.”

“Hm…”

“And Stolu, Drako is certainly a different creature from me. But she’s my friend. So it’ll be fine.”

“Dis…”

At Tooyama’s words, the dragon and the knight closed their mouths.

“Juvenile of Justice, Knight Stolu, those are the words of my friend. I listen well to my friend’s words. Therefore, I shall recognize you.”

“Newest Dragon-sama, my thanks. As his sword, I offer my apology. As a sword, I hope you continue to remain his good friend, dis.”

She said “his” twice.

Drako once again made an unpleasant face, like someone who had found a cockroach inside the house.

“…………Hmm, Naruhito, should you not keep a little distance from this one after all? She has the same female smell as that old dragon.”

“Female? What are you talking about, Drako? It’s Stolu.”

“Tooyama, what does that understanding mean, dis?”

Drako muttered with a serious face, Tooyama tilted his eyebrows, and Stolu smiled quietly.

A tightrope. A scene that would have been impossible under the original destiny existed here.

The main quest had already collapsed.

“Thank you for waiting! Allie, Stolu-chan, Onii-san, Lazaar-san’s bread is done baking!”

Click.

Perfect timing. She had likely been measuring it. Niko appeared in the room with a broad smile.

“Nice, Niko.”

Tooyama murmured.

They had come this far.

So, for now, peacefully. If possible, may there be no more near-death situations.

May his worrywart dragon friend and his stupid knight companion only bicker like this.

In a corner of his heart, Tooyama prayed a little.

He did not seriously pray. Tooyama knew. He knew that in this world, there were no gods or Buddhas. There was only, only, shitty reality.

Surely that was the same in this other world too.

So, a little. Even so, only a little, he prayed.

If possible—may there be at least that much freedom and salvation in this world.