That — How On Earth Did You Do That.

The next day began with a video call with Sia.

“Did you sleep well, Oppa?”

She was still rubbing her eyes, so she couldn’t have been up long, and she looked so pretty anyway.

“I slept well. Thanks to our Sia listening to my story so well yesterday.”
“That’s a relief.”

The warmth in her voice melted my heart clean away.

At first I’d thought it was right to keep quiet about the Villains if I could help it, but the more I thought it over, the more telling her early looked like the right call. Otherwise I might have spent the whole night fretting over when and how to bring it up, and barely slept at all.

“And you, Sia… are you all right?”

Right up until we’d hung up yesterday she hadn’t looked to be in good shape, so I asked carefully, my heart heavy with worry.

“Me? Of course I’m fine!”

Yet her voice was oddly, overly cheerful, as if nothing I’d said yesterday had registered, which only worried me more.

“You’re really okay, right?”
“Of course. I went and got you your revenge, all of it.”
“Revenge? They’re already dead.”

Was there even a way to take revenge on dead Villains? On top of that, I’d never told Sia a thing about who they were. Granted, with her abilities she could find that out one way or another… but even so, getting revenge on people who were already dead would be hard even for a dragon like her.

When I let on that I didn’t follow, Sia’s mouth fell open in shock, as if she’d let slip something she shouldn’t have. It lasted only a moment before her usual expression settled back into place.

“In a dream, I mean. In a dream.”

She’d scolded them in the dream until they cried their eyes out, she said, and threw a cute little punch at the air with a Hyah!

In a dream…?

Somehow it left an uneasy taste in my mouth.

That wasn’t what she’d been about to say, though.

Well, anyway. Nothing good would come of digging any deeper, so I changed the subject.

“Later on, I’m going to go see Lord Rokan.”
“Grandpa?”
“Mm. I have to take him the cam footage of the Gate clear. I’ll show him, get some feedback, and there’s something I want to ask him personally too.”

I needed his feedback on what the wearable cam had caught, and I also had to ask about the aurora-light sword energy I’d managed to use, however briefly. The visit to Rokan with the cam was already settled.

But.

“Can’t I watch it with you?”
“Of course you should. But before that there’s something I need to talk over with your grandfather for a moment, so will you wait just a little?”
“…Is it something I’m not supposed to know about?”

Maybe she thought I was hiding something, because her mood shifted in an instant.

She was about half right. Among the footage the wearable cam had caught was one scene I didn’t want Sia, of all people, to see, and I meant to ask him to erase it. Footage from an ordinary camera I could have deleted myself, but this was the wearable cam Sia had specially modified, and a clumsy deletion on my part might only deepen her suspicion.

“What would I ever hide from our Sia? It’s nothing like that, so relax.”

Once I’d reassured her, I kept the call going a long while, chatting about everyday things instead of heavy subjects like Gates or aura.

“Sia, see you in a bit, then. I’ll call you soon.”
“Mm!”

After hanging up, I packed the camera and headed for Rokan’s lair.

“Come on in.”

Rokan greeted me warmly the moment I arrived.

“I’ve heard the gist from Shasha. That something serious happened yesterday.”
“Yes. I’ll explain everything once we’re inside.”

After a brief exchange of greetings, I gave him a condensed account of what had happened in the Gate yesterday. When I’d finished, I came to the point.

“There’s one favor I’d like to ask.”
“A favor?”
“It’s nothing much — I’d like you to erase part of this video, cleanly, without a trace. It seemed better to ask you, Lord Rokan, than to fumble at it myself.”

I told him why the video needed editing. Just before they died, the Villains had said things meant to shame Sia, and since words like that could wound her, I wanted the scene erased.

Rokan sank into silent thought after hearing me out, but before long he gave his answer.

“Better not to.”
“…Sorry?”

Against all my expectations, he turned me down. Footage of mere human criminals degrading his granddaughter had been captured intact, so naturally I’d assumed he would want that part gone as much as I did. What did he mean, “better not”?

When my face showed I didn’t follow, Rokan went on as if he’d expected exactly that.

“Erasing only that part won’t help — Shasha finding out is only a matter of time anyway. And.”

He gave me a meaningful smile.

“To my mind, Shasha would actually be all the more pleased to see it.”

…She’d be more pleased to see it?

No matter how I turned it over, I couldn’t find a single thing in that footage Sia could like. Still, if he was going out of his way to say so, he must have his reasons, whatever they were. For the moment, I decided to do as he said.

“Shasha will be waiting. Let’s go.”

In the end I stood before the enormous screen without having deleted that part of the video as I’d planned. The moment Rokan connected the call, Sia appeared on it.

“Oppa! Grandpa!”

Barely ten minutes had passed since our last call, yet she greeted me as brightly as if she hadn’t seen me in ages.

“Good. Have you eaten?”
“I’ll eat later! What about you and Oppa, Grandpa?”
“The same for me. And you, Minjun?”
“Looks like the same goes for me. If you don’t mind, let’s eat together later.”

So much for the small talk. Time to get down to business.

Rokan put the video I’d handed him up on the screen and shared it with Sia as well.

“As you watch, I’d like your feedback on anything at all, without holding back.”

Skipping the stretches without any fighting, I went straight to the first engagement with the Antmen. Neither Sia nor Rokan said a word; both were absorbed in the video and the flow of mana it had captured.

Everyone was still watching with serious faces when Sia spoke up first.

“Grandpa. I know he’s our Oppa, but doesn’t he really seem like a genius?”
“Indeed. His rate of growth is out of the ordinary.”

I hadn’t felt it much at the time, but apparently it looked different from a dragon’s standpoint.

“The talent is almost a waste. If you had been born a dragon from the start, Minjun…”

Partway through, Rokan gave a start and waved a hand.

“No — I’ve said something I shouldn’t have. Pretend you never heard what I just said.”

The remark hadn’t struck me as particularly strange, but Rokan apologized like a man who’d made a slip of the tongue and turned back to the video. After studying it a good while, he told us what he’d felt.

“Watching the way you use a sword this time, I find myself thinking you look just like a hatchling wearing a human mask.”
“Sorry?”

I don’t know whether it was just my imagination, but today especially he seemed full of weighty remarks I couldn’t make sense of.

Seeing that I hadn’t understood, Rokan explained further.

“What I mean is that although you are human, in the way you use a sword alone you look closer to a dragon than to a human.”
“Could you explain that a little more?”
“Oppa, I’ll explain it for him.”

This time Sia stepped in, perhaps eager to have her say.

According to her, a human’s sword and a dragon’s sword were bound to differ at the root.

Broadly, a human takes up a sword in one of two situations: to protect something precious, or to take something precious away. Along the way a human’s sword comes to carry every sort of emotion, thick and heavy: sorrow, desperation, yearning, honor, greed.

But dragons are different.

Born from the outset as the greatest species on earth, dragons have no need to wield a sword to protect themselves or to plunder anyone. Why bother with a sword at all, when the Dragon Word is enough? The only reason they ever pick one up is simple amusement, nothing more and nothing less, and so their swords carry none of the desperate emotion humans pour into theirs.

Their blades carry something else instead: the ease of knowing they can get what they want without stooping to swing a sword as crudely as humans do, and the loftiness that grows out of that ease.

“If I interpret what Grandpa said, he means your sword had that ease and loftiness peculiar to dragons about it, Oppa.”
“Precisely. And yet the dense, human emotion rides on the sword as well, and that is the part I truly cannot make out.”

The two might look as though they could coexist, Rokan stressed, but they absolutely could not.

Somehow, the more I listened, the more confused I got.

“Hmm. Oppa, you’re still wearing the face of someone who doesn’t get it.”

Sia had hit the nail on the head.

“This is a little embarrassing. You’re right. Honestly, I don’t understand a word of it.”

Miming wringing out my head, I complained to her that it hurt. If anything, everything I learned only tangled my head further.

Rokan laid a hand gently on my shoulder, saying he’d known it would be so.

“Just remember what I told you. At some point you’ll come to understand it on your own, so don’t worry about it.”
“Yes. I’ll keep it in mind.”
“Enough of that. Let’s move on.”

There was a more important subject waiting.

I skipped ahead to the second engagement with the Antmen and the standoff with the Villains. There was the scene where I panicked for a moment at the Antmen’s overwhelming numbers, then squeezed out every bit of strength to get through; the scene where the Villains attacked once my strength had run dry; and then the scene where, cornered in a desperate crisis, I somehow came to wield aurora-light sword energy.

Right after aurora-light sword energy began to surge from the sword in my wound-covered hand, Rokan stopped the video.

“Minjun, you.”

His voice was calm. So calm, in fact, that those two words alone raised gooseflesh all over me.

“That — how on earth did you do that.”

I didn’t know exactly what aurora-light sword energy was, but it had to be some kind of achievement, so I’d expected Rokan to congratulate me and be glad for me. For whatever reason, though, there wasn’t the slightest trace of gladness in him.

“I don’t really know either. If there’s anything at all I can point to… when that sword energy appeared, I did have a strong will to get back alive, no matter what.”

I’d been flustered at first, but I laid out my thinking calmly. Going by the circumstances, the strongest hypothesis was that my will to survive had let me raise the sword energy, but I didn’t know the exact reason either. That was precisely why I’d meant to seize this chance to ask.

Far from settling my question, Rokan swallowed a low groan, his expression too complicated for me to read. Then he spoke.

“…Let’s take a short break.”

Rokan left us where we were and went into the study; perhaps his head hurt.

What on earth is going on here?

The moment he got back to the study, unsteady on his feet, Rokan shut his eyes tight and let out a sigh.

Having read the energy of Minjun’s soul, Rokan had known for some time that the young man was no ordinary being.

But.

Even knowing it, seeing it is unsettling.

Aurora-light sword energy, of all things.

When Minjun had first brought it up, Rokan had half doubted him. Judged coldly, the Minjun of now could never have handled such immense power; far likelier, he had hallucinated it in the middle of a runaway surge.

Yet astonishingly, Minjun had told the truth. He really was wielding a peculiar sword energy that called an aurora to mind.

None of the other dragons settled on Earth likely knew anything about its nature either. Sia alone was proof enough; hadn’t she worn the face of someone seeing it for the first time?

But Rokan knew. He knew what the power Minjun had wielded was, and what manner of being had once wielded it.

A secret ancient text, one only the successive Dragon Lords had been permitted to read, held a record like this.

“…He wielded a peculiar sword aura that called an aurora to mind, and he captured the eyes of all. Gifted in many fields and not the sword alone, he possessed a strength great enough to overwhelm not only humans like himself but our clan as well. (omitted) He was friendly toward our clan, and yet it was his fate to become an object of our wariness. Because he was * *** **** * ** ** ***.”

Tens of thousands of years ago, the tale had set the whole continent in an uproar, and humans now treated it as a common folktale. Among dragons, though, the story of that one man was handed down not as legend but as history.

Recalling the passage, Rokan sighed again. To be precise, for the moment sighing was all he could do.

How is it that you have reproduced even that?

Of course, set beside what the man in that record had wielded, Minjun’s sword energy did not even reach its toes.

Even so, one thing was certain. If Minjun one day came to handle that sword energy as skillfully as the one whose name was taboo even to speak, he would do more than merely handle a dragon’s power. He would wield a power vast enough to overwhelm even Rokan, an ancient dragon.

But.

At the very least, until Minjun could properly handle a dragon’s power, that power had to be sealed. Otherwise it would swallow him whole.

And if that happened, Minjun would turn into a monster that could no longer be called human.