It's Not A Coincidence

An Emperor who united the continent with a dragon sword, huh.

In that case.

Among the stories Sia had told me a while back, there had been one just like that. Everyone who had drawn out the power of a Dragon Bone Sword, she said, had left a mark on human history, whether by becoming a Sword Master and making a name with the blade or by becoming an Emperor who united a continent. Whether the ‘dragon sword’ in this story was exactly a Dragon Bone Sword, I couldn’t say.

Maybe that dungeon called the Garden of the Dragon Sword was a memorial park honoring an Emperor who had wielded a Dragon Bone Sword.

I hope there’s something in there worth taking away.

Judged coolly, of course, the odds of that didn’t look high. I wouldn’t know until I actually went through the Gate, but as things stood it was a slightly unusual Gate, nothing more and nothing less. The dragon sword might even be one in name only, an ordinary sword with a dragon carved into the hilt.

Still… it’s too neat to call a coincidence.

While I sat quietly sunk in thought, Taeseong asked me a question.

“Minjun, what are you thinking about?”
“Nothing much — it’s just, a dragon sword, of all things, struck me as remarkable. When it hasn’t even been established whether dragons exist.”

I played innocent and said it as brazenly as I could. There really had never been a report of any such being as a dragon.

Officially, at any rate.

Juwon, who had explained the Gate to me earlier along with Taeseong, cut in at that.

“We’ve got Gates, we’ve got orcs, we’ve got the lot — there’s no law saying dragons alone can’t exist. Who knows? Maybe they’re already living mixed in among us.”

He tossed it off lightly, in passing, as though making a joke, but did he have any idea?

What he had just said was the truth.

— Screech.

Not long after, the vehicles pulled up at the spot where the Dungeon Gate stood. We geared up for the dungeon and went through the Gate one after another.

The dungeon clear had begun.

The moment I entered, the first things to catch my eye were a bright sky, countless swords driven into the ground like so many gravestones, and weeds grown about as high as a small child’s knee.

Most Gates show you landscapes you’d never see on Earth, of course, but this scenery was more than unfamiliar. It was strange. From the name ‘Garden of the Dragon Sword’ alone you’d expect something tremendously grand or beautiful, and the reality was nothing of the sort. To me, if anything, it bordered on grotesque.

What kind of combination is this supposed to be?

When I turned my eyes a little away from the planted swords, I saw the huge statue Taeseong had talked about, a dragon sword towering up in the middle of dozens, hundreds of blades stuck among the weeds. I had no idea who had built the place this way, but their aesthetic sense was truly the worst.

“Isn’t it something?”

One of the Hunters came up and spoke to me while I was still busy looking over the inside of the dungeon.

“Today’s my first time here too, same as you, Minjun. But doesn’t this place feel somehow different from the Dungeon Gates we usually go to?”
“I was thinking exactly that myself. Why can’t I settle into it at all?”

As we chatted, Taeseong clapped his hands and called us over.

“The monsters will come swarming any minute now. Everyone get ready, please.”

It’s starting?

That had to mean monsters were about to come leaping out from somewhere, yet no matter where I looked, there wasn’t one in sight.

Just as that thought crossed my mind, black smoke rose from the swords planted in the ground.

No way.

“…Ghost-type monsters?”
“Ah, I forgot to explain that part. That’s what I get for only ever coming here with the same crowd.”

According to him, we would run into exactly one species of monster in this Dungeon Gate.

“They’re monsters you’ll only see in this Gate. There’s no officially settled name for them, so among ourselves we call them ‘Sword Wraiths’.”

That brought back something I’d learned in my Academy days. Hadn’t they said some Dungeon Gates held unusual monsters you’d see in no other kind of Gate?

“Is there a particular way to clear them?”
“Much the same as other ghost-type monsters. And—”

Before Taeseong could finish, the smoke pouring from the swords in the ground slowly swelled and gathered into great masses. At last the formless lumps took on a gloomy shape, let out eerie, wailing cries, and charged at the people around me.

How was a Hunter who used a sword supposed to deal with a ghost-type monster again? I called up what my professor had told us back at the Academy.

Swordsmen and ghost-type monsters are the worst possible matchup, it’s true. If you ever do have to face one, concentrate instead on packing the mana at your sword’s tip thicker than you normally would.

The gist was that when a Swordsman faces a ghost-type monster, what counts isn’t ‘where and how you swing the sword’ but ‘concentrating on feeding mana into the blade’s tip’.

I condensed as much mana at the tip of my sword as I could and swung as fast as my arm would go.

— Shk—!

That single blow split the black smoke cleanly in two.

Given the nature of ghost-type monsters, though, cutting one in half didn’t mean I had brought it down. Sure enough, the halved Sword Wraith came at me ferociously, still in two pieces, as if my cut had made no difference whatsoever. At the same time, the halves were already knitting back together, as though each were searching out the place it had come from. To give it no room to recover, I packed the mana thicker still and swung fast.

The second cut scattered the wraith completely into smoke.

“Phew.”

I had grown, if only a little, and my equipment was incomparably better than it used to be. Even allowing for all that, I had killed it far too easily. Ghost-type monsters normally put you through the wringer; they’re awkward enough as it is, and on top of that I was a Swordsman.

Dealing the same way with the wraiths that rushed me, I took stock of the other Hunters.

Taeseong, a B-Rank mage with a good matchup against ghost-types, had climbed the statue at the dungeon’s center like the leader he was. From up there he watched over the Hunters, me included, and kept the monsters in check as needed. Since the whole point of clearing this Gate was to train up low-rank Hunters, he seemed to be bracing for the moment inexperience opened a hole somewhere in the line.

The other Hunters, meanwhile, were having a hard time holding off the Sword Wraiths. I was the only Swordsman among them, so in theory I should have been the one struggling worst with the matchup. Instead I was cutting them down so smoothly that even I was taken aback, and Taeseong, looking down this way from his high ground atop the statue, seemed thoroughly astonished as well.

A Hunter who happened to be passing by spoke up.

“Minjun, are you really a D-Rank?”
“Yes.”
“You should get retested. At the absolute least you look like C-Rank or above.”

If other people were saying so too, maybe I was growing faster than I’d thought. But that was beside the point.

When is this going to end.

The Sword Wraiths kept charging in without leaving me so much as a moment to check the time, so I had no way of knowing how long it had been since we entered the Dungeon Gate. They say clearing a Gate is hard work by nature, but I’d never seen monsters swarm in without a break like this. Each time I cut one down, the same black smoke rose from the sword again, and each time I thought I’d finished that one off too, yet another plume rose without fail to torment me.

“This is killing me, seriously.”

Even slimes, classed as the very weakest of monsters, would have been a handful in numbers like these, never mind ghost-types.

It seemed to be much the same everywhere else, with people panting and grumbling. Thanks to the healers tending everyone without a break, nobody had actually been hurt, but facing monsters for two hours without a chance to catch your breath was another matter.

So this is why Dungeon Gates get used so much for training Hunters up.

Hard as it was, it looked like a real help for building combat experience in a short span of time. For me, though, something mattered more than that.

I should have been keeping my focus on handling a dragon’s power completely.

I kept resolving to hold that in mind at all times, and still there were moments now and then when I forgot it. Just like right now: somewhere along the way, instead of minding my ultimate goal, I’d gotten wrapped up in nothing but getting through monsters I matched up poorly against.

Starting now, at least.

So, in this situation, what was the most efficient way to draw out a dragon’s power?

“One hour left!”

Somewhere in the din I heard Taeseong’s booming voice announce one hour to go until the Dungeon Gate clear was complete. Two thirds of the three hours had already passed. The other Hunters would be wishing that hour away, but I couldn’t afford to; it was a precious opportunity, and I had no idea when I’d get another. In the hour that remained, I had to draw the dragon’s power sleeping inside me out to its very limit.

So what do I do from here?

Should I just chew over the two keywords Rokan had given me as advice, ‘domination’ and ‘will’, and swing my sword the way I had before? This time, though, I wanted to do it a little differently and make the will more concrete. A will to root out every last one of the near-infinite Sword Wraiths in this place, for instance…

What would it take to make a will like that real? It might be a hasty call on my part, but I didn’t think will alone would be enough to bring this one about. I needed something more, one more card to play: a single groundbreaking move that could flip the whole board.

There was a B-Rank Hunter at my back anyway, so my safety was guaranteed to some degree. I decided to revise my strategy boldly.

The approach I chose was to make a minute change to the structure of the mana wreathing my sword. Not being a mage who handled mana professionally, I found altering its structure in fine detail hard going.

I have to pull it off.

Until now I had focused on ‘emitting’ mana; from here on the aim was ‘absorbing’ it, and every other energy along with it. If the sword absorbed the wraiths instead of cutting them, that would surely create a new variable. Those wraiths defied the natural order, so I had no choice but to defy it myself.

I had no idea what would happen if those pitch-black wraiths were absorbed into the sword, but it would surely be fine. The sword was no ordinary object. It was a Dragon Bone Sword, a match for any famed blade you cared to set beside it. And given that the dungeon was named the ‘Garden of the Dragon Sword’, maybe it was all the better an environment for a Dragon Bone Sword to shine in.

“Ah.”

A short gasp escaped me.

Could the secret behind my unusual ease with ghost-type monsters have lain in this sword all along?

My guard slipped while I sorted through the tangle of thoughts, and in that moment a wraith noticeably larger and darker than the rest lunged at me. It was far too close for me to respond properly. I twisted my body to dodge at least a little, but there was no helping it, and the wraith grazed me.

I had braced for a jolt of pain, naturally. And yet, strangely, my body was entirely fine; it hurt about as much as a light pinch.

Why was that? The Sword Wraith had unmistakably come at me with everything it had, carrying the same hostility it showed the other Hunters, and even so, here I was, completely unaffected.

I can afford to be a bit bolder.

I forgot about protecting my body altogether and began rampaging across the battlefield like a wild beast. With me going all in on attack instead of defense, the wraiths came at me fiercely to exploit the openings, yet just as a moment ago, I felt no great pain.

“Minjun!”

Taeseong shouted in alarm at the sight of me mercilessly exposed to the wraiths’ attacks, but I signaled that I was fine and swung all the more recklessly. The other Hunters seemed no less startled than he was, but I had no time to worry about how each of them was taking it.

The more I swung my sword, the more I felt unknown energies gathering. I wondered if this might be the dragon’s power.

I don’t think it is.

I couldn’t say for sure, but the odds of all these wraiths being connected to dragons were slim. In that case, what on earth were these powers?

All the while, my swings kept getting faster. At some point it felt less like I was swinging the sword and more like the sword was swinging my arm. This was unmistakably close to how it had felt when I released that aurora sword energy, and yet it was plainly different, too. As the energy gathered, the Dragon Bone Sword, unlike that time, began to give off a gray light and hum instead of pouring out sword energy.

“Wh-what the—?”

— Whoosh!

Before I could so much as react properly, my sword left my hand and went flying toward the statue of the dragon sword.