Chapter 5
It was truly beautiful.
“Understood.”
Luri no longer tried to stop the stubborn Ferda.
Given how firmly she had warned him, he had expected her to refuse, but instead, she chose to comply with his wishes without protest.
After Ferda finished his meal, Luri took the lead.
She headed toward an open area in the garden.
“I will need to touch you for a moment.”
Luri, who had been so reluctant to lay a hand on him, was now saying that she would hold on to Ferda.
“Go ahead.”
“Then…”
Luri grabbed Ferda by his clothes.
At that moment, the blazing sun vanished.
Something blocked Ferda’s view.
It was an enormous wing.
A pair of wings sprouted from Luri’s back.
They beat powerfully toward the ground, launching them straight into the air.
Whoosh—!
Gravity disappeared, and the resistance of the air battered Ferda.
He felt as though he might vomit the breakfast he had just eaten at any moment.
Swallowing hard, Ferda endured the changes in air pressure and the violent wind.
The dizziness and pain lasted only briefly.
“We have arrived.”
At Luri’s words, Ferda opened his eyes.
The scenery before him had changed in an instant.
The place they had reached by flying was the summit of a mountain.
‘It felt like only three seconds. Did we really reach the summit in that short a time?’
It had not been teleportation magic.
She had simply flown that fast.
‘No. She might even be the fastest among all dragons.’
As Ferda stared intently at Luri, lost in thought, she spoke.
“I am not what you should be looking at.”
“What?”
“Look below.”
“Ah, right.”
Ferda turned his head and looked down.
He gazed eastward from the summit of the solitary mountain.
A colorless plain stretched out below.
‘The Demonic Land.’
It was a region that had been completely corrupted when the Demon King died.
Something could be seen writhing there.
‘Monsters.’
Monsters.
Invaders from another continent that had continuously poured in ever since the birth of the Demon King.
Even by the time Ferda killed Valdrova, almost nothing had been discovered about where they came from.
The only thing known was that their objective was the same as that of the Demon King from one hundred and fifty years ago.
‘To create a land where only death remains.’
To annihilate and dominate all living things.
And what Ferda was now seeing were the monsters advancing from the east.
‘As expected of the eastern region, those monsters are enormous.’
They were unbelievably huge.
Having crawled out of the Demonic Land, which could not be purified, they boasted staggering size.
They looked large enough to demolish a fortress merely by rolling over.
They were calamities on a scale that humanity could never hope to withstand.
Amid the bleak colors of despair, a single flame of vivid red surged.
No—upon looking again, it was not a flame.
‘The Red Dragon, Valdrova.’
The one destined to become Ferda’s fiancée was fighting there.
Like other dragons, Valdrova possessed an enormous body.
However, she was only half the size of the monster she faced.
Although she was at a severe disadvantage in terms of sheer mass, Valdrova was by no means an easy opponent.
Rumble—!
The monster and Valdrova slammed into each other.
Despite the tremendous difference in size, she was not pushed back even an inch.
Instead, the air itself violently rippled.
The shockwave swept through the forest and reached even the high mountain where Ferda stood.
“Urgh…”
Ferda’s body stiffened.
Had he been an ordinary person, one might have assumed that he had simply frozen in fear, but there was a clear reason for his reaction.
The dragon’s mana had mixed with the shockwave and pierced through his skin.
‘Dragon Fear…’
It felt like an entirely different level compared to when Luri had unleashed her Dragon Fear.
Even though Ferda knew it was not directed at him, it made him feel as though Valdrova herself were staring directly at him.
‘So that is a Red Dragon.’
A sense of helplessness unlike anything he had experienced even as an Archmage swept through his body.
Valdrova’s battle continued.
Rip! Tear!
She was the embodiment of strength and the master of fire.
The Red Tyrant’s fighting style was overwhelming.
Her sharp claws tore through the monster’s thick hide.
With her long snout and fangs, she severed its blood vessels and tendons.
She moved with such agility that the monster’s desperate struggles appeared clumsy by comparison.
She relentlessly targeted its blind spots, leaving her opponent no room to retaliate.
Strength, speed, and an innate instinct for battle.
—Keeeeeeek!
With all of its tendons severed, the monster could no longer resist and collapsed.
It would have died even if she had simply left it there.
Yet Valdrova’s violence did not stop.
Crack—! Craaack—!
Her claws pierced through the monster’s belly and tore it wide open.
Even from his distant position, Ferda could clearly see the monster’s purple blood and green entrails.
At the same time, Valdrova’s abdomen swelled greatly.
A brilliant crimson light shone through the white scales of her belly.
‘Fire Breath.’
Fwoooooosh—!
The Red Dragon’s breath, said to burn hotter than the flames of hell, incinerated the monster from within.
—Keeeeeeek!
The monster let out an agonized scream.
However, its cries did not last long.
Valdrova’s crimson flames erupted violently from every opening in the monster’s body.
Its insides were cooked evenly before being reduced to ash and scattering away.
Its form dissolved into ash and smoke.
Upon the cursed land, only the Red Tyrant remained standing.
—Rooooooar!
Valdrova’s roar thundered across the land, shaking everything around her.
“Gah!”
Unable to endure any longer, Ferda collapsed.
‘Was Dragon Roar always this powerful?’
He felt utterly overwhelmed by the dragon in a way he never had as an Archmage.
His hands and feet trembled, and his teeth chattered uncontrollably.
Ferda had been completely incapacitated.
“This is the true form of the one who will become your mate.”
Luri crouched beside him and looked down at Ferda.
“……”
Luri had emphasized the words “true form.”
Ferda understood exactly why she had phrased it that way.
‘One’s fundamental nature cannot be changed.’
An evil dragon would remain an evil dragon forever.
Her murderous instincts could never be erased, and there was no guarantee that those instincts would never be directed at Ferda.
“A Red Dragon is a creature incapable of living without destruction. Staying by Master’s side…”
Luri’s expressionless eyes seemed to ask him:
Do you finally realize how shallow your decision was?
‘Her power certainly inspires fear.’
Even though he had watched her from afar, the look in her eyes remained so vivid that it felt as though it had burrowed directly into his mind.
It was an unavoidable and undeniable fact.
‘But I am not afraid.’
Valdrova’s gaze remained in Ferda’s mind, but so did her emotions.
Understanding how she had felt about everything she had seen and experienced helped him comprehend all of her actions until now.
‘She does that for the sake of this world.’
She personally hunted the monsters in order to protect it.
‘She is an evil dragon.’
Yet at the same time, she was a knight with a noble heart and the guardian dragon of the continent.
She was an ascetic advancing toward an ideal she might never reach.
“Truly…”
And so his fear transformed into awe.
“Magnificent.”
Ferda’s eyes gleamed.
He was smiling.
Luri hated humans.
As one in whose veins dragon blood flowed, it was only natural for her to harbor such feelings.
However, her master, Valdrova, loved those beneath her.
‘And she was hurt because of it.’
Her hatred had only grown deeper.
Because Luri hated humans more than anyone else, she understood the gulf between humans and dragons better than anyone. She also understood what humans feared.
Thus, she already knew what would happen when an ordinary human witnessed the true form of a Red Dragon.
‘He brought this upon himself.’
Ferda had said he wanted to see it.
Luri had warned him sufficiently and had even tried to stop him.
Although she had grabbed Ferda and flown here so that they could arrive before the battle ended!
She believed she had done more than enough to dissuade him.
Until that moment, everything had gone exactly as Luri expected.
Ferda had merely stared blankly at the scene.
He trembled before Dragon Fear of an entirely different order.
‘A typical reaction.’
That expression would gradually turn into terror.
Soon, he would regret his shallow decision and beg her to save him.
‘By then, Master will understand as well.’
Humans and dragons could never truly become one.
Everything seemed to be proceeding according to her expectations.
But that was not what happened.
“Truly… magnificent.”
An absurd statement escaped Ferda’s mouth.
Wondering whether she had misheard him, Luri turned her head.
Yet the moment she did, she became even more shocked.
‘He’s smiling?’
She could not understand it.
How could he smile while watching a creature being brutally torn apart and burned alive?
Should he not have been terrified that he might one day meet the same fleeting fate?
‘Could it be…?’
At that moment, realization struck Luri like a bolt of lightning.
She finally understood why this man could remain so relaxed after becoming Valdrova’s fiancé.
She understood why he could smile even in a situation like this.
If it was that, then everything made sense.
‘You insane masochist.’
It was the moment Luri’s disgust toward Ferda grew even stronger.
◇
That day, Ferda lay motionless in bed.
He had been exposed to Dragon Fear and had even experienced a Dragon Roar.
An ordinary human would have lost their mind under such circumstances.
Ferda, on the other hand, had remained sane, and his body had suffered the consequences instead.
‘Can I really not move at all?’
Just in case, he tried twitching his hand.
Instead, his toes wiggled.
Whenever he tried to blink, his thumb flapped.
Whenever he tried to move his lips, his nostrils flared.
‘It seems impossible.’
The fact that his mind remained intact was already a miracle.
The best thing he could do was lie still and immerse himself in thought.
‘It looks like I have lost an entire day.’
Still…
‘Why did I want to see that in the first place?’
There had been a reason Ferda wanted to witness it.
He had possessed an intuition that perhaps the battle would give him an answer.
‘Was that intuition correct?’
That was what he needed to determine now.
Ferda decided to revisit everything he had witnessed.
His mind returned to the moment he had arrived at the summit.
He vividly recalled the scent of the air, the temperature against his skin, and even the sensation of the loose gravel beneath his feet.
He reconstructed everything with perfect clarity.
Within the world formed by his mental imagery, he looked down and recalled her battle.
She was not merely the infamous evil dragon.
“…”
She was the one who would soon become Ferda’s mate.
At that moment, he felt something stir within his dantian.
‘This is…’
Ferda knew this sensation well.
It was the same violent fluctuation he had felt when he was expelled from House Rosnova.
‘A Red Circle is forming.’
This was something he should reject.
‘How peculiar.’
Yet Ferda did not do so.
He could sense that this Red Circle was fundamentally different.
‘This emotion does not originate from anger or vengeance.’
The fluctuation had been born from an emotion unlike the one he had experienced before.
And that emotion possessed potential equal to anger and vengeance.
‘I felt this while imagining the way Valdrova fought.’
The same held true now.
The more he thought about Valdrova, the clearer the circuit became.
Perhaps this was why he had felt that he needed to witness Valdrova’s battle.
‘In that case…’
Perhaps this was the answer.
Ferda no longer hesitated.
He focused on his feelings toward Valdrova.
The awe he had felt and the majesty of her appearance.
He molded his vague emotions into words, organizing and intensifying them.
His mana circuit began to swirl violently.
The chaotic rotational force grew stronger and stronger, threatening to swallow Ferda like a stormy sea.
However, Ferda was a man who had once reached the level of Archmage through the Red Circle.
He delicately controlled the vortex created by the emotional upheaval.
He gathered the energy that threatened to scatter, compressed it, and shaped it.
Before long, it formed a single ring.
‘A Circle.’
At the same time, he felt a lingering sense of relief and elation and once again confirmed the source of this emotion.
“…”
That meant there would be no repetition of the same future.
Nor would there be a repetition of the same mistake.
‘It worked.’
Ferda rejoiced at that realization.
His nostrils flared.