The Foreigner on the Periphery

Raymond Wong, the ancient dragon of Hong Kong, suddenly felt a strange sensation.

He could not understand why this creeping sense of unease was suddenly surfacing. He certainly could not have imagined that a Korean orc assemblyman had fallen into the exact same state not long ago.

He tilted his head for a moment before turning away. He then called for the servants outside to clear the dining table. The question quickly vanished from his mind.

Bathed in reassuring fullness and supreme happiness, Raymond forgot about his missing youngest son and the urgings of his collaborators, losing himself in the lingering afterglow.

   *

The darkness writhed.

With their vision cut off, the Todds could not see Minjun, but he could see them.

He thought about what he had just done.

‘Since becoming a prisoner, I've never once changed my body.’

Thinking back, except for the dimension where he had been tasked with escorting the crown prince, his deployments had always been to dimensions inhabited by humans. Therefore, he had simply assumed there was no need to change out of his human-shaped body. After all, transplanting a soul cost Talents.

Rumble!

Minjun watched the darkness surging in all directions. It was a thick, deep veil, dense as mud.

Its true nature was akin to the concentrated essence of the matter that formed shadow monsters. It had manifested here, piercing right through the Spatial Condensation cast by the Todds. Asiph-1 did not possess the ability to slice through dimensional fabrics on its own. What made this phenomenon possible was not the sword, but the wound it inflicted. It was a paradoxical phrasing, yet true. While the sword's power caused the wound, it was the power of the wound itself that connected the rift to a dimensional layer other than the material world.

In other words, Minjun's body had accomplished this.

However, contrary to expectations, no Talents flowed out. Minjun realized that this endlessly pouring substance was also a part of him. That it was his power.

Since it was in his hands, he ought to try swinging it.

   *

"Gasp!"

The Todds were horrified by the sudden change in their vision.

Minjun could manipulate the darkness. He chose what it concealed and what it revealed.

As a result, the survivors could now see each other.

And the prisoner standing in the center.

The commander felt like he was going mad. A terror that logic could not explain surged within him.

‘...What is happening?!’

The darkness crawled forward, thrashing in grotesque forms. It writhed, licking the empty air with black tongues. The Todds felt an unpleasant chill beneath their shells. A sticky, damp sense of foreboding crept over them.

Minjun's face held no distinct expression, which only made him more terrifying. A severe thirst gripped the commander. It was a different kind from what Minjun was experiencing. Rather than his throat, he wanted to soak his dry skin with moisture. It was an instinct carved into his genes from an ancient era when his kind lived by the water.

Back then, whenever predators, natural enemies, or species that hunted them for unknown reasons approached, they would flee into the water. That learned behavior lingered in their DNA; even now, when threatened, they suffered the urge to plunge into water.

Minjun stared back calmly. If his opponents had been more perceptive, they would have noticed the contempt mixed in his gaze. To a species incapable of reading it, Minjun simply looked indifferent, as if he had transcended everything.

Eventually, he spoke.

"Harmful things I can't even eat. How annoying."

Whoosh!

The darkness churned.

It was mere coincidence that the veil of night gathered and surged toward the Todd standing furthest to the right. Typhoons blow and earthquakes strike due to cause and effect, without any special intent. That is because the agent of the event assigns little meaning to the outcome, or perhaps feels none at all.

Minjun's actions right now were exactly that. There was no reason or meticulous plan behind him rousing the darkness to target the rightmost Todd. To him, every Todd here was exactly the same.

They were harmful pests that needed to be exterminated on sight.

So, Minjun did just that.

"H-h... Haaah!"

The Todd reacted instinctively to the seething darkness. And instinct sometimes drives even highly intelligent creatures to perform meaningless actions. He retracted his head, arms, and legs into his shell. His smooth torso rolled onto the floor. It was a defense evolved to withstand wild attacks, but entirely useless in the modern era. It was akin to a species evolved from mammals puffing up its fur in the face of danger.

The darkness smoothly split into five streams and burrowed into the holes where he had hidden his head and limbs.

Soon, horrific sounds echoed.

Crunch!

Crack!

Riiiip!

The screaming stopped in an instant. All that followed was the sound of bones breaking and snapping, of muscles and organs tearing apart. The flat, round torso thrashed violently before flipping over. The belly skin, relatively soft compared to the back shell, bubbled and boiled. Like bubbles forming on a surface, the flesh bulged in round lumps, rising and falling repeatedly.

Squelch!

A moment later, a mixture of crushed flesh, organs, and blood poured out of the five holes. Minjun felt a wave of disgust at the stench it gave off, and the darkness spat it out from between its folds, as if refusing to embrace it.

One died in a flash. The Todds felt as though they were standing before an apex predator. It was not an accurate assessment, since their opponent had absolutely no desire to put them in his mouth.

"Attack! Attack!"

Zap!

Zap-zap!

The Magic Tools fired beams of light. But the lasers were cut off mid-flight. The darkness smothered the strands before they could reach Minjun, dissolving them into nothingness. Spells suffered the same fate.

The Todds were trembling violently. They could not fathom why the prisoner had suddenly changed, but the reason did not matter now. There was no way to win this fight.

Just then, the darkness moved again, aiming for the one right next to the Todd who had just died.

"U-uh, Aaaaaah!"

He fled desperately. Even their flight spells had been nullified; the only things he could rely on were his two legs. Trusting in the sturdy physical body engineered by his ancestors, he ran for his life. Northward, far into the distance. His plan was to escape to the very edge of the Spatial Condensation barrier and attempt an emergency evacuation.

Minjun calmly watched his retreating back. Without raising a hand, he simply waited, giving him a bit of a head start.

"Huff! Huff! ...Huh?!"

How long had he been running?

The fleeing Todd stared at a sight that turned his mind entirely white.

"...?!"

He had definitely run far away, yet something appeared before his eyes. Growing larger as he advanced was the very scene he had just fled. The comrades he had left behind were right in front of him. They were still trapped, looking at him as if they were seeing a ghost.

Minjun, who had been facing the escapee's retreating back, turned his head. He raised a hand, as if welcoming the Todd approaching from behind.

The Todd visualized the structure of a cylinder in his mind. It was a run starting from one point that looped around the circumference, inevitably returning to where it began.

Spatial distortion.

"Th-that's impossible..."

The darkness seethed. The escapee reflexively hid his head inside his shell. It was a useless gesture, but he could not be blamed. It was pure instinct.

The veil of darkness moved even faster this time. Before his left arm was even halfway in, and before his right arm and both legs could hide within the shell... the sharpened darkness wedged itself between his nape and the carapace. Then, like a crowbar, it pried forcefully upward, widening the gap.

Craaaack!

Snap!

The shell was ripped off while he was still alive. The spine, attached in an arch to the inside of the shell, was completely exposed.

Deprived of his innate armor, the internal organs writhed beneath the Todd's exposed back.

Crunch! The darkness pulverized the torn-off shell as if crushing it in a fist.

Thump!

Then it slammed down onto the Todd's unprotected back. He let out a grotesque shriek—one that the word 'scream' could not adequately capture—and died.

After the soul-rending noise ceased, Minjun spoke.

As if he found it all too bothersome.

"Just..."

He said this upon realizing there was no longer any need to hunt them down one by one, nor to test his abilities any further.

Vwooom!

Asiph-1 resonated in response to his command.

"Kill each other."

Though they were once aquatic creatures, the Todds now breathed on land. Even after the darkness covered their surroundings, they had continued to breathe. And the darkness had slowly seeped into their respiratory tracts, coating their insides.

The Todds lunged at one another.

They attacked with ear-splitting screeches. Curling their stubby fingers, they battered their opponents' heads with hard, hoof-like palms. Amid the hammer-like blows, they gouged out eyes with their sharp, beak-like lips. They bit down hard and ripped away flesh. If someone hid their head inside their shell, they thrust their beaks inside and pecked away. Craving flesh, they focused on tearing each other into as many pieces as possible. Blood and guts spilled. As if repulsed, the darkness divided its currents and circled around, refusing to engulf this self-inflicted slaughterhouse.

A moment later, only one Todd remained standing.

"Ah... Ah...!"

He was spared solely because Minjun's other persona had actively argued for it.

Ignorant of the fact that he had been granted a few extra minutes to breathe in this world, the commander attempted to make an ungrateful choice.

He tried to end his barely extended life himself.

Float!

He levitated an orb Magic Tool to his temple. Amidst his ragged breaths, he thought. He did not want to end up like his kin before him. Rather than that...

He squeezed his eyes shut. With superhuman patience, he suppressed the instinctual urge to pull his head into his shell.

Whir!

A laser shot from the orb, aimed directly at the commander's head.

He felt genuine relief. Now he could be free. From this hell. From that monster, at last...

"..."

Freedom...

"..."

His beak-like mouth opened.

"...Ah."

He could not figure out why he was still alive.

Because he could not see it.

Just before the laser fired from the orb touched his left cheek, the beam was suddenly cut off, only to resume a handspan away from his right cheek, flying off before disappearing into the darkness.

Minjun tossed a glance at the despairing Todd. He had left one alive because there was something he needed to hear.

Minjun's two personas negotiated.

‘Right, we do need information.’

However.

‘We don't necessarily have to hear it from him while he's alive, do we?’

The two reached an agreement.

Swish!

His head flew off.

The death the commander met was relatively gentle. He embraced it with relief.

Thinking that he could truly escape now.

=Kiyaaaaaah!=

At least, until he discovered that his soul, separated from his body, was ensnared by an unknown force instead of being summoned to the spirit realm.

The commander realized he had become a wraith.

The souls of the majority of the Todds—those who had died horrifying deaths or died witnessing horrors—wandered the darkness in a state of madness. Minjun gathered every single one of them using Necromancy and muttered.

"Ah, I'm thirsty."

The extermination was complete. He checked on the others left in the darkness. Lakefield and Dong-cheol were safely hidden inside the barrier. Kentius was pressed flat against the floor, his ears pinned back and his scales raised. Though he could see and hear nothing, he had instinctively felt the threat. And Yumtus... Minjun checked on the priest who had passed out in the basement, blood pouring like a waterfall from the third eye on his forehead. He was not in bad shape. He had merely lost consciousness amid a wave of euphoria akin to reaching paradise.

Once he confirmed everyone was safe, the throat-tearing thirst grew even worse.

Gathering the wraiths from the air, Minjun thought. A bizarre light still gleamed in his two eyes.

He repeated to himself.

I'd like to quench my thirst.

That young dragon cowering nearby would not even serve as a palate cleanser. He had no desire to touch something like that.

‘I'm not asking for much. I just wish there was a dragon around two thousand years old nearby.’

He felt a deep, mind-shaking craving.

He was thirsty.

   *

Jenkinson fell into the deepest dilemma of his entire two-thousand-year dragon life.

He had just received an urgent report from Hong Kong.

"Inais's Lair is burning?!"

Blair nodded.

"Yes, sir. It is currently in a state where no one can approach."

What in the world was happening? He could not even guess.

The other dragons would just stand by. He could not think of a single dragon who would step up to help. The heirs who shared bloodlines with the child inside the egg she was brooding would actually be delighted.

At times like this, the Dragon Lord, who would rally their kin for aid, was vacant.

This was why that job everyone hated doing was so important. Even if a unique individual like the predecessor did not hold the seat, the Lord's position inherently functioned as an artificially crafted conscience for the Dragon Race, a collective ethical consciousness born upon taking office.

Jenkinson realized anew just how massive a loss the Lord's sudden death—leaving no successor—was for their species.

And he agonized. He was not close to Inais and had no real ties to her. But he could not just stand by while the Lord's lover and the child he left behind were in danger. Jenkinson was that kind of dragon.

But.

"And Minjun isn't answering?"

"No. That side is also impossible to approach."

An unidentified darkness had blanketed Minjun's Shop. And according to confirmed reports, his friend was likely inside.

‘Is he trapped?’

Unable to directly sense the properties of the darkness, Jenkinson could not imagine its true nature. Furthermore, it was not a form he recognized, and there were types of Magic outside of Dark Magic that also manipulated darkness.

Jenkinson agonized.

Inais and her child, fellow dragons and the bereaved family of the deceased he respected.

Minjun, who was not a dragon but had shared a friendship with him for centuries.

Using Teleport would make the travel instantaneous either way, but there was no telling how much time would be eaten up once he arrived.

Who should he help first?

What was the appropriate choice for a dragon aiming to become the next Dragon Lord?

"..."

After a fleeting moment of deliberation.

Jenkinson made his choice.

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