The Foreigner on the Periphery

That was the exact moment Minjun ground down Todd's soul and flesh to forge a shadow monster.

A massive ship hovered in concealment, far from the black storm.

Having executed an emergency jump without informing the locals of its purpose, the vessel was both a warship and a Jump Ship dispatched by the Tax Collection Command.

Inside the ship's command room.

The captain stared at the screen, frozen in place.

"This is impossible!"

Just moments ago, the Mothership had launched hundreds of armed Todd warriors. Their mission, as agreed upon with the tentacles, was to recover the Endelion princess and arrest the escaped prisoner, Asif-666. That level of force should have been more than sufficient.

And what was the result?

The battalion never even got the chance to execute their diversionary tactics. The sudden whirlwind dragged the soldiers in with a terrifying gravitational pull. Sucked inside, burst, and crushed, their life signs instantly vanished.

The captain decisively shouted the command the field officer had only managed to think of before dying too quickly to issue it.

"Retreat! We're retreating!"

He unleashed a barrage of curses in his mind.

What? Those cowardly tentacles... there was no way the predictions of those freaks, so desperate to get their princess back, could be wrong.

Could the win rate calculated by the universe's greatest actuaries really be incorrect?

Because Endelion technological prowess vastly outstripped the other two races, the Kavites and Todds tended to blindly believe whatever they said. After all, they were rarely wrong.

When they commissioned the Todds to rescue the princess, they had offered a guarantee. Based on the estimated memories Asif-666 had recovered so far, this level of military force would secure victory. The operation was supposed to be a sure success.

"They were completely wrong!"

Asif-666's power vastly exceeded the range the Endelions had estimated.

The captain's mind raced. This was no longer a situation where they had to worry about offending the dragons. He instinctively realized that this had escalated far beyond a localized operation.

"This is war. We need an all-out military response!"

At the retreat order, his subordinates scrambled like their shells were on fire. A soldier calculating the ship's course rushed over to report.

"The nearest Terminal is here!"

The captain planned to cross dimensions and return to headquarters. There, he would condemn the Endelions for their blunder and gather a larger force. He had to do it quickly, before the Kavites—who had noticed the collusion between the two races—could make a move.

He was out of time. He checked the holographic map. This was the airspace of the Shutan Kingdom—a backward nation completely devoid of dimensional Terminals. The nearest Terminal was in the neighboring country, located in the capital of the human-ruled nation.

"Prepare an emergency jump to the Terminal! We move there immediately!"

Keeping its hull concealed, the warship cut through the empty sky. They feared that performing a warship-class Teleport right here would tip off that deranged monster. With the ship's engines, the human capital was only a few minutes away.

But the ship's movement...

Screech!

The shadow monster was quietly watching. It didn't miss the ship's trajectory as it melted into the night sky.

The caster who had summoned her was no different.

A short while later.

Whoosh!

The whirlwind that had been raging near the collapsed Sanctuary vanished as if it had never been there.

   *

"Agh! I really thought I was going to die!"

The dragon gasped for breath, having crash-landed in the forest.

He swept a hand over his chest. I'm really not going to die a natural death at this rate. Wait, I'm already dead... Ah, damn it! Anyway, what the hell is going on?! He continuously muttered to himself, trying to soothe his racing heart.

He had only just arrived after dropping his altitude and distancing himself to avoid getting swept up in the whirlwind. He didn't set the princess down until he confirmed the monster was gone.

"Krrrgh!"

The princess twisted and rolled across the weed-covered ground. Ha Eunseong still couldn't understand the words she kept crying out. He figured they were either curses or meaningless screams.

In truth, Yuria's shrieks meant this:

"Mother! Mother!"

The crocodile looked up at the sky, pouring endless tears. The entrance to the Sanctuary, which had been exposed when the barrier tore apart, was nowhere to be found. She instinctively realized the place had completely collapsed. The location where the Shutan King had been hiding appeared entirely obliterated, swept away in the explosion.

"Ah, aaaaah! Mother!"

Yuria had dreamed of a coup. She had intended to drag her mother down from the throne and seize the succession by force. It was revenge against the woman who had not distributed her love fairly.

But she had never intended to harm or kill the King.

Not once, not even in her dreams, had she planned for that.

A child deprived of love in their youth will still crave it as an adult. Even knowing that the childhood void can no longer be filled, they obsess over it.

Yuria was the same.

"No! Noooooo!"

The crocodile's voice cracked. She thrashed about in soul-tearing, body-rending agony. And then, eventually...

"..."

She stopped moving.

She had fainted mid-spawn. Just as the dragon hesitated and approached her limp body...

"...!"

His sharp senses picked up on something.

The dragon lowered his body and flared his wings. The experience of carrying his creditor on his back had awakened a significant portion of his genetic instincts. In the center of his golden eyes, the crescent irises narrowed to slits. Ha Eunseong glared through the thicket.

Slowly, carefully, a group of figures emerged.

'Crocodiles?!'

They were all stanians. Even at a glance, they were heavily armed. They grew tense upon seeing the dragon, but they didn't look surprised.

From the stanians' perspective, finding this place hadn't been difficult. In a forest that had barely regained its tranquility after the crushing whirlwind vanished, Yuria's shrieks had carried far into the distance.

The crocodile standing at the forefront spoke in the common tongue.

"Dragon, please allow us to tend to the princess. Fainting mid-spawn is fatal. If the eggs burst inside her ovipositor, she will die instantly."

The speaker was a member of the secret society serving the Shutan Royal Family. This was the same organization that Darkbara and Gulesh—both brought to the brink of death by Minjun's hands—belonged to. Completely oblivious to this, Ha Eunseong merely glared at them in warning.

Seeing that the dragon didn't seem to understand, the stanian used hand gestures to convey his meaning.

The dragon's response was...

Growl!

In an instant, the crocodiles in the night-shrouded forest felt a terror that made their scales stand on end and their blood freeze. Their bodies trembled uncontrollably. The two eyes of the dragon facing them glinted with menace.

Dragon Fear.

Instinct dominated the dragon's mind. Defying orders to set the princess on the ground had been the absolute limit of his disobedience. Handing the target his 'master' had ordered him to protect over to someone else was out of the question.

Just as the majority of the stanians—valiant warriors though they were—struggled to even draw a breath...

A single crocodile stepped forward through their ranks. Until now, she had only been watching the situation from far behind.

As she stepped forward, the stanian who had been trying to converse with the dragon gasped.

"Your Majesty!"

While everyone else cowered in terror, the only crocodile to square her shoulders and stride out confidently was the King of Shutan.

The woman whom Minjun had ultimately failed to find inside the Sanctuary.

Yuria's mother, whom Yuria had naturally assumed was swept up and killed when the treasure vault collapsed.

"Mother!"

Another crocodile followed the King out, trying to pull her back. There was no way Ha Eunseong could know this was the second daughter of the Shutan King. Supposedly convalescing in another dimension due to her frail health, she was actually right here.

Slowly but firmly pushing her daughter's hand away, the King spoke.

"I beg of you, Dragon. Please let us take care of Yuria... my daughter. Flawed as she may be, as a mother, I cannot let her die so miserably."

Of course, the dragon could not understand. His belatedly awakened genetic instincts simply kept stabbing at his mind.

It was then.

-Fine. Take that princess and get far away! But you must stay here; I need to have a little chat with you.

Spoken in the common tongue, with perfect clarity.

They were the words of a third party, someone not physically present. The heads of the crocodiles and the dragon snapped around simultaneously. The voice was as vivid as if the speaker were standing right next to them, yet there was no one there.

The voice was transmitted by Del's magic. Instead of approaching Yuria, she had kept her distance. Just as a flame spell required mana to ignite but left a fire that burned without it, this magic had carried her voice all the way into this zone where mana was frozen solid.

Next, a language Ha Eunseong could understand rang out. It was Yumtus speaking through Del's magic.

-Mr. Ha Eunseong! Let them take Princess Yuria away. That way, the princess on our side will have an easier time approaching. She says there is something she needs to confirm with the stanians, and wouldn't it be troublesome if her Polymorph unraveled and she reverted to her true form?

The familiar priest's voice provided a strange sense of stability. Only then did Ha Eunseong suppress his hostility, letting his genetic impulses slowly subside.

His heart, however, was still racing.

'Damn it, how exactly are things playing out right now?!'

The dragon slowly backed away. He gestured with his head toward the unconscious princess. Yuria's younger sister quickly rushed out. With the help of another society member, the second princess took the mana-condenser and hurried far away. The majority of the crocodiles remained behind to guard the King.

A moment later—perhaps because Yuria had gotten far enough away—light flashed from Ha Eunseong's body. The artifact he was equipped with had recovered its abilities. Motes of light wrapped around the dragon, shrinking his body down into a human form. Del and Yumtus revealed themselves almost simultaneously.

'You're awake?'

Ha Eunseong's gaze stopped on Del's face. She was deathly pale, like someone who had seen something she was never meant to see. It was the aftermath of the shadow monster.

Having heard the general circumstances from Yumtus, Del cast her gaze over the crocodiles one by one. Among them was a face recorded in the Endelion database.

The Shutan King.

She had something to confirm with that crocodile.

"What on earth was inside the Sanctuary?"

"..."

Del soon shook her head.

"No, of course I know what it was. Seeing that massive uproar, it was obviously Talents. Just how many Talents were in there?"

Just how much had Minjun absorbed?

That was the only thing Del wanted to know.

Even as he heard the question, Yumtus felt puzzled. There seemed to be no reason for the Shutan King to answer a stranger's interrogation.

But then.

"To think that those who know the secret have arrived. The time has finally come!"

Complex emotions bled into the Shutan King's eyes.

"...?!"

People, Yuria included, had mistakenly believed the King was praying inside the Sanctuary. But that was merely a misunderstanding by those who didn't even know what the interior looked like.

Just as Minjun had already witnessed, there was no space in the Sanctuary for the King to reside. Instead, she had been hiding out in a secret society safehouse close to the Sanctuary all this time. After her youngest daughter was arrested off-world, movements targeting the King herself had been detected.

However, when the King's whereabouts remained unknown even after several months, the other races—primarily the humans—had reached out to appease Yuria.

Despite the miserable reality of her eldest daughter plotting a coup, a strange euphoria was mixed into the emotions pooling in the King's eyes.

Del could not understand.

'The time has come?'

The King's voice trembled. An unconcealable joy could be felt in her tone.

"Finally! Yes, here and now. Finally!"

"...Excuse me, but you still haven't answered my question."

Del frowned. These people had been cowering before the dragon just a moment ago. She had intended to use that opening to extract the information she wanted, but the King's reaction was completely unexpected.

'Should I threaten her?'

It was then that the stanian spoke.

"We have no measuring tools, so I cannot give an exact calculation, but it was roughly a little over two million Talents. It has remained almost completely untouched since my ancestor four generations past first obtained it from the ruins!"

Del's expression turned pale.

Two million Talents?!

"I can't believe it. Why were so many Talents here in the first place? And you all... just stored it without spending a single penny for hundreds of years?"

The King readily admitted it.

"That is correct."

"Why?! From what I heard, the Shutan Royal Family was suffering from such financial difficulties that you even had a separate slush fund..."

"Because the late king, my ancestor four generations past, ordered it so."

"...?"

"The ancestor who discovered the treasure gave the order. He said it must be protected so that no one else could lay a hand on it until its true owner came looking for it. We have merely upheld his dying wish all this time."

Did that mean they had prophesied that Minjun would come here?

Del felt a headache coming on. As far as she knew, even the prophets of the Committee couldn't properly foresee Asif-666's future. It was as if someone hadn't allowed it.

While Del fell into confusion, the Shutan King recalled a phrase that had been secretly passed down.

-When the master of the treasure returns, our race shall finally grasp freedom in our hands, and my descendant upon the throne shall recover her third child and youngest daughter.

For a long time after that prophecy, there had been no case where a king's third child was born female while simultaneously being the youngest. This was because stanians generally laid more than three eggs at a time.

However, in this generation, that condition had finally been met for the first time.

Because of that, the Shutan King had never believed in the death of her youngest daughter, Princess Vermi. She hadn't wanted to.

If the daughter mentioned in the prophecy was Vermi, she would surely return. And on the day she returned, the stanians—who had been oppressed by other races—would regain their true freedom.

---!

At that moment, the atmosphere among the society members escorting the King grew chaotic. Even though it wasn't the time for it, they busily exchanged words in their native tongue. One of them held a Radio in hand. The news they had just received through it was the problem.

"What is the matter?!"

One of the members approached and quietly whispered in her ear. As the King listened while facing Del, her eyes went wide.

"What?! Is that true?"

"Yes, it is, Your Majesty."

Stammering as if he couldn't believe it himself, he repeated the report he had heard over the Radio.

"Right now, in the center of the human kingdom's capital, a black storm... they say a boiling darkness has appeared and is swallowing everything around it!"

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