The Foreigner on the Periphery

Jenkinson agonized, consumed by regret and lingering attachments.

He had remained in the rear until now only because his parents had fiercely insisted on it.

'I should have fought them on it and gone anyway. Even dragons under a thousand years old are fighting in this war. It makes no sense for an Ancient Dragon to guard the rear...'

No, wait.

'...!?'

A sudden sense of wrongness washed over Jenkinson.

This was unmistakably the dawn of the Second Dragon-Ancient Race War.

'When I joined the fight, I was just a young dragon. I hadn't even earned the title of Ancient Dragon yet.'

So why was he thinking of himself as an Ancient Dragon right now?

Amidst the extreme confusion, his sense of self began to split in two.

In this very moment, Jenkinson was a Gold Dragon resolving to join a future war, while simultaneously a Red Dragon remembering his past battles.

The Red Dragon Jenkinson felt a wave of vertigo.

'God, not again!'

His thoughts diverged into two distinct streams.

The Gold Dragon forcefully suppressed his grief and began planning his preparations for the war. Meanwhile, the Red Dragon felt dizzy at his own unraveling mental state.

'I've slipped under again!'

Spending so long buried within the Dragon Lord's memories was making him lose his own identity.

And this wasn't even the first time.

Jenkinson felt a deep, mind-shaking sorrow that alternated with a sharp spike of panic.

He had regained his grip on reality, but the grief over losing the Lord's parents lingered, as agonizing as if he had lost his own. This was despite the fact that Jenkinson's real parents were perfectly fine and alive.

The warm mental waves that had whispered to him the moment he broke from his egg, the tactile memory of their scales rubbing against his own—it all felt so vivid. A crashing wave of longing and sorrow washed over him.

Slipping back into the Lord's emotions, he suddenly jolted in alarm.

'No, stop!'

A terror set in, as if his very soul were splintering apart.

'If this keeps up, I really don't know what will happen to me.'

Who was he?

The Red Dragon Jenkinson.

But that certainty was slowly blurring.

At first, losing his physical freedom to become a purely thinking entity had felt like a prison. Over time, however, that sense of confinement had faded. As the Gold Dragon's thoughts deepened and his senses sharpened, Jenkinson felt all of it with visceral clarity.

Jenkinson frequently lost the lines between past and present, dream and reality. If sensation and perception defined existence, then Jenkinson practically lived within the dream. From that point on, it ceased to be just a dream.

At some point, Jenkinson had become able to predict what the Lord would say. He knew the words at the exact speed they formed in the brain, right before they were spoken. In those moments, he fell under the illusion that the Dragon Lord moved and spoke according to Jenkinson's own will, as if the two of them shared the exact same emotions.

Submerged in that absolute synchronicity, Jenkinson no longer felt trapped in a prison. The Dragon Lord's free will became Jenkinson's free will.

'No. If I keep sinking into this... I'm going to lose myself entirely!'

Jenkinson clung desperately to the only metric that separated the two of them.

He latched onto the memories of the Red Dragon Jenkinson—things the Lord could not know. He recalled the connections he had made, the lives he had brushed past and intertwined with. He reminisced on the events that had brought him joy and sorrow.

Yet looking back now, it was inevitable that his entire life as a Red Dragon felt like nothing more than a fleeting dream.

Jenkinson knew the truth. The subjective time he had spent trapped here was already longer than the entire waking life the Red Dragon had lived.

   *

"Welcome, and thank you all sincerely for joining this battle for the fate of our race."

The Gold Dragon Jenkinson listened tensely to the commander's briefing.

The room was packed with dragons of every origin. There were gorgeously scaled Fire Dragons, of course, but also dragons that breathed lightning, dragons from the oceans, dragons that ruled the underground, and even dragons with insectoid wings. Kinds that were rarely seen had all gathered in one place.

Jenkinson felt a strange awkwardness at seeing the Dragon Race so united.

'Even fiercely individualistic dragons who constantly bicker with each other can unite when faced with a common enemy.'

Could the dragons remain this united even after the war ended?

The dormant voice in his blood seemed to whisper. There had to be a way.

"This is the operation zone: the planet A-Di-Kiel."

A holographic map of the stolen territory materialized in the air.

It was one of the planets the Ancient Race had demanded be returned the moment they resurfaced.

Legend claimed the planet had been named by the Ancient Race. Various tales explaining its origins were passed around—often tied to unverified ruins—but the timelines and historical records were such a mess that the dragons didn't believe a word of them.

Even if the legends were true and the Ancient Race were the original masters of the land, the dragons had no intention of handing the planet over peacefully.

They were going to take it back.

"Here is the local situation after it was retaken by the Ancient Race."

A secretly recorded video of the planet's surface began to play.

Curses of shock rippled through the gathered dragons.

"Jesus! Are those bastards completely insane?"

Most of them were latecomers to the war who hadn't witnessed how the planet was taken in the first place.

"If they were just going to ruin the planet like that, why did they even ask for it back?"

The Ancient Race had desperately demanded the planet, only to turn its fertile lands into a devastated wasteland.

"They unleashed a reckless bombardment, to the point we thought they intended to annihilate the planet entirely. The result is what you see. It makes you wonder if recovery is even possible, but we cannot give up on this world."

The screen shifted. It showed an island floating in a vast ocean. The dragons' eyes widened.

"What the hell is that?"

A city had emerged right in the middle of the ocean.

It was a city built in a bizarre architectural style, one completely unknown even to the displaced dragons who used to live on the planet.

"There was nothing like that there before."

"To build a brand-new city in such a short amount of time... their technology is terrifying."

None of them knew the truth: the Ancient Race hadn't built the city, but merely uncovered what had been hidden.

"They've stationed nearly half their forces on the planet around that area. On top of that, equipment of unknown purpose and a massive workforce are constantly heading there. And..."

The commander finally got to the point.

"We believe all of our captured prisoners and the stolen remains of our fallen warriors are located there."

The eyes of every dragon present, including Jenkinson's, blazed with fury. The very reason he had volunteered for this specific operation had just been named.

The commander pointed to a bizarre structure that looked like an inverted pyramid.

"This is the target of our rescue operation."

How could they strike only the enemy without harming the prisoners or damaging the remains?

The commander's next explanation caught everyone completely off guard.

"You want to use... dragon blood as a weapon?"

"Our blood is the most reliable and efficient weapon we have discovered so far. We already knew dragon blood caused violent rejection in other species, but it turns out it is particularly lethal to certain factions of the Ancient Race."

Intelligence indicated that the majority of the population inside that base were Kavite.

The display shifted to show a newly developed artifact created by the Dragon Race.

"This is a biochemical weapon made with dragon blood."

Hearing that a massive amount of compressed dragon blood was stored inside the bomb, one of the dragons voiced a concern.

"You want to detonate that inside their base? But the Kavite know how to detect dragon blood too. Even if a section gets contaminated, they'll just seal it off and quarantine it immediately."

The commander smiled.

"If we detonated it normally, yes, they would detect it instantly and decontaminate the area before our rescue team could even move. However, the mechanism behind this bomb was actually inspired by pesticides. I'd say it's the perfect weapon for the leeches infesting that base... the insects known as the Kavite."

He elaborated on how it worked.

First, an infiltration team would plant and activate the bomb deep behind enemy lines. The dragon blood molecules would then spread everywhere, completely coated in a harmless liquid that matched the atmosphere's composition. Because of this coating, the dragon blood wouldn't trigger a reaction right away.

"The inactive dragon blood will settle on their clothes, their skin, their tools, and they'll unknowingly spread it everywhere themselves."

Only after enough time had passed would the coating on the molecules evaporate.

"Because it will be diluted in the air, it won't kill them instantly. But we expect it to completely incapacitate them for a window of time. In that window, we'll retrieve our prisoners and our dead."

The commander then asked for volunteers.

"We need a small elite squad to transport this bomb deep into the heart of the enemy base and activate it."

A handful of dragons, including Jenkinson, were selected. They were the most powerful fighters among them.

   *

A spatial interference spell had been cast around the target to prevent anyone from infiltrating via Teleport. Evading the surveillance of the Space Mothership, Jenkinson and the infiltration team slipped silently through the atmosphere. They touched down in the open ocean far from the base and began a slow, covert approach toward the island.

Now, with the ocean-bound city finally in sight, a deep sense of dismay washed over them.

"Did our intel leak?"

At Jenkinson's mutter, a fellow dragon shook his head in denial.

"A dragon colluding with the Kavite? They'd have to be insane!"

"Then what? Were we being eavesdropped on? Why the hell did their security just spike like this?!"

It made no sense.

In just the span of a few days, the enemy had drastically bolstered their patrols, almost as if they knew a dragon infiltration was coming.

"What do we do? Do we abort?"

"It was hard enough just getting down here, and the patrols outside the atmosphere are only getting tighter. At this rate, just getting off the planet will be a nightmare."

As they debated their next move...

"Wait, look at that!"

A black dot had appeared in the distant sky.

Even though they were already hidden by concealment Magic, the dragons tensed, unable to tear their eyes away.

"A Space Mothership? Why would it drop to such a low altitude?"

Had they been spotted?

Fortunately, that fear proved unfounded.

The Space Mothership slowly descended, hovering in the air directly over the artificial island rather than landing. Moments later, a small transport vessel launched from the Mothership.

The dragons quickly realized why the base's security had been on such high alert.

"Must be a major VIP."

With the Kavite soldiers lined up in a grand formation to receive them, the transport's doors opened, and the passengers finally stepped out.

Amidst a massive welcoming procession, the visitors walked across the base, heading straight for the colossal building at its center.

The exact place where the dragon prisoners and the corpses of the fallen were being held.

"Huh?"

Jenkinson suddenly caught sight of something strange.

"What kind of ability is that? Why is that guy glowing?"

If those VIPs were truly high-ranking, even the smallest detail could prove strategically valuable later.

Jenkinson muttered to himself, carefully committing the anomaly to memory.

His companion shot him a confused look.

"Glowing? What are you talking about?"

"Out of all the leeches that got off that transport, why is the one furthest in the back radiating light? Is it some sort of artifact?"

"Light? I don't see anything."

"I don't see it either."

"Light, my ass. What light? This is no time for nonsense..."

After a quick exchange of whispers, Jenkinson couldn't hide his bewilderment.

"What? I'm the only one who sees it? Look right there, the Kavite moving in that weird, jerky way!"

Just as he pointed out, there was one suspicious Kavite in the group.

It moved with stiff, unnatural lurches—like a young beast still learning to walk, or a human stumbling in shoes two sizes too small.

But aside from Jenkinson, every other dragon swore they saw no light coming from the Kavite at all.

"...Am I hallucinating from the stress?"

He blinked a few times, but the image remained the same.

It was driving him crazy.

But through Jenkinson's Magic vision, observing from maximum range to avoid detection, he saw it clear as day.

From that single Kavite stepping off the transport, a vivid pulse of energy was rippling outward like a halo.

It was the most brilliant, breathtaking light Jenkinson had ever seen in his life.

   *

Asiph-1, wrapping up his task, glanced sideways at his creator.

Minjun, having nearly finished processing the Dragon Heart, had suddenly stilled his hands and was staring fixedly into space.

His gaze was locked in the depths of an old memory, and clearly not a pleasant one. Faint flickers of deeply ingrained hostility and quiet anger continuously rippled across his eyes.

Asiph-1 spoke.

"I take it the Kavite brought you to this planet after they retook it, Father?"

Minjun nodded.

He still remembered the day he first set foot here again after waking from his slumber. He remembered the profound humiliation he had felt.

To maintain absolute secrecy, they had forcibly disguised Minjun as a Kavite.

Still ravenous and horribly weakened from his slumber, he hadn't possessed the strength to resist.

"I taught spells to those beasts while waiting for the day I could awaken our kin. The spell to convert a Dragon Heart into a Mana Crystal, to be exact. But I caught on to their true intentions soon enough."

Asiph-1 tilted his head.

"How did you manage to escape? You were still on the brink of starvation back then. The scraps of dragon blood they fed you couldn't possibly have been enough to regain your strength."

Minjun wasn't the sort to believe in miracles. But what happened next... there was truly no other word to describe it.

The primordial race smiled faintly.

"I received an unexpected surprise gift."

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