The Foreigner on the Periphery

"Grand Patriarch, there is a matter I must discuss with you."

A bishop approached Yumtus.

"What is it?"

The priest who requested the meeting spoke with an anxious expression.

"At this speed, we will soon reach our destination. The headquarters of the Committee."

"I think so as well. Contrary to our fears, the dragons are putting up almost no resistance. They're even parting the way for us... Could it be instinct? The innate realization that they must not hinder the advance of the master who once raised them."

Reciting a passage from the secret scriptures that modern dragons could not possibly know, he smiled benevolently.

"However, no matter how I look at it, I feel anxious. We did learn the controls from the prisoners, but..."

He was in charge of this Battleship's artillery.

He trembled slightly.

"At this rate, I'm afraid I won't be able to properly fulfill my role in this holy war. If I fumble despite having this incredible weapon and make a mistake in actual combat..."

"That is enough worrying, Bishop. Is not everything you are doing right now the result of submitting to God? God is absolute good, and all of this is the process of doing good. Even if you make a mistake while serving and loving Him, that too will be part of His plan."

He comforted the anxious bishop, telling him not to worry—even if he accidentally blew up the Battleship with the artillery, it would still fall under God's plan.

After the bishop withdrew, Yumtus fell into thought.

'I understand why he's worried. Right now, we're essentially children holding a blade that can sever even a dragon's windpipe. How exactly does the avatar intend to use us, and these 158 ships?'

However, Yumtus was not worried about the future.

He was simply curious and excited to see how God's plan would be executed, eager to witness that glorious scene.

Rumble!

A deafening roar from outside shattered those joyful thoughts.

*

The goblin was called 'White Eyes' by his peers.

"Shift over! Replacement team, move in!"

A voice blared from the speakers in the mineshaft. White Eyes stopped working and joined his fellow slaves.

Their workplace was one of over thirty mines on this planet. With only around two hundred slaves in total, it wasn't a particularly large operation. Being the strongest goblin there, White Eyes acted as their leader.

Shhh- Ssh- Shsh-

Ssshhh- Shssh- Ssh-

They communicated in a language that sounded like the wind. It was a phonetic system that required no volume in the enclosed, highly echoing underground. Their vocal organs were fully optimized for this language, so not a single one of them ever slurred their pronunciation or stuttered.

White Eyes asked them, seeking confirmation.

"Are you meeting this month's quota?"

"Barely. Just about."

"I don't think I'll have a problem either."

"Ah, but 'Broken Nose' might be in trouble this time."

"Is that right?"

White Eyes turned his head toward the slave whose progress was lacking. The other goblin remained silent despite being mentioned. A distinct body odor wafted through the stale air of the shaft.

The scent of a sick man.

White Eyes made a decision.

"Give some of my share to him this month."

"Really? Are you sure?"

"Yeah, I've already hit my quota."

"Ah...!"

Broken Nose expressed his gratitude in a tearful voice. Even though he had barely avoided punishment this time, his face was dark. He knew the true state of his own body.

'I can help him this time, but...'

He didn't know what the sickness was. All White Eyes knew was that if his fellow slave was in the same state next month, he wouldn't be able to help him again.

Ssh! Shssh!

White Eyes led his comrades.

Sshh!

"Let's head back."

Their shift was over. The grueling fifteen hours of labor had ended. The exact same day would begin again tomorrow, but for now, they could eat, wash up, and rest their bodies.

Scrape, scrape!

The slaves crammed into the narrow mineshaft moved in single file. The floor was jagged and the walls were tight, but they advanced quite quickly. It was completely different from the typical 'goblin walk' known on the surface to be somewhat slow and limping. Through the muggy, stale air, they scurried along in a posture somewhere between bipedal and quadrupedal walking.

Whenever their balance faltered while walking on two feet, they shifted their center of gravity forward and slapped the walls or ceiling with their arms, riding the momentum of the rebound. It was a method of locomotion only viable in such confined passages.

Sshh!

"Good work."

They exited the shaft and arrived at their living quarters. It was the only place underground where sunlight could be seen. An artificial lake sat at its center, where the light filtering down from the surface sparkled upon the ripples.

Goblins gathered around the lake. The returning workers sought out their families, and White Eyes was no exception.

Shsh- Ssh!

He greeted his wife. She held their son, who was barely a year old, in her right arm. Her left arm was severed at the elbow, rendering it useless. One day, following an accident in the mine where an entire digging team failed to meet their quotas, the dwarf overseer had randomly selected their families and chopped off an arm from each of them.

Shsh! Shshh!

She told him about how the child had played today and whether he had eaten well.

Their son was very robust. He seemed stronger than other children his age. That fact filled White Eyes with both hope and despair.

Since his son was healthy, he wouldn't die easily.

And because he was healthy, he would eventually be stationed in the most dangerous depths of the mine, burdened with the most grueling labor.

'Something about this feels wrong.'

The way they were being consumed and exploited was wrong.

Goblins knew no life other than that of mine slaves. Yet even so, this felt wrong. Unless a creature literally ate dirt to survive, there was surely no race in the world designed to mine ore for fifteen hours a day.

Even insects stopped digging the earth once they finished building their homes. But the goblins couldn't stop.

Ssshhh- Shsh-!

Goblins raised their children communally. A few of the goblin women, having gathered the children in one place, began to hum a melody. Sounds like leaking wind overlapped and intertwined, forming a chorus.

The men, returning from work, listened to the song while eating, washing, or simply sprawling across the floor.

The underground environment was ill-suited for reading, and goblin hands were far too rough for writing. It was only natural that their records came to rely heavily on oral tradition.

Ssshhh!

The women sang. Contrary to the prejudices of other races, a goblin rarely ever forgot something once they memorized it. The lyrics they chose today were about a certain being that was said to be rarely born among goblins.

A song passed down for a very long time.

White Eyes listened intently to the lyrics, though they were already burned into his mind like a branding iron.

Shhh- Ssh- Shsh!

*

Even before the Committee existed, the Dragon Race—who had made first contact with the goblins and enslaved them—were bewildered when interpreting their language.

The words used by this subterranean race were mostly excessively long and abstract. A prime example was a word meaning, "one who is free from the rules and laws of God, and stands furthest away from them."

The Dragon Race interpreted the word based on their own common sense. Though they were non-believers, they understood that in most religions, a god symbolized absolute good.

The rules set by God were the "good" that people were supposed to follow. Being isolated and distanced from that state meant "evil." Ultimately, "the one who stands furthest from God" was construed to mean existing in direct opposition to God.

In the end, the dragons paired that long phrase with a single, simple, and violent word.

Demon.

Ssh! Ssshhh!

The women sang of the demon.

To compare the power described in the lyrics to modern concepts, it was closer to that of a superhuman.

However, the dragons paid little mind to that legend. Goblins were infamous as an inferior race among which a Supernatural Ability User was never born, no matter how high the local mana density. The power of the demon described in the song was just downright absurd.

Then, when would this demon appear?

White Eyes muttered the verse.

"When our bloodline can no longer continue and faces the threat of extinction, only then is the demon born?"

Ever since he was young, White Eyes had thought this part was strange.

For one thing, it was impossible to tell just how many goblins were included in the "our" the song mentioned. Did all the goblins on a single planet have to face death? Or did every goblin across all dimensions have to be on the brink of being wiped out?

He just didn't know.

Ssshhh...?!

The women's song abruptly stopped.

"...!"

White Eyes and everyone else immediately understood why. The heightened senses unique to subterranean races were screaming a warning at them.

Beneath this land, something dangerous was writhing.

It felt similar to the tremors that occasionally swept through the earth.

Just before their tightly stretched nerves snapped—

RUMBLE!

The ground began to convulse violently.

*

KABOOM! RUMBLE!

It was an earthquake the likes of which no goblin had ever experienced.

Shsh- Shshh! Shsh!

Hell unfolded in the goblin settlement. The earth shook and pitched frantically. The goblins' belongings toppled and rolled, bouncing everywhere.

Shards of stone rained down from the walls, crushing some of them. Longtime friends lay scattered across the ground, mashed into a bloody pulp.

Ssh-! Ssh!

White Eyes pulled his wife into an embrace. Her right hand was desperately shielding their child. In place of her missing left arm, White Eyes wrapped his own arms tightly over her. The couple huddled together, enduring the chaos while hugging each other and their child simultaneously.

'Damn it, what the hell is this?!'

White Eyes looked around in absolute despair. People were dying. The ground was caving in, and the ceiling was collapsing. Several goblins plummeted into the lake as the earth beneath their feet tilted wildly.

'Why is this happening?!'

His vision shook frantically. It felt like his blood was rushing backward, and his heart pounded like mad.

Thump! Thump! Thump!

'I have to do something!'

Goblins knew of gods, but they did not worship them.

Even in this moment, White Eyes did not pray to another entity; he merely wished.

He directed a cry filled with remorse inward, at himself.

'If only I had power.'

Children shrieked. A coworker he had been mining with just moments ago tumbled headfirst into a newly formed chasm. His entire world was collapsing, and every goblin he knew was now staring death in the face.

'If I...'

White Eyes forced his severely cataract-clouded eyes wide open.

'...had the power to take everyone and escape from here!'

He needed a sanctuary, a place to lead everyone and evacuate from his doomed world.

To use a concept he had no knowledge of—

Something like an ark.

*

"These crazy bastards!"

The command center of the Space Mothership.

Minjun's eyes flashed with rage.

"They're planning to blow this entire planet away!"

His senses warned him. Beneath that surface, distorted magical energy raged like a tempest. The earthquakes tearing across the entire planet right now were only the beginning.

'They pulled this stunt predicting that we would pass through here!'

They must have joined hands with the dragons who owned that planet.

Because no matter how powerful the Committee was, they couldn't just blow up a dragon's planet without their consent.

"...Sick bastards!"

Flash!

Asiph-1, who had gone down to the Terminal, returned. The Pope resonated a mental wave the moment he stepped foot into the command center.

=All fleets, increase altitude! Ascend!=

They needed to get as far outside the atmosphere as possible. The 158 Space Motherships began to move at speeds that ignored the laws of physics.

From hovering just a few hundred meters above the ground, they broke into near-mach speeds in an instant.

However, Minjun knew that this wouldn't be enough.

The Pope relayed God's subsequent command to the fleet.

=Gather around the command ship!=

It was an order for each mothership to pack tightly together as much as possible, instead of maintaining wide formations like they had been doing.

But fleeing at maximum speed while maintaining just enough distance to avoid colliding or scraping against each other required incredible, high-level control.

With the AIs turned off, each ship's helmsman struggled fiercely. They were devoted believers and renowned theologians, but their piloting experience was practically nonexistent.

The results were clear on the screens. A few quickly formed up as instructed, but the majority could not maneuver as precisely as the Pope wanted.

Asiph-1 clicked his tongue and played a card he had prepared for such a moment.

="Submit!"=

His voice rippled outwards, riding the wave of intent.

Thanks to his history of combining countless fragments, Asiph-1 was better at reading and collecting personalities and memories that weren't his own than anyone else in this world. The Pope pulled out the expert knowledge and muscle memory he had extracted from the prisoners' minds as if they were his own.

And just like that, he planted them directly into the minds of the fleet's helmsmen.

Immediately, exactly as God desired, the 158 Battleships began to form a precise, tight formation.

"Urgh!"

Precisely controlling over a hundred believers at once seemed to overload the Pope.

That was when Minjun unleashed his power.

—!

The essence of life force he had absorbed in the form of dragon blood flowed into the Pope.

Thanks to this, the stumbling Asiph-1 regained his balance and focused on the controls. The shields generated simultaneously by the 158 ships overlapped, amplifying their defensive power.

In that instant, Minjun felt a deep sense of emptiness, as if his soul were being gnawed away. Intuiting that it was time to secure a large supply of dragon blood again, he turned his gaze back to the planet.

Down there lived a small number of dwarves and over 15,000 goblins.

But right now, there was no way to save them.

'They did this just to deal a blow to us, fully prepared to slaughter every last resident down there! Those beasts!'

The Ancient Race and the dragons.

In his eyes, both sides were nothing but beasts who had completely discarded their right to be called sentient beings.

Just as that thought settled in—

—!

The surface of the planet boiled over.

That was the moment those aboard the Space Motherships registered an eerie flash of light.

A hemisphere born of an explosion swelled up from the asteroid's surface. It was a circle drawn in crimson light. Soon, similar phenomena broke out across various regions of the planet. The world was morphing into the shape of a piece of fruit chewed apart by patches of light.

Then, debris flew everywhere. A colossal wave of magical energy swept outward.

And then came the impact.

BOOM!

A violent tremor slammed simultaneously into the fleet of 158 ships, which were clamped together by their interconnected shields.

The planet was already swallowed by the blood-red flares. They continued to expand, completely blotting out the pitch-black space around them. The connected space fleet maintained its shields and pushed its engines to maximum output, frantically flying away from it.

And then, they realized that the previous shock had only been a precursor to the real reaction.

An even more blinding light eclipsed their vision, and then—

—!

The planet detonated.

*

"To 4 million Talents!"

Somewhere in the cosmos.

Glasses filled with celebratory wine began to circulate among the dragons.

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