The Foreigner on the Periphery

The dragons were immensely thrilled.

Even the dragons did not understand the principles behind the artifact the Committee had delivered in the nick of time. All they had done was secretly install it.

They had been anxious about whether they had prepared it properly, but in the end, it seemed to have worked perfectly.

Their radar had just detected the explosive reaction of an asteroid owned by their syndicate.

“It’s a success. Hahaha!”

Gathered on the most fertile planet in this dimension, they poured celebratory drinks into each other’s glasses and raised another toast.

Unlike the planet chosen solely for mining operations, the star they resided on enjoyed abundant sunlight, and its atmosphere was perfectly optimized for life.

Brilliant sunlight poured through the wide windows, as if hinting at the glorious future stretching out before them.

Swallowing the sweet, effervescent liquid, one of them spoke.

“Were they all wiped out in one shot like that octopus bastard promised?”

“Well, to be exact, he didn’t guarantee that. He only said we should expect significant casualties.”

“Even so, could they possibly walk away unscathed after taking the brunt of a planetary explosion?”

The monster, introducing itself as a special envoy of the Committee, had contacted them through communications routed via the spirit realm instead of meeting face-to-face, as they always did.

The proposal was both radical and dangerous, but after agonizing over it, the dragons who co-owned the asteroid had accepted the deal.

And right before the Space Motherships arrived, the dragons had received the planet-destroying artifact.

“Oh!”

The visual data arrived after a slight delay.

“It’s certain. It blew up cleanly.”

To their eyes, the planetary debris painting the dark expanse of space looked like a spectacular fireworks display.

A firecracker commemorating their highly satisfactory profits.

“Four million! Four million Talents!”

“As expected of the Ancient Race. To think they’d so readily agree to that sum. Does it just mean they can print as many Talents as they want anyway?”

A Sea Dragon laughed, licking the scales around its mouth.

To be frank, the amount the dragons had quoted was a massive ripoff.

“Four million for a planet on the verge of being mined out and goblin slaves we were going to cull anyway. Such generous tentacles.”

“All we have to do is sit back and enjoy this unexpected windfall!”

While the syndicate members reveled in their joy, one dragon was closely observing the Magic projection.

Where the star used to be, a cloud of blinding flashes was endlessly expanding. The fate of the fleet it had swallowed was not yet visible.

He asked the artificial intelligence managing the system.

“Are we picking up any other signals yet? What’s the status of their Battleships?”

The AI replied.

“All wavelengths are chaotically scrambled from the aftermath of the planetary collapse. It is impossible to determine at this time.”

A Fire Dragon approached his side and chuckled.

“Don’t worry too much. Even if there are survivors, they can’t possibly pose a problem for us!”

The dragon giggled.

“If they protest, we can just feign ignorance and say we didn’t know!”

There was no proof.

Moreover, they had already finalized their story with the tentacles. The dragons would put on a show of outrage, vowing to hunt down the culprits who blew up their planet.

“Even if a few ships survived, do you think they have the leeway to pick a fight with us? They’d only have suspicions; they wouldn’t have the luxury of casually gathering hard evidence of our collusion. You saw it too, didn’t you? The evidence was wiped clean when the planet was vaporized!”

As a result, the evidence existed solely within the dragons’ memories. Unless someone cracked their heads open and looked inside, the full truth would remain hidden.

The Fire Dragon laughed heartily and said,

“Even if the damage is less than we expect and a lot of the warships survived, Asif-666 can’t touch the dragons! Not unless he wants to stir the pot without proof and make enemies out of both us dragons and the Committee at the same time!”

In truth, Asif-666’s fleet had seemed to actively avoid conflict with the dragons in the dimensions they had traversed thus far.

With a decisive battle against the Ancient Race looming, he likely wanted to avoid the worst-case scenario of leaving dragons as enemies at his back.

Thanks to the Dragon Race’s tacit compliance in return, the fleet had been able to march across the dimensional planes without interference up until now.

Despite the Fire Dragon’s confident assurances.

“Hmm.”

The dragon who had initially checked the situation with the AI couldn’t shake an ominous premonition.

With dark, sunken eyes, he stared out at the screen where nothing could yet be identified.

*

Asif-1 used all his strength to control the fleet.

“Ugh!”

The object that had once been an asteroid was scattering, turning into a dust of light.

From the fleet’s perspective, it momentarily seemed slow, but considering the scale of the visual feed, the passengers knew that a ferocious energy was expanding at a terrifying speed.

Rumble!

A massive shockwave crashed into them, one that would have swept the fleet away had they not prepared in advance.

The situation rapidly deteriorated as time passed. Planetary debris began clumping together due to gravity, growing larger and larger.

Even a glancing blow from that mass would render their shields useless.

“Faster! Even faster!”

The pope pounded on the minds of every ship’s helmsman.

Spurred by his sharp, whip-like shouts, the bishops desperately pulled away to put distance between themselves and the blast.

“Ah!”

And finally.

The cloud of light that had filled the external screens began to reveal its contours.

Darkness appeared at the edges of the flash. Space that had yet to be swallowed by the storm of light entered their field of vision. It meant the fleet had managed to distance itself that far from the explosion.

They could see the planetary fragments swirling as luminescent vapor.

“Phew.”

The moment the pope let out a sigh.

“Oh... Oh! Dear God!”

“We did it! We made it!”

Fervent cheers erupted among the congregation.

The beasts’ attempt to leave a stain on the path of the army of God had failed. Voices cried out, brimming with excitement.

God had protected them once again!

“Report the status of all ships.”

Miraculously, not a single vessel had been destroyed.

“There are zero casualties.”

What they didn’t know was that the planet’s explosion speed was far slower than what the Endelions had originally planned.

Because the fleet led by Minjun advanced faster than expected, the Ancient Race couldn’t make adequate preparations. Furthermore, the dragons, encountering the artifact for the first time, were pressed for time and failed to set it up perfectly. The Endelions, who should have personally analyzed the local mana currents to plant the bomb, had instead barked orders through remote communication rather than dispatching technicians.

This series of misalignments overlapped, ultimately working out as sheer luck for the allies.

“I expended far more power than expected.”

Even so, it wasn’t as if they had walked away completely unscathed.

The pope realized he had burned through a significant portion of the life force that filled him. To assist him, the Creator must have also consumed a considerable amount of dragon blood.

“What is the status of each ship?”

The ships’ power sources were in a similar state.

The Mana Crystals loaded into the Space Motherships’ battery slots had been heavily depleted. It was the consequence of forcefully deploying the shields and running at maximum output.

Before moving on to the next dimension, they would have to work hard to produce more Mana Crystals and secure a surplus once again.

‘Perhaps they considered this meaningful enough on its own. Slowing our advance, I mean.’

Asif-1 understood them, yet at the same time, he couldn’t.

‘Just for that... they’d blow up a whole planet?’

Even as the pope wrestled with these complicated feelings, the bishops could not hide their joy.

As they sang out, dedicating all the glory solely to God...

“...”

The actual subject of their praises wore a stiff, hardened expression.

Minjun thought to himself.

‘It has been almost a thousand years since the war ended.’

When begging him to take their side in the war against the dragons, Kavite had said this.

That they should save the people suffering under the dragons.

“Let us put an end to the tyranny and oppression of those scale-covered monsters!”

Yet, he realized the truth.

Even though the Ancient Race had won, nothing fundamental had actually changed.

Another layer had simply formed above them to leech off the dragons’ profits. In fact, the Dragon Race’s exploitation had only grown worse as they sought to recoup the taxes and royalties they were forced to pay to the Committee.

He recalled the words he had spoken to a nameless dragon a long time ago.

‘Just because time passes doesn’t mean everything moves forward. They are actually regressing, trying to backslide.’

The moment the gaze of surveillance and control vanished, desires merely ran rampant.

Whether human or beast, they were no different in this regard.

Minjun had just clearly witnessed the consequences of the freedom granted to them.

“What?!”

Just then.

“A-avatar!”

A bishop monitoring the instrument panels shouted with an urgent expression.

Because the AI had shut down, many systems required direct human intervention.

As a result, they had noticed the anomaly late, and the bishop reported it with a voice mixed with horror and guilt.

“There is... an intruder reading inside the ship!”

“...?!”

This time, Minjun’s face contorted for a completely different reason.

*

A short while later.

Minjun, Asif-1, and several bishops had descended to the ship’s cargo bay.

All of them wore utterly dumbfounded expressions.

‘How on earth?’

Asif-1 muttered, looking completely baffled.

“Didn’t the barrier we just put up also have spatial distortion capabilities?”

Minjun gave a heavy nod in place of a verbal answer.

He was just as confused as the rest of them.

Even if Minjun’s senses had been scrambled by the aftermath of the planetary explosion...

‘To think even I failed to notice?’

It should have been impossible.

Furthermore, as the pope had pointed out, the defensive barrier jointly deployed by all 158 ships didn’t just physically block the explosion; it actively distorted space to minimize the shockwave.

To pierce through that and infiltrate the ship...

‘No matter how I think about it, it’s impossible.’

An alien language seeped into Minjun’s ears.

“Shh-! Shishit!”

“Shi- Shishi! Shiii!”

“Shishit- Shiiiiit!”

A bishop muttered.

“Just how many of them are there?”

Inside the cargo bay were figures who absolutely did not belong there.

A section of the cargo bay that should have been empty was now packed with noise, stench, and bodies.

Someone uttered the name of their race.

“...Goblins?”

Goblins were everywhere—collapsed from injuries, wailing in incomprehension, cowering in fear, casting aimless and bewildered glances, or holding each other tightly with their eyes squeezed shut.

At a glance, there seemed to be hundreds of them.

“There are many wounded, but most of them appear to be breathing.”

They could spot individuals missing arms or legs here and there, but judging from the stumps, the amputations weren’t recent. Such mutilations were especially common among the relatively frailer elderly and women.

The bishops exchanged speculations.

“Those collars around their necks are tracking devices. By all appearances, they certainly aren’t free citizens.”

“They must be mining slaves, right?”

Most of the haggard creatures trembled violently whenever they made eye contact. The goblins seemed just as incapable of grasping the situation. They might have been mistaking the bishops for slave traders or overseers.

“But why are there so many with severed limbs?”

“They are likely the property of dragons. This is something they often do. If a slave fails to meet their quota, they threaten them by mutilating their family members.”

“But there weren’t any slaves listed on this ship’s cargo manifest recorded by the Ancient Race, were there?”

“Even if they were left off the list, they couldn’t have hidden from our eyes all the way until departure. They... just spatially teleported here.”

“No, I mean, how?”

The bishops’ gazes converged on the avatar as if seeking an answer.

But Minjun didn’t know either.

It was a feat even an ancient, venerable dragon couldn’t pull off.

Yet to perform such a miracle...

‘Just how on earth did you do it?’

Faced with annihilation and planetary destruction, if they had somehow perceived the nearest space fleet...

To them, this ship might have seemed like an ark—a vessel they could flee to and stake their lives on just before their homeworld was turned to dust.

However, they had gone far beyond merely noticing its presence; they had executed a mass teleportation all the way here.

And they specifically chose the command ship Minjun was on, of all places.

‘This would require multiple types of extremely powerful Supernatural Abilities. But goblins are a race that intrinsically doesn’t produce Supernatural Ability Users.’

Excluding any unconfirmed anomalies, that was.

‘Could it be?’

Just then, a certain individual caught Minjun’s eye.

“...?!”

A goblin woman missing her left arm was holding a child with her remaining hand, sobbing uncontrollably.

Other goblins tried to comfort her, but unable to contain her emotions, she gasped and choked back sobs as she stared down at the floor.

Following her gaze, the bishops’ faces turned deathly pale.

“Urgh?! That’s...”

It was a thick, sludgy puddle, looking as if flesh and bone had been boiled down and melted completely together.

The bishops grimaced at the gruesome sight, but Minjun was looking at something else.

A hazy mist.

A very faint mist of a spiritual body was slowly spreading around someone’s melted remains.

Asif-1 could see it as well. It was a familiar phenomenon to him, as his own soul had once existed in a similar state.

“Those are shattered soul fragments. Crumbled so finely they almost look like a gas at a glance.”

Souls cannot be destroyed, but they can be fractured into minuscule pieces. What lay before them was the process of a soul dissipating.

Asif-1 reached out and placed his hand into the mist of the spiritual body scattering in all directions. The fine particles slipped through his fingers.

“The single soul that originally resided here is continuously dividing. Even right at this very moment.”

While it couldn’t be called complete erasure, the soul had begun a transformation that infinitely converged upon oblivion.

From now on, that spiritual body would exist not as a fixed entity, but as a changing phenomenon.

Asif-1 voiced his suspicion.

“Who could have done this?”

Before the mist scattered into a realm beyond perception, Minjun managed to gather a small portion of it.

‘Restoration is impossible, but for now.’

Even so, the collapse could not be stopped. The portion he preserved would also eventually change into an unobservable state, but at the very least, he would know that it was there.

Immediately after he secured it, the remaining particles changed in the blink of an eye into fragments even smaller than the microscopic dust Asif-1’s soul had once shattered into. Then, in an instant, they vanished beyond the bounds of observation.

Just before the mist faded entirely, Minjun thought he saw it brush past the weeping goblin woman and her child.

*

“The corpse found at the scene reportedly belongs to the goblin who acted as their leader. They say he was called ‘White Eyes’.”

Though they didn’t know the exact circumstances, they couldn’t just cast these goblins, who had lost their home, out into the vacuum of space.

The priests temporarily moved them into vacant guest cabins. Since the ship was originally designed to accommodate far more people, taking them in posed no issue.

After arranging this, Minjun returned to the command and control center.

Communicating with the goblins in the common tongue was difficult, so Asif-1 stepped forward to read the survivors’ memories directly and report back.

“They say they have no idea how they snuck into the cargo bay either. When the earthquakes began on the planet, they were in the residential area deep inside the mines. Then the ground suddenly started shaking and warping, and they were all just trembling in sheer terror, not knowing what to do. And then, all of a sudden...”

A light covered them all.

And when they came to their senses, they found themselves in the cargo bay of this ship.

“However, there is something rather strange about that dead goblin.”

Asif-1 pinpointed a detail that the dwarf overseers had paid no attention to.

“There was a reason he was called by such a peculiar name. From what I’ve gathered, it seems he suffered from severe cataracts. To the point where his pupils were clouded completely white.”

As time passed, his symptoms worsened; his vision gradually deteriorated, and his work slowed down. Warnings piled up, eventually reaching a point where the dwarf overseers could no longer overlook it.

Just as the crisis loomed right over him and his family, right around the time when everyone expected him to be disposed of...

“Right at that moment, as if by a miracle, he suddenly increased his work speed and accuracy, meeting his quotas once again.”

After that, it supposedly looked as though he had absolutely no trouble distinguishing objects.

Almost as if he wasn’t relying on his eyesight at all.

“...”

There were memories serving as grounds for a hypothesis, but it was hard to conclude anything definitively.

‘Could he perhaps have been a Demonic Goblin?’

Yet, examining the goblin corpse recovered from the scene revealed nothing special about his genetics.

‘Why are his genes perfectly ordinary? I don’t understand it.’

Goblins were a race the primordial race had never paid any mind to during the era when they ruled the cosmos. No one knew what their ancestors looked like or what kind of evolutionary path they had undergone since then.

Minjun dredged up the knowledge he had learned through the Committee from his memories.

‘A superhuman born when their race is on the brink of extinction. Even for a race that intrinsically doesn’t produce Supernatural Ability Users, one is born as if to answer the desperate prayers of their kin... A Supernatural Ability User transcending all imagination.’

It was truly a far-fetched tale.

Moreover, it was doubtful whether the period when ‘White Eyes’ was born could genuinely be considered an extinction crisis for the goblins.

Minjun fell deep into thought for a moment while Asif-1 awaited orders.

“First, I should do what needs to be done.”

It was like an incantation Minjun would recite whenever his mind grew too cluttered.

He would focus on the task at hand.

“Does that mean...”

Asif-1 carefully asked for his intent.

“Are you saying we should immediately move on to the next dimension? Or...”

When a cold silence returned to his question, the pope realized his mistake and bowed his head.

“Ah, I see.”

The primordial race would make a choice completely opposite to anyone’s expectations.

“I anticipated that not all dragons would meekly clear the path for us. However, the fact that there are even bastards actively joining hands with the Committee is definitely a problem. It must be the doing of those who never experienced the war. It would have been better if they just treated each other as enemies and tore at each other’s throats.”

“Then what shall we do?”

Minjun’s eyes flashed coldly.

“In the dimensions we pass through from now on, we’ll have to make an example out of them so that they wouldn’t even dare to dream of trying something like this again.”

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