The Foreigner on the Periphery

Asiph-1 focused its attention on the Motherships at the rear of the enemy formation—or more precisely, on their passengers.

A battleship destined to self-destruct didn't need a large crew anyway. It was far more efficient to leave only essential operational personnel behind and launch the rest in fighter jets.

The battleships merely had to wait for the vanguard fighters to whittle away the order's shields before making one final, full-speed sprint.

And yet.

'The eighty or so remaining ships... why do they all have so many crew members?'

Why would a Mothership on the verge of exploding need so many people?

Only one answer came to mind.

'A diversion?'

What if it was a smokescreen meant to hide someone important on board?

The passengers aboard the battleships all seemed to be in a similar state. They were dominated by suggestion, burning with manufactured rage.

But Asiph-1 was no longer fooled. Recalling Minjun's words, it scrutinized them even more closely.

Someone among them clearly wasn't the victim of the suggestion, but rather the mastermind planting and manipulating it.

"...!"

And then, it found them.

The ship's exterior looked no different from the other battleships—an obsolete model from the ancient wars.

However, deep inside, a presence was emitting a distinct mental wave. It had masked itself with a twisted frequency to appear as just another victim of suggestion, which was why Asiph-1 had initially missed it.

Following the coordinates it relayed, Minjun instantly cast Teleport.

Flash!

Minjun's vision flashed stark white, accompanied by the illusion of time melting and turning sluggish. A strange weightlessness took over as he threw himself through a rippling rift in space.

He was crossing a dizzying distance to breach the interior of the enemy battleship. His body was already burning with more than enough fuel.

The distorted space meshed back together. The rift in space-time began to stabilize, reclaiming its shape. Just as Minjun was about to burst through it...

"...!"

He felt a sense of incongruity.

And that wrongness rapidly mutated into a blaring sense of crisis.

'A trap!'

He had been certain he was right on the verge of reaching the stabilized coordinates.

But he hadn't arrived yet.

Minjun realized a bizarre Distortion Field was lying in wait at his destination. Asiph-1, who had only scanned the mental landscapes of sapient beings from afar, couldn't have known.

The turbulent space sharpened like a deadly blade, surging forward as if to tear Minjun to shreds.

At this rate, he would be crushed in the spatial rift and scattered into pieces. Even if he managed to regenerate, he risked being swept all the way into the dimensional dumping ground—the Abyss.

However.

'Cheap tricks!'

Minjun roared, his eyes snapping wide open.

---!

He ruthlessly shook off the spatial grip attempting to drag him into the snare. The power he had absorbed from the dragon blood boiled throughout his body. Recalculating the coordinates in a split second, Minjun completed the spell once more.

Flash!

He Teleported once again, appearing just outside the boundary of the Distortion Field.

The moment he arrived, he felt hostile gazes pouring over his skin.

'Where am I?'

He quickly assessed the situation.

He was just slightly off from his target coordinates.

He had at least successfully boarded the battleship. His target—the Supernatural Ability User acting as an inferior copy of Asiph-1—was definitely somewhere inside.

But to reach them, he would first have to clear these obstacles out of the way.

"Grrr...!"

About a hundred warriors surrounded him.

There was no one from the Ancient Race. Minjun easily recognized that they were all prisoners.

According to what Asiph-1 had observed, they were trapped in fabricated memories. Their bloodshot pupils gleamed, and their faces were contorted like furious ghosts.

'They've been completely devoured.'

The reason they could feel such intense rage was because the fake memories were forged from real ones. The crucial memories that were erased when they became prisoners—those fragments had been reassembled into an illogical craving, goading them into attacking the enemy.

'They're just puppets.'

Minjun withdrew his gaze from them as if in utter dismissal. He turned his shoulders to face the wall blocking his path.

Minjun taking a step forward and the prisoners launching themselves at him like lightning happened at almost the exact same moment.

Crackle!

The sword energy of Aura Masters, the flames and lightning of magicians, and the force fields of telekinetics poured down in a dense barrage.

Minjun still didn't look at them. His body remained facing the wall. Just before the foot he had extended into the air touched the ground again, the prisoners' attacks reached within an inch of his skin.

And then, there was light.

---!

Even at the moment the flash erupted, Minjun didn't break his stride. The pace of his successive footsteps didn't shift in the slightest. A perfectly even stride.

Behind him, the prisoners lay sprawled on the floor, their entire bodies bathed in blood.

The god asked himself.

'Just now, why didn't I kill them?'

The prisoners lay collapsed without the slightest movement, but every single one of them was still breathing.

Of course, there was the reason that the prisoners hadn't attacked of their own free will and were being controlled by someone. But Minjun knew that an emotional factor had also influenced this choice.

Soon, the answer surfaced from the depths of his ego.

'I see.'

Minjun had severed his connection to the prisoner system a long time ago. Because of that, he couldn't see the identification numbers floating above their heads like he used to.

Nevertheless, Minjun recognized a few of them. It was because he could see their souls.

Although their physical bodies had changed since then, the roots of their minds remained unchanged.

'Asif-1,892. Asif-5,300. Asif-100,970...'

Several other numbers flashed through his mind.

The Committee had stationed them here to guard the place instead of loading them into fighter jets to serve as disposable shields. They were exceptionally powerful even among the prisoners, and they had survived for a proportionately long time. The vast majority of them were likely originally from long-lived species.

And enduring penal labor for that long meant they had inevitably crossed paths with the longest-serving prisoner, Asif-666, in one way or another.

"..."

The god realized anew just how much the prisoner's ego surviving within him, that of 'Asif-666', was influencing him.

Those he had been entangled with back then still remained, holding some kind of meaning to him.

And among them, the one with the strongest presence was...

Craaack!

Cutting his thoughts short, Minjun drove his fingers into the wall as he continued to walk. In that instant, his physical body existed simultaneously in the material world and the spirit realm. The scent of dragon blood wafted beneath his nose, and white flames flared to life on his fingertips. Minjun yanked both hands to the sides while spreading them wide open.

Following the direction of that force, space ripped apart.

Not only the physical wall, but the magical barrier attached to it was blown away as well.

Minjun stepped into the space revealed beyond it without hesitation.

   *

Once he entered, it became even clearer.

The decrepit shell of this ship was nothing more than a disguise.

'This is...'

Equipment that would be considered state-of-the-art by the Committee's standards was scattered everywhere. Looking at the absolute pinnacle of their magical engineering—which was, in reality, just the latest decrypted version of the knowledge Minjun had passed down to them—the god easily read just how far the beasts had managed to keep up.

Furthermore, with just a fleeting glance, Minjun could tell that a section of an entirely different facility had been transplanted intact into this place.

Countless branching pipes snaked across the ceiling. An ominous liquid coursed through them, carrying a dense magical aura. However, unlike dragon blood, it was not natural; it had been tampered with by someone.

Minjun raised his index finger and swiped it through the air.

Swoosh!

A pipe split open, and the liquid flowing inside sprayed out like a geyser. Instead of soaking Minjun's clothes, the stream of fluid parted to either side. He deliberately caught a single drop on his fingertip.

'This is...'

He identified the various ingredients that had been used to create this magical solution.

All the while—tap, tap—his footsteps continued without pause.

'The venom of the Odense Tribe.'

The god once again recalled a memory of Asif-666. The most recent Odense he had encountered had been a bank robber on Earth.

That wanted fugitive, who had used Polymorph to disguise themselves as an old woman, had attempted a sloppy hostage situation before getting their head crushed and killed by one of Minjun's summons.

That tribe operated by making physical contact with a target, puncturing their skin, and injecting venom to control them like a puppet.

'The pheromone of an Ober spider.'

A monster that devoured the testes of males from other species, then gave birth to identical soldiers.

The female spiders secreted a distinct pheromone to seduce males, turning them into both prey and seed donors. As expected, anyone exposed to it was reduced to the spider's puppet.

'The blood of an ISP manifestor.'

While not quite as potent as the first two ingredients, it was largely the same in that it influenced the mind to the point of making the impossible possible.

A gene of fascination that could induce attraction even in species genetically incapable of feeling it.

'I see.'

Minjun was now certain of what this magical solution was for.

'They gathered and used every available ingredient. All to compensate for their incomplete technology and abilities.'

During his days as a prisoner, Minjun had regularly taken the Blue Pill supplied by the Committee. The other sinners had done the same. All under the pretext of preventing mental collapse.

But was that truly the drug's purpose? Or had everyone simply just believed it to be?

Next, Minjun recalled the Endelion children currently on the Order Command Ship. Right before they had fallen under suggestion, they claimed they had been injected with a liquid using an awl-like tool. That liquid, too, had been the same blue hue as the pill.

And then there were the prisoners who had rushed him just a moment ago, only to be instantly subdued. Minjun had noticed a peculiar device hidden within their combat suits—a sharp needle burrowing into the napes of their necks, connected to a cylindrical tube.

All the facts meshed together, pointing toward a single conclusion.

'The raw material was right here.'

The Committee had not yet reached the point where they could control a target without a medium, unlike the perfected Asiph-1.

They could only assert control after clouding a subject's rationality with this drug. Most likely, the physical bodies provided during penal labor had already been marinated in it.

Judging as such, Minjun kept walking. And then, at yet another wall blocking his path...

Riiiip!

He mercilessly tore it open.

Then, it appeared before his eyes.

"...!"

His footsteps, which hadn't stopped once since he had teleported onto the battleship, finally came to a halt.

Minjun frowned slightly as he muttered.

"...It was in this kind of state?"

The subject gave no reaction.

He was certain that 'it' couldn't hear a single sound right now. It likely couldn't even see the intruder.

Minjun slightly lowered the thick mental barrier shielding his mind. Only then did it sense his presence.

=Who is there?=

At the deepest part of the spaceship lay a vast, cavernous space.

And at its very center, a dragon lay sprawled in a grotesque posture.

It was clear the creature hadn't assumed this position willingly. Various tubes and mechanical arms jutting from the walls wrapped around the dragon's entire body. Its wings and both legs ended in blunt stumps, as if they had been sawed off an eternity ago.

Where its eyes should have been, there were only two hollow sockets, gouged out a long time ago. A tube acting as a respirator was hooked into its nose and mouth. Its nutrients weren't being fed through its head, but its stomach; Minjun could see a thick nutrient slurry pumping into a tube jammed into its flank.

Countless other large and small tubes punctured its body, steadily pumping in the same blue liquid Minjun had just seen on his way here.

Minjun gauged the dragon's age.

'Given the size of the body, it's around a thousand years old.'

That meant it had been born right around the war between the dragons and the Ancient Race.

The dragon sent another telepathic message. The thought was incredibly heavy and razor-sharp—the distinct wavelength of a mental-type Supernatural Ability User.

=Strange. I cannot read you. How did you get this close?=

Instead of instantly killing the dragon, Minjun broadcasted his own thought back.

'Who are you?'

The answer didn't come immediately.

The dragon's mental waves rippled with confusion, then suspicion, before finally settling into a thought filled with sudden certainty.

=Ah... I know you.=

A burst of almost incoherent mental waves washed over him.

Then, the dragon transmitted a painfully clear wavelength.

=When I erase memories, I implant a suggestion commanding the victim to forget. Naturally, no one accepts it easily. It usually takes a very long time. But... out of everyone, exactly one person fell under my suggestion far too easily. Almost as if they wanted it.=

The dragon—whose only remaining physical mass was from the shoulders up—projected a mental wave that closely resembled a bitter laugh.

=Yes. That was you.=

As if completely uninterested, Minjun simply asked again.

'Who are you?'

Only then did the dragon answer.

=I am... Asif-500.=

'A prisoner?'

The dragon read the unspoken question in his mind.

=Yes, I am a sinner. From the very moment I was born. As you can tell by my identification number, I began my penal labor even before you did. My sin was...=

The dragon, whose eyes had been gouged out the moment it hatched, projected an emotion akin to a smile through the dark. Then, it whispered, as though reciting the most obvious truth in the world.

=My sin was... being born a 'Dragon'.=

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