The Foreigner on the Periphery

From the Divine Throne on the bridge, Minjun recalled the elf's words.

*

"A wish... you say?"

"Yeah. Who wants to go first?"

That was what Minjun had proposed to the four of them a few days ago.

The orc, human, and goblin born in Korea all reflexively looked at Lakefield. Yielding to the eldest was a lifelong habit; regardless of species, everyone felt more comfortable doing things by age.

However, Lakefield was still hyperventilating. He understood all too well the truth that the others had either failed to notice or hadn't fully grasped the importance of.

Minjun waited until the elf, who was panting heavily and hiccuping, finally calmed down.

A moment later.

"A wish... I don't have... I don't need anything like that."

Seeing Minjun's expression, he hurriedly corrected himself. The old elf was quick on the uptake.

"I'm not that shameless."

He refused emphatically.

"The favors you've shown me since I came to Korea are already more than I deserve. And is that all?"

Lakefield, a former agent for US intelligence, had suffered an accident during a mission. His prolonged inability to properly use his legs was the fallout. He was so old, even by elf standards, that prominent users of Divine Power had shaken their heads and declared him incurable.

But now.

"Look at me. I'm standing perfectly fine, aren't I? This is a miracle."

Lakefield had guessed why.

"A miracle you bestowed. I've already received too great a gift. So, a wish is..."

But Minjun was adamant.

He urged him once more to state his wish, his voice low but heavy with weight. He promised to grant it as long as it was within his power.

Watching this, Cathy felt a deepening sense of anxiety.

Minjun didn't even seem to intend to spend much time here. With a single sentence, he completely shifted Lakefield's attitude.

"The spirit I've always seen—who is it modeled after?"

Lakefield was speechless for a moment, his mouth opening and closing without a sound.

He was a spirit summoner.

And it was known that elemental spirits resembled the person their summoner missed the most. Since they usually manifested in a hazy form, it was difficult for anyone other than the spirit summoner to clearly distinguish their features, but to the summoner themselves, the appearance was enough to evoke memories.

Minjun had never asked this question before. He knew that simply rummaging through certain memories could be hurtful.

A complex expression flashed across the elf's face. He visibly clenched and unclenched his fists several times. Hesitation and shame, agonizing worry and conflict, alternately surfaced.

And eventually, the elf bowed his head.

"You are... truly something."

A brief silence passed.

When his voice resumed, it was trembling slightly.

"She's my daughter."

Lakefield was part of the first generation of mass immigrants.

Before his group of elves crossed over, non-human sentient beings residing on Earth had been rare. Counting them mostly meant entities like dragons who had paid massive sums to obtain individual immigration status, political asylum seekers, or illegal immigrants who had smuggled themselves aboard cargo ships. Therefore, from the perspective of the elves, Earth must have been an unfamiliar and terrifying unknown land.

Moreover, even by the standards of that time, Lakefield was elderly. It was common for elves of his age to stubbornly insist on dying in the land of their birth, no matter how dire the situation in their homeland became. Considering that, Lakefield was a highly unusual case.

Now, Minjun felt he knew the reason why.

"..."

Lakefield dry-washed his face nervously. The thought that he was being shameless refused to leave his mind.

However, now that the conversation had flowed to this point, he also felt there was nothing left to hide.

Finally, desperation overcame his fear, doubt, and shame.

"...I applied for immigration to Earth to find her."

His daughter had become a wanted fugitive after standing against the Committee. Lakefield surmised that a frontier dimension that had just opened its ports would be the perfect place for her to hide.

Having lost his wife early on, his daughter was his only remaining family. Lakefield had disguised his identity and gone through the formal mass immigration process to come to Earth. He believed that through his spirit summoning, he would somehow be able to reunite with her.

But reality was not as easy as he had hoped.

"There was clear evidence that she came to Earth, but after that, her trail vanished like a lie. I hit a dead end."

The reason he had joined the CIA, which also functioned as an alien surveillance and management agency at the time, was in hopes that it would help him find his daughter.

However, time had passed in vain, and since his retirement, he had half given up.

"If by any chance..."

If the Committee was gone, the bounty on his daughter's head would lose its meaning.

If she were only alive, she might be able to live a normal life just like in the old days.

Furthermore, Lakefield now had a rough idea of what kind of existence Minjun was. With his influence, it might be possible.

Choosing his words carefully, the elf murmured in a pained tone.

"If I could at least know whether she's alive or dead, that would be enough."

Lakefield wore a bleak expression.

Minjun, who had been watching him with a silent gaze, spoke.

"That's a relief."

"...What?"

He replied to the bewildered elf.

"Because it's a wish I can grant."

*

Psheeew!

Booooom!

Minjun snapped out of his reverie and looked at the large screen.

Surrounding thousands of dragons, the Mothership poured out Photon Cannon fire. The output of the light beams was precisely controlled. It looked like a scene of relentlessly stabbing livestock herded into a pen with sharp spears.

The dragons, their Teleport sealed, were driven out as their bodies were pierced all over. With their magic, they couldn't escape the net.

There was a reason Minjun had suddenly recalled Lakefield's words while observing that sight from the bridge.

"A Poison Dragon."

"Pardon?"

"That dragon over there. It's a Poison Dragon. A rare subspecies in this day and age."

"Ah... I see."

Yumtus, following the god's gaze, agreed.

Where Minjun pointed, there was a dragon covered in various poisonous plants instead of scales. The dragon, whose home dimension was unknown, was roaring and scrambling around half out of its mind to dodge the Photon Cannon blasts. Just as its innate toxic breath was ineffective against its own kind, it was utterly useless in the face of this downpour of light.

Minjun murmured inwardly.

'Lakefield didn't want revenge.'

He had said that even if his daughter had died, knowing the truth would be enough. That was probably because he believed the culprit was the Committee. The enemy had already been annihilated by Minjun's hands.

But what if he found out that another entity was involved in her disappearance—how would he react?

Would the elf still want revenge?

'If he had demanded revenge, things would have gotten complicated.'

Just as his daughter was a precious existence to Lakefield.

The someone connected to her disappearance was also precious to someone Minjun knew... or rather, had known.

While he was lost in such thoughts, the holes in the Poison Dragon's body were multiplying. The wounds were most numerous on its wings, which had a relatively large surface area.

Eventually losing its strength, it staggered and plummeted low toward the ocean's surface.

Splash!

The dragon sank into the sea. A dark shadow approached the area and retrieved the limp body.

In truth, the majority of the dragons were still laboring under a misunderstanding. The Space Motherships that had crossed over to Earth totaled nine, not eight.

The one that had initially exploded, the seven attacking the dragons in the sky, and finally, the last one submerged in the ocean, collecting the unconscious dragons.

"It seems it will be wrapped up soon."

"Yes. The bishops' marksmanship has improved a lot."

"They will all be deeply moved to hear you say that."

Yumtus smiled and bowed his head deeply.

While the Motherships were hiding in the sea, the precise shots aimed at the Ancient Dragons' brainstems had been fired by Minjun himself.

It was an expression of his intent to capture the oldest and most valuable dragons in as intact a condition as possible.

Afterward, the gunnery officers on each ship directed the fire.

The god had commanded them to capture the dragons alive as much as possible. Implicit in those words was the nuance that it wouldn't matter if a few of them actually died.

The dragons being chased around like mad right now probably still couldn't understand it. Where had all these warships come from?

The concept of moving by commanding the Dimensional Wall to open a path was entirely beyond the scope of their imagination.

"However."

Yumtus spoke cautiously.

"Wasn't sacrificing a Mothership because of them too great a price to pay?"

He was talking about the ship that had been used as bait and subsequently destroyed.

But the god shook his head.

"It's fine. Even the one we're riding right now doesn't have impressive performance, so imagine how much worse the one they used a thousand years ago would be."

The warship that had deliberately exposed its route through more than ten jumps, appearing all over Earth to make them believe Minjun's forces consisted of only one ship, was not a state-of-the-art model. Its armor had merely been modified to make it look like one.

Where, then, did that warship come from?

"True. It was a warship those beasts were planning to self-destruct anyway if push came to shove."

The bait was one of the Motherships that brainwashed prisoners had been riding when they confronted the order in the neighboring world of Dimension #00-001 in the past.

Most of them had exploded upon receiving a self-destruct command at the end of the battle, but this was the one ship that had remained completely intact.

It was the very ship Asif-500 had been aboard.

The reason it remained relatively intact was that Minjun, who had infiltrated the ship to find the brainwashing user, had already seized control of its systems in advance.

"Anyway."

Minjun looked toward a corner of the bridge. Sitting there was the object whose location the tracking team, commanded by Yumtus, had pinpointed.

"You've made a great contribution again this time."

"I am unworthy."

Following Minjun, he turned his gaze.

The object he had found on Earth under the god's orders.

Contrary to Minjun's emphasis on its importance, its appearance was quite shabby.

"If I may speak out of turn again..."

He was hesitant to even attach the name 'relic' to it.

Its shape was literally closer to 'waste.'

"I dare to guess that its storage condition hasn't been good all this time. Will it be able to function as the avatar desires?"

The result of the King of Endelion doing his best in his own way was being dismissed. To the bishop, it couldn't help but look like that.

Resting his chin on his palm, Minjun said.

"Ah, don't worry about that."

And turning his gaze, he muttered while looking in a certain direction.

"It still works perfectly well. Fortunately."

*

Jenkinson wiped away the tears streaming down between his scales.

How much time had passed?

Piercing through his dazed state of mind, he felt a sensation hitting him like motion sickness. The foul stench of vomit filled his mouth. Beneath his feet, the dark-red debris spread out widely on the ocean currents.

The Ancient Dragon, who had been stiffened like a lump of stone...

...muttered to himself in a soliloquy that wasn't quite a soliloquy.

"...Rod?"

- ...

The personality within his mind didn't answer.

Jenkinson felt a terrible headache and an inexplicable thirst.

"...You heard Perseen's words together with me, right?"

The man who was once human, but was now human no longer.

The words and sentences rustled in the empty air.

He didn't know why he was saying these things, but he couldn't stop.

"Hearing those words, I thought of someone."

There was a dragon who had met its death at the hands of Jenkinson and Minjun.

At the time, Jenkinson hadn't listened closely to the words the dragon had fervently spat out before dying.

The voice echoed in his ears like an auditory hallucination.

'Dragons are pests that ruin the social ecosystem. They're the root of all evil. Monsters incapable of coexisting with other species!'

'Other races are all sorts of different paints. Over time, they eventually blend together. But dragons are oil. Even if you pour it in water, instead of mixing, it creates a layer of oil and covers it up.'

'Just as oil pushes water beneath it, dragons trample on other races and dominate them. Because that's the nature of a dragon!'

Jenkinson felt an ache in his chest.

"Was Jang Tae-jun wrong and Perseen right? Is evil not the nature of a dragon, but in truth, all races are born harboring evil, and it's just that only dragons had the capability to commit that evil?"

Jenkinson had agonized for a long time over his kin's nature to exploit and inflict damage upon other races.

But Perseen had firmly denied that notion.

From within the tangled concepts, Jenkinson dredged up a question.

"If that is so, then if one who is born evil, possessing the capability to commit evil, and born into an environment where evil is encouraged, consequently commits evil. Is that their sin?"

- ...

"Or is it the sin of the someone who conceived them to be evil, granted them the capability to commit evil, and created the environment where evil is encouraged?"

- ...

"I don't know."

After hesitating for a moment.

"However, it doesn't seem like Perseen is necessarily right, either."

Perseen had said the Dragon Race was simply doing what it could do.

And immediately afterward, he had been ground up like minced meat and vanished.

Someone with the capability to 'be able to do so' must have intervened against him.

The strong and the weak were relative concepts. The scene where predator and prey had been so easily overturned played out. Faced with the memory in his head, Jenkinson felt like he was going to break down again.

He could no longer be certain of anything.

"Rod, what is right?"

The personality of the previous Rod remained utterly silent.

The dragon turned his gaze in a certain direction.

In the distance over the Pacific Ocean, the magic waves were fluctuating wildly.

A power far more massive than anything he had felt before surged, covering the area. Jenkinson attempted to Teleport there.

"...!"

However, 'permission' was not granted. Jenkinson didn't know it, but the space over there was currently under the localized effect of equipment the Committee had once installed within the star system. So that no one could come and go freely.

Furthermore, that phenomenon felt like a kind of hint to Jenkinson.

A hint that in the future, a world would come where everything, including trivial matters like this, would only be possible with someone's permission.

"I..."

Jenkinson, who had anchored his body in the empty air with magic, spread his wings wide once again.

Various propositions, facts, and concepts swirled around inside Jenkinson's head.

A resolute emotion settled back into the dragon's clouded eyes.

Recalling the question that the personality within his mind had failed to answer, he declared:

"I must hear the answer."

The red dragon began to fly eastward.

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