Asiph-1 didn't even need to look at a calendar. The deadline the Creator had set was December 31st. It was an entirely unrealistic timeline.
It was tantamount to rejecting his plea.
He had begged for an extension, but Minjun had only responded in an even sterner tone.
“That doesn't mean you get a full week to focus solely on that. The Dragon Race from other dimensions will make their move again. Now that thousands of their kind have been taken prisoner, their justification has only grown stronger. We're past the stage where the Space Mothership can serve as a deterrent. You must prepare for their retaliation in parallel.”
Asiph-1's face grew even paler than when he had first arrived.
*
After the Pope left the room, Minjun sat back down.
“...”
He thought about the words he had just heard, his mind growing even more tangled.
The primordial race had also once walked a path of repaying blood with blood, returning hatred with even deeper hatred.
But at a certain point, they had sought to break free of it, and Minjun had done everything in his power to escape that reality.
He was the one who had fought hardest to sever that vicious cycle.
‘Because we possess the potential to break that chain.’
A race walking ahead of the rest.
Asiph-1 had said that even if they spilled Minjun's blood, he hoped Minjun wouldn't lower himself to their level.
The fact that this wish was practically impossible to fulfill reminded him of someone else's plea.
The dragon Minjun still considered a friend.
‘Jenkinson.’
When Jenkinson asked to change his wish, Minjun had expected him to establish boundaries for his protection.
A plea to at least save the dragons of Earth from being consumed as food.
Yet Jenkinson had asked for something entirely different.
‘Has the Balaur Council convened by now?’
He silently praised the dragon's resolve.
Whoosh!
He pulled a small Cube out of subspace.
Minjun no longer had any obligation to view the memories stored inside it.
‘However, just because a wish is desperate doesn't mean it will come true.’
Minjun stared at it intently for a moment before...
squeezing his hand tight.
Crack!
At that moment, a fracture splintered across the Cube.
*
Stepping out of the room, Asiph-1 quickened his pace.
‘One week!’
He recalled the scene he had witnessed at the Kabite Concentration Camp.
With the dangerous Supernatural Ability Users separated out, the vast majority of the Kavites had been bound helplessly and escorted to the camp.
It was a massive facility capable of housing 130 million sentient beings.
Hemmed in by thick walls and a powerful barrier, no one could escape.
The Kavites had marched inside, steeped in despair.
‘Is that... where we're going to die?!’
Watching from a distance, Asiph-1 felt the raw emotions in their hearts. Terror seeped into the procession like a damp fog.
Being mostly civilians, they had no psychological defense mechanisms. Such mental shielding was a new technology, so difficult even for the Ancient Race to handle that it was reserved strictly for frontline troops.
‘We're... we're all going to be massacred here!’
‘No! I don't want this!’
‘Somebody save me! I don't want to die!’
A rumor had been circulating among the Kavite immigrants.
Word was that the Ellahu-Praga Church, having won the war, was preparing a genocide against the civilians.
Because of this, the thick walls of the camp looked to them like a fence separating an execution ground from the living world.
‘Ah, please... please!’
However, their despair soon turned to bewilderment.
Someone spoke up.
“What... is all this?”
The scene unfolding beyond the walls was entirely different from the prison or execution ground they had imagined.
Laid out before them was a massive residential complex that utilized every three-dimensional inch of space.
Of course, it was far from the luxurious environment they had enjoyed before. Nor did it perfectly suit their nearly linear body structures.
But they were in no position to complain. Despite being a facility holding a staggering 130 million people, it was, at the very least, quite spacious.
Even the priests guarding them did not separate families. They were assigned rooms exactly as they had lived before, and could freely visit one another or communicate—so long as they remained within the camp's fences.
“L-Look here, look at this food!”
“There's so much of it!”
The Kavites rejoiced when they saw what was stocked inside their assigned rooms.
More than a year's worth of food rations had been prepared in each room. It seemed to be a practical measure to avoid the hassle of regular outside supply drops.
They naturally took this as a sign of hope.
Proof that they wouldn't be killed for at least the next year.
‘Could it be... was it all just a false rumor?’
Another factor helped shift their conviction.
“W-Who... are you?”
Right next to their camp was a goblin residential area. After struggling to communicate in the common tongue, the Kavites learned that these goblins had been rescued by the order.
‘As long as we share a living space with them, they won't blow this place away with a Photon Cannon. If they were going to kill us like that, they wouldn't have saved the goblins in the first place!’
Only then did the people realize the order's plan.
What they truly intended to do with the Kavites.
“This is a species segregation policy!”
The act of driving a specific race into a restricted area and stripping them of their freedom of movement.
It was a common choice made by victorious races in war.
Only then did the Kavites finally feel a sense of relief.
“Right, it was just a ridiculous rumor. Even if it's Asiph-1... there's no way he would massacre over a hundred million sentient beings!”
“Oh my god, I feel like believing in a god I never even prayed to.”
“Are they guaranteeing us a minimum level of dignity instead of slaughtering us like animals? It makes sense. A being who calls himself a god wouldn't commit such a horrific act.”
Having suffered under extreme tension for so long, their relief was immense when they became certain the ominous rumors were false.
The mere prospect of surviving had a profound impact on the mind.
Hope had sprouted.
Staying hidden, Asiph-1 roamed the sectors, confirming their dramatic emotional shift.
He could both see and feel it. A Kavite mother extended her furry body toward her daughter. Having trembled in terror while clutching her child tight throughout the transport, she sobbed, finally feeling a modicum of relief. She coiled her long, rope-like body around her daughter.
“Mom... what's wrong?”
“...Thank you. ...Thank you so much!”
Right up until she arrived here, she had been terrified by the rumors of ethnic cleansing.
That term carried the implicit promise of brutally slaughtering everyone, regardless of their sins, down to the most innocent child.
She had prayed to a god whose name she didn't even know, begging that even if she perished, her child might live on.
“Thank you!”
Asiph-1 received her raw emotions and thoughts exactly as they were. The mother, whose physical prime had yet to end and who thus had never undergone a body renewal, held her daughter tightly and sent out a heartfelt prayer of thanks to an unspecified recipient.
And Asiph-1 regretted coming to the camp.
‘None of them are clean.’
he muttered in his mind.
‘None of them are innocent.’
So long as they were born as Kavites.
The fact remained that they had unjustly profited off the primordial race and shared the spoils of pan-dimensional atrocities.
He couldn't say that the 99% of civilians who hadn't directly participated in the war were blameless.
However...
‘Damn it!’
Asiph-1 also knew the truth behind the ethnic cleansing rumor spreading among the Kavites.
Its source was none other than the bishops who had managed and escorted them.
Their goal was to plunge the captives into absolute despair, only to let them glimpse a single ray of hope.
When that barely flickering light of optimism shattered once again, a mind would collapse to an irreparable degree.
The sheer emotion and agony expressed during that process would serve as excellent fuel for Dark Magic.
‘Father, your plan succeeded. They do not know. This camp... in the long run, will not be for Kavites, but a concentration camp for Todd.’
Once the appropriate modifications were made, this somewhat spacious area would become a dense prison to house Todd all at once.
That is, after the virus set to be unleashed here selectively purged the Kavites.
‘Is this truly unavoidable?’
Asiph-1 simply couldn't erase the thoughts of the mother who had endlessly given thanks, radiating a mental wave bordering on a prayer.
He imagined the future where they would be sacrificed to Dark Magic, and pictured his creator absorbing those exact emotions and agonizing screams.
That was the moment his resolve hardened.
“I have to stop this.”
He brought his consciousness back to reality.
Asiph-1 stood lost in thought in the hallway for a moment, then...
Whoosh!
He vanished using Teleport.
*
“Chairman? I'm coming in.”
The secretary, Blair, crossed the Lair with an anxious heart and headed for Jenkinson's room.
The day the Space Mothership had appeared all over the globe, an immeasurable energy storm had been detected in the Pacific Ocean.
After returning to the Lair, Jenkinson had issued a few instructions and then locked himself away in the deepest underground chamber once again. Blair had worried that he might have fallen asleep, but fortunately, he replied on occasion.
However, the emotion lingering in those replies was something Blair had never encountered before.
Meanwhile, requests for meetings from other dragons came flooding in. They all sensed that the situation regarding the alien dragons and Asif-666 was taking an unusual turn.
After maintaining a long silence, Jenkinson finally summoned her.
‘Just what in the world happened to him?’
The door to the Lair opened.
The smell of stale, trapped air stung her nose.
And as Blair stepped inside...
“Ah!”
Her body stiffened like stone.
Inside, something resembling a mass of solidified darkness lay coiled up. The elf felt a sense of déjà vu at the sight. Specifically, a dragon named Kentius had once displayed a similar appearance while suffering from severe depression.
Blair forced her voice out with great difficulty.
“Chairman!”
The elf's gaze pierced the darkness, looking straight at Jenkinson in his true form.
The majestic Ancient Dragon she remembered was nowhere to be seen.
The saturation of the darkness enveloping her employer was uneven, clumped up or frayed in places. It wasn't a trick of the lighting. It was due to an anomaly occurring on Jenkinson's body.
The first word that came to Blair's mind was ‘molting.’ Similar to reptiles, dragons regularly shed the thin outer layer of their entire bodies. As someone who loved dragons, Blair knew roughly how the process worked.
But this wasn't that.
Molting did not unfold in such a horrific manner.
She spoke, feeling as though her throat were being crushed.
“Chairman?”
It was a truly gruesome sight.
Jenkinson's red dragon scales, which had once been as beautiful as sparkling rubies, had lost their former luster. Massive, gaping patches were missing here and there. His head, in particular, barely had any scales left. Messy stains lingered all over his back and limbs.
Because of this, Blair saw bare flesh stripped of dragon scales for the first time in her life. It was a rare spectacle no researcher or dragon enthusiast had ever witnessed, but Blair couldn't bring herself to be happy about it.
Like wallpaper left half-peeled in a messy state, his scales dangled and warped all over.
At Jenkinson's feet lay a thick pile of shed dragon scales, like fallen dead leaves from a plant. It looked as if he hadn't even had the energy to sweep them away.
“What... happened to you?”
She couldn't find any wounds or bloodstains on Jenkinson's skin.
Which meant he hadn't torn and plucked his scales out himself—they had fallen off on their own.
Blair scoured the dragon-related knowledge stored in her mind, which far exceeded that of an ordinary person. There were indeed very rare cases of this.
‘Extreme stress and agony that even a dragon's mind cannot endure!’
Just what kind of hell had Jenkinson gone through all alone?
As she stood there unable to continue speaking, Jenkinson fixed his hollow gaze on her.
He muttered in a voice that sounded as if he had lost everything.
His first word was an apology.
“I'm sorry... for making you worry again.”
She held back a sudden surge of emotion.
To her, the Red Dragon spoke.
“I need to convene... the Balaur Council. Please hurry.”
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