Ch.806Dragon Heavenly Demon

There are no parents who can win against their children, but that depends on the child’s behavior.

If you have a child over twenty who stays cooped up in their room indulging in gloomy hobbies, parents naturally become strong enough to beat even the devils from the depths of hell.

Even Frider van Faelrun, who had stubbornly refused to go, couldn’t defy the Duke’s lament that being like this at twenty was bringing shame to the family, and that he should please just go out.

And so we left Faelrun Castle, riding in the carriage specially prepared by the Duke.

—-

The journey back to the institute was incredibly peaceful.

The bandits who used to pop up constantly had been completely wiped out by monsters, like small shops displaced by large supermarkets. And even the monsters were handled by Frider and Demian before I needed to step in.

Demian, in particular, was enthusiastically slicing through monsters. Perhaps he was that pleased with his newly acquired sword—he was acting like a child.

He would stand with his arms crossed watching the monsters, and when they got close, he would summon his holy sword in the air a few steps ahead, letting gravity impale them, then pull the sword from the corpse.

It was so ridiculous that I couldn’t help but laugh.

I wasn’t the only one who felt this way. Lena would gag every time she saw it, and Frider asked if he had hit his head hard somewhere, saying the kid’s personality had become strange while he wasn’t looking.

“…Well. I suppose that’s how the sword is meant to be summoned.”

I offered a clumsy defense to protect Demian’s honor… or was it honor? Anyway, whatever you’d call his honor or image.

As an adult, I should be understanding. How could a seventeen-year-old boy resist a sword that can be summoned from thin air? Having once been male myself, I could understand Demian’s feelings.

“Pfft.”

…Even considering that, it was still funny.

Honestly, how could anyone hold back their laughter? That guy Demian even mutters prayers every time he manifests a miracle with the holy sword.

Even though the divine engravings on the blade complete the formula automatically, making prayer unnecessary.

I’d noticed it since his obsession with jump attacks, but his commitment to the concept was already in the realm of art.

I wouldn’t be surprised if he started singing Latin-sounding hymns while fighting later. Like those majestic orchestral BGMs that played during boss battles.

—-

“What are you looking at so intently?”

Perhaps the leisurely journey was becoming boring.

Frider poked my side while being careful not to drop cigarette ash on the documents I was reviewing, and asked.

He didn’t look genuinely curious—it felt more like he was just making conversation because he couldn’t bear the boredom.

If he was that bored, he could go outside the carriage and train like Demian. Being the weakest among the three of us. Since when does a mere Master get to talk to a Hero?

—If I had teased him like that, he would have caused enough commotion to flip the carriage, so I showed mercy to this Master who dared to question a Hero.

“What else? The prisoner interrogation results. Your father gave them to me.”

What I was reading was the report on the interrogation of the two prisoners, Makaolos and Eirnesia, whom I had left at Faelrun Castle for questioning.

Just before leaving the castle with Frider, Valdemar handed it to me, asking if I had forgotten something.

Of course, I hadn’t forgotten about the interrogation after just a few days—I simply hadn’t expected the results to be ready so soon, so I hadn’t brought up the topic.

So I hadn’t completely forgotten about it, understand? Surely I’m not that stupid. There had been so many events in such a short time that it just hadn’t immediately come to mind, but I would certainly have remembered during our two-day rest at Faelrun Castle.

In other words, I hadn’t forgotten—it had just sunk to the bottom of my memory.

Anyway, the interrogation results were quite impressive.

First, in Makaolos’s case, they determined that restraints alone would be too dangerous, so as soon as he entered the prison, “neutralization measures” were taken.

They cut off his limbs, wings, and tail, and extracted the fire-producing organ located at the back of his throat. The mana-sealing formula that Ophelia had applied was also maintained with the help of mages.

The castle’s mages couldn’t understand the complex formula, so all they could do was supply mana to maintain it.

In any case, all sorts of questions were directed at the completely neutralized Makaolos.

Including the information I had asked them to find out.

Makaolos was uncooperative at first, saying he didn’t trust “that human woman”—meaning me—and calling me a disgusting fraud…

Well, what was the point of resisting when only his head and torso remained?

After drugs to weaken his mental strength, torture that involved peeling off his scales one by one, and nerve stimulation torture inspired by my interrogation methods, he finally submitted.

After that, he became an answer machine, responding to every question.

As befitting his grand title as one of the Five Dragon People, he knew quite a lot.

The name and capabilities of the dragon person who called himself Heavenly Demon, the lord of Palace of Heavenly Demon.

The secret that the king of the Dragon Kingdom was backing the Palace and the reason why the Dragon King supported the self-proclaimed Heavenly Demon

Information about Fist Demon, the only human in the Palace of Heavenly Demon whom I suspected was an apostle.

And even the ultimate goal of the Palace of Heavenly Demon.

These were quite interesting details.

—-

The Dragonic Kingdom of Jin.

A kingdom in the northwestern part of the continent with a founding myth that the ancient sea dragon Tiamat ordered one of the dragonborn who served her to become king and manage the other dragonborn.

Although called a kingdom, perhaps because it was a nation of dragonborn, its culture had completely different characteristics from human kingdoms.

The existence of those called “Practitioners” was one such feature.

Groups of dragonborn who considered becoming closer to dragon form as their ideal and trained themselves for this purpose.

They were similar to lords or nobles in human terms, but unlike humans, practitioners were people united by ideology and philosophy rather than bloodlines.

Unlike nobles, they didn’t involve themselves in state politics—they were non-political groups that simply gathered with like-minded individuals to focus on training and practice.

That’s why practitioners’ organizations were called sects rather than families.

Whether they became more like dragons as they grew stronger, or grew stronger because they became more like dragons was unknown, but in any case, through their training, they gained power on a different level from other dragonborn.

To the extent that the king of the Dragon Kingdom worried about whether these emerging threats should be eradicated before they grew too powerful to handle.

Knowing this, the practitioners moved first before being crushed by the Dragon King’s army and showed their submission before the Dragon King.

They swore that they were only cultivating the path to become dragons and had no interest in power or politics, nor would they ever.

A strict separation of secular power and religious groups, you might say.

The conflict between the Dragon King and the sects, which could have led to massive bloodshed, was thus resolved, and peace came to the Dragon Kingdom.

For the past few hundred years.

The problem was… that the conflict they had patched up had reached its limit.

—-

The passage of time tends to corrupt everything.

The oath between the old Dragon King and the sect leaders of that time, as well as the lofty ideals held by the practitioners of that era, had long since faded and discolored over time.

The first sect, “Small Forest,” which pursued the rejection of temptation, suppression of violence, and training of body and mind.

Contrary to its name, Small Forest’s power grew stronger over time, eventually overwhelming even the royal family.

Just as stronger light casts darker shadows, those who argued that dragonborn should nurture their unique destructive impulses, contrary to the sects that emphasized mental cultivation, also grew incomparably stronger than before.

In such a situation, the oath not to interfere with political power also became meaningless.

The current sects had fallen to become all-powerful groups that didn’t even pretend to follow the Dragon King’s orders, controlling and ruling their territories as they pleased.

The king’s authority had hit rock bottom. Sects governed their territories as they pleased, engaging in conflicts resembling civil war. That was the current state of the Dragon Kingdom.

Therefore—

The current Dragon King of the Dragon Kingdom, Cylude, had decided.

He needed to forcibly integrate the criminal-like evil sects to restore order, and use their power to overthrow the orthodox sects that had thrown the king’s authority and old oaths into the trash, restoring the Dragon Kingdom to its former state.

So, using all the treasures remaining in the royal family, he created an entity to forcibly unite the evil sect dragonborn.

That was the dragonborn Heavenly Demon, Persiella.