BANG! BANG! BANG!

Banxia was an ant before the colossal dragon. Yet those impossible iron fists had the beast pinned, hammering it into the earth while it thrashed and heaved and got absolutely nowhere.

Demons were gifted with physical might and magic by nature. The dragon race stood at the pinnacle of both.

But right now, before this pair of flesh-and-blood fists, the Red Mirror Dragon couldn't even land a counterattack, let alone throw the young man off its head.

The realization that it might actually die here made the dragon's amber slit pupils snap tight.

If it had known someone like this was wandering near its lair, it would have grabbed its treasure in its jaws and flown far away a long time ago.

"ROAR!"

A low growl shook the forest. The Red Mirror Dragon's muscles swelled all at once as it braced for one last desperate stand.

"Water-manipulation magic!"

From a distance, Roxy had already finished charging. She leveled her staff straight at the dragon.

It was the most lethal folk magic spell she could cast on short notice, the same type she'd used back in the goblin cave, but this wasn't a rushing torrent.

This was a killing blow. Compressed, condensed, pushed to the limit.

A high-speed spinning water cannon crossed the gap in an instant, faster than the naked eye could follow, and slammed directly into the dragon's scales.

Splat,

Nothing happened. The water cannon struck the crimson scales, burst into scattered droplets, and vanished.

The scene didn't change. The young man still sat astride the dragon's head, landing punch after punch, beating the thing senseless.

"My full-power water magic..."

Roxy went still.

A red body. Magic resistance beyond all imagination.

It clicked. She'd seen the record once in a monster encyclopedia, and she called out at the top of her lungs:

"Mr. Banxia! I know this dragon! It's a Red Mirror Dragon from the Central Continent! Its magic resistance is extraordinarily high!"

That was the only help she could think to offer right now.

"According to the records, it flies extremely fast, its claws are razor sharp, and it can breathe fire!"

Banxia gave a nod, his punching speed not dropping by a single beat.

"Red Mirror Dragon, huh? Got it!"

So what if its magic resistance was high? It wasn't like he used magic anyway. He just had raw strength.

Left fist: high damage. Right fist: damage high.

He raised his right hand, ready to bring it down again.

Just then, the Red Mirror Dragon exploded into motion beneath him. It reared its massive head, and deep in its throat, a blazing fireball began to rapidly coalesce.

It held zero deterrence for the young man sitting on top of it.

The dragon clearly knew that too. So it swung its head around, aiming straight at the blue-haired girl standing off in the distance — the one who had been "watching and cheering", counting on the threat to make the young man let go.

"The Red Mirror Dragon is targeting you! Do you need help?!"

"Eh?!" Roxy scrambled left and right in a panic. "Don't mind me! Mr. Banxia, please just focus on finishing it off!"

Easy to say. As a mage, she couldn't cover much ground in that amount of time.

The dragon's head kept building power, swaying back and forth as it tracked her, until that enormous fireball had fully taken shape.

The Red Mirror Dragon was certain: once it unleashed this breath, the pest on its head would let go on its own.

The fireball hadn't even launched yet, and the trees nearby were already catching fire on their own. The sheer power of it needed no explanation.

If that hit her, leaving an intact corpse would be getting off lucky.

"...I'm sorry! I was joking!" Roxy caved completely. "If you could look after me after all..."

The fireball was fully formed. It was about to erupt from the dragon's maw.

In that same instant, Banxia, who had been waiting for exactly this, drove a full-force downward elbow directly onto the top of the dragon's skull.

That terrifying flame never got aimed at the blue-haired girl. The Red Mirror Dragon swallowed it straight back down.

BOOM,

A string of violent, muffled detonations rolled out from deep inside the dragon's body.

But beyond either of their expectations, even after eating that horrifying blow head-on, the Red Mirror Dragon was still moving. Still kicking. Not a single sign of critical damage on it.

Apparently, the ultra-high magic resistance it was so proud of showed absolutely no favoritism. Its own magic got the same treatment as everyone else's.

"..."

That brief exchange had been enough. Banxia had his read on the situation.

This thick-skinned, dense-fleshed oversized lizard had a health bar that went considerably longer than he'd expected.

No proper weapon, just fists, grinding away at it from the outside. He had no idea how long that would take to empty it out.

He shifted his fists into open palms.

A ruthless chop drove straight into the dragon's eye. The Execution Hand Blade carved right through the Red Mirror Dragon's ocular defense without any resistance.

The dragon shrieked. Banxia took a deep breath and plunged straight into the nauseating, yielding flesh beyond.

From her spot in the distance, the blue-haired girl watched with her eyes stretched wide.

The result was exactly what Banxia had counted on. Compared to the scales on the outside, the flesh within was far more fragile.

He kept unleashing the Execution Hand Blade, and the damage inside the dragon's body piled up fast.

The pain finally got through to it. The Red Mirror Dragon understood, at last, that it was genuinely close to dying. It let out a string of mournful wails, beat its broad membrane wings with everything it had, and launched itself skyward, carrying the young man who was busy tearing it apart from the inside.

"Mr. Banxia!" Roxy looked up and cried out.

They'd already won. The dragon was running. The young man just needed to get out safely now.

But Banxia, deep inside the dragon, wasn't paying attention to any of that.

Until the system notification rang out, his hand blade wasn't stopping.

"AWOOOO-ROAAAR!"

The dying dragon's wail rolled across the sky above the forest. The weak monsters and animals on the ground trembled.

Under Roxy's worried gaze, the Red Mirror Dragon climbed higher and higher, until it shrank to an insignificant black speck against the night sky,

Then it plummeted.

RUMBLE!

The crash of something massive slamming into the forest rolled in from the distance, and with it came a sky full of swirling black grit.

High-tier monsters left no corpse when they died. They dissolved into this, grit, drifting slowly apart in the air.

"Mr. Banxia won!"

Roxy ran toward the crash site. After a few steps, the worry caught up with her.

Falling from that height, was he really okay?

She had her answer soon enough.

Following the sound, the blue-haired girl pushed through the last thicket of brush and found the young man standing there, clothes long since reduced to rags, beside the massive dragon body that was dissolving fast. His hands held the crumbling dragon horns with open fascination.

"You truly bring me joy, Red Mirror Dragon."

[High-tier monster Red Mirror Dragon slain. Total lifespan: 1,200 years. Remaining lifespan: 600 years. Absorption complete.]

[Current Remaining Time: 624 years]

Under the moonlight, what stood before Roxy was a sky full of dancing black grit, and the tall young man's wide, satisfied smile.

...

"Mr. Banxia, I read in the encyclopedia that Red Mirror Dragons are accustomed to stashing the treasures they collect inside their lairs."

"Seriously? There's a bonus haul on top of everything?"

"It's just that this forest is so vast. Even knowing there's treasure out there, we have no idea where its lair actually is..."

Banxia remembered what he'd glimpsed from up in the sky.

"Actually — when I was up there just now, I spotted a strange patch. A huge section of the canopy was snapped off, and there were drag marks on the ground below. Ten to one, that's its nest."

"Ehh — really?!" The blue-haired girl's eyes lit up instantly.

"Of course it's real. Let's move while I still remember the direction!"

"..."

➤ Next: Mission Accomplished — Face to Face

Chapter 26 - Mission Accomplished — Face to Face

The sun had just risen. The thin mist hanging over the forest was slowly burning off.

It was the second day since the two-person adventurer party had taken the monster subjugation quest.

Three days left on the deadline.

Commissions posted in the guild hall always came with time limits. It was both a rule and a protection for the client, after all, a commission went to a single party, and without a deadline, a party that wasn't producing results could find endless excuses to drag things out.

At this hour, most people in Alterna were still asleep. But in the settlement known as Milky Aroma Village, nearly every household was already up and working.

Milking, filtering, canning. Waiting for the merchant caravans to come collect the barrels of fresh milk.

Day after day, the same routine. The villagers had never complained about it, either. Compared to settlements where families toiled in the fields all year and still couldn't fill their stomachs after taxes, scraping by on milk was a decent enough life.

But today, the village's able-bodied men weren't crouched under cow bellies like usual. They'd gathered around the old village chief, and the air carried an anxiety that clashed sharply with the morning smell of milk.

"Lord Chief, will this really work?"

"Don't worry." The old chief's voice was quiet, but certain. "How could a monster that doesn't exist ever be successfully subjugated?"

The villagers nodded, and the looks they gave the old chief gained a few more shades of admiration.

A chief was a chief. A person of real wisdom.

The old chief nodded, then turned toward the child of a deceased sibling, a child the chief now raised as an own, and said:

"Leon, when the lord adventurers come, don't go running your mouth like you did yesterday."

That was the only worry right now.

Ever since taking Leon in, the child had a habit of blurting out strange things, which had made the other village kids want nothing to do with Leon. The other adults brushed it off as childish quirks. But as a parent, the old chief always felt a faint, nagging unease.

"Mm. I understand, Lord Chief." The boy answered quietly.

Leon had already tried everything that could be tried. Explaining, warning, pleading, over and over. Not a single person had taken it seriously.

But the fire burning out of those dreams wouldn't disappear just because nobody believed in it.

When the real monster finally reached the village gates, every naive plan and desperate hope would be swallowed whole by the flames.

"All right, everyone disperse. Production's down, but don't forget to deal with the caravans — keep a sharp eye on that." The old chief pulled aside a few trusted people for a quiet word, then set off to take Leon to the mother's tavern to help out.

As for the adventurers and the quest, dragging it out slowly would do just fine.

If those two could sleep in a little longer, so much the better.

Thinking this, the old chief reached out and pushed open the tavern's creaking wooden door.

"Yo. Up early, aren't you?"

The old chief's footsteps stopped dead on the threshold.

By the window, a young man in tattered clothes was eating half a piece of bread and waving in greeting. Sitting beside him was the female companion from the party, eyes bright, nose buried in a heavy ancient tome she'd dug up from somewhere.

"...Lord Adventurers. You're up quite early." The old chief felt that something was off, but out of habit, the polite pleasantries came anyway. "No need to rush the quest. Sleep is good for you when you're young, unlike an old one like me who can't manage it even when wanting to."

"True enough." The young man nodded earnestly. "I'll catch up on my sleep once we head back."

"...Head back?"

"Quest's done. Naturally we're heading back."

The old chief went still.

The young man didn't explain. He just looked down and turned a sword over in his hands. The blade had some age to it, a gem set into the guard caught the morning light and glimmered quietly. Even at a glance, it was clearly no ordinary piece.

The blue-haired girl beside him spoke without looking up.

"The monster from the quest. We already killed it."

"No, that's not — how could that possibly..." The words were out before the old chief could stop them.

"Why wouldn't it be possible?" Roxy set down the ancient tome, thick enough to double as a shield, and raised her head. There was a trace of satisfied smugness in her tone, the kind that comes from finally getting the moment you've been waiting for. "Or is it because that monster didn't exist in the first place?"

"How could you know?!"

The girl took a deep breath, ready to lay out every step of her meticulous deductive reasoning in full, and then a small voice came from behind the old chief.

"Lord Chief. Last night I told the lord adventurers everything."

Roxy: "..."

Seeing the old chief's face turn a deepening shade of red, Leon was already bracing for punishment.

There wouldn't be another chance to experience something like this later. Leon had the ability to escape a death that was coming, but leaving alone wasn't something Leon was willing to do.

"Well~ that's about the size of it." Banxia brushed the breadcrumbs from his lips and stood up.

He looked down at the old chief, who came up to just below his shoulder.

"We're keeping the commission reward. Call it a small penalty for trying to play us — and besides, you're not about to walk into the guild and lodge a complaint."

The old chief's expression darkened. That single gold coin had been pooled together by the whole village, every last bit scraped up with difficulty.

But the young man was right. None of them had the nerve to go into the city and seek justice from noble lords or powerful adventurers.

And honestly, when it came down to it, they'd brought this on themselves.

The old chief let out a long sigh and was just opening a mouth to accept it.

The young man kept going.

"That said, it's not like I don't understand your situation. I might be able to help."

"...You have a way, Lord Adventurer?"

At that, even Roxy looked up from behind the tome, visibly caught off guard.

Last night, from start to finish, the young man hadn't said a single word about any of this.

"Don't look at me like that. Economics isn't my thing." Banxia waved her off, then turned back to the old chief. "But I know a merchant in the city. Maybe something can be figured out."

The old chief's mouth opened, then closed. Nothing came out. Just a slow, silent nod.

Things had reached a point where the lie couldn't hold together anymore.

"Is there really still a future?"

Leon murmured it quietly, almost to no one.

"Don't worry. We weren't lying about any of that."

The boy looked up at the young man, still uncertain.

Banxia didn't say more. He just tilted his thumb toward the north.

"Last night in the woods, we really did put down a big one. How to put it... pretty much a big red lizard with wings."

"Mr. Banxia!" The blue-haired girl beside him immediately looked up, correcting him with full seriousness. "I've told you, that wasn't a lizard. It was a dragon. A Red Mirror Dragon."

Leon stared at the adventurer standing there in torn, dirty clothes without a scratch on him. The boy's lips moved twice before anything came out.

"...It looked just like the one in my dream."

Being able to describe the monster's appearance and name it clearly, and then standing there alive in front of Leon's eyes.

What that meant didn't need to be said.

"Big brother." Leon suddenly lifted his head. For the first time, those eyes lit up with something that actually fit his age. "Can I become an adventurer like you someday?"

"Of course."

"But... I'm just a farmer's kid..."

"Don't worry about that. As far as I know, the last farmer's kid already became a god among mortals."

"..."

The two adventurers' figures shrank down the village road and finally disappeared. Leon still couldn't work out what "a god among mortals" was supposed to mean.

But there was no time to think about it. The old chief and Leon's mother were already coming from behind, footsteps heavy with intent.

If there was any running to do, now was the time, because Leon could already picture exactly what kind of enthusiastic, two-person thrashing was about to arrive.

➤ Next: The Journey's Return and Harvest