Chapter 039: The Secretly Passionate Armored Dragon King (Patreon)

"Ruijerd!?!?"

The moment he woke up, Perugius, the Armored Dragon King, frowned as he looked over at Ruijerd, who sat there calmly.

Hearing Perugius address him in that tone, Ruijerd blinked, puzzled.

"Do we know each other?" he asked.

Before Perugius could answer, Rudy had already raised a hand with a smile and made the introductions.

"You two might actually know each other. This is Perugius, the Armored Dragon King — I dragged him here to teach me summoning magic."

Hearing this, Ruijerd studied the figure before him with astonishment — Perugius, the Armored Dragon King, who had somehow turned into a beautiful white-haired girl.

As Ruijerd remembered it, wasn't Perugius supposed to be a mighty, muscular man? So what in the world was going on here!?

Faced with Ruijerd's astonished stare, Perugius turned his face away, visibly disgusted.

But the next instant, Rudy forcibly turned his face back around.

"Whatever grudge you two had before, Ruijerd is our savior now. So, Perugius... it's not too much to ask you to say thank you to Mister Ruijerd, is it?"

"You—!"

Perugius glared furiously at Rudy. But the moment he noticed Rudy's gaze turn suddenly cold, a chill ran through him.

He lowered his head and, thoroughly unwilling, murmured, "Thank you."

Rudy patted him with a smile. "Louder. You're all grown up — don't tell me you're actually getting shy?"

Feeling Rudy's hand press harder and harder on his shoulder, Perugius shouted, none too happily, "Thank you, Mister Ruijerd, for the rescue!"

"Uh... you're welcome..." Ruijerd replied blankly, then kept glancing curiously back and forth between Rudy and Perugius.

As he recalled it, Perugius shouldn't have been this spineless — and he was fairly powerful in his own right, too.

Just what had Rudy done to reduce Perugius to this state?

Honestly, Ruijerd had never imagined he'd meet an old comrade-in-arms from centuries past under circumstances quite like this.

As Perugius came around, Eris and Sylphiette also slowly stirred awake.

But the instant they saw Ruijerd, memories of what their mothers had told them as children came flooding back: if they didn't behave, the Superd tribe would catch them and eat them.

To wake up to a sight like that was simply too much of a shock!

For a moment, Eris and Sylphiette recoiled in fright, backing all the way to the cliff wall. With nowhere left to retreat, they trembled and begged to be spared.

For some reason, watching this scene made Perugius feel inexplicably better.

Ruijerd, meanwhile, turned to look at Rudy. "See, this is the reaction people are actually supposed to have when they see me."

Rudy nodded at him with a smile, then stepped forward and helped Eris and Sylphiette to their feet.

"Don't worry, look — we're both perfectly fine. Actually, Mister Ruijerd is the one who saved our lives."

Listening to Rudy's gentle voice, and with their heads clearing quickly, Sylphiette and Eris gradually tried to accept Ruijerd's presence.

When they tried talking to him, Ruijerd turned out to have no airs about him at all — his words and his expression were both gentle.

Thinking back on their parents' old warnings, they suddenly felt they'd been thoroughly deceived all these years.

Seeing the two girls like this, the corner of Ruijerd's mouth curved up slightly.

With the lie shattered, Eris pulled Sylphiette along, and the two of them began curiously getting to know Ruijerd.

Rudy, meanwhile, pulled Perugius aside and set off on his own journey of learning summoning magic.

Though thoroughly unwilling, faced with the threat of a bloody fist, Perugius had no choice but to grudgingly walk Rudy through the knowledge of summoning magic.

From just this first lesson alone, Rudy realized that the spirit summoning magic he'd learned from Roxy before didn't even come close!

But there was no helping it — if his own strength hadn't broken through to the brink of Nuclear-rank, he wouldn't have dared step forward to provoke Perugius, a figure the original story portrayed as ferociously powerful.

And so, learning as he questioned, at first Perugius answered evasively and half-heartedly. But as their exchange went deeper, he found himself increasingly astonished by the ingenuity of Rudy's ideas.

Though Rudy's knowledge of summoning magic ran shallow, many of his ideas struck Perugius as excellent directions for research in their own right.

Maybe it was astonishment at Rudy's ability, or maybe it was simply from having gone so long without talking to a kindred spirit — whatever the reason, something in him finally found release. Perugius and Rudy talked more and more animatedly.

Watching from the side, Ruijerd felt a wave of astonishment.

So it turned out Perugius was actually such a secretly passionate person underneath it all.

And yet the boy who could draw such a reaction out of Perugius was just a ten-year-old child — one Ruijerd found utterly impossible to read.

Overwhelming strength. An overwhelming force of will. An overwhelming capacity to learn. Even after several hundred years of life, Ruijerd had never come across a child like Rudy.

Recalling their conversation from the very start, Ruijerd found himself looking up at the star-filled sky.

So the goal really was the sea of stars, huh!