Epilogue

Later, the elements and magical power scattering from the ice dragon's corpse left Lunéville with a stretch of unusual weather, including out-of-season snowfall.

While the commission paperwork was being processed on the branch's first floor, Ilya, Frank, and Amabel, a branch staff member who handled material appraisals, all scowled at the ice dragon's horn that had been laid out for assessment in the third-floor parlor.

"Ilya… what do you think?"

"… Either way, it's strange."

Right. When Amabel had asked, Frank had answered that the horn was odd.

Normally, horns in general — not just a dragon's — reflected the elements the creature carried. The surface color was irrelevant; what mattered was the color on the inside. For an ice dragon, that should have been blue, with green particles sprinkled throughout.

However, the color inlaid within this horn was black.

"… Monstrification."

"Monstri… what?"

"Do you know about the thing called miasma?"

The two looked at each other and Frank nodded.

"It's that mist that turns you into a monster if you stay in it too long, right?"

"That's the common belief, but it's actually different. To ordinary creatures it's nothing but poison, but if an increase in mana is like a drug that activates monsters, then miasma is closer to a potent medicine that promotes changes like strengthening and frenzy in them. The process by which that miasma mutates the mana inside a monster's body is called monstrification."

The two of them stared in puzzlement at first, but before long Frank spoke up, still confused.

"But didn't you say that dragons aren't monsters?"

"Right. That's exactly why it's unlikely."

If it had undergone monstrification, it would have forgotten its habits and wandered without purpose… and even the fact that it had attacked people despite being injured could be chalked up to its dulled intellect.

But in that case, a different problem arose instead.

The only beings able to interfere with the bodies of creatures that weren't monsters and cause monstrification… were demons.

Demons powerful enough to interfere with the bodies of divine beasts, higher forms of life at that.

 

People called such beings evil gods.