Rin, the Skyswimmer

 

I go where I want to go.

And if that's right here, then staying is my choice too.

 

"The price… what do you mean, the price?"

"That just now will do for a start. Look, here it comes, Mentorrr."

Rin wiped her lips with the back of her arm, then slapped my back to jolt me out of my stupor.

I hastily turned to face forward. The two-horned red dragon had smashed through the thick wall of water Rin had created and was barreling straight toward us.

"You focus on driving, okay, Mentorrr?"

No sooner had Rin spoken than countless spheres of water rose from the lake and launched themselves at the red dragon.

"Ngh, ohhh…!"

None of the water projectiles were larger than what a person could hold in their arms, but the sheer volume of them drove the red dragon back with a bellow, pinning it to the earth.

I knew exactly how that felt, having taken a few hits across my own scales. For a fire dragon, being struck by water was far more devastating than being hit by an iron mass of the same weight.

"Rin, you can use magic again…? And the price…"

If the breath escaping from her gills meant she was breathing underwater, then…

"Yep. Got it all back! Centuries' worth of lost memories and feelings of love. That's more than enough for a price, right?"

Flashing a mischievous grin, Rin puffed out her chest with pride.

Steadfast and unchanged, yet ever-evolving. That was her smile.

At that moment, a thunderous explosion shook the air.

A white dragon burst from the rising plume of smoke, and hot on its heels, four red dragons emerged.

Riding on Ai's back, Yuuki turned toward us, her eyes widening just a fraction.

"Rin!"

"Yuuki!"

That was all it took. Just calling each other's names.

The two of them, once the closest of friends, seemed to understand everything in an instant.

Yuuki leaped from Ai's back, and Rin, having transformed into an Eastern dragon, swept beneath her to catch her mid-fall.

"Here we gooo!"

The instant Rin shouted, a flash of light blazed, and her shadow on the ground took on substance, surging upward into the air.

That technique…!

I could never forget it. Giving shadows physical form and bending them to one's will was the specialty of Rin's former classmate, the half-wolf Luka.

Rin's shadow clones all breathed out a pitch-black fog in unison, and the surroundings were instantly plunged into a darkness deeper than the dead of night.

The red dragons spewed flames to burn it away, annihilating the shadow dragons and scattering them, but the real Rin seized a trailing edge and tore a piece free.

She draped it over the sword in Yuuki's hand, shaping it into an enormous blade.

Molding flame into solid form. That was a technique of the lizardman Sig.

And the thorny vines that raced through the air like cracks spreading through glass were the craft of the elf Violet.

Yuuki sprinted along those thorns, swinging her sword. The blade of flame whipped through the sky as though it had a will of its own, slicing through the scales of red dragons that should have been utterly immune to heat and fire.

They were strong.

It was a strange thing.

The two of them had merely regained their past memories. They hadn't actually grown any stronger. And yet, both were clearly more formidable now than they had been before losing those memories.

At the same time, I thought I understood why.

What they had recovered were memories of the past. But the Rin and Yuuki of today had grown far beyond who they had been back then.

Rin, who had mastered the magic of transforming into any shape, could now draw on those memories to reshape parts of her body after her former classmates, replicating their abilities.

Yuuki, blessed with a human's rate of growth and an elf's lifespan, could inherit those memories and channel the techniques of every generation of Swordsaints through her gifted body.

That was how powerful memory was for a magus.

If magic was the art of giving form to one's mental images, then lived experience was far more potent than mere imagination.

Far, far more than anything words could express.

"What… is happening? Why… are they able to resist us?"

My great-grandfather murmured in disbelief, watching the spectacle of just two people overwhelming four fire dragons.

They would never understand. Born supreme, having claimed the mantle of the mightiest without ever needing to strive for it, they could never comprehend.

The very concept of becoming stronger than you already are.

"Allow me to show you, Great-Grandfather."

But I was different. My life was short compared to his, yet the density of what I had lived through was surely many times greater. Time and again, in every sense of the word, I had faced opponents stronger than myself.

I called to mind the image of my friend, the one I had just seen moments ago: Durga.

I recalled the moment we first met. I had been a mere twelve-year-old hatchling back then, struggling desperately just to bring down a behemoth. Durga had leaped onto the head of one the size of a building and severed its thick, steel-hard neck in a single blow.

That strength. That power. I would reproduce it in my own body.

The sight, the sound, the smell, the sensation, the emotion of that moment. I recalled every last detail.

And I gave it a name.

"Mighty Power!"

Power surged through my entire body in an instant.

This was nothing like the reinforcement magic I had always been terrible at. Durga's movements were seared into my mind. I would unleash that strength at a dragon's scale.

"Raaaaaah!"

My fist, now in dragon form, sent my great-grandfather flying despite him being several times my size.

"What…?!"

He tumbled across the ground with a cry of shock, but I was not surprised. Durga had slain beasts hundreds of times his own weight. As a mere human, he had posed a genuine threat to me, a fire dragon.

If that power were layered onto my own, the difference in size between my great-grandfather and me was trivial by comparison.

"Throwing Stones!"

I scooped up the boulders scattered around me and hurled them. The image I drew upon was my very first exchange students and the stone-throwing contest that had decided their class representative.

Yuuki's stone had traced an unnatural arc to strike its target. Luka's had snapped clean through a desk leg and toppled a pile of firewood. Of course, what I was now treating as a desk leg was my great-grandfather's.

"Impudent… tricks! As if that will work!"

Flames erupted from my great-grandfather's entire body, shooting down the boulders like anti-aircraft lasers. A terrifying walking arsenal.

But his imagination, I was certain, could reach no further than that. Magic was not limited to personally recreating past events.

"Unexpected Strike!"

The brick schoolhouse still stands in Scarlet to this day. And I would never forget Lufelle the giant's headbutt that had destroyed it the very moment it was built. I imprinted that vivid memory of raw destructive force onto one of the boulders I had thrown.

"Ngh?!"

It punched through his intercepting flames and slammed into my great-grandfather's body, forcing him to one knee.

"You… insolent…!"

A wounded fire dragon's last resort was always its breath. My great-grandfather drew in a colossal lungful, and the air around his jaws shimmered with heat haze. How much thermal energy could an ancient dragon who had lived tens of thousands of years produce at full power? Enough, most likely, to destroy even another fire dragon.

"Salamandra!"

But that breath would never reach me.

I had witnessed it during the selection trials for a new research position: the magic of Mel, a spirit summoner without peer. The flames spilling from my great-grandfather's maw transformed into a massive salamander and, obeying my will, pinned him down.

"Im… possible… this can't…"

Crushed under his own flames charged with lethal force, my great-grandfather writhed as smoke poured from his body.

And that sight, too, became fuel for my power. The heat resistance of a fire dragon's scales was far from perfect. Sufficient heat could inflict real damage. He had just taught me that himself.

All that remained was to hit him with everything I had.

Two memories came to mind.

"O thing redder than my scales, stronger than my fangs, hotter than the blood in my veins, more radiant than my eyes."

I had unleashed this only twice in my entire life.

"Thou art the spear that scorches all, the sword that annihilates all, the arrow that pierces all, the hammer that shatters all."

The first time, it had been aimed at Durga. The second, to carve a trench into the earth.

That surging fury from the very first time.

The second time, when I had tried to recreate it and failed.

"Thy name is—"

I understood now why I had failed. The name I had given it was wrong.

If I was going to draw upon the full force of that memory, this magic could never be called a dragon's breath.

"The name befitting thee is—"

It was the defiance that stood against all absurdity and blew it away.

"Dragon's Rage!"

The torrent of light that erupted swallowed my great-grandfather whole.

It tore through the earth and blasted a second gaping hole through the mountain behind him.

 

＊　＊　＊

 

"Thank goodness. Nina, you're all right!"

"Barely…"

Her hair was singed and frizzled in places, and she was covered head to toe in soot, but she didn't appear to have any serious injuries. With Chryse safe at her side, I breathed a sigh of relief.

"Will you withdraw now, Great-Grandfather?"

My great-grandfather had survived a direct hit from my full-power breath. Even so, his wings were burned to tatters, his body was covered in burns, and he was clearly in no condition to fight on. Wounds this severe would not heal in ten or twenty years, even with a dragon's regenerative power.

"Just as you took care not to kill us, I, too, would prefer not to kill you if at all possible."

"You dare… threaten us…"

My great-grandfather let out a strained laugh.

It wasn't so much self-deprecating as it was tinged with something almost like amusement.

"Very well. My great-grandchild. In honor of your strength, I shall—"

Abruptly. Without warning. Without any context whatsoever.

My great-grandfather's words cut off mid-sentence.

Because an arrow had pierced his heart.

"Wha…?"

Not a single one of us had been able to react.

Not the five fire dragons. Not me, not Nina, not Ai, not Chryse. Not even Rin and Yuuki.

Before any of us could even process what had happened, the fire dragons, wounded and weakened though they were, had each been pierced by arrows and killed.

The one who had fired them was a woman with short-cropped white hair.

She carried a bow I recognized, but she herself was a stranger.

"I'm told that a single year for a fire dragon is equivalent to ninety-eight years for a human," the woman said in a cool, clear voice.

"Well, a fire dragon's lifespan exceeds a human's by far more than a hundredfold. When you factor that in, the ratio might be about right, or perhaps even on the low side."

"Who… are you?"

She had materialized out of nowhere and slain the fire dragons without warning.

I knew nothing about her. Not who she was, not where she had come from, not what she wanted.

"Who? Who, you say?"

And yet, watching this woman laugh as though something amused her greatly, I was certain I knew her.

"Why would you ask that? You should know, Ryouji. After all—"

The woman spoke my name with an almost intimate familiarity.

My true name. One that almost no one in this world should have known.

"You're the one who gave me my name."

She giggled softly. But it was only on the surface.

Her lips had been twisted into a smile from the moment she appeared, but what lay in her eyes was something else entirely.

"It's been so long. Oh, so very long. Truly, it has been so long. Three hundred years since then, you know. Tell me, Ryouji. If one year for a dragon feels like a hundred years for a human, then—"

Deep, deep hatred.

"How many years do you think a hundred years feels like for a creature whose lifespan is only one year?"

In that question, I understood everything.

This was the surviving white rat I had once let escape.

The very same archer who had killed Chryse… and who had killed my mother.

"Algernon…!"

Calamity itself had taken human form, and there it stood.