Chapter 55

With those words, our tentative alliance was created. I could at least trust that he wouldn’t stab me in the back for the moment.

Also…

“Ah… Would you happen to have a mana crystal I could borrow?”

***

A short shower later, I felt like a new man. The dirt and grime had practically sloughed off of me. Luckily, the drains seemed to have been made for such abuse, and nothing was clogged in the process.

After that, Koise took a shower of his own, though I imagine that the water running over the wounds on his arms must have been painful.

Before going to sleep, he applied a salve of some sort from his item bag over his arms.

The next morning, I awoke to the sound of the door thudding shut as Koise left the room.

I didn’t think much of it and was contemplating following him to get food in my stomach that wasn’t just the usual item bag rations when distant shouting reached me through the building. n/o/vel/b//in dot c//om

Not having anything in the way of extra clothing, I had elected to sleep in nothing while the small cubicle of a cloth cleansing unit had done its work in the night with Koise’s magic crystal powering it.

Throwing on my freshly cleaned clothes and realizing how ragged, worn, and full of holes they were as I did so, I stumbled through the doorway and rushed down the stairs toward the source of the shouting.

“What the hell did you do?!”

Lein’s voice?

I turned the corner into the inn’s tavern area to find the mostly empty room with Awakeners here or there at tables, all staring over at Lein and Koise, who were standing next to the serving bar.

Lein was positioned with his hand out toward Koise, who was only a few feet from hi, like a loaded gun.

He shouted, “Answer me or I swear on the System that I’ll do it!”

Koise had seen what Lein’s abilities were, right?

Koise was standing opposite Lein, looking more casual with an arrow held in one hand.

“What are you on about?” Koise spoke, genuinely confused by the accusations.

The innkeeper looked about ready to bolt and call the guards, and our plan would be ruined before it even began if Lein got himself killed right there. I wasn’t too concerned about Koise’s safety.

“Hey!” I shouted out and weaved my way around the tables towards them.

Lein’s head snapped over at my voice, taking in my cleaned clothes and the fact that I was not, in fact, dead back in the room.

“Aizen…?”

“Relax, everything’s fine.”

“What…?”

It was understandable that he was a bit confused. After all, when he had gone to sleep the previous night, Koise had been tied up as our prisoner.

I couldn’t just talk about how we were going to kill the city’s leader in earshot of everyone else in the tavern, though.

“He’s joining our party for now. It turns out that we have mutual goals.”

At that, Lein seemed to relax a little bit and lowered his hands, still casting a suspicious look at Koise.

“Alright…”

After eating, we left the inn and walked to the edge of the city where I had initially met Lein. Not only did it offer a good view of the castle jutting from the edge that the dragon claimed as its home, but it was also sparse in terms of other people who could overhear us.

Most seemed to subconsciously avoid the edge of the city, and I could understand why.

Looking down into that seemingly bottomless fall with the cloud cover far beneath, who could guess what horrors, wonders, or phenomenon lay below? People were afraid of the unknown, and keeping it out of sight also helped to keep it out of mind.

I also noticed that the wounds on Koise’s arms looked much better.

“Alright, someone tell me what’s going on then,” Lein said, still not having been properly told about what was happening.

“We’re still going after the dragon, but Koise is going to help with creating and executing the plan.”

Lein gave Koise a scrutinizing look.

“Alright… So this guy, who wanted to kill you before, suddenly wants to help you kill the city lord?”

Koise spoke then, saying, “No, I want to help you kill a dragon.”

Lein nodded as if that explained everything.

“Oh, so he’s just crazy.”

We were hoping to catch some sight of the dragon returning from the dungeon, but we weren’t having much luck.

I stepped into the conversation, redirecting it back to how we were actually going to plan our dragon-killing endeavor.

“Alright, we have to actually be able to reach the dragon in order to kill it. What’s more, we need a way to stop it from just flying away if it deems things too dangerous.”

Lein sat with his legs dangling precariously over the edge as he thought.

“Well, the dragon appeared directly to give the official quest last time, so I suspect it’ll appear again this time to give an update or a new quest once it realizes the Relic isn’t obtainable from the ruined dungeon.”

“So you’re saying the best chance would be to ambush it in plain view of dozens of other Awakeners?” I asked.

“No, not necessarily. It’s not like the dragon is just going to fly straight to the city square and start its speech. It’ll probably stop by the Association first to relay orders and set up the next task it’s going to ask the Awakeners to complete.”

Koise stood looking at the dragon’s castle while idly thumbing his chin.

The morning was a bit chilly, and a low wind blew our hair and clothes about intermittently while we spoke.

“We run the risk of ambushing it when it’s at its most wary, though. It would be ideal if we could get to it in the castle somehow. Everyone always relaxes a bit when they believe they’re safe in their den.”

“Impossible.” Lein waved his hand as if the idea wasn’t even worth considering. “Not only are the entrances kept under strict guard, but there’s a dispelling effect around the castle that blocks flight spells, so flying there, even if we could, wouldn’t be an option.”

It only blocked flight spells? That seemed like an oversight to me…

“If it only blocks flight spells, it should be easy enough to just… jump over there, right?”

Lein twisted around and looked at me like I was crazy.

“What, jump the closest gap where the guards can’t see you? So, basically, from here all the way to the castle? You would have to be able to jump hundreds of meters. Not even a strength-specced Awakener could do something like that…”

I thought of the System and Second System abilities I had. It didn’t seem like jumping that far would be impossible if I went for pure distance and used everything I had. Of course, it was a massive risk, and miscalculating would be the death of me.

“Did both of you forget that I’m an archer?” Koise looked between the two of us like the path we had to take was obvious.

“I’ll just shoot an arrow with a rope over there and we can climb across, no need to jump, fly, or anything stupid like that.”

He had a point…

“And if that works, what are we going to do from there?”

We had an idea of how we were going to potentially approach the dragon, at least, but that didn’t solve the biggest problem of how we were going to kill it.

“Our first attack has to be our best. It’s ok if we don’t kill it in one shot, we just have to mortally wound it. Dragons have to sleep like any other being, and their form naturally reverts to their original one when they do so, which is also when they’re weakest.”

In other words, Koise was saying we would have to injure it enough to just have to worry about landing the final blow and stop it from just flying away.

“Do we have anything that can do that?” Lein asked.

Koise glanced around, checking to see who else was in eyesight before he reached into his item bag and produced a single arrow. The shaft of the arrow was of a smooth, brown wood, fine to the point that the grains of it couldn’t be seen.

The arrowhead, though, was particularly eye catching.

In the place of where one would normally expect to see a triangle-shaped, grey, metal arrowhead, there shone a thin bodkin-like arrowhead of a scintillating, orange metal that looked like it was on fire beneath the surface. I noticed he took great care to not touch the metal at any point.

“Is that…?” Lein’s voice trailed off.

I hadn’t ever seen it before, but I had heard of it. What Koise was holding in his hands was likely more valuable than the rest of the items in his and Lein’s item bags combined…

A true scarlet steel arrowhead.

Who could say whether it would be enough to kill the dragon? Even if it penetrated the dragon’s scales, it would still have to get through bone if we wanted to kill the thing or mortally wound it in one strike.

“I didn’t expect that I would use it so soon, but I can’t think of many any that it could find better use on than a dragon.”

After all, if we killed the dragon, its scales and organs, as gruesome as it sounded, would be ours to harvest—and dragon hearts were even more valuable in weight than scarlet steel.

We had an idea of how to get to the dragon and an idea of how to kill it, next was…

“But what about its breath?” Lein voiced what I had been thinking.

We needed a way to neutralize its dragon breath in the case that the first shot didn’t kill it. We would likely be fighting an uphill battle anyway if that were the case, but better to fight an uphill battle than to have no chance at climbing the hill at all.

“I think I have something that could work for that.”