Monster

 

Four goblins and two apples. How many get eaten?

The answer is three: the apples and the goblins alike, all in the boss goblin's belly.

— A nursery rhyme of the Scarlet Clan

 

Creatures born from magic.

That's why they were called monsters.

Goblins, orcs, ogres, trolls…

We gave those names to the flesh-bearing spirits that had once attacked the village under Algernon's command.

Given that Chryse was, in origin, a similar sort of being, I had reservations about the term "monster." But Chryse herself used the word without a shred of concern, and before long it stuck.

Like Chryse, at least the Chryse of those days, they were neither spirits nor ghouls. They were living creatures.

In practical terms, that meant they ate food, drank water, and, in turn, bore young and multiplied.

Ever since I placed my curse on Algernon, severing him from the rat collective, the monsters had lost all organized behavior and become, to all appearances, just another kind of animal.

Gone were the days of them gathering weapons, marching in formation, and splitting into multiple units for coordinated pincer attacks. On the contrary, different species would even fight and devour one another. In that sense, they were no different from wild beasts.

Except far more dangerous, and far more violent.

True to their humanoid forms, they were incomparably more intelligent than wild animals.

They wielded tools with ease, understood language, and employed tactics, crude as those were compared to the days when Algernon led them.

And the most troublesome part of all:

They could not create anything.

Perhaps because the rats had created them, the monsters could understand our language and use tools, yet were utterly incapable of making them. Not just crafts in the narrow sense; they couldn't construct buildings or manage even something as simple as cooking.

And every single one of them sought to compensate for that lack by stealing from others.

Eighty years had passed since the battle with Algernon, and in that time, I had tried again and again to find some path toward coexistence with the monsters.

The monsters could speak, if only in broken phrases, and basic communication was possible. Surely cooperation would benefit both sides more than hostility.

… That hope bore no fruit whatsoever. No matter how patiently I reasoned with them. No matter how courteously I treated them. Even when we took them into the village to live alongside us. Even when we raised their newborns together with our own children.

Their nature never changed. They were irreconcilable with people.

If the goblins had been digging burrows into hillsides and building nests, that might have opened some possibility for coexistence. Unfortunately, nothing of the sort had occurred.

"Huh? Mentor, you still haven't given up on that?"

When I brought the subject up in the university lab, Innis blinked at me in surprise.

Lounging on her floating sofa as always, she looked no older than her early teens, but she was a human who had mastered anti-aging magic and was nearing two hundred years old, a grand sorcerer in every sense. She also held the uncontested record for longest tenure as my student, even among the long-lived races.

"You've tried everything under the sun and proved you can't coexist with them, haven't you? Even if they did start building their own nests, that'd just make them a bigger threat. I don't think it'd improve your chances of making friends one bit."

She was probably right. The rats had created the monsters for the express purpose of killing humans. That was precisely why I felt no qualms about exterminating goblins.

… And yet, they had simply been made that way. I couldn't entirely suppress the pity I felt for them.

"Besides, you know better than anyone how bad it'd be if they started making things — well, weapons specifically. You've experienced that firsthand."

Innis produced a crossbow from inside her sofa and leveled it at me. After a deliberate pause, she pulled the trigger.

I reflexively swept the coat I was wearing around to shield my body. The bolt bounced off the fabric and clattered to the floor with a sharp, metallic ring.

"Your reflexes are slow as ever. You're supposed to be a dragon, so can't you react a little faster?"

"I blocked it in time, at least."

I replied to Innis's exasperated jab while checking my coat for damage. That said, if she hadn't paused before firing, it might have been a close call.

"Besides, I don't think dragons actually have great reflexes… There was never a need to dodge."

A dragon's scales… a fire dragon's, at least, were extraordinarily tough. Even when I was a hatchling, an armored bear's claws hadn't so much as scratched mine; they shattered against me instead.

Yet eighty years ago, the goblins under Algernon's command had shot arrows that pierced those same scales. It wasn't that their arrows were sharper or stronger than an armored bear's claws.

"Oh right, the thing you asked about? I finished it."

Innis clapped her hands and pulled another contraption from within her sofa. The cylindrical device had markings etched along its length, and inside its glass body swirled a blue liquid. Its tapered tip gave it the look of an oversized thermometer.

"Here, tuck this under the arm of that coat."

Even the method of use was identical to a thermometer. I did as she said, slipping it under the coat's arm while still wearing it. The liquid inside began to rise rapidly.

"Are you channeling your defensive magic right now?"

"No, I already dropped it."

"Ninety-eight at baseline? No wonder dragons sit at the top of the food chain."

When I shook my head, Innis let out an incredulous groan.

The device she'd built for me was a mana gauge. Until now, "mana" had been a word we used vaguely and intuitively. This tool could express its strength as a numerical value.

"What's the scale based on?"

"… My full-power mana output is exactly one hundred."

When I posed the straightforward question, Innis answered with clear reluctance. That meant my resting mana was roughly equivalent to her absolute maximum. I couldn't help feeling a little guilty.

"Well, all it takes is going a tiny bit over to pierce through, so—ngh!"

"Ow! That hurts!?"

Innis picked up the fallen bolt and jabbed it into my shoulder. It was only a light press through my clothes, more of a sting than real pain, but the very same bolt that had bounced off a crossbow shot was now embedded in my shoulder.

"Let me see… Hm, proof complete! Well, not exactly, but at the very least it doesn't contradict the theory."

Innis pressed the mana gauge against the bolt and measured the mana imbued in its tip. The reading showed ninety-nine. Slightly below a hundred, likely because some time had passed since the mana was infused. She brushed her hand lightly over the bolt's surface, and the reading dropped to ninety-seven.

She made it look easy, but siphoning off just a sliver of mana was a terrifyingly precise operation. I wouldn't even know where to begin.

"With this, the bolt shouldn't be able to pierce your coat anymore."

Innis twirled the bolt on her fingertip, then drove it into my shoulder with all her might.

And then—

"GYAAAH!?"

A sharp pain lanced through my shoulder, and I screamed.

"Huh? That's weird. Why did it go in?"

While I clutched my shoulder and rolled across the floor, Innis gazed at the bolt with a puzzled expression.

"Because! You… put mana… into it… didn't you!"

I didn't think I was bleeding, but it hurt enormously. It would probably bruise.

"Oh come on, Mentor. I may be a genius beauty of a sorceress, but even I can't infuse mana into something instantaneously without an incantation. Hmm, maybe the theory's wrong…"

"No… it's not…"

I managed between ragged breaths.

"Magic is… powered by will… In other words… all will is magic. When you thought 'I'm going to stab this' and brought it down… that intent… became magic."

"… I see. So you'd need to subtract that value to actually block it. Huh. Well, sorry about that."

Without a trace of remorse, Innis gave a breezy apology while running her hand along the bolt again. As she did, she floated her sofa over to where I lay on the floor.

"… What are you… planning…?"

"I was just wondering how much mana gets added by my intent."

"That'd be… hard to measure. The intent probably only manifests the instant you bring it down…"

Innis's mana gauge took several seconds to register a reading. It wouldn't be fast enough to capture intent riding on a bolt mid-swing.

"Oh come on, Mentor."

But Innis just smiled sweetly.

"I can just keep reducing the mana a little at a time and repeat until it stops going in."

 

＊　＊　＊

 

"Hmm. The results are way too inconsistent depending on how I stab. Not very useful!"

"After turning me into a pincushion, that's what you have to show for it…"

I lay sprawled out, grumbling bitterly.

The experiment of reducing the bolt's mana incrementally and stabbing my coat each time had yielded maddeningly inconsistent results. Sometimes it pierced through, sometimes it didn't. Innis's intent to stab seemed to register at roughly ten to thirty on the mana scale, but the value depended entirely on her state of mind.

Even a forceful swing sometimes bounced off, while a gentle push sometimes went right through. To her credit, after that first time Innis held back enough to avoid actually injuring me, but it still hurt.

"Now, now. A necessary sacrifice for the advancement of sorcery, Mentor."

With that, Innis murmured a brief incantation to recharge the bolt with mana, measured it with the gauge, nodded, and held it suspended above me. Then she let it slip from her fingertips.

The bolt dropped onto my coat and… far from piercing it, far from even slightly deforming the soft fabric, it bounced off and rolled across the floor.

"That's a bolt at a pure mana value of ninety-seven."

Free fall. No intent from Innis riding on it. The fact that the fabric hadn't so much as dented proved that a magically imbued object couldn't be affected by anything with less mana than itself.

"You could have just done that from the start."

"But now we know that even ordinary, everyday actions carry mana. Look at all the great research that came out of it."

Innis grinned smugly.

"Indeed, this is a monumental discovery."

I flashed her a bright smile of my own.

"So let's name the unit of mana after you. The Innis. My coat registers at ninety-eight Innis. Congratulations, Innis. Just like your husband's great-aunt, your name will go down in history."

"Absolutely not!"

In my previous life, naming engineering units after people was perfectly common. Henry, Pascal, and so on. For a researcher, it was presumably the highest honor imaginable, and yet Innis refused with every fiber of her being.

"I'm going to be the one using that unit more than anyone else! How am I supposed to keep a straight face saying my own name over and over!?"

For Innis, a natural recluse with zero desire for fame, it was nothing but a punishment game. Well, I'd known that when I suggested it.

"Speaking of husbands, how have things been going with Ara late—"

I was just about to tease her further when it happened.

"… What is this?"

A sensation I had never felt before jolted me upright.

"What's the matter, Mentor?"

Innis peered at my face, puzzled.

"What isn't the matter!"

I shouted, leaning out the window to scan the sky. Nothing visible. No alarm bells. But my body felt it, unmistakably.

"… It's coming."

Where was I sensing it from? How did I know? My instinct had bypassed every intermediary and delivered the answer whole.

"Coming? What's coming…?"

Shaken by the gravity in my voice, Innis asked with mounting dread.

"A dragon."

But what bore down on us was something no amount of dread could prepare for.