Before long, Theodore reached the city where, as the villagers had warned him, the residents had been mentally broken. He saw people lying on the roadside, unmoving, as if they were dead. He saw people attacking others for no reason, completely frenzied, and victims of such abuse taking it all without doing anything to protect themselves. There were also people drawing mysterious symbols on the ground, paying no attention to anything around them. They might have been living like that for hundreds or even thousands of years.
Theodore was filled with apprehension at the possibility that he might end up like those people, too.
“I want to go back to a world where I can die.”
A beautiful girl whom Theodore met in the city told him that. Her eyes were already lifeless—she was one of the broken. Her existence was a vicious circle of being held captive and used for others’ amusement until they got bored of her. Every time she escaped, someone else would enslave her.
“You need to become stronger,” Theodore told her.
He taught her how to use a sword.
The sun never set in the tower world. Even without eating or drinking, people didn’t die. They couldn’t die. They had endless time on their hands.
“The sword can solve your problems. Master it, and you will become the master of your life.”
They trained together, day after day, year after year, tirelessly. Sometimes, they sparred together. Theodore had nothing else to teach the girl.
With unlimited time to refine his skills and no need to worry about becoming too worn out from continuous training, Theodore thought he couldn’t have asked for a better world to have found himself in.
One day, for the first time in half a century, the girl smiled.
“There’s a village south of here. If you ever grow tired of our training sessions, you could go live there instead of the city,” Theodore said to her as they were practicing.
“No—that’s the village of liars. And you fell for their lies, too, letting them take your armor.”
She laughed, and Theodore swore to himself he’d never leave his sword, no matter what anyone said to him.
It took about five years of training for the girl to become so strong, she could overpower anyone who’d attack her in the city. The broken learned to leave her alone.
“It’s time for me to go,” Theodore said to her, gazing upward.
The beautiful girl didn’t tell him to stay. After those five years, she knew him well enough not to.
“If you keep going that way, you’ll find a gate guarded by a holy beast. You must defeat it for the gate to open—at least, that’s what I heard, but nobody here has managed to defeat the beast, so it could well be a lie.”
Theodore found a large, heavy gate with a lion in front of it. The girl had secretly wished for him to fail so that she’d see him again, but she knew how powerful Theodore was. He won, and the gate opened. Theodore found a stairway behind it and climbed to the floor above.
From then on, Theodore kept traveling higher and higher up the tower, defeating holy beasts to earn his passage. He went through a world with nothing but water, and a world of ice and fire. One of the holy beasts he fought was in human form. The Night Serpent stuck in his memory as a particularly tough opponent. When he had slain the Great Ice Wolf, he absorbed the beast into his body, its power becoming his own. He kept climbing higher and higher, becoming stronger as he went. He had to reach the top to finally become satisfied with himself.
“This one’s strange…”
After climbing the tower for what seemed like eternity, Theodore still hadn’t reached the top, but he found a floor unlike any other. It was completely empty. It wasn’t a self-contained world like the other floors; it was just an empty space with a massive hole on one side. It seemed to open to the world outside the tower.
“Did something fall out of the tower into my world?”
Since he didn’t find a holy beast on that floor, Theodore could only assume that the beast had broken a hole in the tower’s wall and jumped out of it. He stuck his head through the hole and looked up, but he still couldn’t see the top of the tower.
Theodore had never given up halfway on any task he’d taken on, but if the holy beast had escaped the tower, the kingdom he’d left to his hero friends to protect might be in danger.
Without second thoughts, he leaped through the hole in the wall, back into the world where time flowed and people died. But Theodore wasn’t really thinking ahead.
A few years passed.
Since his return from the tower, Theodore hadn’t aged one day. He didn’t feel hunger or thirst, but he was unusually sleepy. In fact, he was spending more time asleep than awake.
✦ ✦ ✦
In Dragonglory Year 105, something dropped from the sky near a certain small village, flattening a long swath of woodland as it tumbled down until it stuck deep into the ground. A villager went to investigate and discovered that the “thing” was a human. To the villagers’ amazement, the human stood up as if they were perfectly fine.
“Ah, good to see a fellow human,” the man from the sky said.
He was holding a sword and was completely naked. His fall had laid waste to the nearby land, but eerily, the man didn’t have as much as a scratch on him.
“You can speak? Where did you fall from?”
“The tower.”
“You must be a god, then,” the villager said, assuming the man must have been confused, having suffered a concussion after falling from a tree, perhaps.
In the span of the one thousand and four hundred years since the heroes defeated the demon lord, their kingdom had been through wars, but it’d been thriving nonetheless. Monsters had been culled until near extinction, and humans spread through the land, building new towns and cities and founding new countries.
A hundred and five years before Theodore jumped out of the tower, the name of the era was changed to Dragonglory to signify the dominance over the land going from the hands of humans to the claws of dragons.
“Dragons appeared all over the kingdom a hundred years ago, and they are now the rulers?”
“Yes. The high-caste dragons can assume human form, but to them, we are food. They leave us alone for the most part, as long as we provide them offerings—sacrificial humans for them to devour. If we fail to do so, they burn down our towns.”
Humans were living in fear again, just like they had when the demon lord roamed the land. Theodore surmised that the dragons must have come from the tower. He reflected that the demon lord had also appeared out of the blue. Perhaps he, too, was one of the holy beasts from the tower?
“Can’t have you walking around stark naked. Take this.”
The villager gave Theodore a brown robe and traveler’s clothes. Theodore put them on and started walking toward the kingdom’s capital.
“I will slay the dragons,” he announced.
The villager panicked. “Careful what you say, or you’ll be branded a traitor and sacrificed to the dragons! Even speaking of opposing them is a crime!”
Theodore turned to the man. “I will slay the dragons. Humans deserve to live in dignity.”
The decisiveness in his voice made the villager swallow back words of protest. The villager dared to imagine a world without dragons—a world where humans thrived.
“Let me tell you this, then. It’s impossible to kill all the dragons—they are far too numerous. If you truly wish to fight them, go after their kings. There are five of them, and they breed all the lesser dragons. Even a single dragon king has the power to destroy an entire country with the flap of its wings… I really cannot imagine how a human might rival them.”
“Do not worry.” Theodore rested his sword against his shoulder and smiled at the man. “As long as I live, I will fight for what I believe in.”