It was then that Alec felt the tiniest of incongruences. His brow furrowed, though he could not immediately identify what it was that felt so out of place. He thought of the dragon, and the constant barrage of magic it was attacking them with.
Fire, earth, wind, fire, earth, wind, fire, ice, fire...
The monster was even capable of unleashing powerful magical energies that brought on dark hallucinations. And now, once again, it was launching fireballs at them.
“Ah, so that’s it...” Alec muttered. “For a so-called legendary ice dragon, it doesn’t actually use much ice magic.”
It wasn’t just that either—fire magic was traditionally an ice-elemental magical beast’s weakness, but the dragon seemed very fond of it. Alec’s words seemed to lead Shiori to her own realization, and she gasped.
“That’s it, Alec!” she exclaimed. “The fact that it was sealed away in an ice lake... Don’t you think that’s odd?”
“What is?”
“If it is an ice dragon, how would plunging it into an ice bath put it to sleep?”
Being placed at the bottom of a deep lake—surrounded by thick chunks of ice—should have been akin to heaven for an ice dragon. And yet it had remained trapped and unable to move, asleep for nigh on two hundred years before it had been released. Alec’s eyes went wide. He felt as if the truth were hovering right there before him—both the dragon’s weakness, and its true form.
“The way it’s been asleep here for so long,” continued Shiori, “it’s like it was in hibernation. And if that’s the case, the dragon’s affinity isn’t ice, because it’s clearly vulnerable to it. Which means...”
“Its element is fire!” exclaimed Alec. “It’s a fire dragon!”
Alec thought it likely the dragon was a crossbreed between an earth dragon and a fire dragon, with the appearance of the former and the temperament of the latter.
“So the element it’s hiding deep in the darkness of its core...is fire?”
Wrapped deep in that seemingly boundless magical energy was the element of fire, and yet to gaze upon it was to lay eyes upon the king of ice monsters.
No, Alec thought. It was deliberately made to appear that way.
It was an earth dragon with an affinity for fire, made to live in an icy lake. Over many long years, a preconceived notion about the creature had developed, then solidified—that the dragon trapped in the lake was itself the most feared of ice monsters.
And all of this had been done to offer the Empire’s descendants one last ace to play.
“This blood...” Shiori said, her voice shaking as she touched the liquid that had sprayed across Alec’s armor. “It’s probably ice-aspected.”
It was a fleeting, near-imperceptible sensation that was difficult to read while within the natural chill of the area. However, Shiori could feel it all the same—the cool chill of ice in the blood on her fingers.
“Perhaps it was fed with ice magic crystals crushed into dust and mixed with its food...or perhaps a blood transfusion from an ice dragon,” mused Nils. “I don’t know how they did it, but they hid the dragon’s natural elemental affinity by the use of ice elemental blood.”
There was rage boiling in the herbalist’s every word. It was like he could see the smirking researchers who had done all of this to the unfortunate dragon—a magical beast made into a symbol for the very thing that it was not. In their minds, these imagined researchers’ evil smiles felt like those of the nobility in the Imperial capital, and it was enough to make them all sick.
“The dragon is a force to be reckoned with,” added Zack, wiping the blood from his face, “but I did think there was something strangely dull about the way it was moving. If your hypothesis is correct, it all makes sense—the dragon isn’t meant for a climate like this, and that’s why it’s instinctively looking to move elsewhere.”
The guild master’s expression was stern, but there was pity in his eyes.
“What’s our next move?” asked Alec. “Should we hit it with ice magic? All things going well, we might even put it to sleep.”
It was anything but a certainty. Still, Zack nodded.
“Let’s do it. But we have to hit it with enough magic to freeze an entire lake in summer. Look at how well it moves even in this environment. If we hit it, we have to hit it hard.”
The section of the lake from which the dragon had broken free had already frozen over. Just how cold was it down there?
“We freeze it up to the neck,” Zack decided. “We’ll put all the mages on it, and have them fire at the same time. Then we take the head off the old-fashioned way.”
Everybody was in agreement—they’d already exhausted all their other options.
“Linus,” he continued, “let everyone know that the target is likely fire-aspected, and we’re going to attempt a full freeze up to the neck.”
“I’m on it!”
The archer bounded across the battlefield. When the message was delivered, the adventurers and knights let up and, for a brief moment, halted their attack. The dragon, too, stopped moving, confused by the sudden change in tactics.
“Nadia, now!” shouted Zack.
“Cast away!” shouted Nadia.
In the next instant, a huge open pit swallowed the dragon, and it fell to the bottom with a loud thump. The monster quickly lifted its head up and out of the pit, very disgruntled by its sudden fall. It bared its fangs and regarded the surrounding humans venomously. But in that same instant, the mages and the mage knights were already casting their freeze magic in a vortex, with the giant magical beast at its center.
Crackling sounds echoed through the air as the ice dragon—which had now been revealed to be a fire dragon—was suddenly encased in a giant slab of ice. It cried out viciously, shuddering as the humans’ strategy revealed itself. The dragon writhed and struggled with everything it had to break free, but its efforts were in vain, and its movements dulled as it began to be lulled into a sleep that was near impossible for it to resist.
With another deafening roar, the dragon fought against encroaching slumber, and magical energy burst from its being. It was a toxic, darkly colored magic that seemed to well up from the very pit of the dragon’s heart like a scream.
I’m so sad, so alone. I don’t want to be here, I just want to be somewhere warm. I don’t want to go back to the bottom of that lonely lake. I refuse!
The wills of the humans were shaken, withering before the outburst.
“Stand strong!” barked Zack, his words like a flame in the darkness. “Pity has no place on the battlefield! Sympathize with your enemies and death awaits!”
His fiery red hair was a mess as he shouted, and if one had been watching closely, they would have seen the hint of tears in the corners of his eyes.
“Save your sympathy for when we’re done!” shouted Alec. “Focus on the task at hand! The dragon must be slain!”