The Hero’s party sprinted along under the blue sky of the real world, not a speck of red above them, and discovered a horse-shaped mirror running amok near the Arzyna Kingdom.
Lara frowned as she observed the cracked mirror. “What a pain. Although this thing operates almost exactly the same as the mirror horse we fought during the great war, it’s going to take more than just breaking it to fix things. If we shatter it, we risk the simulations inside of it leaking out into reality.”
“Ugh.” Max also had a terribly sour expression.
“The only way to resolve this is to get in there right now and stop the core.”
“Will it be a two-way trip, I hope?”
“I can manage it.”
“Hmm. Are there any areas of concern?”
“As we make our way through, we’ll need to fix the calculations that make us lose the great war in their simulation, so it will be quite the workout. The Garden of the Summit, the Rin Kingdom’s capital, and the Boiling Mountain are all facing collapse.”
Stein nodded at Lara’s concise explanation, but her last words had made him turn his head, baffled.
“Oh my,” Elrica said with a hint of surprise.
“Tsk.” Max clicked his tongue and frowned intensely.
The Boiling Mountain was Stein’s old home, while the capital of the Rin Kingdom was the birthplace of Max, a former member of royalty. As for the place known as the Garden of the Summit, it was the headquarters and holy ground of the religious forces, and most importantly, it was where Elrica had been born. Even though it was only in a simulation, it was hard for the three of them to remain calm when places so important to them were on the verge of collapse.
“Hic. Then let’s just quickly go and get this over with,” Sazaki suggested, drinking all the while.
“That’s right,” Ferd agreed, as advancing in a straight line was the only strategy he knew of.
“Let’s do it, then.” Lara, who was strangely hot-blooded despite dwelling in the abyss of magic, also nodded. She activated her magic, isolating the mirror from the outside world and entering inside.
“Well, well, what a strange place.” Ferd entered the mirror and the world of its calculations, gazing at the space within, which was filled with mirrors of various sizes.
The group went past a mirror fragment depicting the battle of Greer, which had just been calculated, but as a tiny mirror piece passed next to them showing the results of the calculations of Franz displaying the brilliance of man, they heard that voice.
“That’s right, boy! Well done! You did great! That is the light of life!”
“Perhaps we should hurry...”
“Indeed...”
Ferd and Elrica felt exasperated at the familiar voice that they’d never wanted to hear again. In fact, every member of the Hero’s party looked fed up.
“It’s nothing but an imitation. But yes, we should probably hurry... There it is, the Garden of the Summit.”
In the space with various small mirrors dancing all around, a rather large mirror depicted a scene taking place on an old battlefield. It was a surprise attack on the mortals’ most important base launched by the Great Demon King, which would later be labeled the decisive battle of the Garden of the Summit and should have ended with the victory of the living. However, that result was about to be reversed. The holy ground, located in the mountains of the northern part of the continent, with various blooming flowers decorating large, white temples, was burning red.
“O Lord!”
“Bring us salvation!”
“We’re getting pushed back!”
“Call for reinforcements!”
Priests using the power of prayer and temple knights clad in white armor were desperately fighting back. Since this was the holiest location in the entire continent, the church possessed powerful military strength, but they were being pushed into more and more of an unfavorable situation.
“That accursed dragon!” A high priest was glaring at the sky, where a black dragon soared overhead.
“Huh? Isn’t that Ka Ru? I took him down, didn’t I? Why is he alive?” Max wondered as he looked at the flying dragon in the large mirror approaching them.
“Because you probably died first here,” Lara replied, raising even more questions for him.
“What?!”
“I already told you. This is a simulation where we are defeated.”
Ka Ru, the Dragon of Darkness, whose entire body was jet-black and even larger than a fortress, was the natural enemy of all religious forces. His unreasonable and illogical powers specialized in unequivocally erasing the gods’ power of light, leaving the temple soldiers who fought using the power of god unable to defeat him no matter how hard they fought. However, in reality Max had killed Ka Ru in the battle right before the decisive battle at the Garden of the Summit, so the dragon shouldn’t have been here. In other words, in this scenario it was possible that Max, the cause of Ka Ru’s death, hadn’t been involved with him for some reason—which would have been the case if Max had already died.
“I’m not there... Could it be that the front line didn’t manage to hold out so the fine-tuning on my construction hadn’t been finished in time?” There was one more difference. Elrica, whose final adjustments should have finished in the small opening when the situation in battle had improved a little, wasn’t there either.
“Maybe.”
“All right, we’re going in.” With the mirror finally reaching them, Lara gave the signal for them to start.
“Okay!” Ferd poured his strength into his sword.
Ka Ru, the Dragon of Darkness, had thought that he held absolute superiority over light, but he had been unaware that there was a domain he couldn’t reach.
“Light, come forth!”
“Augh! Light?!” The Garden of the Summit glowed bright, and Ka Ru was dazzled by the unexpected brilliance from the geezer who had plunged into the mirror.
Red clouds, a red sky, red heavens; even though the Hero had fought his hardest to turn them back to normal, the sky was the same bloodred as in the past.
“All right, let’s go.”
What Ka Ru was facing wasn’t the light of the sealed gods... Although the final battle had been an exception, Ferd the Hero, whose mental state was currently the same as in his prime, illuminated the world with a light that wasn’t derived from the gods, but from the people.
Hey, been a while. At the same time, the blue Dragonsbane Knight, who’d defeated all the evil dragons, cut through the air to attack Ka Ru. The blue ring shining on Max’s finger screamed in a high-pitched voice that only he could hear. This Ka Ru was but an imitation created by the calculations, but it didn’t matter; the ring still told Max to go kill him right away.
Responding to the plea of his practically cursed equipment, Max flew into the sky the moment he entered the mirror. The very fact that he was flying was already far from ordinary. The sky was the domain of the gods, dragons, and birds; flight magic was so unbelievably difficult that even Lara found it tedious to do more than simply float. However, since Max had dragon blood running through his veins, he operated a bit outside of human logic, and he’d only needed footholds until the middle of the great war. Having fought through the final battle, Max was no longer bound by the laws of gravity and magic.
“What?! I was told that you died!”
Don’t go killing me off just yet! The Dragonsbane Knight leaped into the sky with the sun at his back and unleashed his full power, cursing at the first true dragon he was fighting in seventy years, rather than an imitation from a dungeon.
I haven’t gone all out in over half a century! I hope I haven’t grown weaker! Max had traveled from place to place, running into all kinds of trouble, but there still hadn’t been an opportunity for him to use his full power. He hoped that his skills hadn’t grown dull. Of course, he had no reason to worry about that. Someone who so easily lost their edge would never have kept up against the Great Demon King in the first place.
Max was enveloped by pure blue inside his armor. Unlike the halfway transformation he’d adopted back in the dungeon, he was now a complete dragon-man. A torrent of power surged out of him like lightning and covered the sky.
Wh-What is this power?! How is he surpassing the blue one’s strength?! Ka Ru was shocked by his enemy’s unbelievable power; it truly was an earth-shattering event for him.
Ka Ru had realized that Max had been granted the power of the blue dragon who protected the Rin Kingdom, but common sense dictated that it was unthinkable for the person receiving power to surpass the one who had bestowed it upon them. Especially since the recipient of that power was a mere monkey, a species far inferior to the dark dragons. This was truly mind-boggling to Ka Ru. But this wasn’t the Max from the middle of the great war, when the decisive battle at the Garden of the Summit had originally taken place. This Max was the man who’d broken through his limits at the very end, during the final showdown against the Great Demon King, and reached the peak not only with the power of a dragon but also with the power of a human.