Chapter 19: Hole

「Brings back memories. Come to think of it, the first time I met Dalga was also when we went to hunt a Behemoth.」
「With Founder-sama?」

As we walked along the prairie road, I nodded to Yuuki, who was walking at my side.
The way to look for a Behemoth is the old-fashioned way: track its footprints. Even if you can fly, combing an entire vast prairie is hard, and not even a dragon’s eyes can pick out footprints from the sky.
So the two of us walked side by side, following the faint traces left on the ground.

「Yeah. We ended up fighting over the kill. It got a bit messy, but in the end we became friends.」

He called me Aniki and looked up to me, but to me there was never a pecking order between us.
A best friend—if I can call it that, then that’s what we were closest to.
Nina is of course an irreplaceable friend too, but what I had with him felt like a different kind of friendship.

「What kind of person was Founder-sama?」
「Hmm...」

I thought for a moment, then said,

「He looked just like Amata does now.」

When he was little he was so adorable you could mistake him for a girl, and then—somehow—Amata shot up into a dashing young man... and kept right on going, growing into a hulking brute of a man. The way he stays mild-mannered and polite makes it all the funnier.

「Every now and then, right? There are kids who grow up like a throwback and end up looking just like Dalga.」

And it wasn’t limited to boys or girls. I looked her over again and thought how glad I was Yuuki hadn’t taken after him.
Unlike Amata, she hadn’t gotten much taller. If I recall, when we measured the other day she was a hundred forty-five centimeters. Even in this world, that’s on the short side for a twenty-year-old woman.

Her guileless, lively personality was almost the same as ever, but the boyishness she once had was completely gone. Maybe it was the hair that, even tied in twin tails, now fell to about her waist...

Or maybe it was the way her chest made its presence loudly known.

「Hm?」

Noticing my gaze, Yuuki turned and smiled. It was so grown-up it made my heart skip, and I hurriedly averted my eyes.

「Ah, there it is, Onii-chan!」

And then, tug-tugging at my clothes as she squealed about spotting a Behemoth, she was a child again. Like a pendulum, people swing between adult and child and, little by little, grow older. And in doing so, all of them—leave me behind.

「Onii-chan?」
「Yeah. Let’s go.」

I hastily nodded to her as she peered up at me in puzzlement.
That’s something I’ve known, all along, forever.

「’Kay!」

Yuuki nodded and leapt onto my back. The feel of that soft body pressing to me was embarrassingly flustering. I hurried to shift back into my dragon form.

Just like Rin said, Behemoths really don’t run. If they’re hurt they’ll try to flee, but a person getting close won’t so much as make them twitch. Well, with that bulk and that ironhide, I suppose other carnivores are nothing to be afraid of.

Even when a fire dragon appeared right in front of it, the Behemoth didn’t try to run at all—maybe because I was smaller than it was. Bold, or just set in its ways... and because of that it gets hunted so easily it’s almost fair to call it a dunce.

「All right, Yuuki—if you would.」
「Mm-hm!」

Nodding, Yuuki straddled my head and raised her spear.

「O, thou long, thou keen, thou that piercest all! If thou art the peerless spear, miss not thy mark and let none ward thee—become a single shining star!」

The spear left her hand with the spell and, just as sung, trailed a shining tail as it struck the Behemoth square in the rump. With a muffled grunt, the Behemoth lumbered into motion.

It thought it was... running away, I suppose, but those legs churned far too slowly. Its body is massive, so the raw speed was decent enough, yet there was nothing hurried about it at all.

「Nina, can you hear me? We found a Behemoth. We’re going to drive it your way now.」

Chasing after the Behemoth as it sort-of-jogged—no, walked—along, I opened a line with magic.

「Got it. But you’re off—more to the left.」

Uh, since when could she casually backtrace our position like that?
Well, it’s Nina—what else can I say...

Following Nina’s nav, having Yuuki throw her spear a few more times to tweak the Behemoth’s heading as we herded it along, we finally saw a colossal wall rearing up on the horizon: the wooden pen Nina had made.

Of course, a plain pen would be smashed apart in no time, so we’d built in a few tricks to prevent that: long, spear-like logs grown all along the interior.

If it tried to charge, there’d be no avoiding getting stuck by them. Whether they’d really pierce that ironlike hide was doubtful, but Yuuki’s throws had already taught it how much sharp points hurt. We were counting on that caution to make it hold back.

「It went in!」

With fine course corrections, we drove the Behemoth into the pen. I’d worried the pen might be a bit too tight for its body, but it went in nicely enough. Then, perhaps wary of the rows of spear-like spikes lining the inside, it stopped the legs it had been moving.

Did we... get it?

The very next instant, the Behemoth gaped its mouth wide, clamped down on one of the jutting timbers, and started crunching away with a crackle and a grind.
Then it bit into the pen itself and, after happily munching it down, sauntered off. All we could do was watch in silence.

「...Behemoths... eat wood...?」

On my back, Yuuki murmured in a daze.

「Right...」

I realized I didn’t even know what Behemoths ate.
In that case, even if we caught one, there’d be no way to keep it.

「Well... if it eats wood, at least we won’t have trouble finding feed.」
「So in other words, you’re still not giving up.」

Nina said, sounding exasperated, to my muttered aside.

「No, I kind of feel like this could work.」

Everything else had bolted without a second thought. But the Behemoth, at least, had stopped. It felt a lot more manageable than deer or goats.

「For example, we could make it out of wood so hard a Behemoth can’t chew it...」
「Nina-sensei, can you make wood harder than that?」
「Nope.」

Hearing my idea, Sig asked, and Nina shot it down without hesitation.
The wooden pen hadn’t been made by felling trees from the forest; Nina had conjured it with magic. Cutting and hauling enough timber to pen a Behemoth was beyond us in the short term, but with the power of the “dropout” Nina, it wasn’t that hard.
If she said it was impossible, then it was.

「What if we made it wood that tastes bad, even if it eats it...」
「Then it’d just spit it out without swallowing and break it anyway, wouldn’t it?」
「How about putting the spikes much closer together?」
「Thin spikes probably won’t hurt it. Behemoths are tough as it is.」
「What if someone stood in front of the pen and poked it with a spear when it came near?」
「And who’s going to do that job...?」

Luka, Violet-san, and Yuuki tossed out ideas one after another, and Sig shot them all down. Not that he was just nitpicking, though.

「Then how about, not wood—use stone?」
「You’d never find stones that big anywhere... no, wait, using stone just for the tips might work—like a real spear. What do you think?」

After mulling over Rin’s suggestion a bit, Sig turned to me and asked that.
Lately I’ve noticed he’s extremely good at teasing out flaws in a rough idea, plugging the gaps, and building it into something practical. Rin tosses out flexible notions; Sig shapes them. It’s a scene we’ve been seeing more and more.

「Stone might not have the durability...」
「So it won’t work, huh...」

I thought it was a good idea, Sig muttered, shoulders drooping.
But I was thinking something completely different.

「Put the other way around, if we can just solve the durability, we’re good. If we had something harder, tougher, and sharper than stone...」
「Does something like that even exist?」
「It does.」

I knew it existed.

Metal.

「The problem is... I don’t know how we’d get our hands on it.」

I’d thought before about moving from stone tools to bronze implements. Though I don’t even know if this world has copper.
But I had no idea how you were supposed to dig it out of a mine. You can’t exactly dig rock with a wooden pickaxe, and stone tools wouldn’t cut it either.
I figured you’d need metal tools to dig—but then you hit the chicken-or-egg problem.
How on Earth had they done it?

「Do you know where it is?」
「Yeah. In the mountains... I mean, inside them. You dig into a mountain and it comes out—from inside, I think.」

And even that wasn’t certain. What kind of mountains gave iron or copper, and which didn’t? I had no knowledge whatsoever like that.

「‘You think’? ...Well, if making a hole in a mountain makes it come out, then we just have to go get some.」
「Where?」

At my question, Nina smoothly pointed behind me.
Towering there was a grand mountain—the one we called Hole Mountain.

The name’s simple enough: there’s a gaping, tunnel-like hole in its middle slope.

「Ah...」

And I’m the one who opened that hole.
About five hundred years ago. To be precise, five hundred and eight.

It was the gaping hole I blasted open with dragon breath when I lost my temper in the fight with Dalga.