Chapter 23: Reaching

Dragon Era 698

The seasons turned, time flashed by, and its torrent carried everything away.

「Okay, here we gooo!」

At the village outskirts, beside the road that runs south.
Under everyone’s watch, Ruful raised a massive iron hammer and declared.

「Haaah!」

The hammer, metal down to the haft, slammed into the ground with a thunderous boom and shook the earth.
In truth it wasn’t a hammer but, so to speak, a giant stamp.
Brought down, the stamp pressed the carved pattern on its face into the ground, inscribing an impromptu magic circle on the earth.

Immediately a small shadow fluttered down onto the circle.
Tia.

「Awake!」

She pressed her small palm to the circle and spoke the activation word.
In an instant, as if unfolding origami, the ground split open to form a trench, then packed itself firm and paved over like stonework.

At its beauty I involuntarily caught my breath. No one but Tia could deploy magic this perfectly.

The opened trench linked the reservoir to the canal, and water began to flow into it. It should connect all the way to the bay where the merfolk live—so far off that even a dragon’s eyes couldn’t see that far.

「We did it!」
「Congratulations!」
「It really took forever, huh.」

A roar of cheers went up at once.
A grand project to link Hiiro and the merfolk’s bay with a canal.
That great endeavor, spanning decades, was now complete.

「You did it, Ruful!」
「Tia!」

The tiny woman raised her palm to the huge girl who still retained a touch of childhood.
Ruful, with no restraint at all, slapped her own hand against that palm.

「Will you ease up a little already! Are you trying to squash me!?」

She slipped past the wall-like hand and smacked her palm to Ruful’s fingertips, shouting her usual complaints even as a smile played on her lips.

Both their laughing faces were caked with mud.

Enchantment—the magic of carving characters and activating them—has one chief feature: you can split the intent, the meaning, and the will required for magic and assign them separately.
The intent lies with the carver. The meaning lies in the carved characters. And the will is entrusted to the one who activates it.

In cooking terms, the intent is the recipe, the meaning the ingredients, and the will is like the cook.
Even with the same recipe and the same ingredients, the cook’s skill can make the taste vary greatly.
And Tia was, beyond doubt, a first-rate chef. Perhaps because of her small body, the precision and delicacy of her magic were second to none.

Ruful put her giant body to work swinging the hammer and carved enormous runes for enchantment.
Tia activated them and unfolded canals of the utmost fineness.

By combining their strengths, the great work was accomplished.

「We somehow made it in time, didn’t we…」
「Don’t jinx it.」

At Light Blue’s relieved-sounding remark, I couldn’t help but grimace.

Seated in her wheelchair gazing at the canal, the wrinkles etched on her face were plain to any eye now.
Her hair, once like spun gold thread, had lost all color to white; it was unrecognizable now.
Since losing Yutaka the year before last, she seemed to have aged all the more.

「Yeah! Mom, you’ve gotta stay spry for a long time yet, okay?」

Yuuka puffed out her cheeks and grumbled; in contrast to Light Blue, she still looked as youthful as ever.

「Well now… with Ruu-chan and the others done with the canal, the only thing I’ve got left to regret is not seeing my grandchild’s face.」
「Then you’ll need to live at least another hundred years for that.」

Yuuka proclaimed it as if in triumph.

As a child she’d been the spitting image of Yuuki, but not so much now. If anything, with that red hair grown down to her waist, her features somewhat resembled a young Light Blue.

In other words, she was quite a beauty—and quite popular in the village—but for all that, there wasn’t even a single romance to speak of.

She herself says she likes dependable older men. Thirty years ago, when she still looked her age, that was one thing, but now there aren’t many unmarried men older than her… give it another twenty years and they’ll be extinct.

For the record, without my asking she’s already told me, “Sensei, you are older, but…” Consider me deeply aggrieved.

「…All right, it’s done—let’s go home. This will wear on your body.」
「Mm. You’re right.」

Nina tugged my arm and I nodded.
The winter chill had deepened yet again; it must bite hard for Light Blue now.
I was just about to take her wheelchair when the canal suddenly heaved in a great swell.

「What!?」

No way a mermaid got here already… We’d only just started the flow—it was far too soon. The water shouldn’t even have reached the bay yet.

Yet clearly something large was moving underwater. I knew of no beast that could go through flowing water—however gentle the current—without surfacing for breath.

Nina seemed to feel the same; we stared fixedly at the surface, nerves taut. Yuuka stepped in front of Light Blue to shield her and put a hand to the stone sword at her waist.

Suddenly I felt a sense of déjà vu. It was like this had happened before…
Ah.

「I’m baaaack!」
「Look out!」

Wood bullets fired by Nina, Tia’s flames, and Yuuka’s sword flash all flew toward the shadow that burst up from the water. Almost at the same time I lunged forward and charged the figure that appeared.

「Huh!?」

Whose startled voice was that? Without even knowing, I hurled myself at her—at Rin. In human form my body is only as sturdy as a human’s, but the coat I wear is another matter.

The Scale Armor, formed from transformed dragon scales, deflected every one of Nina and the others’ attacks. Feeling the impacts thud into my back, I wrapped my arms around her soft body—

—and with too much momentum, tumbled into the canal together with Rin.


* * *


「Man, that scared me!」
「That’s my line!」

To Rin’s blithe remark, Nina arched her willow brows and smeared ointment on my back.
After we soothed the apologizing Yuuka and made it home, I stripped off my soaked clothes to find my back swollen in a straight line.

「Nina, a little gentler, please…」
「And you were the one being reckless! There, all done!」

When I couldn’t help but complain at the merciless way she rubbed the salve in, she smacked me and I let out a small yelp.

The Scale Armor is extremely tough and doesn’t conduct heat, but it doesn’t absorb every impact. Get hit with a metal rod over that soft fabric and some of the damage will get through.

It was bad luck that I’d been behind Light Blue shielding her. Nina and Tia had held back somewhat, but Yuuka’s strike was aimed to finish the target in one blow—if I hadn’t stepped in, Rin’s torso might’ve been cleaved clean in two.

Thank goodness Ruful hadn’t joined the attack. Cautious as she is, she’d hung back to watch—but if she’d hit me with that great hammer, I’d probably be dead even with the Scale Armor.

「Yuuka was so tiny, and now she’s so strong—wow.」

Despite having just about been split in two, Rin said it blithely.

「I’m surprised you knew that was Yuuka.」

Nina had a point. If I recalled, Rin had set out on her travels when Yuuka was about five.

「Huh? That much I can tell. Light Blue’s changed a lot too, but I’m glad she still looks lively. As for Yutaka… I’m sorry.」
「You’re the one at fault for not keeping in touch.」

She was probably angry about both Rin missing Yutaka’s funeral and today’s stunt. Rin had sent messages almost daily for the first ten years, but—as expected—they’d cut off abruptly one day.

My scale‑mediated communication magic is handy, but it has one flaw: I can’t target a specific scale from my side. I’ve given shards to dozens of people, and calling out connects to all of them. If the other side speaks first, we can talk one-on-one just fine, though.

「About that—Sensei’s scale seems to have broken.」

Rin said this as she rummaged in her bag and took out a scale.

「Broken?」
「It just suddenly stopped connecting.」

The scale she produced didn’t have so much as a crack. Nina still uses a scale I gave her nearly seven hundred years ago—it shouldn’t break that easily.

「Let me see… Can you hear me?」

Nina took the scale from Rin and whispered with her lips close; besides the air‑vibrating sound, her voice resonated directly in my skull.

「I can hear you fine. And… looks like my voice is getting through, too.」

Focusing on it, I spoke out loud; the scale quivered and reproduced my voice exactly.

「Huh?」
「If it’s not age deterioration… maybe there’s a distance limit. Rin, how far did you go?」

The farthest we’ve tested is probably between the lizardman settlement and the merfolk bay. We never surveyed precisely, but it should work over a few hundred kilometers.

「Ummm… here’s our village, and over here is Sig’s. There’s a mountain here, a river here, follow it all the way, and around here is the giants’ settlement…」

As she spoke, Rin sketched a rough map on paper. Her lines didn’t waver, and within the region I knew the relations were roughly right. Soon she was drawing places unknown to me, and the map covered an area many times wider than I’d ever traveled.

「It was around here that I stopped being able to get through.」

She pointed to the middle of the map as she said it—on a straight line extending from Hiiro to Sig’s settlement, maybe about a thousand kilometers out.

「You went awfully far.」
「Yeah. There were even villages that said anything nonhuman was an enemy—it really shocked me.」
「Were you all right?」
「Mm-hm. I did this.」

With a single stroke of her hand, her tail turned into human legs and the ear fins on her face changed to human ears.

「So you went disguised as a human?」

Rin nodded vigorously at Nina’s question. It was a splendid transformation spell, though apparently she still couldn’t speak while in that form.

「Elves are the same, so we can’t exactly judge, but some villages are really closed off.」
「Ours is probably the odd one out, though.」

From the very beginning ours has been a village that coexists with a dragon. Compared to that, elves and giants look more human and probably blend in more easily.

「Still, I didn’t expect to get, “Monster! Get out!” yelled at me and have rocks and spears thrown just for getting close.」
「A certain someone’s walked that road too.」

As Rin changed her legs back and pouted, Nina grinned. Another nostalgic story… hmm?

「Huh? Isn’t that strange?」

Something occurred to me and I tilted my head.