The continent's north, divided into the frozen-earth, snowfield, and Snowy Mountain regions.
The frozen-earth region is close to the centre of the continent and has a comparatively warm climate, where flora such as conifers grow.
But it is warm only 'comparatively.'
It is by no means something you could call warm.
Average temperatures hovering between minus four and minus five degrees are the baseline.
When the season of brutal cold comes, the average temperature falls to minus fifteen.
And right now was precisely the time when the season of brutal cold begins.
Sleep rough and you freeze to death on the spot; never mind food, even water is hard to obtain.
In the present circumstances, the north was a place where surviving at all was one challenge after another.
Which was why—
"I will go and look for my brother with the soldiers right away."
There was a need to find Adrian as soon as possible.
Seraphia pulled her thick fur coat tightly closed.
Even so the chill that drove in was murderous in the truest sense.
Every time it did, Seraphia could not shake off the foreboding that kept blooming in her chest.
Two weeks since Adrian went missing.
Two weeks in this brutal cold had to be counted as freezing to death.
And it was right to consider the chance of surviving with only the clothes on his back to be nil.
"Sir Kai, please look for my brother with the soldiers as well."
"......"
Perhaps because of it, Kai did not answer.
His lips, pressed firmly shut.
But a face and expression plainly full of hesitation.
He seemed to have something he wanted to say.
Before long Kai slowly opened his mouth.
"...I do not understand the reason we must find Lord Adrian."
This situation, with Adrian having disappeared of his own accord.
For Kai it was a situation that could not be better.
There is no need to find Adrian, and no reason to.
Kai confessed his honest feelings, and Seraphia gave her answer to it in a single word.
"He's family."
A relationship formed the moment you are born into the world.
And therefore a relationship that heals one another.
But a relationship that cannot be severed however you try.
And therefore a relationship that wounds one another.
Being the closest, when they wound one another, it carves a wound more irreversible than any other relationship.
That is probably the disease that goes by the name of family.
Therefore in such a case the disease called family must be healed.
Which is why the late Count cast Adrian out.
He boldly cut off the blood relation of parent and child.
And yet Seraphia and Adrian are not even a relationship bound by blood, are they?
"Even if it were you, Sir Kai, I would have done the same."
But that was true of Kai as well.
Kai and Seraphia likewise were not bound by blood—
"We're family."
Family.
"Understood."
Kai nodded.
But this did not mean he had accepted Adrian.
It was merely Kai's loyalty and his knighthood.
And Kai's loyalty and knighthood belonged to one person.
Seraphia.
They were directed at her alone.
"This time I will search the Snowy Mountain."
"Then I will look through the snowfield and the frozen-earth regions."
Seraphia smiled slightly, as if in thanks.
And then, as though there were no time, Seraphia left at once.
With every step she took her silver hair swayed from side to side, and Kai held the sight in his eyes for a moment before moving off slowly.
***
Metal armour holding the chill of the Snowy Mountain touched his skin.
Protecting his body with Aura, Kai pushed up through the snow of the Snowy Mountain with the soldiers.
How long did they climb like that?
It was when they reached about the middle slope of the Snowy Mountain.
"Over there! There's something!"
When he turned his head at the soldiers' shout, something was buried in the snow.
They approached quickly and pulled out what was buried, and something heavy, four metres in size, revealed itself.
"It is an Alakron's corpse."
The Alakron, a monster that inhabits the Snowy Mountain.
From the state of the frozen corpse it seemed at least a day had passed.
And the state of the corpse was extraordinary.
The flesh had been torn away brutishly, in a way that made it look as though something had eaten it.
"No wonder the Snowy Mountain's monsters have been scarce lately..."
"It seems the monsters of the Snowy Mountain have been competing over territory."
The soldiers reached their conclusion in an instant.
They thought this corpse had come about through a struggle among monsters.
And no wonder — the flesh torn away here and there was unmistakably the trace of something having eaten it.
And there was exactly one kind of being that would do such a thing.
Nothing but a monster.
Because a person absolutely cannot eat a monster's flesh.
"It appears Lord Adrian is not on the Snowy Mountain."
Therefore this was an entirely reasonable inference.
But Kai's thinking was different.
Kai examined the Alakron's corpse closely.
The marks where the flesh had been torn and eaten.
They were somewhat different from a monster's.
Rather than a monster's teeth, they were traces that looked as though they had been chewed by human teeth.
Some parts, even, had a clean cut surface, as though sliced with a knife.
Kai was able to reach his conclusion quickly.
'A monster again...'
This is what Adrian left after eating.
The soldiers could not have imagined that Adrian would eat a monster.
It would be accurate to say they were incapable of it.
However starving you are, eat a monster and your mind goes mad.
Therefore saying you will eat monster meat is no different from saying you will kill yourself.
That is the continent's long-standing law and common sense.
But Kai's thinking was different again.
...Because he had seen it.
He had seen Adrian tearing into a Dermexus's heart.
None other than Kai had seen it clearly, with his own two eyes.
That was in no way false.
Only, at the time it had been all right.
Adrian, who tore into the Dermexus's heart, had fallen briefly into madness but had been able to return to his original state quickly.
At the time he had wondered how that could be.
But sure enough, it was as he had feared.
'So he has been eaten by the madness in the end.'
Adrian had gone mad with madness.
In fact that was an entirely natural and foreordained outcome.
Thinking about it now, Adrian had vanished after tearing into the Dermexus's heart.
'So this is why...'
Kai was able to understand at once why Adrian had not shown himself for two weeks.
It was not that he had not shown himself.
It was that he could not.
Because once swallowed by madness, Adrian was no longer human.
In all likelihood, at this very moment Adrian would be wandering the Snowy Mountain with his reason lost.
He would be slaughtering the monsters of the Snowy Mountain.
He would be tearing into monsters and ceaselessly accumulating madness.
By which Adrian would before long 'turn monster.'
If it had come to this, Adrian must not be left alone.
Adrian, wandering the Snowy Mountain with his reason lost.
Adrian absolutely has to be killed.
"What shall we do?"
To the soldiers' question Kai answered without hesitating.
From now on this mission is not a 'search' mission for Adrian.
"We continue the pursuit."
A mission to 'pursue' and 'shoot down' Adrian.
The odds that Adrian was on the Snowy Mountain were very high.
Never mind two weeks — it was a brutal environment where one could not survive a single day, and yet Kai did not think Adrian had died.
Adrian is certainly alive.
But today, Adrian will die.
Following the traces, Kai headed with the soldiers toward a higher part of the Snowy Mountain.
And that was precisely when it happened.
CRASH—!!
All at once a great explosion burst out on one side of the Snowy Mountain.
***
The unidentified being that had suddenly attacked me.
Before long the flurry settled completely, and—
Within it, fragments of emotion like hatred and along with it joy and exultation bloomed.
A beast covered in pitch-black hatred and madness, a creature moulded from blind killing intent.
From the roar settling low burst a madness that seemed wrung out of every blood vessel.
An endless thirst for blood.
The desire of hunger.
They felt as though they would tear me apart that very instant.
"Gelu Drake..."
Gelu Drake.
A mutation of the monster called a drake, given the prefix Gelu-, which means ice.
Translated plainly you could call it an 'ice drake.'
That is, the Gelu Drake was the same species as the Drake.
By classification it is a 'Subspecies,' and the two can interbreed and reproduce.
Only, because of the difference in habitat they do not naturally interbreed.
Therefore, Gelu Drake or Drake.
If it is a drake, they all share one common ancestor.
Dragon.
The very name drake was derived from dragon to begin with.
Not simply because their appearance resembles one.
It denotes a kind similar to a dragon but somehow different.
The drake, unimaginably long ago.
Was a species that branched off and separated from the dragon.
That is, the drake belongs to the dragon Family.
The tiger and the cat belong to the same cat family.
Dragon and drake likewise show a difference on the order of tiger and cat.
In other words, they show a stark difference.
But the problem was that the being called a dragon is an outrageous specimen to begin with.
Dragon.
The continent's mightiest specimen and a great calamity.
The dragon is called the 'summit of biological evolution.'
A single organism can adapt perfectly to a specific environment.
Just as life inhabits even a Snowy Mountain of brutal cold that drops to minus seventy degrees.
But adapting perfectly to a specific environment is like a double-edged sword.
Because if that specific environment collapses, it goes extinct helplessly.
Just as a Snowy Mountain monster thrown into the blazing heat of the south steams to death within a day.
Adapting to a specific environment is possible.
But adapting to every environment is impossible.
With exactly one exception.
Excepting the dragon.
A dragon could adapt and survive in any environment on the continent.
In the freezing winter, in searing heat, in the salt of the sea, in a parched desert, in dense undergrowth.
Amid countless natural environments.
A dragon can capably survive.
And in all of those environments the dragon reigns as the apex predator.
Strong enough that there is a history of a single specimen burning down an entire kingdom without taking one wound.
A living creature effectively close to invincible, the Dragon.
The drake is a species that separated off from such a dragon.
They show a stark difference, like tiger and cat, and even so the fact that it is a powerful specimen is unchanged.
And so the name it is called by, Master of the Snowy Mountain.
As if to prove it really is a distant relative of the dragon, the Gelu Drake was the predator dwelling at the very top of this Snowy Mountain.
You could tell just from the colour of the Gelu Drake's hide.
Most of the monsters dwelling on the Snowy Mountain take on 'white.'
It is to take on protective colouring against predators.
But the Gelu Drake was not so.
Hide of a vivid reddish brown.
The Gelu Drake, which did not even need protective colouring, showed by its very existence that it was the 'Master of the Snowy Mountain.'
As it branched off and separated from the dragon, its wings degenerated. In exchange it gained the agility to run swiftly across the ground.
Its muscular tail not only keeps its balance but is also used as a powerful striking weapon.
But unlike its appearance it was a monster closer to herbivorous.
More precisely it is omnivorous, but the Gelu Drake evolved that way.
The environment of the Snowy Mountain, where food is not readily available.
The Gelu Drake digs through the snow with its hard claws and makes the mosses and grasses growing beneath it its staple food.
Which is why it dwells at the Snowy Mountain's summit and rarely comes down.
'But why on earth...?'
Along with the question, the terror of death came over me.
My instincts sounded an alarm without pause, telling me to run at once.
And yet my whole body would not move, as though frozen.
It was as though I had become a statue of ice.
That was a phenomenon born not of the cold but of fear.
But on the other hand—
I could not hide the electric exultation running through my whole body.
The drake separated from the dragon unimaginably long ago, and even so it is classified in the same 'dragon Family.'
In other words, the 'dragon's genetic factors' are engraved into a drake.
The dragon is a specimen I failed to devour even in my previous life.
The continent's mightiest living creature, which even I, the allied forces' Predator, could not summon the nerve to devour.
And such mightiest genetic factors are right before my eyes.
GRRRK—!
How could my whole body not be electric with it?