The next day.
I started my day with a video call with Sia.
[Did you sleep well, oppa?]
Judging by how she was rubbing her eyes, she hadn't been up long, but even so, she looked so pretty.
"I slept well. Thanks to my Sia listening to me so well last night."
[I'm glad.]
Sia's soft, warm voice made my heart melt.
At first I'd thought it best to avoid talking about the villains if I could, but the more I thought about it, the gladder I was that I'd told her early.
Otherwise, I might have lost sleep worrying about when and how to bring it up.
"Sia, are you... okay?"
She hadn't seemed to be in great shape before we hung up yesterday, so I asked her carefully, worried.
[Me? Of course I'm okay!]
But Sia's voice sounded strangely, overly fine.
It was as if she hadn't heard a thing from me yesterday.
That only worried me more.
"You're really okay, right?"
[Of course. I went and got revenge for everything.]
"Revenge? They're already dead."
I doubted there was any way to take revenge on dead villains.
Besides, I'd never told Sia anything about who the villains were.
Of course, with Sia's abilities, she could probably find out who they were somehow...... but even so, taking revenge on people who were already dead would probably be hard even for a dragon like Sia.
When I looked confused, Sia's mouth fell open in surprise, as if she'd said something she shouldn't have.
But only for a moment.
Sia soon recovered her usual expression and spoke.
[In a dream, I mean. In a dream.]
Saying she'd scolded them in her dream until they cried their eyes out, Sia threw a cute punch into the air with a little 'Hyah!'
'In a dream......?'
For some reason, it left me uneasy.
I didn't think that was what she'd meant to say.
Well, anyway.
Nothing good would come of digging deeper into this topic, so I decided to change the subject.
"I'm going to see Lord Rokan later."
[Grandpa?]
"Yeah. I need to bring him the Gate raid footage from the cam. I'll get feedback while I show him, and there's something I want to ask him personally too."
I needed feedback based on what the wearable cam had recorded, and I also had to ask about the aurora-light sword energy I'd been able to use, if only for a while.
So taking the cam to Rokan was already on the schedule.
But.
[Can't I watch too?]
"Of course you should. But I need to talk with your grandfather for a bit first, so could you wait a little?"
[...Is it something I'm not supposed to know?]
Perhaps she thought I was hiding something; for a moment, Sia's mood changed.
She was half right.
There was a scene in the wearable cam footage I especially didn't want Sia to see, and I was planning to ask him to delete it.
If it had been an ordinary camera, I could have deleted it myself, but with the wearable cam Sia had specially modified, a clumsy deletion on my part might only make her more suspicious.
"I'd never hide anything from my Sia. It's nothing like that, so don't worry."
That reassured Sia.
After that, I kept the call going for a long time, chatting about everyday things instead of heavy topics like Gates or auras.
"Sia, see you later, then. I'll call you soon."
[Okay!]
After hanging up, I grabbed the camera and headed to Rokan's lair.
"Welcome."
Rokan greeted me warmly the moment I arrived.
"Sasha told me roughly what happened. I hear there was serious trouble yesterday."
"Yes. I'll explain everything once we're inside."
After a brief greeting, I gave Rokan a short account of what had happened in the Gate yesterday.
I finished my explanation.
"I have a favor to ask."
"A favor?"
"It's nothing much. I'd like you to cleanly erase part of this footage without a trace. I thought asking you would be better than me clumsily messing with it."
I explained to Rokan why the footage needed editing.
Right before they died, the villains had said things insulting Sia; it might hurt her, so I asked if he could delete that scene.
But after hearing me out, Rokan sank quietly into thought, and before long he gave his answer.
"It would be better not to."
"...Pardon?"
Contrary to what I'd expected, Rokan turned down my request.
The footage had captured, in full, a bunch of lowly human criminal bastards degrading his granddaughter, so I'd assumed Rokan would naturally want it deleted as much as I did.
What does he mean, better not to?
When I looked puzzled, Rokan went on as if he'd expected as much.
"Even if you erase just that part, it will only be a matter of time before Sasha finds out. And."
Rokan looked at me with a knowing smile.
"I rather think Sasha will be happier for seeing it."
...She'll be happier for seeing that?
No matter how I thought about it, there didn't seem to be anything in that footage Sia would like.
Still, if he was going this far, he must have his reasons, whatever they were.
I decided to do as Rokan said for now.
"Sasha must be waiting. Let us go."
In the end, without deleting that part of the footage as I'd planned, I stood before the giant screen.
As soon as Rokan connected the call, Sia appeared on the big screen.
[Oppa! Grandpa!]
It had barely been ten minutes since our last call, but Sia greeted me as happily as if she hadn't seen me in ages.
"Yes, yes. Have you eaten?"
[I'll eat later! What about oppa and you, Grandpa?]
"Same for me. And you, Min-jun?"
"Same here, I think. If you don't mind, let's eat together later."
The small talk didn't last long.
It was time to get down to business.
Rokan put the footage I'd handed him up on the screen and shared it with Sia as well.
"Please give me any feedback at all as you watch, without holding anything back."
We skipped the parts without fighting and went straight to the first clash with the Antmen.
Sia and Rokan both fell silent, focusing on the footage and the flow of mana it captured.
Everyone was watching the video with serious expressions.
Sia was the first to speak.
[Grandpa. I know he's my oppa, but doesn't he seem like a real genius?]
"Yes. His rate of growth is extraordinary."
I hadn't really felt it back then, but from a dragon's perspective, it seemed they saw things differently.
"Such talent is almost a pity. If you had been born a dragon from the start, Min-jun...."
Midway through, Rokan started and waved his hand.
"No, I have said something I should not have. Pretend you did not hear that."
It didn't seem like a particularly strange thing to say, but Rokan apologized like someone who'd made a slip of the tongue and turned his attention back to the video.
After studying the video for a long while, Rokan shared his impressions.
"Watching you use your sword this time, you strike me as a hatchling in human guise."
"Pardon?"
Maybe it was just me, but today there seemed to be an awful lot of cryptic remarks I couldn't understand.
Seeing my confusion, Rokan elaborated.
"I mean that although you are human, the way you wield a sword looks closer to a dragon than a human."
"Could you explain in a little more detail?"
[Oppa, I'll explain for him.]
Perhaps wanting to chip in, Sia stepped up this time.
According to Sia, a human's sword and a dragon's sword were fundamentally different by nature.
The situations in which humans used swords could broadly be divided into two.
To protect something precious, or to take something precious.
In the process, a human's sword came to carry a heavy load of emotions, from sorrow, desperation, and longing to honor, greed, and more.
But dragons were different.
Born as the greatest race on earth, dragons had no need to use swords to protect themselves or to plunder others.
They could simply use Dragon Words instead, with no need for a sword at all.
So their reason for using swords was mere amusement, nothing more and nothing less.
That was why dragons' swords didn't carry desperate emotions the way humans' did.
Instead, their swords carried something else.
The ease of knowing they could get whatever they wanted without wielding a sword as crudely as humans, and the lofty grace born of that ease.
[To interpret what Grandpa said, he means your sword had a dragon's unique ease and lofty grace.]
"Precisely. And yet your sword also carries deep, human emotion, which is what I cannot fathom."
The two might seem able to coexist, Rokan stressed, but they absolutely could not.
Somehow, the more I heard, the more confused I got.
[Hmm. Oppa, you still look like you don't get it?]
Just then, Sia hit the bullseye.
"This is a little embarrassing. You're right. Honestly, I have no idea what he means."
Pretending to wring my brain, I complained to Sia that my head hurt.
The more I learned, the more tangled my head got.
Saying he'd expected as much, Rokan gently rested a hand on my shoulder.
"Just remember what I said. At some point, you will come to understand it on your own, so do not worry."
"Yes. I'll keep it in mind."
"That is enough of this. Let us move on."
There was a more important topic than this.
I skipped ahead to the part that showed the second clash with the Antmen, the standoff with the villains.
It ran from the scene where I was briefly thrown by the Antmen's overwhelming numbers and scraped through by squeezing out my strength, to the scene where the villains ambushed me once I was worn out.
Then came the scene where, in that life-or-death crisis, I found myself wielding aurora-light sword energy without knowing how.
The aurora-light sword energy began to surge from the sword in my battered hand.
Right then, Rokan stopped the video.
And then.
"Min-jun."
He called my name in a calm voice.
But his voice was so excessively calm that that one word alone gave me goosebumps all over.
"How on earth did you do that?"
I didn't know exactly what that aurora-light sword energy was, but it certainly looked like some kind of achievement.
So I'd thought Rokan would congratulate me and be happy for me.
But for some reason, Rokan showed no sign of being happy at all.
"I don't really know either. If there's anything I can point to... when that sword energy appeared, I did feel a strong will to make it back alive no matter what."
I'd been flustered at first, but I calmly shared what I thought.
Given the circumstances, the will to survive let me raise that sword energy— that was the likeliest hypothesis, but I didn't know the exact reason myself.
That was exactly why I'd meant to ask him here.
But far from answering my question, Rokan swallowed a low groan and wore a complicated expression I couldn't read.
Then.
"...Let us take a short break."
Perhaps he had a headache; Rokan left us and went into his study.
What on earth is going on?
***
The moment he staggered back into his study, Rokan squeezed his eyes shut and sighed.
Having read the energy of his soul, Rokan had long known that Min-jun was no ordinary being.
But.
'Even knowing that, this is unsettling.'
Aurora-light sword energy, huh.
When Min-jun first brought it up, Rokan had been half in doubt.
Judging coolly, the Min-jun of now could not have wielded such immense power; it was far more likely he had hallucinated while his power ran wild.
But astonishingly, Min-jun had told the truth.
He really had wielded a peculiar sword energy reminiscent of an aurora.
And the other dragons settled on Earth probably knew nothing of what this aurora-light sword energy truly was.
Even Sia had looked like she was seeing it for the first time.
But Rokan knew.
He knew what that power truly was, and what kind of being had once wielded it.
A secret ancient tome that only the successive Dragon Lords had been permitted to read held this record.
A tale that had set the whole continent abuzz tens of thousands of years ago, but that humans now treated as a common folktale.
Yet among dragons, it was handed down not as a folktale but as history: the story of one man.
Recalling that passage from the tome, Rokan sighed again.
To be precise, for now there was nothing even he could do but sigh.
'To think you reproduced even that.'
Of course, compared to what the man in that record had wielded, Min-jun's sword energy didn't even come up to its toes.
Still, one thing was certain.
Someday, Min-jun might wield that sword energy as skillfully as 'that being,' whose very mention was taboo.
If so, he would go beyond merely wielding a dragon's power; he would command a might great enough to overwhelm even Rokan, an ancient dragon.
But.
At least until Min-jun could properly handle a dragon's power, that power had to be sealed.
Otherwise, Min-jun would be swallowed by it.
And then he would turn into a monster that could no longer be called human.