“Coordinates?”
“18N29. I already marked it with mana.”
“Good.”
Bella nodded and continued flying upward.
Into the sky, higher and higher!
She shot endlessly upward.
The higher they climbed, the thinner the air became.
Bella folded her wings and released flames through magic. Eugene wrapped his own face with air magic.
Only when the blue sky turned black, and the horizon visible below looked like a rounded circle, did Bella stop ascending and turn her body.
As if guiding them toward the place they had to go, the thread of mana Eugene had spread stretched in one direction.
Bella pointed her head that way and murmured,
“This will be the last Charging of my dragon life.”
“No, it won’t be the last.”
“…….”
Tap. Eugene struck Bella’s back.
“From now on, you’ll be Charging like your life depends on it. Look forward to it.”
Bella let out a small laugh.
“Fine. I’ll leave it to you, partner.”
Eugene laughed as well.
“You’re finally calling me partner. Even though you hated carrying me on your back so much.”
“I detest frivolous men like you. But…… I cannot refuse to call someone with whom I can even perform Lance Charging my partner.”
The sense of unity she had felt when she charged with Eugene toward the Behemoth in that moment of absolute crisis still lingered like an echo. After tasting that, it was only natural that she felt a sense of closeness.
“When we go back, I’ll start by training you. If I rebuild that feeble body of yours, we should be able to perform an even more powerful Charging than now.”
“What training…… You should study more magic. If you properly operate your mana capacity, you could kill most monsters before they even get close.”
“Will you be satisfied with picking off small fry from afar? You truly are a man with no spirit.”
“You’ve got too much spirit. That’s why your life is so tiring.”
Why had they never realized until now that they were Twinstella?
The two of them were different.
Not only they themselves, but everyone else as well had believed there was not a single thing about them that fit together.
But that had only been true on the surface.
Now that they acknowledged each other as partners, they knew.
At first glance, they seemed different, but the essence of the two was more alike than could be compared to anyone else.
Right now, their thoughts were the same.
‘I don’t want it to end like this.’
‘I don’t want memories of defeat to mark the end.’
With only that single conviction, the two carried out their final Charging.
Having entered battle stance, Bella spoke as if growling.
“We’re going.”
“Yeah.”
The fall began.
The silver dragon folded her wings and shaped herself into a cone to minimize air resistance.
She did not rely on free fall for acceleration. Instead, she spewed flame through mana and accelerated even further.
And Eugene, hiding behind Bella’s back to block the impact, held out a long, enormous lance toward the front—the Dragon Divine Armament, the symbolic weapon of a Dragon Knight.
WHOOOOOOOSH!
As acceleration built, Bella’s silver scales heated from the friction. Sparks scattered, and Bella’s scales spread with an orange glow like a lump of iron placed inside a furnace.
Bella and Eugene became a meteor and fell toward their target.
The first thing they saw was a layer of pitch-black dark clouds.
The Voidnir were not beings harmonious with nature.
They did not distinguish between animals and plants. They devoured living things, everything that possessed caloric energy, and vanished only after turning everything to ash.
After digesting all the energy existing in an area like that, they discharged the remaining waste into the atmosphere in the form of clouds.
Bella and Eugene pierced through the layer of waste created that way.
It was not particularly bright beneath the clouds either.
The faint light that had barely forced its way through the clouds illuminated the land, which was merely stained gray-black.
A wasteland where the whole world had been dyed gray and black.
Even a hellscape burning with fire would not be as desolate as this. It was truly a world where everything had died.
But that was precisely the world of the Voidnir.
Into that gray-black world, the Dragon Knight with the lance before him plunged.
The enemies reacted.
On the ground, which had been dark without a single point of light, red lights began blinking one by one, then soon spread across the entire area like a wave.
Bella shouted,
“They’re coming!”
“I know!”
As if he had been waiting for it, Eugene unfolded his magic.
“Absolute Shield!”
A rider who had formed a contract with a dragon could share a portion of the dragon’s vast mana. Because of that, if the rider had enough skill, it was possible to deploy powerful magic that would be impossible for a human.
Thus, the vast barrier Eugene drew out and wove from Bella’s mana enveloped the two of them.
BOOMBOOMBOOMBOOM!
At the same time, bombardment from the ground came pouring in.
Voidnir created for artillery had begun firing shells made of bone.
Eugene, who had spread the barrier against the incoming impacts, clenched his teeth.
“Grrrgh!”
As expected of combat lifeforms, perhaps. They had astounding accuracy even against a target falling at high speed.
Eugene continued unfolding magic with all his might.
“Absolute Shield!”
“Absolute Shield!”
“Absolute Shield!”
How many times had he repeated the process of spreading it and watching it shatter?
In a brief instant, a shell that broke through the barrier lodged between Bella’s scales, and the shock shook them both.
It was enough that even Eugene, who had not taken a direct hit, felt pain as if his organs were twisting. Bella’s bones creaked, and her torn scales sprayed fountains of blood.
Bella did not stop her charge.
“AAAAAAAAAAH!”
Without slowing down, she pierced downward through the rain of shells. With her wings wrapped around Eugene, she continued falling toward the ground.
Once they descended below a certain altitude, the widely scattered lines of shellfire no longer reached them, and now small flying creatures blocked their path like a swarm of locusts.
“Move!”
Bella roared and flew in. Eugene adjusted his grip on the shaft of the Dragon Divine Armament.
RIIIIIP!
The monsters caught on the sharply honed claws of her wings, the dragon’s teeth, and the blade Eugene held out front were torn away like sheets of paper.
In an instant, they broke through the formation of the small swarm. Then, this time, a big one flew up toward them.
GROOOOOOOOH!
The gigantic monster they had fought earlier, a Behemoth, was surging upward toward the two of them.
A beast of aerial combat responsible for the Voidnir’s air superiority.
The monster that had taken the lives of countless Dragon Knights until now revealed its sharp teeth and fired the tentacles beneath its belly.
CRASHCRASHCRASH!
Tentacles thicker than the pillars of most buildings struck their bodies in passing, and an impact incomparable to anything so far swept over the two.
Yet even in the midst of that, Bella did not stop accelerating.
Eugene lifted the shaft of the lance.
He aimed the tip of the Dragon Divine Armament at the Behemoth’s head.
Then Bella wove acceleration magic and gathered their center of gravity forward.
FLASH!
The figures of dragon and rider transformed into a flash of light for an instant.
Dragon Lance Charging!
The moment the straight-thrust lance tip pierced the monster’s head.
The Dragon Divine Armament, an indestructible weapon.
It transmitted forward every last bit of the power they had gathered until now.
The point of contact at the lance tip opened in a circle as if drawn in a picture, and a massive cylindrical impact pierced through the beast’s body in a straight line at once.
The Dragon Knight with the lance before him drilled head-on through the body of the dozens-of-meters-long monster and emerged on the other side.
Bella’s tail, held straight, completely exited the Behemoth’s body.
Then, belatedly, an explosion erupted.
BOOOOOOOM!!
The mana that had been chasing after Eugene and Bella surged, and the Behemoth’s body, which had barely maintained its form, shattered into pieces and scattered in every direction.
Bella spread her wings.
FWOOOM!
The collision with the Behemoth had cost them most of the kinetic energy gathered from the fall. Bella beat her wings and recovered her posture, but Eugene vomited blood.
“Guaaagh!”
Dragon Lance Charging was a technique that rammed into an enemy by turning one’s own body into a cannonball. No matter how remarkable the technique used to divert the impact was, it could not reduce that immense torrent of force to zero.
With only the small amount of backlash that remained, Eugene’s body was left in tatters.
His ribs had broken. His collarbone and arm seemed to have cracked as well. Perhaps the shock had reached his organs, because blood surged back up madly.
And the same was true for Bella.
But even while she had been battered by shells and was pouring blood from the impact of the Charging, she did not stop beating her wings.
“Eugene! Are you all right?!”
“Yeah…… I’m alive for now! Koff!”
“Hold on just a little longer! We are almost there!”
The ground was right before them.
In terms of altitude, perhaps about fifty meters?
Below their feet was a horrific sight covered in the Voidnir’s production structures, full of tentacles and crushed flesh.
But between them, the shape of a magic circle glowing blue could be seen.
Now, if they only landed on the ground and drove the key into the magic circle…….
GROOOOOOOH!
-What? Is this déjà vu?
In that instant, a roar identical to the one they had heard moments ago rang in their ears.
When they turned back with wide eyes.
ROOOOOOOH!
……another Behemoth was raising itself from the ground and flying toward the two of them.
““Oh, fuck!””
Curses burst out.
Eugene pulled the shaft of the lance back, and Bella spread her wings.
The two people’s wills and mana resonated, and the acceleration magic that unfolded at the same time erupted behind them.
““One more time!””
Along with a cry that spat blood, the two shadows stretched like strands of taffy—
BOOOOM!
The lance streaked forward, and once again, a cylindrical shock wave pierced the giant beast’s torso.
GROOOOOOAR!
They could not completely crush the Behemoth’s body as they had with the Charging performed together with the fall.
But they succeeded in inflicting a fatal wound.
The Dragon Knight, who had barely pierced through the monster’s body and emerged, plummeted like a kite with its string cut.
CRASH!
Dust rose.
The monster structure struck by the dragon’s enormous body splattered green blood.
And Eugene, who had been riding on her back, was flung out of the saddle. As the impact sent him flying through the air, Eugene shouted,
“Bella!”
“…….”
There was no answer. The blood-soaked silver dragon let her head drop as if her breath had been cut off.
All sorts of feelings crossed Eugene’s mind.
Fuck, is she dead?
……I don’t know. She’s a tough bastard.
But what was certain was that even such a powerful lifeform had taken an impact severe enough to be fatal.
He could not blame her, asking whether she had called him partner only to leave him alone like that.
Because Eugene was the one holding the key.
And Eugene understood that. And he, too, had agreed with that intention and diverted even the impact he should have borne entirely to Bella.
……He understood.
But that fact, this reality in which they had to go that far, made him maddeningly furious.
THUD!
Eugene, flung from Bella’s back, fell to the ground.
The moment his back struck the ground, a choking sound escaped on its own, and stars flashed before his eyes.
Eugene’s body was not in good condition either. Each time he rolled across the ground from the impact of the fall, his head pounded, and his vision flickered as if it would cut out.
A thought came to him on its own.
Perhaps, as Bella had said, he really did need training.
“Guh, haah!”
He barely gathered himself and rose.
Most of his senses were gone. He did not feel as though he was alive, and his limbs flopped as if every bone in his body had broken.
Even so, Eugene moved.
What made that possible was his tenacity, the conviction that he could not simply stay still after losing the one with whom he had shared his soul.
“Click, krrrrrrk!”
There was no time. The monsters on the ground that had noticed his presence were running toward him.
Eugene clenched his teeth.
“Ngh, nnnngggggh!!”
Desperately, he moved his hand and took the key to the magic circle from inside his chest. A vivid blue light flashed in his eyes.
Fine, just you wait and see!
If I can just go back. If I can just get another chance!
I’ll make you my dragon and work you to the bone for a long, long time!
His blood-soaked hand rose above his head, holding the key.
The Voidnir leapt up to tear into Eugene’s neck.
But Eugene driving the key into the magic circle was faster than those sharp teeth biting into his fragile nape.
Light burst out.