Episode 21 – Survival
Nada, who had lost consciousness in a pool of blood, didn’t know how much time had passed before he finally came to.
The first thing he felt was light.
An overwhelming light.
He felt the brightness pressing against his eyelids—so bright it made him think it was stronger than daytime sunlight at its peak.
Finding it dazzling, he still didn’t keep his eyes shut; Nada cautiously opened them.
The first thing he saw was his own hands.
They were wet with blood.
His right hand held nothing. On the back of his left hand, the Solideum was attached. Other than that, there was nothing. He still had his pants on, probably. Nada dug through his memories, but it was only natural that he had nothing else—everything had been melted away by the dragon’s stomach acid and abandoned inside its body.
“Damn—”
For Nada, who currently operated solo, this loss was enormous.
But he couldn’t sit there grieving.
To check the situation, he immediately looked around.
It was a vast space.
Even though he was inside the dungeon called Podie, the area was wide as if it were a whole city. The intense brightness he felt came from hexagonal crystals growing densely across the ceiling. All of them shone in white light, illuminating the dungeon far more than necessary. However, in the center of the ceiling yawned a large hole—beyond it was darkness without a single ray of light, and Nada couldn’t see a thing in that void.
Looking elsewhere, he saw his Green Dragon Crescent Blade lying a short distance away. Struggling to walk over to it, he picked it up—the shaft slightly bent.
And far beyond that, lying as if in peaceful slumber—a corpse.
He recognized it.
He had only seen that form once, yet its impression had burned itself into Nada’s mind.
—The red dragon’s jaws.
Eyes with diameters far beyond anything human. A gaping maw that could easily swallow a person whole. White fangs longer than the Green Dragon Crescent Blade, and a rough tongue full of bumps hanging loosely out of its mouth.
That dragon was unmistakably dead.
There was no doubt.
There were barely any external wounds, just blood flowing from its mouth.
But the reason was obvious: near the dragon, a short distance from Nada, lay a massive, blood-soaked Calvaon, rolled over on its side. It was smaller than the heart Nada had seen earlier, and broken into several large chunks—maybe four, counting the bigger pieces. But none of them was anything he could simply carry back.
“Ah… so I killed it—”
Seeing the Calvaon that had come out of the dragon’s body, Nada finally realized he had actually killed the dragon.
When he first woke up, he couldn’t believe he had pierced the dragon’s heart. The dragon before him had a body the size of a small mountain. No matter how he thought about it, it felt impossible that someone as small as a human—him—had delivered the finishing blow.
But seeing it motionless, Nada understood that his memory of driving the crescent blade into its heart wasn’t a dream.
“I… killed it—”
He said it aloud.
And yet, strangely, no sense of accomplishment welled up.
Instead, deep in his chest, relief spread.
—He had escaped that hell.
That warped space where flesh enclosed him from all sides. The terrifying insects are crawling everywhere. The stomach acid, the quivering, bouncing floor—experiences of fear unlike anything he had known. To have escaped that, and most of all, to still be alive—Nada felt utterly relieved.
Letting out a long sigh, he finally realized something: none of the adventurers he had met inside the dragon were anywhere around.
He wandered his gaze across the area, searching for them, but not a single familiar face from the dragon’s insides was there.
What happened to them?
A casual, faint question rose in his mind.
Dan should be alive.
That was the first conclusion Nada reached.
He alone “does not die.”
Nada had been enrolled at Larva Academy for five years, and in that time, he had seen countless adventurers blessed with the Healing God’s Gift. Many of them were people he met back when he was affiliated with Aghiya.
Yet among all those adventurers, the one Nada believed to be most loved by the Healing God was Dan.
Sure, Dan’s ability to produce potent healing potions and grant powerful blessings was undeniable—but beyond that, Nada believed his greatest strength was his self-healing.
No matter the injury, the Healing God’s Gift activated on its own, completely unrelated to Dan’s own will, and he healed in an instant—so fast it made one hallucinate that time itself had rewound. That figure was unmistakably immortal. Though he was technically an adventurer who lived close to death, Nada considered him the furthest from it.
Then what about the others? Nada wondered.
He didn’t know their Abilities well, since he hadn’t known them long. But he was sure that if they had been inside Serena’s Ability, Escondil Utero, they would have survived even that moment when blood burst from the dragon’s heart.
If anyone besides Serena had been inside that space—
No, Nada cut off the thought halfway.
After all, he had been the one closest to the dragon’s heart, the one who should have been suffering the most from the lack of air—and yet he was alive.
If they had strong enough vitality, they were probably alive too, he concluded forcefully.
Nada then checked the state of his body.
It wasn’t good.
Naturally so. He had spent a long time inside the dragon’s body, and even in that flood of blood, he hadn’t been breathing.
And yet, strangely, he didn’t feel that bad.
Sure, his joints hurt. But the pain wasn’t nearly as severe as when he had been fighting the “insect,” and he still had enough stamina left to clear the shallow floors of a dungeon with no trouble.
Why was that?
He had no idea.
And he didn’t want to think about it.
The only thought left in Nada’s mind now was simply to go home and rest his body. He was tired. Just an ordinary, mundane desire—that was all he had left.
He immediately began searching for an exit from the dome-like chamber he was in.
—He found one.
Far away, there was a hole just large enough for a person to pass through, leading out of the dome.
Nada took a step toward it—then stopped, as if reconsidering—and turned his gaze, as an adventurer would, to the dragon’s Calvaon he had slain.
To Nada, it looked incredibly tempting.
Four massive Calvaons, all of them dark in color.
If he could take those back, just how much would his life improve?
He almost started calculating the value on the spot.
Heart pounding slightly with excitement, Nada walked toward the four Calvaons with a faint grin, touching one with his right hand and enjoying the rough, rugged texture.
But then Nada realized something.
He noticed—and couldn’t unnotice it.
All four of the enormous Calvaons he had acquired were each the size of his waist in height and width.
How was he supposed to take something that huge back with him? He didn’t even have a bag, much less any clothing on his upper body.
Even so, Nada didn’t give up. He struck the Calvaon several times with his crescent blade, but all that happened was a dull numbness traveling up his hands—no cracks whatsoever.
“Haah—”
Letting out a long sigh, Nada gave up on the Calvaons and quietly headed toward the exit he had found. He no longer had the energy to explore this place. And yet, as he walked, he kept looking back—again and again—at the massive Calvaons. Each time, he sighed deeply before forcing himself forward.
Eventually, he reached the exit.
A narrow, dim passage stretching into darkness.
Nada stepped into it a few paces—and then hesitated, casting a longing look back at the bright, glittering dome he had just left.
—It happened in that instant.
A tremor struck Nada, like a tectonic shift.
With a roar powerful enough to knock him off his feet, the ceiling collapsed and buried the path leading back into the dome.
The quake subsided quickly.
But Nada stood there, staring longingly at the collapsed passage filled with rubble, all the while dreaming of the massive Calvaons beyond it.
He remained there without heading home, lingering until he finally accepted his decision.
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