The aerial battle continued. The tactics the Tigermen used against the White Dragon reminded me of how a pack of wolves would surround and hunt a large water buffalo.
These Tigermen were obviously sly and experienced hunters. They used the agilest unit among them as bait that’d repeatedly fly around in front of the White Dragon. As long as the unit attracted the White Dragon’s attention and dragonbreath, the others would continuously swarm it and worsen the injuries on the White Dragon’s back and wings.
Whenever the White Dragon furiously tried to counterattack and do everything it could to kill its mortal enemies, these Tigermen would scatter. Their wyvern steeds were swift and capable of making sharp turns in midair. White Dragons were well known for being clumsy and stupid, and this particular one was unable to follow them. The advantage of the wyverns’ smaller size proved quite useful here.
The Tigermen were patient hunters. They weren’t tempted by a swift win. They slowly whittled their prey down, waiting for the White Dragon to reach the brink.
Meanwhile, on the surface, Copper Dragon Evelyn was still all smiles as she watched me. It appeared as though she didn’t care about the battle in the sky in the least.
“Are you not going up to help? Isn’t that a fellow dragon? It seems to be seriously injured.”
That White Dragon’s wingspan was only three or four meters wide. It might not even have reached Adult Dragon status yet. More than ten bloody harpoons were impaled in its wings, and its speed was slowing down at a visible rate. The situation didn’t seem all too well for this White Dragon, yet the Copper Dragon before me seemed content with simply watching.
“White Dragons are no family of mine. Perhaps you need to study more about dragons. All dragons only pay a basic amount of respect to those closely related to them. You can’t casually use words like family or same species. And there’s also the enmity between Color and Metal Dragons. An Adult White Dragon is no different from a wild beast. A starving White Dragon is even capable of eating its own children. As a Copper Dragon, it’s already rare for me to not go and help hunt it down. If I go out to save a White Dragon and word spreads, all the other Metal Dragons will laugh at me. Besides…”
“Elite hunters from the Eternal Thunder tribe? You cat-headed cowards, stop bullying a young dragon! Come face the wrath of a true dragon!”
An angry roar interrupted Evelyn’s interruption as Blue Dragon Evelyn suddenly appeared in the sky. Unlike Halent’s brother and steed who had only recently reached the age of an Adult Dragon, this Blue Dragon had a length of more than twenty meters. She was already at the standard level of an Ancient Dragon.
It was impossible to identify the patterns on her scales due to her wavy body.
Rampaging thunder raged inside the single horn on her head, while each of her front claws grasped a pearl-shaped treasure. Dark clouds covered the skies as she unfurled her blue wings and soared straight for the aerial battle in the sky.
Before even getting close to her opponents, the Blue Dragon’s high-level draconic might and the thunderous clouds it summoned had caused the SemiDragon wyvern steeds to panic. The Tigermen aerial knights had to shout in order to stop their wyverns from turning and running in panic.
Most mystifying was that the thunderclouds she summoned sent out a series of chain lightning, and the first electrified target was actually that White Dragon which had been ganged up upon.
“…Besides, my sister’s unable to take it anymore. If I steal her prey, she’ll attack me as well.”
“So this is the Blue Dragon, known for being the biggest combat maniac and the speediest of the dragons?”
Looking at the howling White Dragon falling right in her path, Blue Dragon Evelyn apparently had no intentions of saving it. She instead slammed one wing into the White Dragon, speeding up its crash into the ground.
Her wing alone was larger than the White Dragon’s entire body. Her wing slam directly knocked it unconscious, causing it to freefall to the ground. Moments later, it landed with a brutal impact.
*Boom!*
How vicious. Instead of saving the White Dragon, Blue Dragon Evelyn didn’t hesitate to use an AOE thunder magic attack. Although she too was a Color Dragon, she didn’t think twice about attacking her White Dragon relative.
“It seems that Fifth Sister has been suffering from great stress recently… It’s not strange to see her attacking a White Dragon. Until a White Dragon evolves enough to obtain intelligence, none of us will view them as our equals. White Dragons that haven’t reached the Immemorial Dragon rank have the intelligence of only a wild beast. And the other residents here are capable of taming them, so White Dragons can become a threat to us. Take a look at those SemiDragon wyverns. They’re probably the half-blood bastard offspring of some White Dragon. Fifth Sister really loathes dragons that don’t have intelligence. She believes their similar appearances to herself are nothing more than an insult.”
However, what attracted me more than analyzing the personalities of different species of dragons was the girl herself.
“She’s so beautiful~”
“What?!”
Did I say something strange? Even the silly cat was so shocked she stood up on her hind legs.
“…She has the exact same soul and memories, but her physical body influenced her to walk down a different path with a different personality. This is a miracle given by the God of Probabilities. If I could only dissect—I mean deeply research this, perhaps I can find shortcuts to make the physical body influence the soul!”
“As expected, that seems correct.”
“Yep, no mistaking it, that’s Roland.”
The signs coming from around me made me feel mysteriously angered, but I was indeed interested in Evelyn’s situation. She was my first ever Original Sin creation, and she had such a long time to self-evolve and perfect herself. If only I could dissect—carefully research her, I’d definitely benefit.
Unfortunately, judging from the current situation, none of these ten dragons would be easy to fool. It wouldn’t be easy to have them walk onto my surgery table—I mean cooperate with my research.
“You want to dissect me? Dream on! You—you—if you dare to point your butcher’s knife at Cher, we sisters will fight you to the death!”
“…I accidentally said it out loud? I don’t have such a habit, do I? Oh, it was you, you damned silly cat. Evelyn, listen to me—I was only making an analogy! An analogy!”
I only had to glance at the smug silly cat to realize the problem. While the soul connection with a magical pet was convenient, it was also a double-edged blade. It would be easy to leak certain information. The silly cat definitely secretly informed Evelyn just now.
I finally managed to “explain” how I only meant the word dissect as an academic adjective synonym for “careful research.” Yet the Copper Dragon still watched me with a far more vigilant expression, forcing me to give up on my future research plans.
“Damn it! I’d intended to use Cher as my bait to make her cooperate in my research. Harloys, it’s all your fault.”
“…Hmph! Do you really think she wasn’t on guard to begin with? Did you forget how many people witnessed you threatening the Snake Archduchess? Did you forget that the unfortunate me is a living warning to everyone else? She was always on guard against you. Haven’t you noticed that the Evelyns haven’t consumed a single piece of food or water from us?”
Harloys’ analysis was quite on spot. The current Evelyn’s standpoint was a curious one. Was she on the side of the dragons? But her soul and memories were of a human. She even had an impossibly tangled relationship with Bardi. Yet was she on the side of the humans? After all, she was currently one of the major leaders of the dragons.
“I need to have a good discussion with her. Yep, even if it’s just to obtain this unique experimental subject, I need to have a good discussion.”
My lab rat was now on guard, so I would no longer be able to carry out my original plan. In that case, I would just temporarily set it aside. Meanwhile, the battle in the sky had reached its end. The moment Blue Dragon Evelyn took to the skies, the battle’s result had been decided.
These Tigermen named the Eternal Thunder Tribe could do nothing against this Blue Dragon at the Ancient Dragon level. The moment they saw her, they unhesitatingly turned and fled. Unfortunately, their opponent was the speediest of all dragons, skilled at controlling lightning and tempests. Only a few lucky ones were able to escape.
As for that White Dragon? One could only hope that it still had a complete corpse after crashing down and creating such a large crater. However, when considering how White Dragons had bestial levels of intelligence and reproductive abilities, there wasn’t much difference if one more or one less White Dragon survived. Blue Dragon Evelyn probably wanted to use this chance to vent a little.
We had now obtained some extra captives. Upon closer observation, I discovered that these Tigermen were unrelated to the beastmen from the mortal plane. In fact, they probably didn’t even have the same ancestors.
The beastmen in the mortal plane of Eich had many physical features similar to humans. It was analogous to being two distantly related branch families. The most obvious difference between humans and beastmen was that beastmen typically had a few bestial traits. But it would only be the extent of having a beast head and some beast ears and so on. Actually, those with certain interests even found human/beastmen pairings acceptable. On the other hand, the Tigermen before us had obviously evolved down a different path.
It was rather difficult to explain but quite obvious if you saw the example before us.
The current Tigermen had tiny tiger heads that were a bit smaller than the average human head. Their average height was less than 1.6 meters and they all had hunched backs. They also preferred to scamper on all four feet, and it seemed that their joint structure didn’t allow them to stand upright. Their fingers were different from typical beastmen’s fingers, which were just like human fingers with claws at the end. Instead, their fingers were simply three blades, evolved to become a vicious weapon.
They wore light armor that was easy to move around in, which appeared to be created out of casually put together cloth. Meanwhile, their shaking physical wings on their backs exposed their anxiety.
Even under the threat of dragonbreath, their murky eyes were filled with the desire to hunt for flesh and blood. Their bladed hands possessed the stench of blood and had pieces of meat attached. Plus, two sharp fangs reached out of their mouths. Even without needing to look at the strangely-colored long spears on their backs and their blood-letting tools, it would be quite easy to understand that these Tigermen were a vicious and dangerous predatory species.
“What is this place? Speak. If none of you speak, I’ll eat you all.”
The surprising part was that Copper Dragon Evelyn directly asked a question in the dragon language.
“…Ghostwind Plains. This is the Ghostwind Plains. We are hunters from the Tantail Tiger Tribe. O powerful divine beast, we didn’t realize that you had come to our home with a request. We were only attacking that White SemiDragon because he attacked our farm and robbed us of our livestock.”
Alright then. They called the Copper Dragon a divine beast while the White Dragon was only called a SemiDragon. It would seem that even the natives here didn’t have any respect for White Dragons. Well, it was the White Dragons’ own fault for having low intelligence, slow growth, not knowing how to use magic, and even having the terrible habit of eating their own children and eggs… with all this against them, the White Dragons truly deserved their reputation of being the weakest dragon species.
Even more surprising was that a Tigerman with golden feathers on his forehead replied to Copper Dragon Evelyn’s question in the dragon language. Although his accent was somewhat strange, he was indeed fluent.
The dragon language was one of the required classes for becoming a mage, which meant it wasn’t easy at all. It possessed its own magic power and involved a large number of sounds that required curling the tongue along with many sounds not perceivable by the naked ear. Many students with no talent for it would end up having surgery performed on their throats or tongues in order to attempt mastering the dragon language. It was common sense, then, that if an entire species was able to master the dragon language to a certain extent, that species would have natural talent for producing mages. In fact, even the idiotic Dogmen beastmen tribe was known for their high proportion of magic talent.
So these seemingly vicious predator Tigermen either had excellent talent for languages or the dragons used their incredibly long stay here and the threat of dragonbreath to force these natives to voluntarily learn how to communicate with them.
“Ghostwind Plains? Our luck this time was truly bad. The Ghostwind Plains are very far from the Moor Mountains we’re heading to.”
“The teleportation point isn’t fixed? How is it possible that you created such a large-scale Dimensional Door with a random teleportation point on the other side?”
“It’s fixed that you’ll be teleported somewhere in the Dragon World. However, the location is random because the constellations here are too annoying. The entire plane’s coordinates are constantly in flux.”
I gazed up at the sky to look at the three moons and nodded in understanding. With astronomical bodies so close, there would be great amounts of interference. Plus, this interference would randomly increase or decrease in magnitude. With multiple moons’ powerful interference, it would be difficult enough to be able to teleport here. Precise teleportation would definitely be impossible.
“How’s the environment here? Could you give us some basic information?”
“…I don’t know. Don’t be so surprised! We spend most of our time in the Dragon World portion of this plane for the sake of our high-speed growth. However, this plane is so big; how are we supposed to know about the whole plane? I only know that a major battle once occurred here. I heard that several extremely powerful dragon elders all died here.”
“Our majestic Tiger God is undefeatable! Kill off those damned lizards.”
Although that golden feathered Tigerman muttered in a tiny voice, I heard him as clearly as if he was talking right next to my ear thanks to my enhanced hearing. Judging from Evelyn’s reaction, this location seemed to be quite distant from the dragons’ home turf. However, for me, just because of this reason, this place was perfect.
“Aerial knights, begin exploring and mapping this area! Engineers, construct a temporary defense line! This may very well be our future home.”