I Married the Dragon I Killed [Novel] Chapter 256

Chapter 256: If I Die, That’s That

Zed lowered the fist he had driven into the knight’s jaw.

Then he turned toward the woman who had helped him and asked,

“Are you sure about this?”

“About what?”

The woman grinned.

“You’re fine with letting someone on your side get beaten like that?”

“On my side?”

She tilted her head like an innocent puppy.

“Why would I be on that guy’s side? He has nothing to do with me. If anything, he was unbelievably boring.”

Her eyes moved from one person to the next.

Zed.

Penelope.

Garnet.

And finally Ferda.

“Those people promised to give me something interesting, and they kept their promise. That’s all. It was just a contract. Though I got bored pretty quickly anyway. Since you came here, I suppose I don’t need to think about killing that Marquis again, huh?”

“Then are you going to choose us instead?”

“Do you people look worth choosing?”

Her expression sent a chill through the air.

Her gaze settled on Ferda.

And from those eyes, Ferda could feel it.

A destructive instinct.

Something carved into her at the level of instinct and blood desperately wanted to break Ferda apart.

“The way your eyes are moving is rather impure.”

Garnet quietly warned Gae Bolg.

“And what if they are?”

“Then I suppose it can’t be helped.”

Ferda moved a finger.

The shadows driven back by the lantern rapidly crawled across the floor and stretched forward.

Their assigned purpose was restraint.

“Urk!”

They bound Penelope instead.

She froze with one hand stretched toward the table covered in devices.

“Do not touch things without permission.”

“W-What did I even do!? That’s so unfair!!”

“You again…”

“No! I wasn’t! I was just going to pick it up for a second! You think I’d do something like that just to satisfy my own greed, kyaah! My hair! Let go of my hair! My beautiful hair!!”

Completely fed up with Penelope’s sticky fingers, Zed grabbed her by the hair and physically restrained her.

If she had merely been reaching for some worthless object, they would have ignored her.

Unfortunately, the object Penelope had tried to grab was the violet-glowing grenade sitting on the table.

Touching it carelessly might have been enough to make it explode.

“How did you know?”

Gae Bolg asked with a wide smile.

“That thing is dangerous, I mean.”

“Dangerous?”

“Yep. That thing the third-rate demon lady just tried to touch was a bomb capable of blowing this entire area away. If she’d picked it up wrong, boom! This whole neighborhood could’ve vanished without a trace.”

“W-What!? Then why would you leave something like that sitting there looking so easy to steal!? Are you insane!?”

Penelope, somehow managing to act like the victim, shouted in outrage.

“You can be quiet now, miss. I asked the handsome man over there.”

Gae Bolg’s eyes shone wetly with curiosity.

“Tell me. How did you know?”

How did he know?

Because the very reason this woman had drawn even a small amount of his interest in the first place was one of the greatest disasters in the empire’s history.

The day an entire Marquis household vanished from the center of a city had shaken the whole continent.

It had been the opening firework announcing the true birth of Gae Bolg, future godmother of crime.

“Instinct.”

“Hmmm. You must have good instincts.”

Gae Bolg accepted the explanation without probing further.

“So what do you want to do after taking me away? Are you going to mess me up completely?”

“If that is what you desire.”

“Hehehe. I bet you could, handsome… but tell me the real reason.”

Gae Bolg narrowed her eyes.

The sharpened gaze filled the room with tension.

She looked ready to cause trouble at any moment.

Ferda answered.

“Do what you are good at.”

His eyes moved toward the violet grenade.

“I want to use those bombs to kill monsters.”

“Use them to kill monsters…”

She puffed out her lips and wobbled her head loosely like an inflatable doll.

“Handsome. Have you ever walked through a marketplace?”

“Many times, both then and now.”

Whether in his current life, where he was treated like a noble, or in the past, when he had been treated as less than human.

“When I go to markets, hawkers always say things like this.”

She changed her voice, imitating a middle-aged merchant.

“Our shields can block anything! Buy the shield that will protect your life! Invest in me!”

She returned to her normal voice.

“When you hear that, what do you think?”

“That it must be a good shield.”

“Me? Every time I hear something like that, I think this.”

She pressed both hands against her head.

“That shield… would it really not break? What would they do if I smashed it right here?”

“You wanted to prove yourself?”

“Yeah. I just wanted to prove it.”

People like that existed everywhere.

The word ‘absolute’ itself provoked them into wanting to challenge it.

Usually, that desire came from wanting recognition by defeating whatever had been placed before them.

“I couldn’t stand it. I wanted to show them how worthless their masterpiece really was. How pathetic it was.”

But Gae Bolg wanted nothing as ordinary as recognition.

She wanted them to despair.

She wanted the thrill of watching someone break after she destroyed the thing they believed in.

“Is that why you attacked a noble?”

“Yep.”

The reason she had attacked Marquis Phellus.

“Aegis, was it? The people guarding some fat noble were overflowing with pride. They said that as long as they were there, no one could lay so much as a fingertip on him.”

Who would believe such a ridiculous reason?

She had attacked them simply because they dared to claim their defense could not be pierced.

“So I succeeded in touching him.”

“And got caught.”

“That was all I needed.”

Thus had been born Gae Bolg, the spear that pierced the heart.

If someone said something could not be broken, she broke it simply because they had said so.

“Then I have the perfect place for you.”

Ferda needed precisely that kind of woman.

Within the category of pure firepower, she was a genius among geniuses, someone even Burnell could not match.

“How many things do you think exist in the east that everyone says can never be destroyed by something you’ve made?”

“Hmm. Probably a lot?”

“There are countless places where your creations could shine. All you need to do is destroy them.”

A disturbing smile spread across her face.

Her answer was simple.

“Nooope.”

Gae Bolg rejected Ferda’s offer.

“Why?”

“Why? Monsters? That’s no different from blowing up bombs in some empty mountain valley. Who despairs when I do that?”

“The demons, presumably.”

“But people would be happy, wouldn’t they? I don’t like that.”

Her answer made one thing clear to Ferda.

She would not dance according to his intentions.

“If you refuse, only one choice remains for you.”

Death was the only proper answer for a terrorist.

Yet even that death felt wasteful compared with Gae Bolg’s talent.

That was precisely why she had survived even after nearly assassinating Marquis Phellus.

“I know.”

Her hand moved.

At the suspicious motion, Garnet raised her bowgun and aimed it at her.

The slightest sign of an attack and she would pull the trigger.

What Gae Bolg picked up was a small knife used for sharpening pencils.

Holding it between her middle finger and thumb, she smiled.

“When this world stops being fun…”

She let it fall.

Directly beneath it was a taut rope.

“I can just die.”

Ferda’s shadow snatched the knife before it could cut the cord.

But that had been a feint.

Somewhere overhead, Zed’s ears caught the sound of something snapping loose and moving.

FWOOSH!

A bottle mounted to the ceiling spat out a cluster of sharpened nails.

Their target was the magitech grenade.

The moment that thing broke, the entire area would disappear.

Zed moved.

With a spectacular series of motions, he deflected every nail, knocking away every projectile headed for the grenade.

“Hehehe~”

Her eyes remained bright with interest.

They clearly said it was not over yet.

Ferda used his shadows to completely wrap the area around the grenades.

He created an isolated space where no impact from outside could reach them.

“What will you do now?”

Ferda asked.

“That’s what I want to ask you.”

Gae Bolg’s design was not finished yet.

“What are you going to do?”

At that instant, a vibration rolled through the entire floor.

The piles of garbage she had stacked began collapsing, and light flickered between them.

Violet light.

Exactly the same color as the glow inside the grenade.

Ferda’s shadows ripped the garbage piles apart.

Grenades were hidden beneath them.

Five of them.

Her attack had already begun inside the garbage heap.

Worthy of the future godmother of crime, she had shattered everyone’s expectations and launched her attack from somewhere no one had considered.

She asked again.

“What are you going to do?”

Ferda asked himself the same thing.

What could he do?

The first thing Gae Bolg had created from magitech was a grenade.

Her fanatical obsession with explosions had transformed into a genius that treated accumulated conventional knowledge as though it meant nothing.

This was the violet explosion that would become Gae Bolg’s signature.

A crystallization of destructive power that would later be called plasma particles.

And it was about to become reality.

‘Did I get too greedy?’

Ferda blamed himself.

He had wanted her talent so badly that he failed to fully account for her nature and exposed everyone to danger.

But he pushed self-reproach aside immediately and confronted the problem.

How could he face an explosion of this scale?

‘Run.’

That was the most correct answer.

The slums would vanish without a trace, but Ferda himself would suffer no meaningful problem.

‘And the people here?’

Garnet, Zed, and Penelope.

If they were caught in the blast, simply surviving would be something to be grateful for.

He could not run alone.

Then what could he do?

Did he possess any power capable of swallowing an explosion this enormous?

Ferda searched through the spells in his mind.

He pulled out every defensive spell stored in the library that was his memory.

The answer was always the same.

Failure.

Among spells of the Fifth Rank or below, there was nothing capable of stopping a plasma explosion.

‘There is.’

Then a voice spoke.

A voice from inside him.

‘You can use it.’

Use what?

His mind did not understand.

His body did.

At that moment, mana began moving regardless of Ferda’s will.

It came from within the Dark Circle.

“Aaaagh! It’s going to blow!!”

“Regent! You must get away…!”

The violet light grew fiercer.

Garnet and Zed threw themselves around Ferda, trying to shield him.

But Ferda’s body did not move.

As if entranced, his eyes remained fixed on the light.

Ferda did not properly understand magitech.

Nor did he understand the principles behind plasma, what force created it, or how one might neutralize it.

He wanted only one thing.

For the object emitting that light to disappear.

He made that wish.

The Dark Circle moved.

It took the shape of hands and reached toward the light.

Whatever formulas or theories might say, one thing alone felt certain.

The moment those hands swallowed the light,

Everything would become as though it had never existed.

The two hands closed like a wrapping cloth around the violet radiance.

They formed a round sphere.

Then the sphere compressed smaller and smaller.

The violent vibration knocked down garbage piles and shook dust from the ceiling.

At last, the sphere collapsed into a single point and vanished.

And with it, everything returned to as though nothing had happened.

“…Huh?”

The ecstatic expression on Gae Bolg’s face twisted.

The explosion had vanished at the exact moment it should have occurred.

“What…?”

She dug frantically through the collapsed garbage pile.

The grenades were gone.

Looking utterly hollow, she lowered the trash in her hands and turned her head.

The way she looked at Ferda resembled a beast that had lost its young.

She was furious.

“It becomes something that never happened? What kind of bullshit is that? Are we children playing pretend? What is this, ‘rainbow reflection’ or something!?”

Gae Bolg lost all reason and extended her sharpened nails.

Then she charged directly at Ferda.

Unfortunately, her body was little more than a skeleton wrapped in skin.

“Take this! Pepe Attack!!”

Even a third-rate demon’s flying body tackle was enough to subdue her easily.

“Aagh! I’m pissed! I hate you! Disappear!”

“Stay still! My bounty reward!! Woohoo!”

Gae Bolg began throwing a tantrum like a child.

“Regent Ferda…”

Garnet stared at Ferda.

She was in awe of an ability she had never seen before.

Ferda maintained a calm expression.

He was just as confused as everyone else.

He simply could not allow that confusion to show.

“It seems you truly have no methods remaining.”

“What do you mean none!? I can bite off my tongue right here and die, mmph! Mmph!”

“Thank you. Now you truly have none.”

Zed quickly shoved a gag into her mouth before she could try anything else.

“Lady Garnet.”

“Yes.”

“What do you think would be the best way to handle her?”

Garnet processed everything they knew and made her judgment.

“The fact that she broke through the defenses and attacked Marquis Phellus alone means she’s probably the best designer we could ask for. And the fact that she turned magitech devices into specialized equipment without even having blueprints means she’s unquestionably the best engineer for what we’re seeking as well…”

Her advantages were enormous.

Unfortunately, so were her flaws.

“She would pose an equally enormous threat to both you and the territory, Lord Ferda.”

The safety of the territory was the same as Baldrova’s safety.

That was one risk Ferda could not afford to treat lightly.

Would it be better for the future to simply dispose of her now?

“Burnell will simply have to work harder.”

Ferda gathered mana at his fingertip.

He intended to pierce Gae Bolg’s head in a single strike.

Then…

“Mmmph! Mmph! Mmph!”

“This bitch! She’s flopping around like a fish just pulled from the sea! Stay still!”

Penelope pushed down on Gae Bolg’s shoulders, trying desperately to keep hold of her.

It looked more than enough like someone struggling because she did not want to die.

But Ferda thought otherwise.

A woman who had been trying to kill herself only moments ago was unlikely to have suddenly changed her mind.

“Remove the gag.”

“What?”

“I said remove it.”

Penelope carefully pulled the gag free.

The instant her mouth was liberated, Gae Bolg asked,

“That Burnell the handsome man mentioned…”

Something had changed in her eyes.

It was different from the smile she wore when trying to screw someone over.

Different from the sulking anger she showed when things failed to go her way.

“Do you mean a man called Marquis Burnell?”

There was no mistaking it.

That was the gaze of admiration.