32 - Killing a dragon...is still killing someone.

[Flight] was a 7th circle spell, which happened to also be the entry into the class blood stage.

Right now, I was using [Sonic Flight], the 10th circle variant of [Flight].

Like the name suggested, it allowed flight at the speed of sound. Actually, it was slightly faster.

Reaching the appropriate distance, I did as I had done years ago with the clams, diving straight down.

[Sonic Flight] worked underwater as well, although the speed is reduced by about 50%.

Diving down 3 km, I once again saw the silhouette of a water dragon beneath me.

Just like the other time, the dragon noticed me back and immediately rushed to attack me.

My aura was on full display, since I needed it to survive 3 kilometers underwater from the water pressure, so the dragon could tell I was dangerous and attacked immediately.

I evaded using [Sonic Flight] and rushed to its head.

Crashing into its head while landing, I quickly looked around for a place where the scales were slightly overlapped.

Scales were inflexible, unlike skin, so there were places on reptiles where they overlapped. I wanted to grab the underside of one of these overlapping scales to hold onto.

By the way, dragons didn't like being called reptiles, and they technically weren't, but they did share a lot of similarities. This was one of them.

Finding one, I used my left hand to hold onto the scale to stay on the dragon's head, much to its fury, and used my right hand to summon a sword from the treasury.

Uncasting [Sonic Flight], I prepared to use [Void Severance Slash] on the dragons head.

Specifically, from where I was, I was right next to its eye. It had the eye lid closed, but that wouldn't matter.

The dragon sensed me gathering mana in a hyper-condensed attack and tried frantically to shake me off, but couldn't.

Finally, the build-up was finished and I swung the sword.

Crack!

There was a cracking sound as the void rift appeared right inside the dragon scale.

It was impossible to tell if the rift or the scale made the sound, since both cracked.

Suddenly, I let go and was flung far away, but it was already too late for the dragon.

The moment I opened the void rift, the dragon screamed in pain as I slashed its eye while breaking through the defense of the scaled eyelid. As it screamed, it also flung its head and body around, writhing in pain, but the void rift stayed still, so the dragon ended up essentially making a huge chunk of its body pass through the void rift by writhing around without moving away.

When it finally realized what was happening, there was already a huge scar on its face, going from above its eyebrow down to its jaw.

The jaw in particular was looking real bad. Due to the way the head arched as it passed through the rift, there was only a deep gash near the eye, not reaching the brain, but lower down, by the jaw, there was a deep incision.

The dragon was bleeding out profusely from this incision. I didn't stick around idling about either and hurriedly recast [Sonic Flight] before going up to its flailing body that had moved away from the rift and repeating the process with half the raw power and no rift opening.

Without the rift, this just caused a small wound to appear on its body. Of course, that wasn't the end for me. If this was the limit of my attack, being restricted in area of effect due to the compression magic, I'd be ashamed of my void magic stage cultivation.

Sinking the sword deep into the small wound I had created, I willed the compressed mana through the sword and into the tip of the blade. Just before the mana went out of the sword, I undid the compression magic, increasing area of effect by 500x.

Keep in mind that this is also void mana, which is countless times more destructive and long-lasting than normal mana.

The burst of void mana, starting from the small wound, rippled through the dragon's body, wreaking havoc.

However, this alone wasn't enough. A dragon's flesh was also absurdly strong, even if it was less than the scales.

So, all I managed to do each time was the damage equivalent to a mini-explosion, not a full explosion that killed the dragon.

Still, the effect was palpable.

The dragon's blood had muddied the waters, and I was swimming in it.

As I kept on repeating this process, eventually the dragon stopped moving.

After an hour of a hard fought fight, I had finally killed it.

***

Taking in the corpse into the treasury in a corner, I rushed up and out of the water.

If anyone were to see me right now, they'd see a man covered with blood with an exhausted and conflicted expression on his face.

It really hadn't been willing to die easily. There wouldn't be many creatures that so stubbornly refused to die.

Looking at it wailing in pain, I had felt pretty bad, actually.

Here it was, minding its own business, when suddenly I came around looking for a fight.

In the end, what did it die for? So I could vent my frustration at not being able to find clues to a warp drive?

For a moment, I had a dazed look as I felt how truly meaningless the so-called sacrosanctity of life was.

What murder? What evil? In the end, I was the one alive and the dragon was dead. My reasons for killing it would be a trivial part of the occasion, to others.

If I were to merely tell someone of this achievement, and mind you, it certainly was an achievement, I would be lauded and praised among all mankind as a great warrior.

Meanwhile, dragonkind would come to hate me if they heard of me.

Two sides of a coin, both having opposing opinions of me for the same act.

I was a murderer. Plain and simple. I had felt that truth back when I saw the body become a corpse as it stopped moving.

I wanted to curl up and puke, but there was no ground to curl up on. I wanted someone to talk to, to tell me I wasn't who I felt I was, but I was alone then.

Alone, levitating above the water in an endless sea.

Dazed, I rushed back to land, and the moment I landed I fell to my knees and became breathless.

This wasn't just due to the realization I had had, but also due to the fact that after the fight, I had to upkeep my aura and [Sonic Flight] until reaching land. My mind had no time to relax as it focused on the casting and aura release.

Now, the exhaustion fully kicked in.

Turning around on the ground, I laid myself down on my back and took deep breaths in and out, arms and legs spread apart.

Looking straight ahead, my eyes were greeted by the clouds.

Drifting high up in the sky, I felt, for a moment, true admiration for them.

Clouds didn't need to think about conplex things like morality. Clouds were just clouds, and they were ok with that.

Subconsciously, I raised my arm and pointed at one, the cloud right above me, and I shot out a blade beam made of aura.

I hadn't meant to do this, I hadn't even had the thought to. It just happened, as some things do.

Looking up, I forgot about my fatigue, and about the moral questions, and the dragon's screams of agony that were still wailing in my ears.

I was just fully absorbed in the trajectory of the blade beam.

As it went up higher and higher into the sky, I slowly felt myself become the blade beam, soaring ever higher into the heavens.

This was, of course, a hallucination. Or, perhaps it'd be more accurate to call it a peculiar form of synesthesia.

Suddenly, the clouds got closer and closer to the blade beam, and then my consciousness shoke.

The hallucination ended, and the immersion was broken.

I panted, short of breath. I hadn't realized I had started holding it in.

Frantically, out of a bizarre impule that grew out from my subconscious for god knows what reason, I looked up at the cloud I had hit, and there I saw.

It was a hole. Straight through the cloud, a hole the shape of the blade beam.

Just a line randomly missing in the middle of the white fluff, like someone had forgotten to paint it in on the canvas of the sky.

Yes, this was the problem.

I wasn't a cloud. Clouds were clouds.

And clouds were weak. Anyone could come along and change their shape, put a massive hole in the middle of them.

Anyone could mess with a cloud. Clouds were free, but with freedom came a lack of identity. You can be anything, but that means at any given moment, you aren't any one thing, able to be changed and constantly changing.

And if you're identity does not exist...then neither do you.

Clouds aren't people. They don't need an identity. They can die and nobody cares, not even the clouds.

I can't do that.

I mustn't do that.

I was a person. I needed an identity, I needed to live, I needed to be strong and not just some weak, gaseous thing that can, literally, be blown away by the wind.

And if freedom came with that weakness, perhaps with strength came restriction.

Perhaps that restriction was the fact that I'd need a mountain of corpses to stand on in order to touch the heavens.

Was I ready for that? A mountain of corpses?

In reality, I had already started, and not just with the dragon.

I don't know why it never struck me like it had today, maybe the animals I had slaughtered before were too easy, too much of a split second instakill. Even the sphinxes only took a couple blows. I had never given it much thought.

I had never given it enough thought.

I-...

I didn't want to become a remorseless killer.

I wanted to be better than that.

But...was that not what I-no...what everyone had always been?

Was nature not just a contest to see who could kill the biggest prey to become the apex predator?

This semblance of peace, of kindness and good intentions in people that I had intuitively believed in...was it just...

A lie?

Is everyone, collectively, unanimously, without ever admitting it or saying it out loud, coming to their own decision to lie and say, "Hey, look. I'm a good person. Now like me and help me and be good to me back."

Were they just saying that so they wouldn't have to deal with the opposite?

[People are afraid of a world filled only with remorseless killers, so they lie to themselves alongside everyone else, even going so far as to set their own example of being a "good" person, just so they can continue believing the world is a nicer place than it is.]

A logic like that. Was that...

Reality?

Sitting up and leaning over to the side, I threw up.

Opening my eyes, it looked disgusting, yet I forced myself to look at it, the bile puked up onto the rocky floor.

That was me. That disgusting filth, that I wanted to run away from. That was me.

But unlike the bile on the floor, I couldn't run away from myself.