Chapter 46 Let’s Wreck the Seiryuusai Festival with Evil Dragon! ⑦
Edited by: Kanaa-senpai
The Void Dragon hung high above, unmoving, its vast shadow blotting out the stars. Its body was built from darkness so deep it seemed to swallow the light around it, and yet somehow hollow—like even the shape it wore didn’t truly belong to it.
There was no spark of self in its motionless form, no soul flickering behind its eyes. It just stared blankly into the void, a perfect puppet awaiting the pull of its Puppet Master. And still, this soulless thing was the flawless Clone of the world-ending Evil Dragon, brought into being by humans so consumed with pride they’d dared to reach for the gods’ throne.
It was a weapon—a living Frankenstein’s monster made of miasma and hubris. Did they really think something that could end the world would just… obey them?
”Doesn’t the Void Dragon have any kind of control device—a kill switch?” My voice came out sharp before I could stop it. “If it goes on a rampage, it could wipe out the world.”
I had to keep him talking. Buying time until Yaten arrived was all that mattered now. Just a few more minutes. If the Void Dragon started moving before that, it would only take a blink for over a thousand Innocent Lives to be erased. So I had to drag words out of him, stitch seconds together, long enough to prepare our trump card.
”Of course it does,” Seiichi replied, serene as a monk lost in prayer. “The miasma that forms the Void Dragon’s body cannot exist without my orb. In the impossible event it goes on a rampage, destroying this would end everything.”
”…You’re being awfully honest about something that crucial. That’s your entire lifeline, and—oh.” The realization hit me like a snap of ice, and I let out a bitter laugh. “So that’s it.”
Seiichi smiled at me the way a teacher might at a bright student who’d finally caught on. “The Main Family has already served its purpose. From now on, we of the Branch Family will lead the Shiryuin Clan and restore order and discipline to the world of exorcists.”
A death sentence, said as if it were a kind favor. Now that the Main Family wasn’t useful as their puppets anymore, they planned to wipe us out—clean house, like getting rid of old stock. Not just us, either. Any noble houses that might someday stand in their way. The Seal Dragon Festival, gathering leaders from across the nation, was the perfect place to do it. With the power of the Void Dragon behind them, they could rewrite the world overnight.
”You’re even planning to make the Void Dragon deal with the sealed Evil Dragon?”
”A bound and motionless Evil Dragon is less than dust before the Void Dragon,” he said lightly. “The duty the Main Family has upheld for a thousand years will end with me, the Head of the Branch Family. You can rest easy.”
”You can really say that world’s safe, if it only stands because the Void Dragon lets it?”
They wanted to build a world with the Void Dragon as the backbone of their power structure. A world where the only thing keeping it from shattering was a soulless Clone of the Evil Dragon. It wasn’t just reckless—it was insane. If it rampaged, it would be the end. And the idea that whoever held the orb would rule everything… that only led to one place: mountains of corpses and rivers of blood. Maybe Seiichi had hidden safety mechanisms as backup, but if the first step of his grand design was mass murder, how could anyone trust the rest?
Seiichi only smiled wider, brushing all that aside, and raised the jet-black orb. Its surface flashed with a cold glint.
”Then allow me to show you,” he said, voice rich with pride. “A proof that we are in complete control.”
At his words, the Void Dragon began to bleed miasma. Black haze spilled from its vast body, drifting down like toxic snow. It was thin enough that a grown exorcist would only feel dizzy—but for the unborn and newborn scattered unconscious across the plaza, it was pure poison. The moment I understood what Seiichi meant to do, I flung my arms wide and hurled an instant Barrier across the entire Seal Dragon Festival plaza.
It was the distilled essence of the barrier arts that had held the Evil Dragon sealed for a thousand years. Power honed to contain a world-ending being roared out from me, and the invisible dome slammed down, covering every guest in the plaza. The miasma scattered harmlessly off it like smoke against glass. Because it was tuned just to kill tiny lives, it was weak enough that, as Head of the Shiryuin Clan’s Main Family, I could push it back without even straining—but still.
”You just tried to harm thousands of guests,” I shouted, my voice cracking. “By this act alone, you’ve declared rebellion not just against the exorcist world, but against the nation itself!”
They had done it. In full view of leaders from across the country, they had unleashed a deadly poison. It was beyond high treason—it was attempted mass murder. From this moment, Seiichi could never claim innocence again. He would be branded an arch-criminal.
And yet, instead of fear, he clapped his hands together, beaming at me like I’d just done a party trick.
”Ah, as expected of the Head of the Main Family! To deflect the miasma meant to cover this entire plaza, even if it was weak—splendid work!”
”Do you even understand what you were trying to do?!”
”Of course. We accounted for you stopping it and—wait. Huh?”
The wicked smile slid off his face. Seiichi blinked, baffled, and tilted his head back to stare at the sky. The twelve other Branch Family men followed his gaze like puppets on strings. I felt the opening like lightning and coiled my legs to spring, ready to snatch the orb from Seiichi’s hand in that one fatal moment of distraction—
—and froze, my whole body locking up.
Something was looking down at us.
It wasn’t the empty stillness from before. This was will. A clear, razor-sharp will, steeped in malice so pure it felt like standing inside a killing curse. My lungs seized. Instinct screamed, and I kicked off the stone, throwing myself backward just as a blur of black carved through the place where I’d been standing.
Miasma howled in a violent burst. The stone split with a shriek.
Then a beam of darkness—more like a spear of solid night—ripped down from above. It punched through the floating stage, through Seiichi, through all thirteen of the Branch Family before they could even flinch. They vanished. Not bodies falling—just gone, erased, their souls snuffed out like smoke in the wind.
I couldn’t even process it. One heartbeat they were there, the next they weren’t, and my body was already snapping upright on pure reflex, head whipping up—and my gaze met its.
”…Yaten—” My breath caught. “No. The Void Dragon.”
The shape that had filled the heavens as the Evil Dragon—the Void Dragon—was simply gone.
In its place, a single girl hovered in the air, bare and weightless, looking down on the world like she had just been born. She looked maybe thirteen, fourteen at most, like someone had sculpted Yaten’s girlhood straight from memory—an almost unreal beauty, the kind that could topple kingdoms. A few soft pink petals bloomed across the small swell of her chest, and her body still had that fragile bud-like shape of something that hadn’t yet opened, a sharp contrast to the full, voluptuous figure Yaten carried now as a mother.
Curved black dragon horns curled from her head, and long black hair spilled all the way down to her feet, stirring in some wind I couldn’t feel. Her golden eyes were completely blank as they blinked at me, tilting her head in a way so innocently curious it made my breath snag. She was like… Yaten’s Girl Form, if someone had pulled it out of a dream and given it flesh.
Yeah. Communication wasn’t going to happen. Everything about her felt wrong in that eerily clean way—like she’d go on calmly killing every living thing around her, not from hatred, not even from hunger, just… because. Because she existed.
A bundle of miasma given shape, born from the world-ending Evil Dragon’s own leaked essence. In other words, the Void Dragon was nothing less than pure malice given form—the natural enemy of all living things.
It had gone after me and Seiichi and the other twelve Branch Family heads just because we were moving nearby. I doubted it had even *thought* about it. That was just what it did. Which meant if it erased me next, it would move on to the thousands of guests at the Seal Dragon Festival and wipe them all out. It was like a natural disaster with a heartbeat.
Her eyes fixed on me, and for a second, I felt her will lock like a weapon clicking into place. She raised her hand, fingers open, palm aimed straight at my chest, ready to kill.
And then—
”…In… ji?”
—her face wavered. Confusion? Hesitation? The killing light faded from her gaze, and the Void Dragon blinked down at me with the shy wariness of someone running into an old classmate in the street. My heart lurched. We had never met, and yet… and yet she looked like she *knew* me.
”…Hh—! Wha—whaaaaaaa!!”
A strangled squeal burst from her lips. She jerked like she’d just bitten into forbidden fruit, her golden eyes going wide as she glanced down at herself—then she yelped, twisting her slim body away. Arms shot up to clutch her chest, her long hair whipping as she turned her back, trying to hide her nakedness from my stunned stare.
She was *blushing*.
Somehow, impossibly, this creature of pure malice had realized she was naked, and shame had bloomed in her. The Void Dragon—who wasn’t supposed to even *have* a soul—had felt embarrassment.
”Th-this… this is… fine!”
She spun back around with a tiny huff, cheeks flushed, and with a flick of her wrist, a pure white kimono shimmered into place around her. Then she straightened, puffed out her chest, and—oh gods—dragged her tongue slowly across her lips like a predator eyeing prey.
Ah. I’m dead.
This time her movement was different. Deliberate. Focused. Her power coiled around her like a storm being drawn back into a single blade. Now that she had tasted self, she seemed to have found a craving for it—for her own malice. Hunger glimmered in her golden eyes. Drool touched the corner of her mouth.
And then the world went black.
A beam of darkness—thick and absolute—erupted from her hand. A Dark Beam that would not just kill, but devour everything down to the soul, leaving not even ash. My brain spat out one clean phrase—certain death—and the world slowed, sound fading like water slipping down a drain.
”NUUUOOOHHHHHHH!! Husband! Are you unharmed?!”
”Yaten…!”
Lightning didn’t even begin to cover it. One instant the world was drowning in black light, the next Yaten was just *there*, moving so fast she had left the sound behind. She slammed her bare palm against the Dark Beam and *batted it away*. Raw force. My ears popped from the pressure as it veered off and shattered into harmless sparks in the distance.
Yaten landed in front of me, breath ragged, shoulders heaving, and glanced back at me with a quick flicker of worry in her crimson eyes before snapping her gaze back to the thing that wore her younger face.
”I will not forgive any who dare harm my mate! …More importantly—who is that?! She looks exactly like me!!”
”She’s the Void Dragon—a Clone made from your spirit fragments!”
”Wha—! They made a clone of *me* without my leave?! How utterly insolent of these humans!”
Even Yaten’s composure cracked at that. To create an existence equal to the world-ending Evil Dragon itself… no wonder her voice shook with outrage. But she stayed sharp, keeping herself between me and the Void Dragon, her stance tight, her gaze slicing from the clone to the scattered guests on the plaza.
”Are the mothers safe?”
”They only fainted. The miasma didn’t touch them, so… not yet, anyway.”
”Good. Then this must be swift. The children must not be harmed. Do not drop the Barrier for even a moment, my mate.”
She was right. Even if the Void Dragon’s miasma hadn’t poisoned them, the sheer weight of her presence could crush the unborn if this dragged on. Yaten and I both knew it, and for a moment our eyes met in grim understanding—before we turned together to face the girl, who now looked faintly annoyed at being ignored.
”Yaten,” I said, low, “fly her as high into the sky as you can. While you’ve got her distracted, I’ll destroy the orb—the Branch Family’s control core.”
”The orb… of course. So they used such a thing. Then I shall draw her away and open a gap…”
”Mine,” the Void Dragon hissed, her voice trembling, words sticking like they were new and sharp in her mouth. “Mine… my place… give it back—GIVE IT TO ME!”
It was going to be a quick and brutal fight—no room for second chances, no room for breath.
Yaten and the Void Dragon faced each other without another word, their human forms cracking away like glass as they unfolded back into their true shapes—two titanic Evil Dragons, black as the void, coils blotting out the sun. The air trembled around them. Even from the ground, I could feel the weight of their gazes locking, the kind of pressure that made the sky itself want to crawl out of the way.
Then they moved.
The plaza floor shuddered as twin whirlwinds of miasma ripped skyward, their wings slamming open in unison like black sails catching an invisible storm. Claws like obsidian spears scraped against each other with a shriek that split the clouds. They twisted, collided, and spun apart again, their massive bodies coiling around one another as they shot higher and higher, like two black pillars trying to stab through the heavens. The Barrier hummed under my feet as it strained to keep their leaking power from spilling down onto the unconscious guests below.
My breath caught somewhere in my throat. This… this was what the end of the world would look like.
The sky went darker the farther they rose, the sunlight thinning until only the glow of their golden and crimson eyes cut through the storm of miasma. Every wingbeat cracked like thunder. Black scales rained down like fragments of night. Their roars rolled across the world, shaking the air itself to pieces, echoing back from the mountains like the earth was screaming with them.
I clenched my fists so hard my nails bit into my palms. Yaten knew as well as I did—this had to end fast. Every second they stayed locked together like that, the sheer presence of them pushed down on the Barrier, pressing on the fragile lives curled inside it. The unborn. The children. If the Barrier faltered even for a heartbeat…
”Yaten…” I whispered, though I knew she couldn’t hear me through the screaming sky.
Higher and higher, the two black dragons climbed, their bodies twisting tighter and tighter together as they fought, two shadows coiling around each other like serpents trying to strangle the sun.
Notes:
• Seiichi – Branch family head, loyal but quietly disturbed by the clan’s decline. Cautious, more grounded.
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Edited by Kanaa-senpai.
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