Chapter 3
Carnelian sat on the bed with a weary expression, Julitan sat on a chair looking indignant, and Steon paced around with a pitiful expression, all three in one room.
“I never woke you! Why are you making such a fuss saying I did!”
Julitan cried out to Carnelian, protesting in an indignant voice, but she only looked at him with a gaze that said, *It must be nice to be so ignorant.* If, until just moments ago, Carnelian’s gaze toward Julitan had been like a cat trying to rub against its owner, now—if one had to roughly compare—it was akin to the expression one makes upon discovering a house centipede in the bathroom right before a shower, pink slipper in hand…… Yes, it was much like that.
“……You mean you didn’t even know that setting my name was what awakened me? You idiot!”
“I don’t know! I said I didn’t know! I’ve done just fine living my whole life without knowing stuff like that!”
Julitan shouted back, his expression defiant, but Carnelian’s face remained unchanged. *It must truly be nice to be so ignorant…….*
“That woman is a Seal. There’s no way bumpkins from the countryside would know about something like that.”
Steon let out a sigh and spoke.
“Oho, you seem to be someone who knows a thing or two…… Why don’t you explain what I am to this ignorant human.”
“I was just about to. Julitan, listen carefully. A Seal is……”
At Carnelian’s sneer, Steon shook his head from side to side and spoke.
“……They are beings that appear sealed away in various corners of the world. They’re often discovered in mines, forests, or caves…… but I’ve never yet heard of one appearing inside a fish’s stomach.”
“There were circumstances. Circumstances.”
Carnelian smoothed her slightly disheveled hair and muttered in an irritated voice.
“Awakening those Seals from their seal is called a contract, but realistically, such a contract is only possible for those far stronger than ordinary people like knights or mages. How should I put it, one might say that Seals react to strength. Unless a strong person who can perfectly wield them desires it, Seals will not awaken.”
Steon glanced back and forth between Carnelian, nodding with an expression that said it was an undeniable truth, and Julitan, whose face showed disbelief at the idea that such beings could exist in this world……, before continuing.
“And if you bestow a name upon an awakened Seal, that Seal is bound to serve the one who awakened it. The one who awakens a Seal is called a Tamer.”
Hearing this, Julitan tilted his head. It didn’t feel like they were trying to scam him, but something about it was off.
“But I’m not strong at all…… so how was I able to awaken you?”
“Probably because she’s defective.”
“Shut up!”
It was a high-pitched voice that made one’s blood run cold just to hear it.
“The abilities of Seals vary by type, but if that woman’s primary field is combat, then her ability is……”
Steon paused briefly, as if trying to set the mood.
“Her ability?”
“She possesses combat power that cannot be matched even by tens of thousands of regular soldiers.”
“Tens of thousands? That’s a gross underestimation of me.”
Carnelian spoke as if it were nothing, but to the two men beside her, “tens of thousands” was a number that held absolutely no tangible meaning.
“That’s ridiculous.”
Julitan stared at Carnelian with the expression of someone who’d just been slapped, muttering to himself. How could such a small, cute-looking woman possibly possess the power to fight tens of thousands…… He couldn’t imagine it at all, but it was clearly no joke.
“Now do you understand? Why a cook like you should never have awakened me!”
Carnelian pointed a finger at Julitan’s face as she spoke. With an expression of supreme indignation.
“What the hell! Let me make this clear: I never had the slightest intention of awakening you! And besides, you’re the one who showed up uninvited!”
“You cause all this trouble and then claim you’re not at fault! What a pathetic man! You!”
“Ahh, I wish you two would give it a rest.”
Steon intervened between the two with a look of utter bewilderment. Then, suddenly donning a curious expression, he asked her.
“By the way…… I’ve never seen one myself, but I heard Seals are submissive to their Tamers. Why aren’t you? Could you really be defective?”
“It’s because this Julitan fellow is a cook.”
“So what if I’m a cook! Why do you keep bringing that up!”
“I’m saying I don’t resonate with you.”
“Resonate?”
“To put it simply, I don’t feel that you are my master in the slightest. There’s no reason for me to be submissive.”
Resonance was a kind of controlling force carried in the words a Tamer spoke to their Seal. One might describe it as the persuasive power born from a Tamer’s strong will and ability.
Steon spoke.
“……I’m sure I’ll see all manner of bizarre cases. Then how exactly did he awaken you if he doesn’t feel like your master?”
“That is……”
Carnelian fell silent for a moment, a complicated expression crossing her face as she fell into thought.
“……I don’t know either.”
Steon, Carnelian, and Julitan all let out long sighs almost simultaneously. In other words, everyone had realized that nothing—absolutely nothing—was proceeding as it should.
“But hey, you.”
Julitan looked at Carnelian and spoke. When he suddenly leaned in close, she flinched.
“Can you cook?”
“With this sword?”
Carnelian held up the sword she possessed, one that exuded a strange beauty, and spoke. Her contemptuous expression essentially said, *Could you cook with this?* It was unmistakably a magnificent blade, yet trimming a Peseter with such a greatsword would surely result in a terrifying, unprecedented culinary abomination.
“…….”
“…….”
Julitan’s devastating counterattack.
“What the hell. You’re completely useless.”
Carnelian’s fury peaked.
“Kyaaaaah! You foolish, idiotic man! That’s what a Seal is—a being meant to aid its Tamer and protect the world! I don’t do things like cooking, how many times do I have to tell you!”
Julitan wasn’t about to back down either.
“The way I protect the world is by cooking! I don’t need a Seal that can’t even cook!”
Julitan shouted, seething with a face that said if there was a god of fate, he would dearly love to give them a solid beating.
“Let’s transfer her.”
Suddenly, Steon quietly spoke.
“T-transfer?”
Julitan wore a face that asked what that was. As expected, someone educated in the city knew all sorts of things.
“Ahh, right. That was an option.”
Carnelian nodded with a resigned expression.
“A transfer is the procedure for moving a Seal to another Tamer. Another Tamer gives her a new name, and if you agree to it, that Seal will go to that Tamer.”
“Simple enough.”
Julitan found it odd that a Seal—a being he knew nothing about—could switch masters so easily, but in this situation, he didn’t particularly care. In any case, he had no need for a Seal that couldn’t cook, and she had no need for a pathetic Tamer. A relationship of mutual irrelevance…… It was a chilly connection, but it seemed they had finally found something they had in common.
“Well, it’s only something I heard, but I’m sure of it. I’ve heard that Castello, the son of the local lord, is a Tamer, so you can ask him to perform the transfer. If she’s a Seal as rare and precious as they come, he’ll never refuse.”
Julitan had no way of sensing it, but as Steon said, a high-grade Seal like Carnelian—blessed with outstanding beauty to boot—was a tremendous “luxury item,” valuable beyond measure. A Seal worth killing for, had she been discovered by others, yet here she was found by a cook in some backwater village and suffering this humiliation; Carnelian’s mood could be nothing but the worst. Of course, Julitan wasn’t the type to quietly accept such words, even now.
Carnelian pouted at those words from Steon.
“Whaaat? The son of some backwater lord? He probably isn’t a Tamer of any real standing……”
A brief silence…….
“Well. He’d still be better than this cook.”
Carnelian looked down at Julitan with that same house-centipede stare, her smile visibly spiteful and cold. In the next instant, Julitan responded by slamming his rage-filled fist onto the table.
“Wh-what the hell is wrong with you! Is me being a cook that—!”
“Aah, so noisy. I’m going back to sleep, so don’t wake me until that provincial lord’s son or whoever gets here. I want peace and quiet, so all of you, get out.”
Carnelian waved her small hand dismissively through the air and turned away.
“…….”
As Julitan and Steon looked on, having lost all words, Carnelian simply lay down on the bed and pulled the covers over herself, soon beginning to fall asleep. She was a Seal who adapted with terrifying speed and possessed an incomparably impudent personality. If all the Seals in the world shared this temperament, the world would be a truly bleak place.
“Finally, a little quiet. Well then, I must go deliver a letter to Castello. Treat that woman, Carnelian, with care. For the time being, you are her Tamer, after all.”
Steon grinned broadly as he looked at Julitan.
“I do hope you don’t end up dead at that woman’s hands before the lord’s son arrives.”
Julitan replied wearily.
Steon smiled at that and turned back to Julitan before leaving, saying,
“This is just something I heard, but…… I’ve heard that those Seals have served powerful masters since hundreds or thousands of years ago, falling back into slumber each time their master died, repeating that cycle over and over. In other words, they may be transcendent beings who have watched over this world since long before humanity.”
“But this amazing being still can’t even cook a single meal?”
Julitan replied with a joking tone and a weary expression, but Steon’s words lingered in his mind, refusing to fade.
Beings who had existed alongside humanity since ancient times. Possessing infinite life and power, yet endlessly repeating only the duties assigned to them, awakening and slumbering and awakening once more. Julitan, who had lost his parents at a young age, found himself thinking that perhaps they were the loneliest beings in the world.
Come to think of it, when Carnelian had referred to Julitan as her master, a faint hint of sorrow seemed to have crossed her face as well.
*Even so…… how can her attitude change so drastically just because I’m a nobody of a cook? Could this actually be a Seal’s true, so-called submissive nature?*
Julitan felt an inexplicable sense of betrayal toward Carnelian as he lay back in the chair, surrendering to an early sleep. The sun was pulling long shadows from the village buildings as it dipped behind the spinning windmill, and Julitan’s eyes began to close beside the bed where Carnelian lay.
Vellesima, in the northeast of Hesperia—a place composed solely of a simple combination of dry brown sandstone and dark gray gravel.
This land, the Hesphalcone Territory of the empire at the continent’s heart, would likely have remained a place of frozen time where no human presence could be found at all, were it not the central hub to which the continent’s greatest merchants flocked.
The female knight Rie Dietrich, who had been admiring the quiet, desolate beauty of Vellesima from the balcony on the upper floor of a bright, earth-toned stone building, turned her head to look at him as her Seal, Ikates, entered.
The male-type Ikates had neatly kept hair that covered half his ears, falling across his forehead in bright, deep crimson. His deep blue eyes looked utterly harmless and strangely captivating. He was a Seal who perpetually wore a light smile on his lips—a pretty boy who appeared gentle and impeccably polite to all who saw him. He had looked this way ever since the young knight Rie, who had now passed her late twenties, freed Ikates from his seal about five years prior.
Rie spoke, gently swirling her wine glass as if to savor the aroma. Strands of her blue hair swayed in the faint breeze.
“It truly is a quiet, lonely sunset. Ikates, if I may ask—what do you feel when you see something like this? Do you feel something similar to what humans feel?”
Rie spoke, her gaze set upon the window. Her fair skin, so unsuited for a knight, appeared flushed, as though drunk on the sunset light.
“I still do not know what humans feel when they look upon such things, Lady Rie.”
“That they are alive…… they must feel it. Perhaps.”
Rie took a sip of the pale, water-colored wine she held, a faintly lonely expression upon her face. Strange, how someone feeling alive could look so lonely.
“Lady Rie. I sensed it faintly, but it seems a new Seal awakened yesterday. Her presence is familiar to me.”
“Oh? So it’s a Seal you know as well.”
“Yes. But she is a Seal with a very painful past. The last time I met her, she told me that she never wished to awaken again. She said it most clearly.”
Ikates wore a sorrowful smile.
“If she has awakened…… I do hope she has found herself a good master.”
With that, Rie rose and headed toward her desk, which was piled high with heavily annotated documents.
And Ikates closed the balcony door against the slowly encroaching sandy wind, then began to clear away the half-finished glass of wine.
Dragon Lady
Author / Gim Cheolgon
Publisher / Bak Seongin
Managing Editor / Editorial Department
Published by / Next Level Studio
Address / 4F, 113 Seongsuil-ro, Seongdong-gu, Seoul
Main Phone / 070-8801-6987
ISBN 979-11-92729-25-1
This book is an ebook published by Next Level Studio under contract with the copyright holder.
Unauthorized reproduction of the contents of this book is prohibited under the Copyright Act.