Meanwhile, at the very moment Nidhogg was treating Baek Yeon.
Far away from him, inside a Gate, numerous people were moving busily about.
Centered around the enormous palace situated at the heart of the Gate, people were leveling the land, raising pillars, and carrying out construction work. Every one of them possessed a beautiful appearance, and on their bodies they wore the Valkyrie standard armor that Nidhogg had given to Shin Sua.
Their identities were none other than gods and Valkyries who, like Nidhogg, had crossed over from a ruined world.
The one commanding the Valkyries absorbed in the construction work was a goddess whose beauty could not be adequately described with the simple word “beautiful.”
Her golden hair flowed down like a waterfall, and her appearance seemed as if the very word beauty had been gathered and shaped into human form—something not even the work helmet on her head or the dust on her face could conceal.
Freyja.
Among the gods of Asgard, she was the deity who possessed the most beautiful appearance.
She pointed out a Valkyrie who had made a mistake during the work.
“Over there! The pillar’s tilted! Set it up properly, vertically!”
“I’m sorry!”
“And you over there! That’s where we’re planting the catalyst for magic, so be careful!”
“Yes, ma’am!!”
As the Valkyries moved in perfect order according to her commands, a Valkyrie in charge of scouting the outside hurriedly flew in among them.
“Lady Freyja!”
“Linnea? How did the scouting outside the dimensional gate go?”
“Lady Freyja! That isn’t what matters right now!”
“Then I’m asking what happened!”
The Valkyrie, her face deathly pale, flew right up in front of Freyja, glanced around, and whispered so quietly that only Freyja could hear.
“We found t-t-traces of Nidhogg…!”
“?!”
The moment the name Nidhogg came out of the Valkyrie’s mouth, Freyja’s face also turned pale.
Who was Nidhogg?
He who attacks with hatred.
The sneering slaughterer.
The dragon of hell.
All those ominous epithets referred to Nidhogg.
His power surpassed that of the gods, and his battles against his rival, the eagle who lived at the highest place, had always shaken the world. Freyja had never faced him directly, but she harbored fear toward Nidhogg.
“…We must inform Odin. You, follow me.”
“Understood!”
Freyja took the Valkyrie Linnea and entered the palace situated at the center of the Gate.
Unlike the outside of the palace, which was busy and noisy due to the construction, the interior was quiet, and there was no one around.
Snap!
As Freyja walked down the palace corridor, she snapped her fingers.
At once, the hard hat and the dust on her face disappeared, and she returned to being Freyja, the goddess of beauty and magic, as usual.
She opened the door to the deepest part of the palace and entered.
“Odin!”
It was the audience chamber of a mysterious king.
A place where liquefied gold and various magic circles drifted leisurely through the air.
At the end of that audience chamber, upon the throne, sat one person.
Long black hair, an eyepatch covering one eye, and dark circles heavy beneath the other.
With a haggard appearance, the woman sat on the throne with both knees bent and hugged to her chest.
At first glance, she looked like a shut-in wreck, but this woman was none other than Odin, the king of the gods who ruled over all the deities of Asgard.
With an indifferent expression devoid of any emotion, Odin answered while moving only her fingers to modify the magic circles floating in the air.
“Freyja. What is it? What about the Asgard reconstruction plan?”
“That isn’t what matters right now. Nidhogg. We found traces of Nidhogg!”
“……”
The instant Nidhogg’s name came up, Odin froze in place as if someone had pressed a pause button.
Soon, her body began trembling.
“H-hieeeeeek……”
“Haa…”
“D-death! Death is coming…!”
Freyja looked up pathetically at the convulsing Odin, then approached her and shoved medicine she took from her bosom deep into Odin’s mouth.
The medicine Freyja, who was also a god of magic, had personally manufactured took effect immediately.
Odin’s trembling, convulsing body went still.
“I told you to take your medicine on time, didn’t I?”
“Hiiiii… But…”
After taking the medicine and calming down, Odin’s cold, composed demeanor from moments ago vanished entirely, and she shriveled up, fidgeting without even being able to make an excuse.
“Ragnarok has already passed. We survived the twilight of the gods.”
“W-we just ran away to another world.”
“In any case, we survived.”
“Hic! Yes…”
After calming Odin down, Freyja crossed her arms and asked in an overbearing tone.
“So.”
“Yes?”
“So what are you going to do? Now that traces of Nidhogg have been found, we can’t just sit still like this, can we? You haven’t forgotten what we did to Nidhogg, have you?”
“Well… We challenged him to a bet, then tricked him and tore off a few of his scales.”
Just as the two said.
Having already been given the fate of destruction and death, the two had gathered materials in order to deceive fate and escape to another world. In the process, they had even tricked Nidhogg and torn off several of his scales.
That was why the two believed Nidhogg must be thoroughly furious with them.
On top of that, they were even thinking that perhaps the reason Nidhogg had been discovered here was because he had come to kill them.
“W-we have to stop Nidhogg.”
“And to do that, we need to hurry the reconstruction of Asgard.”
“R-right. Once Asgard is complete, we can stop one Nidhogg who’s only strong in terms of raw power.”
The two were confident.
If it was the Nidhogg they knew, then they would be able to stop him with Asgard’s densely woven barrier.
“We’ll also need someone to monitor Nidhogg in the meantime.”
“T-that, Freyja. You take care of it.”
Since operations and personnel had originally been Freyja’s responsibility, she nodded.
After they finished dividing up their roles and turned around, Valkyrie Linnea was waiting below the throne with a blank expression.
“Come to think of it, you were here. Odin had another seizure, so I forgot.”
“Y-yes, ma’am. I didn’t see anything!”
“I’m not going to scold you for seeing that, so don’t be frightened. More importantly, where and how did you discover traces of Nidhogg?”
At Freyja’s question, the Valkyrie, stiff with military discipline, spilled everything she had seen.
Following the orders she had been given, Linnea had concealed herself and investigated Earth. First, in order to confirm the beings called Awakened Ones in this place, she headed to the Association.
And there, while observing the humans who had gathered in a group since morning, she discovered Nidhogg clinging to the shoulder of one human.
“Wait. Nidhogg was clinging to a human’s shoulder?”
“Yes? Yes. That is correct.”
From her perspective, it was utterly incomprehensible that the arrogant dragon Nidhogg had been clinging to a human’s shoulder. However, there was no way a Valkyrie would lie, so she told her to continue explaining for now.
Valkyrie Linnea had also thought at first that perhaps she had seen wrong, but no matter how she looked at him, it was unmistakably Nidhogg as she knew him.
Because of that, she concealed her presence as much as possible and continued surveillance. Before long, after confirming that Nidhogg had entered some Gate along with many people, she hurried back in order to report this fact.
When Linnea’s report ended, Freyja turned to Odin and asked.
“Hm… Odin. What do you think about what Linnea just said?”
“M-maybe, you know. Perhaps some restriction was placed on Nidhogg when he crossed over to this side? H-he’s hopeless when it comes to magic.”
“That’s a reasonable opinion.”
“R-right?”
Just as Nidhogg had been subjected to isolation measures inside the Gate when he crossed into this world, they too had nearly been isolated immediately after crossing the Gate.
However, Odin and Freyja had interfered with the system using their outstanding magical skills and minimized the restrictions. Thanks to that, aside from a certain degree of limitation on their power outside the Gate, they had been able to remove the other restrictions.
Though it was not certain, Odin’s face grew noticeably more relaxed after coming up with the hopeful assumption that something had gone wrong with Nidhogg’s power.
“If it’s a w-weakened Nidhogg…”
“If things go well, perhaps we could subdue him and put him to use instead?”
“H-huhuhu…”
“Ahaha.”
At the sight of the two laughing wickedly, Linnea, who had finished her explanation and was standing there, trembled.
After laughing wickedly for quite some time while imagining tearing materials from the subdued Nidhogg, riding him around in place of their broken magic carriage, and otherwise exploiting him in all sorts of ways, the two stopped laughing at the same time and looked at Linnea.
“Linnea?”
“Y-yes?!”
“I’m going to entrust you with an important mission. Until Asgard’s construction work is more or less on track, monitor Nidhogg and the human he is with.”
“Me?”
“Then should I go? Once Asgard’s construction is on track, we’ll handle the rest ourselves, so until then, just for a very short while, please do it.”
“U-understood.”
“If you understand, what are you doing? Hurry up and go.”
“I-I’ll be off!!”
After Linnea accepted the mission and left, Odin and Freyja remained inside the palace. With sinister faces, as if afraid someone might overhear, they quietly made hasty, excited plans about what they would make Nidhogg do first once they captured him.
Not knowing that his power was intact.
***
My ears were itching, even though it wasn’t as if someone was talking about me.
Scratching my itchy ear, I asked Baek Yeon, who was kneeling in front of me.
“So… what did you say? Say that again.”
“I was dismissed from the guild.”
One week after we came out of the Gate.
Baek Yeon, having been kicked out of the Seongcheon Guild, came to my house.