"Hm?"
The endless surge of azure lake-like light gradually subsided.
Standing on scorched earth, Shane noticed that the dragon-beast beneath him, which had still been struggling desperately moments ago, was resisting with less and less strength.
Crack!
With one final tear, the battered steel dragon body collapsed completely. Countless twisted fragments of its limbs scattered across the ground.
And at the very center of that pile of scrap metal, a strange object flickering with a dark violet glow fell out, standing out sharply amid the ruins.
"This thing… is the organ it used to store the magic it collected as tax?"
Shane lowered his massive body slightly, bringing his dragon head closer for a careful look.
It was a strange device with a structure similar to a human heart, but made from a weave of translucent crystal and precise metal gears.
Even though the outer shell had been smashed to pieces, this core was still inhaling and exhaling the lingering magic around it in a steady rhythm, following some fixed frequency.
Shane tried channeling his own magic into it.
To his surprise, this little crystal was like a bottomless pit. No matter how much magic he poured in, it absorbed everything instantly. Its storage capacity seemed completely unfathomable.
"Interesting. It can't compare to Melusine's [Dragon Reactor Core], which creates magic out of nothing, but just its massive and seemingly limitless storage ability makes it a pretty impressive creation."
Shane gave it that silent evaluation.
However, although this thing was precious, it was honestly a bit useless to him right now.
In this magicless world, he himself was an infinite source of magic. He had no need for an external power supply.
For now, he could only put it away and see whether it had some other use after he returned to Earth Land.
Just as he was about to store the core, something familiar half-buried beneath the shattered remains suddenly caught the corner of his eye.
"This is…"
Shane paused, then stretched out a hooked claw and carefully pulled the object out of the ruins.
Under the dim yellow light, he saw it clearly.
It was a human body.
More precisely, it was a mutilated upper body that had undergone deep magical modification. Its limbs had all been severed, and many broken magic-conducting tubes were still connected to its chest.
And when Shane's gaze fell on that face—pale from excessive modification, eyes closed in unconsciousness—his feelings became somewhat complicated.
It looked almost exactly like him, yet carried a mechanical stillness.
Of course, perhaps because this one was female, the lines were a little softer.
"So this is your real body?"
Looking at her miserable state, Shane suddenly felt the whole thing was rather empty.
Before this, whether it was Mystogan's serious warning or the terror shown by this world's natives whenever they spoke of her, everything had repeatedly emphasized just how powerful his counterpart was.
And when she first appeared in Rune City, the pressure she radiated had truly left a deep impression on him.
But now…
Before Albion, the perfect dragon standing at the peak of legend, this fake thing built from patchwork and plunder hadn't even lasted until the dim light created by the vision faded. She had been thoroughly crushed into scrap metal in every way.
"But thinking about it carefully, that's only natural."
Shane sighed, and the faint disappointment in his heart quickly vanished.
"No matter how much effort you poured into modifying your own body, no matter how much you tried to use stolen magic to reach the summit, how could an artificially altered defective product compare to a pure-blooded dragon of fantasy?"
"Maybe… if you had lived in Earth Land, where magic is abundant, with better resources and a better path, you might have become far stronger than this half-human, half-monster state."
Because he did not know her past, Shane did not judge too much the pathological obsession with power held by another version of himself.
With a dexterity completely mismatched with his size, he picked through the ruins for a relatively clean piece of cloth and crudely wrapped up the ruined body.
Then, gently closing one claw around the bundle and the core, he beat his wings and flew toward the distant royal palace.
The wind roared.
As he swept over the palace, Shane suddenly remembered how Knightwalker had used her Legion to tear open the mushroom house earlier.
Because everything was about to end, and because the fourth vision had been resolved more smoothly than ever before, a trace of mischievousness suddenly rose in him.
Imitating what he had seen, Shane unceremoniously used one dragon claw to tear open the palace hall's once-grand and spacious dome.
Boom—
Dim yellow light mixed with dust spilled into the hall.
A massive dragon head slowly lowered inside. Cold dragon eyes narrowed slightly as they looked down from above.
King Faust, who had once sat high and mighty, instantly lost every trace of royal dignity under that gaze.
Because of sheer terror, he collapsed awkwardly beside the steps of the throne. Strange choking sounds came from his throat, and his entire body trembled uncontrollably.
Thud.
Shane loosened his claw and casually dropped the half-body wrapped in cloth, landing it accurately at Faust's feet.
"This is the evil dragon you relied on so deeply and waited for so eagerly?"
He did not deliberately suppress his voice.
Speaking with Albion's massive body made his voice boom like a great bell, like rolling thunder, making the pillars inside the hall hum in resonance.
Faced with this almost divine interrogation, Faust retreated again and again in terror, not daring to answer at all.
Mystogan and the others also fell into brief silence under Shane's terrifying pressure.
Only Knightwalker, who had been defeated off to the side, somehow found a burst of strength when she heard that voice and struggled to crawl over from the ground.
Disregarding everything else, she threw herself in front of the cloth-wrapped bundle and pulled the fabric away with trembling hands.
After confirming the lifeless face inside, she raised her head and looked up at Shane in midair with an expression of disbelief, even a trace of fanaticism.
"You… you really defeated her?!"
Knightwalker's voice was trembling.
As the kingdom's strongest warrior, she had pursued this counterpart evil dragon for years. More than anyone present, she understood the terrifying extent of that creature's strength.
It was a monster so despair-inducing that it seemed almost impossible to find any weakness.
And what she could neither accept nor understand was that the one who had defeated that evil dragon was actually Shane—the outsider she had looked down on not long ago, believing him weak and easy to bully.
Moreover, the dragon form he now displayed was far, far more perfect than the painstakingly forged dragon body below, whether in power, beauty, or pressure.
"Hey! Don't mess with my body without permission!"
Shane didn't pay attention to the hunter lady's shock. Instead, he shouted down with some annoyance.
The Strauss sisters, who had been hiding far away earlier, had now adjusted after their brief shock and boldly moved up to the bundle.
Both of them were full of curiosity. Not only did they show no fear, Lisanna even reached out and poked the face of the ruined half-body, as if verifying whether it was real.
"Eh!"
Hearing the person in question stop her, Lisanna looked a little displeased. Having two Shanes in front of her felt very novel.
Shane selectively ignored the girl's muttering and once again locked his gaze onto Faust, whose lips had turned purple.
"Now, I only have one small curiosity left about you."
Shane looked down at the old king.
"From what I observed, this evil dragon had no reason left at all."
"So what method did you use to reach that kind of mutually beneficial understanding with a beast that had no ability to communicate?"
Facing that overwhelming intimidation…
"At first, in order to plunder magic, she rushed into the palace for the first time. Not only did she cause massive destruction, she even tried to steal the royal family's forbidden weapon, Dorma Anim."
The old king swallowed. Not the slightest trace remained of his earlier sinister arrogance.
"At the last moment, I made an agreement with her. As long as she did not destroy the royal capital, I would gather the magic power of the whole nation and offer it to her."
Faust's eyes looked somewhat dazed as he recalled it.
"Maybe because over the years, we did indeed feed her the vast majority of the magic we collected… a sort of instinct similar to honoring the agreement formed in her subconscious."
"I see…"
Hearing that explanation, the last bit of curiosity in Shane's heart vanished.
"So it was just a Pavlovian habit, like training a cat or dog by feeding it…"
Shane had originally thought this old man possessed some special magic that allowed him to communicate with an irrational monster. In the end, it was just this primitive feeding-and-training method.
"In that case…"
Shane's huge dragon head lowered slightly, his indifferent gaze sweeping over everyone present.
With a faint flash of light, the enormous black dragon disappeared from the hall, and Shane returned to the refreshing appearance of a black-haired boy.
Before everyone could recover from the daze of watching him shift forms—
Shane walked straight to the half-body wrapped in cloth, lifted his right foot expressionlessly, and brought it down.
Crack!
A horrifying crunch of bone.
The head almost identical to Shane's own was mercilessly crushed under his foot.
A mixture of red and white splattered across the floor.
"K-killed her?!"
It happened too fast, too decisively.
The old king's eyes bulged. Knightwalker froze in place, her mind blank. Even his companions showed disbelief.
"S-Shane-nii…"
Lisanna's face went pale, and she suddenly covered her mouth.
Although she knew the person on the floor was an evil dragon who had committed countless crimes, seeing someone with the same face as the companion she had been close to since childhood have their head crushed so simply in front of her—
that intense visual impact still made her feel violently uncomfortable and nauseous.
"Hey, Lisanna. If anyone else reacted like that, it would be understandable, but you absolutely cannot."
Among everyone present, only Mira remained the calmest.
Not only was she not surprised, she seemed to have expected Shane would do this from the very beginning. She stepped forward, placed a hand on her sister's shoulder, and warned her in a low, serious voice.
"Still… why did you have to kill her now?"
Mystogan, beside them, looked deeply confused, his brows tightly furrowed.
In his view, there were still many secrets to uncover from this evil dragon, such as how she had modified herself and the details of her secret transactions with the kingdom.
He had originally leaned toward detaining her first, trying to restore her sanity, then interrogating her.
However, considering this monster had been defeated by Shane single-handedly, the right to decide what happened afterward should naturally belong to him. Mystogan could not criticize him too much.
"Why?"
Shane withdrew his foot. Hearing the question, he instead showed a trace of surprise.
"Didn't this person already cause the deaths of many comrades from this world's Fairy Tail?"
"And judging from how she harvested magic without caring whether civilians lived or died, the number of people who died directly or indirectly because of her probably isn't small either."
He casually kicked aside the bloodstained fragments of bone by his foot. His tone was very calm, even carrying a bit of confusion.
"Since she committed those crimes, then as her enemy, isn't it only natural for me to personally end her life?"
"Surely you don't expect me to overlook those blood debts just because she happened to have the same face as me?"