Every Morning, My Mirror Saves the World - Chapter 16

Chapter 16

On the Proper Use of Galahad: A. Remove teammate status at critical moments. B. Have Galahad join the enemy camp and rapidly drag down their luck stat. C. Let Galahad fight bravely and lower the enemy’s average intelligence. D. …

No need for D. Under normal circumstances, by the time A, B, and C have all been used, everyone should have already pushed through the boss.

The three of them advanced in single file through the narrow cave. As a Silver Knight, Galahad naturally walked at the very front, but at the moment, the young man felt not the slightest swell of pride from protecting the old, weak, sick, and disabled. His face was dark, and he looked as if he might burst into tears at any second.

“Slow down. You’re moving out of reflection range,” Ruiyin called softly.

“…I am not here for you to reflect light off me!” Galahad finally could not take it anymore. He spun around, stamping his feet as he roared, “I am a Silver Knight! A knight! How can you… how can you use my armor only to reflect firelight and illuminate a wider area?!”

“Oh?” Ruiyin looked at him with a smile that was not quite a smile. “Then what other use did you have in mind?”

“I also want to… damn it! It’s not that I ‘also want to’ anything. I just don’t want to be used like this!”

Lars tried to coax him gently. “But Ruiyin really is smart. I never would have thought that without a mage’s Light Spell, we could use a Silver Knight to light the way like this. Galahad is amazing! I don’t have armor that shiny, so I can’t do what you do.”

Starry eyes. Wagging tail. From head to toe, he radiated sincere worship that said, Wow, you’re so incredible, and I really mean it.

…Damn it, the more sincere it was, the more infuriating it became! Like this… Galahad could not even find a target to vent on!

The party of three continued forward in silence and harmony. Because of the dragon’s roar they had heard when they first entered the cave, all three of them, including the mirrored reflective object, remained on high alert the entire time. Yet after nearly half an hour of walking, nothing appeared except the uneven ground beneath their feet.

Galahad, who had been desperately trying to break free of his identity as a reflective object, expressed great disappointment. “Did we hear wrong when we came in? There was clearly a dragon’s voice. Why hasn’t anything appeared yet?”

“It will still take about this much longer,” Lars, who had been silent all this time, suddenly said. But the moment the words left his mouth, not only Ruiyin and Galahad froze; even he himself was stunned. He scratched his head and said, puzzled, “I… why did I say that? I obviously don’t know either.”

Ruiyin looked at his confused expression, and an unpleasant premonition slowly rose in her heart. If what Holy Archmage Lars had told her was true, this cave should have been arranged personally by Lars after he had fallen into darkness, using some unknown method to return here. His treasure, the artifacts he had collected, and his dragon had all been prepared to change that predetermined fate. But now, why would this Lars, who had so far shown no signs of turning dark and had not changed class into a mage during the last betrayal incident, reveal such a sense of familiarity with this place?

Did that mean his future self was still inextricably connected to this place?

While Ruiyin was imagining hanging a disobedient Lars in midair and giving him a thorough spanking, the road ahead had already come to an end. A door as tall as the cave ceiling blocked their way. Carved into the stone door was a magic array identical to the one they had seen when they entered, except this one had something else as well: a huge dragon with its eyes closed, looming over the array. The dragon carving was so lifelike it seemed as though it might open its eyes and spread its wings in the very next moment.

“Do we still need a sacrifice?” Lars asked uneasily, looking at the enormous dragon. The instant he heard that, Galahad crossed his arms over his chest in a warped posture and hopped backward a step.

“I’m not sure,” Ruiyin said thoughtfully. “But judging from the missing section of the magic array, we do still need that mirror.”

She untied the mirror from her waist, the one as multifunctional as a Swiss Army knife. Before she could move, Lars had already rushed forward and snatched it from her hand.

“I’ll do it.” The boy gave her a steady smile. He had even cut his fingertip a step ahead of time, then copied what Galahad had done before and pressed the raised and recessed pattern on the back of the mirror against the magic array.

He did not even recite an incantation. The instant his blood stained the magic array, purple lines rapidly lit up and spread outward from the point beneath his finger. It was as if an invisible brush dipped in moonlight was swiftly painting across the stone, tracing curves like tangled vines crisscrossing one another. Lars even felt as though those things had pierced through his skin and wrapped all the way around his heart.

After the entire magic array lit up, the enormous dragon on the stone wall seemed to be standing on a ground of glowing moss. In a daze, Lars reached out and lightly touched the dragon’s spine.

In that instant, all three of them heard an earth-shattering roar. It was the same sound they had heard when they had just stepped into the cave. Lars raised his head in surprise, only to discover that the carved dragon shape above him had, at some point, opened its eyes.

They were the golden eyes of a living dragon. Within the black vertical pupils burned towering fury like wildfire.

“Get back!” Ruiyin shouted sharply. Lars released his hand in time, but it was already too late. The cave shook violently, and huge chunks of stone kept crashing down from above. The dragon carved into the stone wall was straining with all its might to break free of the shackles binding it. Lars nimbly leaped away from the wall. With one hand shielding the top of Ruiyin’s head, he looked up in shock at the dragon that, according to legend, should only appear on Dragon Island.
Its rough scales could only be marked by the grand magic circles of a Holy Archmage. Its rugged tail was the long whip with which the God of Earth had split the strait. Its enormous wings could blot out the sunlight from half the sky. Its sharp claws could pierce a Golden Knight’s Armor of Light. And the Dragon Flame it breathed was said to be capable of setting a town ablaze with a fire that would not die out for a hundred years.

This was a terrifying power only the Creator could have made, and now it stood before them in the flesh, looking down with cold, pitiless eyes at creatures that, to it, were no more than ants.

It opened its mouth arrogantly. “Awooo-”

A flicker of surprise crossed its golden eyes. “Awoo?”

It lashed its tail, suddenly growing somewhat frantic. “Awoo awoo awoo? Awoo awoo!”

For some unknown reason, the wyvern had become agitated! It stomped madly in place, its tail whipping violently against the stone wall beside it. Huge chunks of rock came crashing down, and the cavern wall began to collapse. Lars shielded Ruiyin as they dodged away. When he turned his head, he was astonished to discover that behind the cracked stone wall was a towering pile of priceless treasure!

Gold, silver, gems, relics from ancient ruins, longswords, famed blades, crystal spheres, scrolls, and every kind of treasure people would lose their minds chasing were piled everywhere like pebbles children had been playing with. Any single piece taken outside would be enough to drive the world into a frenzy. As if it sensed Lars’s astonished stare, the wyvern grew even more agitated. It let out a string of furious “awoo awoo awoo awoo” roars at the sky, then went right back to its earlier stomping tantrum.

Ruiyin watched in silence for a while, then suddenly said, “Hey… why do I feel like this dragon is throwing a fit because we can’t understand what it’s saying?”

Galahad said, “Uh… wouldn’t it be weirder if humans could understand a dragon’s language?”

Lars turned back in confusion. “We can’t? But I understood it perfectly.”

Ruiyin and Galahad looked at him together. “You can understand it?”

Pointing at the rampaging dragon, Lars said, “It’s obvious. At first it said, ‘Foolish humans-‘ and then the next line was, ‘Huh, what’s going on?’ After that it said, ‘What is this? Has the seal still not been undone?!'”

“And after the treasure came out just now, what it said was, ‘Get lost, no looking at my collection!’ Right?” Ruiyin continued, clutching her forehead.

Lars jumped up happily. “Yes, yes! Exactly! So you can understand it too, Ruiyin!”

“Yes, my foot!” Galahad picked up a stone and slammed it hard back onto the ground to vent his frustration. “What kind of nonsense guesswork is that? If that’s how it works, then I say I heard it telling us to take all this stuff!”

The instant he finished speaking, the wyvern whipped around. Its savage, scale-covered face pointed straight at him, and it unleashed a roar that shook the mountains and rivers. “Awooo-”

Lars kindly translated, “It says, ‘As if I’d ever give someone like you anything!'”

Galahad had the urge to roll around howling along with that dragon.

The stupid dragon, still rolling about because these ants could not understand its language, showed no sign of stopping. It kept destroying the cavern, exposing more and more treasure. Lars dodged continuously, using the gaps between attacks to quickly scan everything in the cave, but he found no trace of the Sword of Shadow.

“That stupid dragon!” Galahad shouted angrily. “How long does it plan to keep going crazy? We should leave first. Once it remembers it can breathe Dragon Flame, it’ll be too late!”

The cavern was not very large, and by now more than half of it was filled with boulders the wyvern had shaken loose. The stupid dragon’s range of movement grew smaller and smaller until, at last, it rolled headfirst into the wall. The mirror fitted over the surface of the magic circle fell off with a clang and landed on its head.

“Awoo?” The wyvern clutched its forehead and cried out blankly, as if it still had not realized what had happened.

Under the three stunned gazes, its enormous body shrank at incredible speed. Its mountain-like form was like a punctured balloon, rapidly deflating until the three of them no longer had to look up to see it, and finally settling at a height that required them to look down.

A tiny pink dragon appeared before them, round as a ball and looking like a giant balloon with two roasted chicken wings stuck into it. It was still hopping and rolling all over the place, but the sounds it made had now become words everyone could understand.

“They’re all mine! I don’t care, anything sealed away with me is mine! I’ve watched them for hundreds of years, so how could I just hand them over so easily? I don’t care about any stupid agreement! They’re all mine, waaah-”

Lars and Galahad looked at each other.

Ruiyin stepped forward. First, she picked up the mirror from the ground, then asked calmly, “You’re saying everything here is yours?”

The little pink dragon scrambled upright and nodded tearfully at Ruiyin.

Ruiyin unhurriedly hung the mirror back at her waist and announced coldly, “The things here were hidden by my friend, and your seal was opened by something that belongs to me. Therefore, not only do the things here belong to me, even you belong to me.”

Lars and Galahad were both stunned in place by a declaration even more shameless than the dragon.

Author’s Note: The mascot makes its debut-