BSS 97

“Oh my, Rai! Long time no see.”

[Master…….]

“How have you been?”

When I spoke lightly, Rai puffed out his cheeks and glared at me in dissatisfaction.

Puffing out cheeks when you’re a snake—he really imitates humans too well.

[How could I possibly be doing well?! You were absolutely awful! You dumped me with that idiot dragon and went off to laze around by yourself!]

“What?! Laze around? I’ve been barely getting by each day, drowning in sorrow, you know?”

I protested, but it hit a nerve—because it was mostly true.

[Liar! You offered me up as a sacrifice and gained your freedom! How can a master sell out their own spirit?!]

“That’s not true!”

It was obviously true, but I denied it to the bitter end because I knew that if I admitted it, Rai would just flap around even more angrily.

[Day by day, your face just keeps glowing more and more!]

“You’re misunderstanding. Do you know how worried I’ve been about you? I couldn’t sleep properly, couldn’t eat properly—”

As I spoke, I glanced down at the rabbit meat in my hand and hastily wiped the grease from my mouth onto my clothes.

“Oh, right! I brought you a present!”

[You’re changing the subject!]

“Rai, you said it before, didn’t you? That you wanted a body from a four-legged animal. So I caught a handsome-looking wolf.”

Rai’s eyes instantly sparkled with a magical gleam.

[Really?]

“Really!”

[I can trust you, right? You didn’t catch something weird again, did you, Master?]

Since that day, Rai’s shell was still damaged.

It was shriveled, charred, and hideous to look at. The corrosion on his body from blocking the dragon’s breath in the imperial palace was a permanent injury—something that couldn’t be recovered.

That was dragon breath for you, one of the most powerful attacks in the world.

Anyway, Rai needed to be completely recoated with a new material, and since things had come to this, I decided to give him an entirely new body.

It was an extremely troublesome task, which I’d been putting off for years, but if I wanted to appease Rai—who had been sulking badly lately—it was something I had to do.

“What do you mean, weird? When have I ever—”

[You brought back a salamander last time! That’s basically the same as my body!]

“That’s different. It had four legs.”

[I don’t care! I hate it! I hate stuff like that! Master never understands my feelings!]

Rai hated every single candidate body I brought him.

Like a middle school boy who hates every outfit his mom buys him.

“Picky little thing.”

[It’s just that your taste is weird! So where’s my body, then? It’s not some polka-dotted wolf, is it?]

“Does something like that even exist? If it did, I’d have used it already. I put it in the freezer storage for now—oh, but Magi just went into that storage. I don’t think I’ve told her yet not to eat it since it’s yours.”

Rai whipped his head around and slithered toward the storage at lightning speed.

Soon enough, I heard the two of them bickering inside. Before the noisy reptiles came back, I hurriedly finished off my rabbit meat.

Finishing my meal quickly turned out to be the right choice.

Magi said she didn’t want to eat alone and deliberately sat me across from her before starting to tear into an ogre raw.

I was used to seeing her devour monsters whole by now, but not enough to be able to eat while watching that.

Magi slurped up the ogre’s long, thick intestines like noodles.

In dwarf form.

I really couldn’t get used to that.

“Magi.”

“Hm? What is it? Want a bite?”

“No, I’m good.”

I didn’t even want the thought.

I didn’t want to know where all that food even went.

“I wanted to ask something. The storage is full of magic-related books—aren’t there any spirit tomes or anything else?”

“That’s probably all there is. I didn’t collect them myself—Mom filled it up, so I don’t really know.”

“Hmm. Didn’t you say this lair was also a gift from your mom? Do dragons have that kind of culture? Preparing things for independence and all that?”

“I don’t think so. My mom was really worried about me becoming independent. So she prepared everything!”

That explained a lot. Magi was a bit… lacking, for a dragon.

Dragons loved their children just like anyone else, it seemed.

Watching Magi chew on an ogre’s finger like it was dried squid, I thought to myself how strong my stomach had become.

“I’m supposed to become independent when I turn five hundred, but I’m only four hundred now. I got scolded by the Dragon Lord once because I lied and said I’d live together for another hundred years.”

“Aren’t dragons supposed to be unable to lie?”

“What? Why? I’m great at it.”

“I feel like I heard somewhere that dragons aren’t allowed to lie or something.”

“We can’t break promises, but we lie all the time!”

How proudly she said that.

“When you polymorph and wander around the human world, lying becomes a daily thing.”

“Ah, I guess so.”

“As long as you don’t make promises to humans! Trusting humans is something you do only when you want a short life, or so they say.”

Then Magi was doing everything her mother had warned her against.

Letting a human live, bringing a human into her lair, becoming friends with a human, even making promises.

Honestly, she was full of so many gaps that if I had bad intentions, I could probably take advantage of her.

It was probably dragons like Magi—young and relatively naive—who became the favorite prey of dragon slayers and ended up as a page in human mythology.

Instead of taking risks, though, I was busy wiping ogre blood from Magi’s mouth. I was nothing if not safety-oriented.

I could completely understand why her mother didn’t want Magi to become independent.

The world was a dangerous place.

“By the way, Magi.”

I set down the book I’d been reading as a question suddenly occurred to me.

“Why are there so many magic theory books in storage? Dragons don’t need those.”

“Magic books?”

The book I’d been reading out of boredom was extremely basic.

That was from the perspective of someone with higher education, of course.

It might’ve been complicated for an ordinary person, but at Drike Academy, it was the sort of thing children learned.

In other words, it was a level completely unnecessary for dragons—the ancestors of magic.

“I was studying those.”

“…Who?”

“Me!”

“You’re a dragon, though?”

“But I’m bad at using magic. So.”

At first, I thought she was joking—one of Magi’s unfunny jokes.

“Pfft!”

I laughed outright.

That was ridiculous.

“You’re polymorphed right now!”

“Yeah.”

“You teleported me here.”

“Yeah.”

“And you’re saying you can’t use magic?”

“That’s everything I know how to do. Oh! There’s one more—subspace creation.”

No way.

It was so absurd that I forgot how to speak for a moment.

“So, you’re saying you can’t cast something like Fireball, but you can use Teleport?”

“Yep!”

“That sounds like incredible talent in its own way…”

Skipping all the basic steps and using advanced magic just by memorizing formulas meant she at least had the fundamental qualities of a dragon.

An infinite mana core, an innate sense for handling mana—things like that.

Where humans coax and beg mana to move, dragons were beings that ruled mana from birth.

Those were physical, hereditary traits, so of course she had them.

Then what Magi lacked was…

“Mom says I should just understand it automatically, but I don’t. How am I supposed to understand something I don’t get? I hate numbers.”

“Numbers…”

“She says when you look at formulas, you’re supposed to just get them.”

“……”

“Mom and Dad can. But I can’t.”

“So you just memorized them?”

“It was really hard to memorize!”

I understood now.

As much as I hated to say it, Magi really wasn’t very smart.

At least, not by dragon standards.

Dragons—each one practically a magic prodigy—were famous for their extraordinary intelligence. They could do complex calculations in their heads and never forgot anything they’d ever learned.

To the point that forgetting was considered a blessing.

But Magi forgot things. Like a human.

“Come here, Magi.”

“Hm?”

“Can you solve this formula?”

I opened the book to a page showing a third-class magic formula.

“I feel like I learned it before…”

“You don’t remember?”

“I don’t know.”

“You know the teleport you use all the time is seventh-class magic, right?”

“I know that!”

She was like that.

She could recite and use an anthem, but had no idea what the words meant.

She memorized characters not as letters, but as pictures.

Basic magic was like two-digit addition and subtraction, while advanced magic was like seven-digit multiplication and division. You had to understand addition step by step first—but Magi had given up at addition and just laid down.

Maybe dragons found someone like Magi so far below their level that they didn’t even know how to teach her.

It was like asking a genius to teach a toddler.

Maybe dragons weren’t beings meant to be taught at all.

Everyone else probably awakened and understood things naturally.

“Magi…”

“Why are you looking at me with the same eyes my mom uses, Genie?”

“Do I look that pitiful?”

“Yeah.”

What a waste of talent.

Born with a dragon’s magical potential, but with a human-level brain!

She needed education adjusted to a much lower level.

But it wasn’t like I could send her to a human academy…

Wait. If I thought about it—

“Magi. Want me to teach you magic?”