“What is that...?”

As Ero murmured blankly, the bird-beak beside him, one hand holding down his top hat, answered.

“A Tur’ark. They also call it the dragon of the desert.”

“The dragon of the desert?”

Ero turned to the side, his lips barely moving. The terrifying nickname was one thing, but what really threw him was the absurdity of the fellow passenger casually answering his muttering. But only for a moment. The gigantic monster that had surged upward toppled onto its side and shoved the sand away with its massive body. The little craft they were riding pitched dangerously because of it.

Inside the sandstorm lashing across his face, Ero shouted Leonardo Blaine’s name with all his strength.

“Hyu—!”

But there was no way Leonardo Blaine, who was steering the Tur’ark’s head, could hear a voice buried beneath its roar. If anything, as the beast twisted its limbs trying to throw off the uninvited rider, he caught one of its feelers in one hand and struck the center of its head with three or four bolts of lightning.

The desert, which had been unnaturally bright, flashed as if lightning were splitting the sky. Even its hard outer shell seemed to take a fair amount of damage, because the beast shrieked again and convulsed violently. But from where Ero was looking up, it seemed as though some eel-like deep-sea monster was discharging electricity to attack Leonardo Blaine.

There was no time to question the sudden life-and-death struggle with this bizarre creature. Growing desperate, Ero stepped onto the Sabla’s back and rose unsteadily to his feet. The urge to help came first. 𝐟𝐫𝕖𝗲𝘄𝚎𝗯𝕟𝐨𝕧𝐞𝚕.𝕔𝕠𝐦

“I do not think you need to help.”

The bird-beak, having grasped what he intended, chimed in leisurely. He looked like some idle loafer, one hand braced behind him and one knee raised.

Ero forced strength into his trembling legs, fumbled at his waist, and barely managed to pull out his pistol.

“What are you talking about? We’re a team! Big bro, I’ll save you, I— gah!”

Just then, one of the Tur’ark’s fins, half-buried in the ground, swept across a dune and sent an enormous mass of sand rushing downhill. The avalanche-like surge swallowed a nearby cactus grove and even the Sabla the two of them were riding. The Sabla, carried by the flow, promptly lost its footing and was swept away.

“Whoa—!”

Ero on top of it was no exception.

He lurched wildly, then barely held on by grabbing the reins. Hooking one arm around the Sabla’s back, Ero aimed the trembling muzzle at the Tur’ark’s head.

It was not easy to keep one’s eyes properly open with a storm crashing in head-on. He could not even take proper aim. Narrowing his eyes to slits, he twitched once and pulled the trigger.

Bang!

The bullet tore through the pressure of the wind, then burst into a gale and flames that smashed into the area around the monster’s eye. But it seemed a bullet like that was little more than a child’s toy against the Tur’ark’s hide. Its blue eye, not scratched in the slightest, rolled toward Ero and fixed on him.

For a split second, Ero let out a strangled gasp and instinctively held his breath.

I’m fucked.

But the Tur’ark was apparently not the only one who had noticed Ero. Leonardo Blaine, who had been fighting for his life on top of the beast’s head, turned as well. His gaze fixed on the tiny little craft and the human clinging to it.

When the whipping motion of the cape calmed somewhat, Ero instinctively realized that his boss had spotted him and waved both arms broadly.

“Big bro! What happened—?!”

The shout he bellowed at the top of his lungs once again failed to reach him and scattered into empty air. But Leonardo Blaine, apparently catching the urgency of it at a glance, lifted one arm as well.

“......!”

He seemed to be saying something, but Ero could not hear him properly. Only one thing came through clearly after the long sentence.

“...Swallowed.”

...Swallowed? What got swallowed? Ero tilted his head with a blank expression, but soon the Tur’ark, still resisting Leonardo Blaine’s control, twisted its body and changed direction.

The creature seemed irritated by the increasingly dense field of cacti, because it slammed its tail down once and completely destroyed what little patch of vegetation remained. Then it tried to bury its head underground again. Its speed was terrifying. The monster that had been right in front of them was already racing away in an instant.

Afraid he would lose Leonardo Blaine, Ero hurriedly loaded another round. If he had to, he was prepared to grab even the thing’s tail and be dragged along behind it.

“Hey, you do know you’re under no obligation to take me with you, right? I’ve met up with my boss now, so I’ll just—”

Busily moving his hands as he grandly rambled on about leaving the other man behind, Ero suddenly turned to the side and trailed off.

“...Huh?”

The bird-beak mask that had been with him only a moment ago was nowhere to be seen.

Just as when he had appeared, there had not been the slightest sign of his presence.

Ero stared blankly behind him for a moment, but there was nothing but barren open desert. Had the recoil from earlier somehow flung him into the sand and buried him?

Even as Ero was left dumbfounded by the whereabouts of the man who had appeared and vanished like a ghost, the vine round he had fired wrapped itself tightly around the Tur’ark’s tail.

The moment he felt the pull reach his fingertips and clenched the pistol, both of Ero’s feet left the ground.

“Aaagh!”

Before he could even turn forward, he was dragged across the sand like a fishing rod that had lost control of the line.

***

By the time the heated geothermal ground and the sand pouring into his mouth had nearly driven him out of his mind, Ero only managed to gasp for breath because Leonardo Blaine hauled him back out of the ground.

Afterward, clinging to one of the spines rising from the Tur’ark’s back, he vomited up everything he had eaten that morning. Fortunately, the muck running down the beast’s shell was quickly washed away by the sand. While Ero remained draped over it like the piece of baggage he was, the Tur’ark crossed back over the route the two humans had come from and headed toward the opposite side of the desert.

The place it was heading for lay opposite the cactus-heavy area, a stretch where the air seemed to boil all the more fiercely beneath the collapsing sand and the vertical sunlight. By now only shriveled, dried grasses remained scattered around. At last forcing himself back to some degree of awareness, Ero lifted his head and shot Leonardo Blaine a worried look. Is this really the right way? was what it meant.

But after about five minutes, the scenery around them began to change.

There were suddenly far more rocks and pebbles buried in the fine sand, and now and then they could hear hawks crying in the sky. The plants, which had been closer to yellow-brown, had gradually taken on a fresh green hue. What brushed the tip of his nose was no longer the smell of dry earth, but the smell of wet grass.

Around then, Leonardo Blaine’s senses, which had been sharpened to the limit, caught a powerful trace of water.

It was not far from here. Leonardo Blaine immediately grabbed the Tur’ark’s feeler and tore at it.

As if slammed by the brakes, the beast threw its head upward, roared, and then crashed face-first into the ground.

“Spit it out already—!”

Every time his words broke off, dents appeared here and there across the Tur’ark’s exposed belly plates. Leonardo Blaine kept kicking the already-unconscious beast with all his strength.

From the thing’s gaping jaws spilled the corpses of all sorts of creatures found in the desert region. Because of that, the number of birds of prey in the sky, which until now had been so few that one was hard to spot, increased to five or six.

They were the scavengers that always handled the cleanup after a predator moved on. Staring blankly at the sky, which looked yellowed from motion sickness, Ero frowned at the situation, disgusting in every possible way. Then he plopped down on a patch of dry moss that was at least a little less hot.

After watching Leonardo Blaine, who looked as though he were taking out his stress on the Tur’ark, Ero asked in a somewhat deflated voice,

“How did you know there was no oasis over there?”

Leonardo Blaine had wrapped Ero’s vines tightly around the Tur’ark’s teeth, fastening them in place, and was hauling the reeking jaws downward to force the jaw joint open to its ★ 𝐍𝐨𝐯𝐞𝐥𝐢𝐠𝐡𝐭 ★ limit. Keeping it like that, he took a few steps and then hurled his entire body forward to slam another impact into its belly plates.

If the beast’s body had at least been soft like a water balloon, the abdominal pressure might have forced whatever was in its stomach back up. But its shell was hard as armor, and there was still no sign of the shot puts coming out. At last, after a sigh, he spoke.

“A place with nothing but cacti... is more likely... not to have... an oasis.”

Because he was still kicking it nonstop, his voice kept breaking with exertion in the middle. Finally deciding it was not working, Leonardo Blaine stopped and stepped back about five meters.

“And there was something else I got wrong at the start.”

“...Wrong? What do you mean?”

“I assumed that west, the west we saw from the arena, would still be west after crossing through the portal.”

Blinking, Ero scratched at the tip of his chin with one finger.

“Boss, I... don’t quite follow.”

“I mean there’s no guarantee the space beyond the portal has the same directions as the space before it. Even if I launched the shot puts westward, the moment they passed through the portal, that direction could have become east.”

Only then did Ero fully grasp what he meant, and he smacked his palm.

“Then we were actually heading east? Ah, no wonder it felt strange. No matter how far we went, there wasn’t so much as a puddle, let alone grass. Wow, but isn’t the Council being way too much? If someone got lost in a place like this, they’d die if they made one wrong move!”

Various complaints droned on beneath the scorching sun like background noise when Leonardo Blaine stretched one arm toward the Tur’ark’s body. A dry wind, different in kind from the sandstorm, brushed past and stirred the hem of his cape. Perhaps sensing the ominous atmosphere, Ero instinctively shut his mouth.

A moment later, compressed air fired from Leonardo Blaine’s hand and flew toward the pale belly of the beast.

The Tur’ark’s abdomen was crushed flat for an instant, matching the shape of the air sphere created by magic. Its body was blasted backward and slammed into a rocky outcrop with a heavy boom and a deep tremor. At the same time, all kinds of things mixed with stomach acid began pouring out of its gaping mouth.

Ero, who had been sitting there in comfort, scrambled upright in a panic as filthy water burst out like a breached dam.

Reeking chunks of meat and sand turned to mud. Scrap metal and gelatinous lumps mixed in there for some reason too. Thankfully, there were no human bodies among them.

Pinching his nose shut, Ero pressed his back tightly against a rock to avoid the stomach acid spreading in all directions.

“Ugh, that smell—”

At that moment, the Tur’ark, its muscles twitching as it continued to wheeze, coughed up two small spheres.

The shot puts landed with dull thuds on the ground, rolled through the field of filth, and before long came to a stop near Ero’s feet. Their surfaces were soaked and uneven, but they were in better condition than expected. More than that, the numbers were still perfectly clear at a glance.

“540,” “79.”

What the hell?

Leonardo Blaine, who had come closer just then, bent down as well and checked the numbers on the shot puts.

The two of them immediately lifted their brows and looked at each other at the same time.