When Night turned around, a familiar crimson dragon head slowly emerged from the shadows.
A pair of vertical pupils stared at him with savage intensity and a thread of something demonic.
Looking down from above for several seconds.
The two of them locked eyes, cold and still.
Until the savagery in the dragon's eyes dissolved, as though the awareness behind them had shifted into something entirely different.
"How much longer are you planning to stay here?
This is really something.
A dragon, brought low by a little song.
Time to wake up."
...
Night was just about to say something.
When in the outermost layer of reality,
He had already walked to the edge of the rocks where the sirens were.
They moved toward him eagerly, the nearest one already pressing herself against his body.
Up above, Artemis saw this and knew it was time to act, though she could not quite keep a flicker of disappointment from surfacing.
Even knowing the sirens' song had reached a level no mortal hero could withstand, she somehow expected him to pull off a miracle and waited until the very last moment.
But just as the moon goddess was about to release an arrow bright as moonlight, she suddenly noticed something that made her eyes go wide and her hand stop.
Wait, something was wrong.
Down below,
When the siren pressed her hand against Night's chest, intending to reach in for a very personal introduction,
A voice sounded quietly beside her ear. "Women who are too forward are not something men find appealing."
In an instant,
That siren went rigid, her gaze snapping up in alarm.
It was only then that she realized Night's eyes were perfectly clear and faintly contemptuous, looking down at her from above as she pressed herself against him.
Those cold eyes looked as though they could end her life at any moment.
He had clearly never lost consciousness at all.
When exactly did he come back to himself?
"You want to ask when I woke up, don't you?"
The siren: "...!"
"I was never enchanted in the first place," he spoke.
"Impossible!!" the siren snapped, her earlier fear twisting instantly into fury.
She refused to believe he had stayed conscious from the very beginning.
Otherwise, why would the singing have drawn him over at all?
But his next words made her feel as though she had been plunged into ice water.
"Though I managed to stay aware, resisting your song still took nearly everything I had.
Fortunately, there was a moment when the singing broke off.
Even though you started up again quickly, once I was prepared, a cheap little tune like that..."
As he spoke, the young man suddenly looked down at her with an expression of contempt so thorough it felt like a personal insult.
"Honestly, even the sacred prostitutes on the street corners sing better than you lot."
"What?!!"
Boom.
The minds of the Sirens instantly exploded.
Overwhelmed by a wave of intense shame, their faces fluctuated wildly, flushing a frantic, deep red one moment and turning deathly pale the next.
Sacred Prostitutes?
In Greece, that was the general term for women who belonged to that profession.
Furthermore, all such women were known to be followers under the domain of Aphrodite, the Goddess of Beauty.
Even with a divine title attached, the nature of the work remained exactly what it was.
It is worth noting that in the neighboring Mesopotamian plains, Enkidu's transition into the world of man, the very person who provided the blueprint for their human form, was also a sacred courtesan, a follower of Ishtar, the Goddess of Venus.
Though Ishtar and Aphrodite bore different names, their mythological personas were, for the most part, one and the same.
(Ok, so Courtesan, Prostitutes, Pornē…are all the same in this context, so you're free to interpret. He's just calling them harlots.)
Back to the present, after being compared to human women in that profession,
The sirens, who had once been brazen enough to challenge even the Muses themselves in a contest of song, had just been told their voices were cheap and trashy, not even worth as much as the sounds made by those women in their work.
They lost it.
Rage contorted and twisted their expressions into something monstrous.
Up above, the moon goddess Artemis, upon realizing Night had never been bewitched at all, felt the corner of her mouth curve upward before she could stop herself, then immediately flushed bright red at his next words.
Those starlike eyes fixed on him below, carrying a thin thread of indignation.
How dare he make a pure goddess of the moon hear something this filthy?
How despicable!
Could he not have found a better comparison?
That said, she did not actually feel much genuine displeasure.
As for what actually happened on Night's end, that required going back to the very moment the seduction first hit.
Apollo's musical blessing gave him resistance.
On top of that, the draconic nature within him carried its own formidable resistance as a natural trait.
(As for how he's a Dragon...well, let's not go deep into it.)
A dragon's greatest strength was a body that was nearly immune to the vast majority of status abnormalities in the world.
Particularly powerful dragons could even shrug off instant death effects.
So Night had been fine from the start.
He even managed to quickly split his consciousness into two layers, the surface level and the subconscious beneath.
One part pretended to be bewitched and sank into the illusory layers.
The other stayed cold and calm, biding its time for the right moment to strike back.
And because he offered no resistance at all, that descending layer of consciousness kept sinking further until it reached the deepest layer of his subconscious, brushing against the contract with the red dragon Helena.
That dark world was probably not his own inner landscape at all.
It felt far more like Helena's.
He got mocked by the dragon and then kicked right back out.
This idiot.
Who knows where she even wandered off to.
But through that brief moment of contact, there seemed to be a slightly deepened and subtle connection between them, and what struck him most was that Night could faintly sense Helena's location.
She was in Troy.
He had no idea what that meant exactly, but knowing that dragoness was not dead was enough.
He would find a way to track her down later.
And now,
A sharp, ear-splitting shriek burst from the siren pressed against his chest, the beautiful song twisting instantly into a sonic wave with devastating force.
His eardrums nearly ruptured from the impact, and he nearly bled.
The undying body of steel worked its effect here, protecting even those fragile areas.
Even so, the experience was deeply unpleasant to the hearing, and now that Night had learned to appreciate music and understood what beautiful sound actually felt like, his expression looked as though someone had forcibly shoved something foul into his mouth.
He took back what he said earlier.
This grating noise was worse than the steam whistle of an industrial-era engine.
"You sound absolutely awful! You hideous creature!!" Night roared.
The siren was already pressing in hard, surprised that he came through that last attack unharmed at such close range, but there was still a chance.
The heart was right there.
Even a hero was flesh and blood. Take out the heart, and it was over.
But then came a grinding creak, like fingernails dragging across glass.
No matter how hard she clawed and scratched, her nails nearly flying off, she could not leave so much as a white mark on his skin.
Boom!!
Without warning, Night wrapped one arm around the siren and squeezed with sudden force.
Crunch, crack.
A terrible sound of ribs shattering came from within her body, followed by the collapse of her internal organs.
Blood burst from her mouth, and her eyes went wide, every vessel broken, staring at him in horror.
At the same time, words reached her ears that made her tremble.
"Who do you think was approaching whom just now?
If I could not get you to drop your guard and come within my striking range, how was I supposed to kill all of you while putting up with that noise you call singing?"
His cold, merciless words hit her like a comet striking the earth, detonating in her ears and filling her with absolute terror in an instant.
In that moment, she understood the full, chilling depth of it.
Because he was too far away and the sound was interfering with him, without a reliable means to take them down from a distance, this man just pretended to be drawn in and walked toward them one step at a time.
And they actually moved to meet him on their own, eagerly approaching this death god who had been walking toward them with iron resolve and the intent to kill.
The desperate will to survive made the siren try to scream.
But her throat and chest were locked shut. No sound came out.
She could only feel her body breaking apart inch by inch under the crushing force, and the blood that sprayed outward seemed to be screaming in her place.
No...!!
.
.
.
(End of the Chapter)