Looking at the dead Dragon's remains, Rhode let out a sigh of relief, only for a wave of weakness to wash over him.
To make his magic as powerful as possible just now, he had nearly drained every last drop of his mana. On top of that, blocking the Dragon's breath earlier had consumed quite a bit as well.
He could not squeeze out even a single drop now.
Beside him, Serie noticed the exhaustion on Rhode's face. She lowered her head, seemingly lost in thought.
For some reason, Rhode felt a chill creep up his spine.
Across from them, Som and the others jogged over.
The shockwave from that violent explosion had left them even more bedraggled.
The lucky one was Norn. The instant he saw the beam appear, he had run behind a large boulder in advance and escaped mostly unscathed.
Som and Erik, on the other hand, had not been so fortunate.
They had been knocked flat, rolled several times, and were covered head to toe in dust by the time they climbed back up.
But their disheveled state could not suppress their excitement. They came to the Dragon's corpse and inspected it repeatedly.
"Ah, what a shame. It's all been blown into pieces. These scales are basically useless now."
Som could not stop sighing as he looked at the wreckage scattered across the ground. He had wanted to use those scales to forge himself a simple shield.
He did not know any more advanced forging techniques. At most, he could use the forging skills ingrained in Dwarf blood to do some basic processing.
But now, that plan had gone down the drain. At best, he could collect a few scales as keepsakes.
"Say, now that it's been reduced to this state, are there any useful materials left?" Erik asked curiously, looking at the Dragon's head, which was all that remained of half its skull.
"At the very least, we need to collect the Dragon blood."
Norn took a simple waterskin from his backpack and tried to collect the blood remaining in the corpse, but the leather waterskin was instantly burned through by the Dragon blood.
It seemed that even though the Dragon was dead, its blood was still terrifyingly hot.
That made things troublesome.
Norn looked troubled. Without Dragon blood as a material, he could not make ink that would not fade. Worse still, the spilled Dragon blood was rapidly evaporating at a visible rate, which pained him to watch.
"Is there any way around this, Serie?"
Seeing this, Rhode asked Serie. He did not want all their efforts to go to waste.
Serie shook her head, indicating that she had no good solution either. But then she seemed to recall something and said, "We can check its lair. Dragon race have a habit of collecting treasures. We might find what we need inside."
No one dared delay. They hurried toward the lair deep within the valley.
The spacious lair was filled with ores of every color, but the most eye-catching sight was the pile of multicolored gemstones heaped into a small mountain.
There were even some gold coins mixed in, and judging by their design, they looked very much like the ones Amuro had given them.
"My guess is that the Dragon used these gems as a bed."
After carefully examining the surface of the gem pile, Norn came to that conclusion.
"Wouldn't that be uncomfortable?" Erik found it hard to believe.
The gems came in all sizes. Just looking at them made him feel uncomfortable, and he had no idea what strange hobby that Dragon had to use them as a mattress.
"Who knows? My knowledge of the Dragon race is limited to what I've heard."
At the front of the group, Serie passed directly by the colorful ores and gemstones and came to an inconspicuous corner, where quite a few suits of armor and weapons lay.
However, those pieces of equipment were covered in rust. They had clearly never been maintained, and some were even half-destroyed, making them basically unusable.
"These are?" Rhode noticed the equipment too and stepped closer to ask.
"Elf race bows, Dwarf armor, Winged race longswords... These belonged to those who died at this Dragon's hands."
Serie picked up an Elf longbow and ran her fingers over the utterly indistinguishable crest on its body. The passage of time had long since destroyed the bowstring, leaving only the bow itself, made from special wood.
"Should we take it with us?"
"No." Serie set the longbow down. "There's no point. Magic is better."
She was merely feeling sentimental. If those Elves had wielded powerful magic instead of those weak bows before her, would the outcome have been different?
But unfortunately, not every Elf could use magic.
Elves unable to learn magic either became powerful martial monks like Kraft or became archers, which at least gave them some combat ability.
"Then let them rest here."
Rhode gave up on searching through the equipment as well. Mainly because it was obvious at a glance that nearly all of it was junk, with nothing worth digging through.
As the saying went, anyone killed by that Dragon probably had not possessed very good equipment to begin with.
The sort of story where an adventurer wielding the legendary Holy Sword got taken out by a Dragon, only for him to find the Holy Sword afterward, probably would not happen to him.
Besides, what use would he have for something like that?
It was not as if he could imitate some white-bearded old man and slash people with a magic wand in one hand and a Holy Sword in the other.
Just then, Som, who was rummaging through the pile of gems, suddenly found a metal box glimmering faintly. "Huh? What's this doing here?"
In theory, this place should have contained only gems and ores. Som had wanted to find some valuable materials among them, but instead, he had uncovered something resembling a treasure chest.
It was a palm-sized silver-white box. Rhode wanted to see what was inside, only to find that he could not open it at all.
"A magic seal?" Serie sensed traces of mana on the box. "Let me try."
Serie took the metal box and used the simplest, most direct method—she forcibly broke the magical seal on it. With a faint crack, a slit opened in the box.
Inside was a small piece of ore. Everyone looked at one another, completely unable to understand what was so special about this black stone that it deserved to be stored in a sealed box.
When they asked Som, he said he had never seen this kind of ore either.
With no other choice, they put the stone away for now and emptied the box to collect Dragon blood.
The box, made of special metal, was just sturdy enough to withstand the temperature of the Dragon blood.
After leaving the Dragon's lair, Rhode picked up several pretty gemstones, while the Dwarf Som stuffed a huge bag full of precious ores. His forging skills were awful, so who knew what he needed so much ore for?
Erik, meanwhile, carried a sack filled with gems and muttered, "So, can these gems actually be traded for anything?"
"Who knows? We have to try."
Norn did not take much. He merely picked out a few gems and gold coins to put in his pocket, forming a sharp contrast with Erik.
As for Serie, she did not take anything at all.
She had no interest in anything in the Dragon's lair. She had simply wanted to accomplish the feat of slaying a Dragon.
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