Starting out as a Dragon Slave-Chapter 149: The Dragon Soldiers

The sky over Paris, already darkened by the smoke from previous fires, was stained with an unhealthy crimson. The air vibrated with electrical tension, as if the atmosphere itself sensed the impending horror. The dimensional portals, those violet gashes in the fabric of reality, now pulsed with a bloodied glow.

- "Activate the secondary portals immediately. Release the true army. Phase two of the invasion activated."

The disembodied voice resonated through the control room with metallic coldness. Each word seemed to embed itself in the vitiated air like so many death sentences for humanity.

Mordred remained frozen for a few moments, an icy shiver running down his spine. Nausea twisted his entrails while his fingers grew numb. He knew this phase. He knew exactly what would emerge from the portals. The creatures released until now were nothing but cannon fodder, sacrificed to exhaust human defenses. Disposable pawns in a cosmic chess game. This new wave, however, would seal the world’s fate.

Without a word, he exchanged a heavy look with Ygdrasyle. His companion’s face remained impassive, but his obsidian eyes reflected unprecedented gravity. A silent understanding passed between them – the point of no return had been reached.

Together, they activated the capsules one last time. Under their fingers, the controls seemed to burn with an invisible fire, as if each gesture further consumed a part of their soul. The energy around them crackled, charged with malevolent intentions.

A blood-red light exploded from the dimensional portals, so intense that it projected their distorted shadows against the metallic walls. This time, the air became unbreathable, heavy with a metallic smell of fresh blood mixed with suffocating effluvia of sulfur and putrefied flesh. The temperature rose brutally, beading cold sweat on Mordred’s brow.

Immense scarlet forms emerged slowly from the portals, unfolding in all their horror like carnivorous flowers opening to devour the sun. Red dragons with scales thick as tank armor, bristling with bony spikes oozing a greenish corrosive liquid. Their membranous wings, traversed by pulsing veins, stretched several meters, casting deathly shadows on the ravaged ground. Their immense claws, carved to shred flesh and steel with equal ease, clacked against the concrete, digging smoking furrows. In their gaping maws, lined with razor-sharp fangs like daggers, forked tongues frantically writhed, tasting the air charged with terror. Their reptilian eyes, vertical slits of an unhealthy yellow gleaming with cruel intelligence, scrutinized their surroundings with military precision.

Even these soldiers, these so-called "minor" dragons, possessed terrifying power that immediately placed them beyond the reach of human hunters. Each creature embodied a cataclysm unto itself, capable of reducing an entire district to ashes in a few wing beats.

Mordred felt his mouth go dry at the spectacle. The creatures fixed their gaze on him for a moment, their slit pupils dilating slightly in recognition, before turning toward their objective. Without hesitation, the dragons swooped down on the city, cleaving the air with a deafening tearing sound.

The collective roar that followed made the very foundations of buildings tremble. Century-old stained glass windows shattered, projecting a rain of colored glass over terrified worshippers who had taken refuge in the cathedrals. The dragons unleashed their devastating power without discrimination. Their breaths of ardent flames, almost black-red, instantly set buildings ablaze, transforming anyone nearby into human torches.

The Haussmannian façades, architectural jewels of the capital, liquefied under the effect of infernal heat. The stone itself seemed to scream as it twisted, revealing trapped silhouettes consuming in seconds, their cries of pain mingling with the voracious crackling of flames. Entire families men, women, children carbonized in a breath, their blackened bodies frozen in an ultimate position of torment, like a macabre exhibition of contemporary art.

Historic structures, symbols of human culture and pride, were reduced to ashes in seconds. The Eiffel Tower, emblem of a nation, twisted under the heat before collapsing with an atrocious metallic screech, crushing hundreds of fleeing people beneath its incandescent debris. The windows of buildings exploded under pressure, transforming the air into clouds of sharp blades that shredded faces and bodies. Metal melted into fiery streams that flowed through the streets, trapping survivors in a burning shell. ƒгeewebnovёl_com

Chaos fell upon Paris as never before. The Apocalypse was no longer a prophecy it was unfolding before their eyes.

In the concrete entrails of his bunker, fifty meters underground, Adrien Valcourt contemplated the images transmitted by surveillance drones with an icy horror that devoured his insides. The command room, designed to withstand the worst attack scenarios, suddenly seemed as fragile as an eggshell against the power deployed on the surface.

The general, once so assured, so inflexible, felt his legs tremble beneath his weight, his heart painfully beating against his ribs, as if desperately seeking to escape from his chest. His throat tightened to the point where he struggled to breathe, each inhalation burning his lungs.

- "Those are... dragons..." he whispered, his voice strangled, unrecognizable. The trembling in his hands intensified as he stared at the screens. "How is this possible..."

Around him, the silence was complete, weighing like a shroud. Léa Moreau, the brilliant strategist who had never lost her composure even in the most desperate situations, had placed a trembling hand over her mouth, her eyes wide with horror. Her complexion had taken on a cadaverous pallor, and a single tear traced a damp furrow on her cheek.

Vincent Delcourt, the methodical, sober man who had coordinated Paris’s defenses with clockmaker precision, seemed petrified. His lips moved without emitting the slightest sound, unable to formulate any coherent order. His fixed gaze betrayed a soul broken by the spectacle of the unnameable.

On the screens, images scrolled in a macabre ballet of destruction. The surveillance cameras, one after another, exploded under the effect of heat or went dark with a sinister crackle, like so many eyes torn from humanity.

Suddenly, the dragons landed in the heart of the ravaged city, their claws sinking deep into the devastated streets, crushing asphalt and the bodies lying there into a bloody pulp. Shreds of flesh splashed onto still-standing façades, painting a grotesque tableau of human horror. The air vibrated with heat above their massive bodies, creating dancing mirages that further distorted the nightmarish reality.

Then, with a sickening fluidity that defied all laws of physics, their bodies enveloped themselves in blood-red light. Their colossal silhouettes contracted in a series of repugnant bone crackings, their scales fusing with their flesh in an organic boiling. Their size slowly diminished, their bestial features recomposing into a perverse parody of humanity.

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