Starting out as a Dragon Slave-Chapter 150: Divine Punishment

The monsters gave way to perfect human silhouettes, disturbingly elegant and powerful. Men and women of superhuman beauty, almost angelic in appearance, but with eyes injected with a crimson glow and expressions cold, merciless. Their garments, ink-black, seemed to absorb the surrounding light, creating around them an aura of palpable darkness. They advanced slowly through the still-smoking rubble, their steps leaving no footprints in the ashes, as if they floated above the devastation they had sown.

These beings methodically tracked terrified survivors, sniffing the air like predators to detect the scent of fear. They effortlessly flushed out those who had hidden under debris or in basements, extracting them from their precarious refuges with inhuman strength.

A child, discovered curled up behind the ruins of a school, was seized by the throat by one of these creatures with a feminine appearance. The humanoid dragon observed with curiosity the tears streaming down the little boy’s dirty cheeks, a thin smile stretching her perfect lips. With a casual gesture, she broke his neck, the sharp sound resonating like a whip crack in the vitiated air. The lifeless body was thrown with disdain onto a heap of corpses already as high as a macabre hill.

Adrien felt as if his blood was freezing in his veins. Never had he seen such atrocity. Never had he imagined that war would take this form, a war so cold, so methodically brutal. A war of extermination where the enemy didn’t even seek to subjugate, only to annihilate.

- "Alert all our remaining hunters immediately!" he suddenly shouted, his voice breaking with emotion. Droplets of saliva mixed with blood—he had bitten his tongue without realizing it—splashed the console in front of him. "Tell them to fall back immediately, to evacuate whatever they can!"

But he already knew, deep inside, that these orders were derisory. Paris no longer existed. The City of Light had gone out, replaced by an infernal blaze. The humanoid dragons roamed the alleyways, hunting humans without mercy, using enchanted blades that glowed with a bluish sheen to coldly finish off those who dared resist them. Each blow sliced flesh with surgical precision, leaving wounds that didn’t bleed immediately, as if even the victims’ blood was momentarily frozen by the horror of what was happening to them.

Marc Lemaire, the once arrogant and self-assured inspector, now crouched in his devastated office at the Hunters Bureau headquarters. The windows had shattered, projecting glass fragments throughout the room. His impeccable suit was now torn and soiled with blood—his own and that of colleagues he had tried vainly to help.

He observed with a haggard gaze the absolute chaos reigning in the streets below, where humanoid dragons implacably tracked survivors. He saw a pregnant woman, running as fast as her condition allowed, being caught by one of these creatures. With a negligent gesture, the monster in human form plunged its tapered fingers into the distended belly, tearing out the fetus in a spray of blood before contemplating it with morbid curiosity. The mother collapsed, hands clenched over her eviscerated belly, her screams fading into a gurgle of blood.

Suddenly, a dull pain filled Marc’s heart, a profound guilt gripping him as never before. His legs gave way beneath his weight and he collapsed to his knees, short of breath, vision blurred by tears he didn’t even know he was capable of shedding.

He thought abruptly of Isaac Verne, the man he had tortured for endless hours, whose meticulously built reputation he had destroyed, whose life he had broken, without even a hesitation, without the shadow of remorse. He saw again Isaac’s pleading eyes, could still hear his cries of pain when electricity coursed through his body, felt under his fingers the texture of skin tearing under the bite of pliers.

- "Is this... is this my punishment?" he whispered, hands trembling, soiled with an invisible blood that would never wash away. "Karma... for what I did to Isaac?"

Terror froze his blood when he saw, in the street below, a humanoid silhouette with flaming eyes suddenly turn its head toward him, as if it had heard his whisper through the chaos and screams. Their eyes met for a moment, and Marc had the absolute certainty that the creature had read him like an open book, had seen his crimes, his cowardice, his cruelty.

A terrifying smile stretched the humanoid dragon’s lips, briefly revealing sharp fangs behind that mask of humanity. With an inhuman leap, the creature launched itself toward the building.

Marc instinctively backed away, breathless, suddenly aware that his actions had perhaps led directly to this disaster. That in his blind quest for power and recognition, he had dismissed the only man who could have foreseen and perhaps prevented this catastrophe. Isaac had tried to warn them, and they had silenced him with calculated brutality.

The sound of footsteps in the hallway grew inexorably closer. Marc closed his eyes, accepting his fate. In a few seconds, he would join his victims.

Throughout the entire city, dragons deployed without limit. Half of them had resumed their original form, taking to the air with sinister grace to extend chaos across all of France. The sky darkened with their scarlet wings, forming an organic, moving ceiling above the condemned lands. Their piercing cries resonated like a funeral knell in every city, every village, every countryside hitherto spared.

Darkness fell on the country like a shroud, the sun itself seeming to withdraw before such horror. In this supernatural gloom, only flames danced, endlessly devouring the vestiges of human civilization.

Amélia Leroy, the A-ranked hunter with numerous victories, stood with what remained of her squad on a ravaged bridge spanning the Seine. The water below was no longer blue but red, carrying mutilated bodies and still-smoking debris. Her torn uniform revealed multiple wounds, some still oozing, others hastily cauterized. Her face, once remarkably beautiful, was now marked by a deep gash running from her temple to her jaw, the raw flesh pulsating painfully with each heartbeat.

She observed with a livid expression the hordes of dragons descending toward them with military precision, their silhouettes cutting against the reddish sky like so many ominous omens.

- "We won’t hold here," she said to her comrades, her voice broken by fear and exhaustion, but strangely determined. She wiped with the back of her hand the blood flowing into her eyes, revealing a steely gaze. "Prepare to evacuate the remaining civilians. Don’t think about fighting these things. We must save what we can."

Behind her, about thirty survivors huddled together, their gazes empty, in a state of shock. Silent children with faces blackened by soot, women in torn clothes, men whose courage had evaporated in the face of the unspeakable. frёewebηovel.cѳm

Victor Tréjean, exhausted but still valiant, gripped his enchanted sword in his bloodied fingers. The blade, once gleaming, was now chipped and soiled with a blackish liquid that was not human blood. His right arm hung limp at his side, his shoulder visibly dislocated, but he stood straight, refusing to bend.

- "If we stay here, we all die," he said in a hoarse voice, staring at the approaching silhouettes. He spat a mixture of saliva and blood onto the pavement. "These things... they’re not natural. I saw one of them take a rocket straight to the chest and continue advancing as if nothing happened."

Amélia placed a gentle but firm hand on his good shoulder, leaving a bloody print on the already soiled fabric.

- "Yes. But we’ll save these people first." She turned her gaze toward the gutted metro tunnel that opened at the end of the bridge. "The underground is our only chance. These dragons seem to prefer the sky and open spaces."

She didn’t say aloud what they all knew that even underground, they would only delay the inevitable. That France, and soon the entire world, now belonged to these creatures.

Mordred contemplated the scene from the heights of a gutted building, sitting on the edge of the void like a bird of ill omen. The hot wind, laden with ashes and smells of death, made his dark hair dance around his drawn features. Each scream, each explosion tore him apart internally, as if human suffering resonated in the depths of his soul.

He saw dragons massacring indiscriminately, terrified children thrown from the tops of buildings, their frail bodies smashing onto the asphalt in a scarlet rain, families screaming under the implacable claws of these creatures as their skin separated from their flesh in bloody strips. He saw their blood, their tears, their desperate pleas.

A mother tried to protect her infant with her body, curled up against a wall in an alley. A humanoid dragon approached, observed her for a few moments with clinical curiosity, then plunged its hand into the woman’s chest, ripping out her still-beating heart. It contemplated the organ with fascination before bringing it to its lips and biting into it, blood streaming down its perfect chin. The baby, covered in its mother’s blood, was seized by the legs and thrown against the wall with terrifying force. Its skull exploded in a spray of gray matter and broken bones, its cries as abruptly interrupted as music whose source had been torn away.

Mordred’s entire body trembled, his mind tortured by an atrocious dissonance between what he was and what he wanted to be. Between the creature he had been and the man he aspired to become.

- "What have I become?" he whispered, his hands covered with the blood of innocents he had indirectly condemned. He slowly closed his eyes, knowing he could never forgive himself for what he had just unleashed upon this world.

Ygdrasyle stood silently beside him, his chiseled face betraying no emotion, but his fists clenched until his knuckles whitened revealed the inner turmoil that inhabited him.

- "We need to go, Mordred," he finally said, his voice low, barely audible above the rumble of the city in ruins. "It’s too late now. What’s done is done."

Mordred opened his eyes, his expression suddenly dark and glacial, as if a terrible resolution had crystallized in his mind. His posture subtly changed, becoming straighter, more determined, and for a fleeting moment, a scarlet glow danced in his irises.

- "No, Ygdrasyle..." He slowly raised his head, staring at the red wave invading the sky, those hundreds of dragons obscuring the last rays of the setting sun. "Do you want to know why I have these dissonances in my soul?"

Ygdrasyle tilted his head slightly, intrigued. For the first time since they had known each other, a spark of concern crossed his imperturbable gaze. He nodded slowly, as if he feared the answer but could not resist the temptation to know.

- "Then follow me," whispered Mordred, his voice suddenly carrying a strange, almost inhuman echo.

The two silhouettes leaped from the roof, melding into the growing shadows while beneath them, the city continued to burn. Human blood flowed in torrents through streets and gutters, forming purple streams that converged toward the Seine, transforming the historic river into a bloody serpent crossing the corpse of the capital. The cries of the dying echoed in the falling night, accompanied by the triumphant roaring of dragons and the voracious crackling of flames devouring the last vestiges of civilization.

Humanity, on that evening, finally understood that it was no longer at the top of the food chain.

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