Starting out as a Dragon Slave
Chapter 172: Overheating

Chapter 172: Chapter 172: Overheating

The world was disintegrating around him, fragment by fragment.

A sharp buzzing sound, like a steel drill, drove into his temples with methodical cruelty. The ghostly echoes of the sonic explosion didn’t just resonate in his bones they carved themselves there, transforming every fiber of his being into a violin string stretched to its breaking point. His vision liquefied, colors drowning in waves of metallic gray and sticky shadow. The contours of the world lost their definition, morphing into a bloody watercolor where reality and nightmare merged.

His consciousness, suspended by a silk thread ready to snap, oscillated dangerously above the abyss of unconsciousness. Each heartbeat was a challenge thrown at death, each breath an act of rebellion against imminent collapse.

But that thread... he grasped it.

Not with delicacy. Not with grace.

With the ferocity of a trapped animal, with the brutality of a man who refuses to die.

A deep, primitive roar rose from the depths of his chest as he reopened his eyes. His pupils, dilated by pain and adrenaline, reflected an incandescent orange glow that of a cornered but far from defeated predator.

Mana responded to his call with unprecedented violence. The blue energy circulating in his veins transformed into a tumultuous torrent, carrying with it a pain so pure it was almost pleasurable. In a tearing of flesh and spirit, his mana wings burst from his back, deploying with the desperate urgency of a man who knows his life hangs in the balance at this precise moment.

The bluish energy composing them pulsed erratically violent, aggressive, unstable. Electric arcs crackled along their translucent membranes, projecting bursts of harsh light that tore through the air like claws of light. His muscles, paralyzed by the previous shockwave, protested vehemently as he forced them to obey. Every movement was torture, every gesture a challenge thrown at his own body.

He slightly straightened his torso, clenched his teeth until the enamel ground, and gathered what remained of his will.

Then, in a sharp beat that resonated like thunder, he struck the air.

The fall slowed but not enough. Never enough.

The impact was cataclysmic.

Mordred crashed onto the rocky ground with the violence of a meteor fallen from the heavens, his body becoming the epicenter of destruction that spread in concentric circles. The shockwave didn’t just burst—it roared, propagating in a radius of several dozen meters with a force that made the earth itself tremble.

The ground cracked in a concert of mineral groans, forming a giant spider web whose every gaping fissure seemed ready to swallow the world. The rocky plateau on which he had crashed groaned under the impact, its millennial foundations protesting in a telluric rumble that resonated to the surrounding mountains.

Stone fragments shot in all directions, transformed into deadly projectiles by the force of impact. Some fragments, as large as fists, whistled through the air before embedding themselves in the earth hundreds of meters away.

At the center of this improvised crater, Mordred slowly stood up.

Blood flowed from his lips, tracing scarlet rivulets on his chin. His clothes, already battered by previous battles, hung in tatters on his torso. But his eyes... his eyes shone with a light that was anything but human.

- "Activate now..." he growled, his voice hoarse and charged with contained rage.

Mana flowed into his veins like a flooding river, responding to his call with a docility that contrasted with the violence of its summoning. The energy rose along his legs, rushed into his torso, and spread through his arms before flowing toward his hands.

[Active Skill: Earthquake – SS Rank]

The ground responded immediately, as if it had been waiting for this moment.

A telluric roar split the atmosphere, so powerful it seemed to awaken the very bowels of the earth. The entire plateau began to vibrate, first imperceptibly, then with increasing intensity that transformed solid stone into a rolling sea of rock and dust.

Faults opened with a deafening crash, swallowing everything in their path. Chinese military structures, designed to withstand the worst cataclysms, disintegrated like houses of cards. Bunkers collapsed, their reinforced steel walls bending under telluric pressure. Communication towers crumbled in showers of sparks, their severed cables crackling like electric serpents.

Chinese soldiers lost their balance, some falling to their knees, others desperately clinging to anything that could still stand. Armored vehicles were overturned like simple toys, their tons of steel and armor weighing nothing against the earth’s fury.

- "What the hell was that?!" shouted an operator, his hands gripping an anti-aircraft console that swayed dangerously.

His voice was lost in the ambient chaos. All around him, his comrades screamed, some in Chinese, others in English chopped by panic. Orders mixed with curses, calls for help with situation reports. It was a cacophony of terror and confusion.

Alarms sounded in chain reaction, their strident sirens adding their voice to the concert of destruction. Military sensors went haywire, their screens displaying incomprehensible data, seismic peaks that exceeded all measurement scales, energy readings that blew the fuses of measuring instruments.

In the main control room, a Chinese commander watched the screens with eyes wide with disbelief.

- "Seismic level 9.2! No, wait... 9.4! 9.6! The sensors are overheating!"

"Impossible!" spat another officer. "No hunter can generate such power!"

- "Then explain to me what’s happening out there!"

But Mordred could no longer hear any of this. He no longer cared about their alarms, their panic, their incomprehension. His rage was cold now, surgical. He had an objective, and all those who stood in his path would share the same fate.

The debris barely settled, he channeled his mana toward his feet. Energy accumulated in his legs, transforming his muscles into springs stretched to the extreme. He felt the familiar tingling sensation that preceded the activation of [Shidensen] this instant movement technique that had saved his life so many times.

Lightning split the air.

[Active Skill: Shidensen]

He disappeared.

Not in a dramatic cloud of smoke or in a theatrical burst of light. He simply... was no longer there. One moment, he was at the center of the crater, covered in dust and blood. The next moment, he was crossing space like an arrow, his body having become pure kinetic energy.

The world reduced to a tunnel of speed and light. Air tore in his wake, creating miniature shockwaves that made the atmosphere vibrate. He was pure speed, absolute movement, force in action.

Mid-course, a detonation grazed him the characteristic whistle of a heavy-caliber projectile. An anti-hunter rifle shot, probably fired by a sniper positioned in the surrounding hills. The bullet, the size of a small missile, split the air with deadly precision, aiming for the exact point where he would materialize.

But Mordred didn’t materialize where they expected him.

At the last moment, he made a millimetric head movement, an adjustment so subtle it would have been invisible to the naked eye. The bullet passed two centimeters from his temple, so close he felt the air displacement on his skin. The projectile continued its course before embedding itself in a rock with a dull sound.

He landed silently, his feet touching the ground with feline grace. Around him, the Chinese military camp spread out in all its tactical complexity. Trenches zigzagged between fortified positions, machine gun nests stood at strategic points, armored vehicles were positioned to cover all approach angles.

An impressive defense. Methodical. Professional.

Completely useless.

He crossed the first lines like a specter, his passage marked only by the whistle of displaced air. The sentries, trained to detect the slightest suspicious movements, only saw him when he was already among them.

The first cries rose, first isolated, then spreading like wildfire.

- "Contact! Contact! He’s coming straight at us!"

- "Sector 7, we have an intruder! Repeat, intruder in sector 7!"

- "It’s an enemy hunter! Unknown threat level! ALL UNITS, OPEN FIRE!"

The reaction was immediate and massive. Dozens of soldiers rose behind their cover, their weapons pointed at this silhouette that moved with inhuman fluidity. Orders flew in all directions, mixing Mandarin Chinese and military English in a cacophony of urgency.

Projectiles of all calibers crackled through the air, transforming the atmosphere into a wall of death. Conventional bullets, armor-piercing ammunition, explosive charges everything was used. But it wasn’t just firearms that came into action.

Chinese hunters, recognizable by their reinforced uniforms and the mana aura surrounding them, invoked their spells with formidable efficiency. Fire spheres burst from their palms, tracing arcs of orange light in the night air. Purple lightning crackled between their fingers before shooting toward their target. Ice projectiles, carved like spears, whistled toward Mordred.

One of these flaming spheres hit him head-on, the explosion projecting sprays of flames in all directions. The heat was such that the air itself seemed to catch fire. Any outside observer would have concluded that Mordred had just vaporized in this fireball.

But at the same instant, a voice resonated in the air, cold and detached:

[Active Skill: Intangibility]

Magic passed through his body like a wave through water, with no more effect than a breath of wind on a flame. No burn marked his skin. No wound opened on his body. He emerged from the explosion as if stepping out of a warm bath, his intact silhouette standing out against the backdrop of flames that continued to dance behind him.

The silence that followed was more terrifying than all the previous screams.

- "Shit..." murmured a soldier, his voice barely audible. "He passes through everything..."

- "How is that possible?" stammered another. "No magical defense can..."

- "Shut up and keep firing!" screamed a sergeant, his voice breaking under the effect of fear and adrenaline.

Other soldiers were already charging, their boots hammering the rocky ground in a frantic rhythm. An entire platoon converged on him, their weapons pointed, their faces contorted by determination and terror mixed. They formed a perfect semicircle, their crossfire creating a wall of projectiles that should have reduced any target to shreds.

But Mordred’s instinct took over.

[Passive Skill: Instinctive Awakening]

A luminous veil briefly formed on his skin, as if his body had suddenly become translucent. His eyes, already intensely orange, sparkled with a supernatural gleam that seemed to come from another world. His pupils dilated, capturing every detail, every movement, every micro-expression of the soldiers surrounding him.

Time seemed to slow.

His muscles moved without conscious command, his body becoming the instrument of a primitive intelligence that transcended rational thought. He pivoted on his hip, his movement so fluid it seemed to defy the laws of physics. A machine gun burst passed through the exact spot where he had been a fraction of a second earlier.

He slid between the shots as if dancing, each step calculated with mathematical precision. A magic blade, materialized by an enemy hunter, split the air a few millimeters from his throat. He simply tilted his head slightly, and the spectral weapon met only emptiness.

He no longer thought. He was movement. Instinct. Pure survival.

Each gesture was a work of deadly art, each dodge a poem written in the language of violence. He passed between the soldiers like a ghost, their bullets and spells hitting only afterimages. A shoulder twist to avoid an explosion. A controlled slide to pass under a burst. A lateral leap to dodge a rocket shot.

The Chinese soldiers, trained for the most extreme combat, couldn’t follow his movements. Their weapons, pointed at him, met only air. Their spells, cast with precision, hit only the ground or their own comrades.

- "Impossible!" roared one of them. "Nobody can move like that!"

- "That’s not a Dragon !" cried another. "That’s a demon!"

But Mordred no longer listened to their cries. His orange eyes had spotted his target. There, behind improvised armor, a soldier still held his sniper rifle. The one who had shot earlier. The one who had shouted "Enemy down" with such satisfaction.

The one who had dared to think he was dead.

Mordred didn’t slow down. If anything, he accelerated.

Two meters from his target, his right arm wrapped in purple lightning, energy crackling along his muscles with blinding intensity. His black katana, this blade that had drunk the blood of so many enemies, appeared in his hand in a flash of pure mana. The weapon seemed to absorb the surrounding light, its obsidian surface reflecting absolute nothingness.

The sniper raised his weapon, his eyes wide with terror. His hands trembled so much he could barely aim. He pulled the trigger, but his bullet only carved a furrow in the ground.

Too late.

Lightning.

A metallic whistle.

A stifled cry.

The sniper’s head rose into the air, suspended for a moment in a macabre ballet. His eyes, still wide with stupor, fixed on a point in the void. Blood spurted from his severed neck, projecting scarlet arcs that fell back on the dusty ground.

The head rolled to the ground with a dull sound, its features still frozen in the expression of one who didn’t have time to understand what was happening to him.

- "You’ll never shout again," Mordred said in a low, almost detached tone.

His voice was devoid of emotion, as cold as death itself. He wiped the blade of his katana on the corpse’s uniform, the black metal regaining its dull shine.

Around him, the surviving soldiers stepped back, their faces pale with terror. Some vomited, others began praying in their native language. All had understood they weren’t facing a man, but something far more terrible.

But suddenly, the air became heavy. Saturated with an unhealthy energy that made hair stand on end.

Mordred felt it immediately. That sharp vibration, so familiar it seemed inscribed in his flesh. That strident whistle that chilled his blood.

- "No... not again."

A salvo of three sonic bombs.

Somewhere in the surrounding hills, Chinese sensors had recalibrated their target. War computers had analyzed his movements, calculated his probable trajectories, and adjusted firing parameters accordingly.

This time, they wouldn’t miss him.

- "SONIC BOMB INBOUND!" roared a voice through the camp’s loudspeakers. "RED ZONE! EVERYONE TO SHELTER! IMPACT IN FIFTEEN SECONDS!"

Soldiers scattered like ants, some throwing themselves into trenches, others rushing toward reinforced bunkers. They knew the power of these weapons, had seen the craters they left behind.

Mordred straightened up, his mana wings beating violently. The blue energy composing them crackled with static electricity, projecting miniature lightning bolts in all directions. He tensed his muscles, gathered his mana, and propelled himself toward the sky.

But the projectiles followed him with implacable precision. The three sonic bombs, each the size of a refrigerator, traced perfect arcs in the night air. Their integrated sensors adjusted in real time, correcting their trajectory to intercept their mobile target.