Starting out as a Dragon Slave

The truck had been moving for several minutes, gliding silently toward their next target. The group had settled back into a relative calm, each member going about their post-mission routines with gestures automated by habit.Some cleaned their weapons with obsessive precision, rubbing away invisible stains, checking mechanisms that were already perfectly maintained. Others updated their tactical data on the wall-mounted screens, their fingers gliding over the holographic interfaces like virtuoso pianists, compiling information, refreshing statistics, adjusting parameters with intense concentration. The screens projected a bluish glow onto their focused faces, transforming their expressions into spectral masks.

Isaac, meanwhile, remained seated in his place, arms crossed, observing this routine with a forced detachment. His mind replayed the events of the dungeon, searching for something he might have missed, a neglected detail, an ignored sign. But he found nothing, and that very absence of discovery fueled his frustration.

Lazare, still standing at the center of the cabin, maintained his balance effortlessly despite the occasional movements of the vehicle over uneven terrain. He stood there, perfectly stable, anchored to the ground like an unmovable mountain. Isaac noticed that even when the vehicle took a sharp turn or crossed an obstacle, causing slight imbalance among the other passengers, Lazare remained perfectly still, as if his body instinctively adjusted to these disturbances before they even affected his posture.

The guild master observed the holographic sheets projected at mid-height in a corner of the cabin. Data scrolled rapidly, listing the next dungeons to visit, their known characteristics, reported anomalies, and listed creatures. His eyes moved with supernatural speed, absorbing quantities of information that an ordinary mind would have taken hours to process.

— "Next portal in six minutes," he announced without tearing his gaze from the data. "Level D- confirmed. Possible presence of ’fungoids,’ parasitic spore classification. Nothing dangerous."

His tone was sober, factual, devoid of any emotional inflection. He delivered the information like a particularly well-calibrated machine—neither alarmist nor disdainful just precise.

Naesha, sitting silently next to Isaac, was checking her daggers with methodical, almost hypnotic movements. She ran a gloved finger along the curved blades, not to test their sharpness that would be an insult to weapons so perfectly maintained but as part of what seemed to be a personal ritual, a form of tactile meditation. Isaac noticed that the blades did not reflect light as they should have. They seemed to absorb it, creating the illusion of slits in reality itself.

One of the men the one who had been suspicious of Isaac since their first encounter let out a heavy and deliberate sigh. His body language betrayed a growing irritation that he no longer sought to conceal.

— "Ten low-level portals in sight. Ten quick missions. And not a single anomaly," he articulated, shaking his head slightly.

— "We have to start somewhere," replied the red-haired sniper calmly, without pausing her meticulous calibration of her weapon.Her tone was conciliatory but firm, that of a veteran accustomed to tempering team frustrations.

— "We’re mostly just wasting our time," the skeptical man retorted, crossing his arms in a defensive gesture. "I’m not saying this guy is necessarily lying..."He threw a sideways glance at Isaac, evident enough to be intentional.— "...but if all we’re getting are epileptic gnomes and brainless spores, we can seriously start questioning his story."

Isaac didn’t react immediately. He stared at the floor for a few seconds, his gaze empty, impassive. Outwardly, he maintained a facade of detached calm, but inside, a cold anger began to crystallize.His fist clenched slightly on the armrest, a movement almost imperceptible, but Naesha seemed to notice, as she subtly turned her head in his direction.

Lazare stopped consulting the data and slowly turned his head toward the skeptic. His face remained perfectly neutral, but something in his gaze hardened, like a still lake whose surface suddenly freezes.

— "The attacks the government suspects to be of draconic origin since Isaac’s discovery in the dungeons remain extremely rare," he said in a calm tone, yet with a subtle inflection of authority. "Officially, in France, only three cases have been suspected in the last five weeks. All were immediately classified. Isaac is the only verified survivor. That’s precisely why we’re conducting this operation. I remind you that Richard Mandsome, a rank A very close to rank S, never returned with his team from a B-rank portal."

He paused deliberately, letting the silence amplify the weight of his next words.— "If you were hoping to find a dragon behind every moldy stone, it’s because you haven’t understood the mission."

Those last words, spoken in a colder tone though not aggressive carried an evident disciplinary weight. The soldier visibly swallowed his frustration, shrugged without responding, but his body language betrayed reluctant acceptance of the reprimand.

The atmosphere in the cabin remained tense for a moment, then Lazare resumed in a deliberately more relaxed voice, as if to diffuse the situation:— "While we’re at it... Let’s hope we’re strong enough to kill it. We might just be running to our own deaths."

Several nervous chuckles rippled through the cabin.

Second Portal: The Fungal Forest

A nightmarish ecosystem entirely composed of gigantic mushrooms in hallucinogenic colors. Fleshy domes three meters tall pulsed gently, exhaling clouds of iridescent spores. The spongy ground gave way beneath their steps, releasing gas bubbles with putrid smells. The air itself seemed alive, filled with microscopic particles dancing in the rare rays of light filtering through the fungal canopy.

The spore-fungoids moved between the larger mushrooms like misshapen guardians. Amorphous creatures, halfway between plant and animal, their translucent bodies revealed internal organs with indeterminate functions. They communicated through light pulses that shimmered under their gelatinous epidermis, creating hypnotic patterns potentially dangerous for an unprepared observer.

The Phantom Unit didn’t even give them a chance. The man with the ritual tattoos simply raised his hand, murmured an almost inaudible incantation, and a wave of negative energy spread in concentric circles. Where it passed, the fungoids... liquefied. No explosion, no screams, just molecular dissolution, as if the very cohesion of their cellular structure had been denied.In less than two minutes, the dungeon was cleared, without Isaac having taken more than a few steps.

Third Portal: The Blind Tunnels

A labyrinth of narrow underground galleries, with walls glistening with an indeterminate organic substance. Darkness was almost absolute, only broken by bioluminescent crystals embedded in the rock at irregular intervals. Each step echoed with distorted acoustics, the sounds propagating in non-linear ways, creating the illusion of movement in otherwise empty corridors.

The air was saturated with a musky, slightly intoxicating scent, seemingly designed to gradually disorient intruders. The tunnels subtly shifted in configuration when not directly observed, creating an environment in perpetual mutation.

The blind mutant rodents inhabiting this maze were pale creatures with unsettling proportions. As large as medium-sized dogs, their bodies were covered in fur so fine it resembled more of a whitish mold. Their elongated snouts ended with complex sensory appendages that constantly vibrated, and their forelimbs had adapted to resemble primitive hands equipped with sharp claws.

Deprived of sight, they had developed supernatural hearing and smell, along with a primitive form of mana perception that allowed them to detect intruders from dozens of meters away.

This time, it was the red-haired sniper who took the lead. She deployed her weapon, activated a special vision mode through her enchanted scope, and began picking off the creatures through the very walls. Her projectiles pierced the rock as if it weren’t there, reaching the mutant rodents in their chambers and hidden tunnels.

The other team members focused on securing the intersections, silently eliminating the rare specimens that tried to escape. In less than ten minutes, the dungeon was cleared of all hostile presence, exterminated silently, without a trace.

Fourth Portal: The Sounding Marshes

An oppressive landscape of blackened mud and stagnant water, dotted with weeping willows whose branches were so long they dragged through the sludge. A permanent mist limited visibility to a few meters, and the ambient light, a sickly green, seemed to come from nowhere and everywhere at once.

The true danger of this dungeon lay in its aberrant acoustics. Every sound made by an intruder was captured, amplified, and sent back as deformed waves that resonated directly with the nervous system. A mere whisper could return as a sonic blade capable of causing internal bleeding.

The screaming toads, natural inhabitants of this cursed environment, used this acoustic property as their primary weapon. Massive creatures with warty skin covered in vibratile growths, they could concentrate their cries into destructive sonic beams, capable of liquefying the internal organs of prey from a distance.

They moved with deceptive slowness, camouflaging themselves in the mud before springing out to attack their victims, disoriented by the hostile environment.

Naesha demonstrated perfect adaptation to the environment here. Moving with absolute silence, she eliminated each toad before it could even open its grotesque maw. Her blades severed vocal cords with surgical precision, neutralizing the creatures’ main threat before finishing them off with a clean strike at the base of the skull.

The other members used acoustic isolation enchantments to protect themselves, but Naesha seemed to have no need for them—as if she existed in a bubble of perfect silence, impervious to the dungeon’s acoustic laws.

Fifth Portal: The Incandescent Plains

A desert of ashes and volcanic rock, where geysers of flames erupted randomly from the cracked ground. The ambient temperature far exceeded normal human tolerance, requiring thermal protection enchantments just to breathe without burning one’s lungs.

The sky, a deep red streaked with black veins, seemed to pulse like a living organ. Showers of incandescent ash fell intermittently, turning each step forward into a constant exercise of evasion.

The fire hounds that reigned over this infernal domain were fierce creatures with bodies partially composed of solidified flames. Massive quadrupeds with basalt fangs and molten lava eyes, they hunted in coordinated packs, using the ambient heat to mask their thermal signatures until the moment of attack.

Their combustible saliva could instantly ignite whatever it touched, and their howls triggered heat waves capable of melting ordinary metal from a distance.

This time, it was the man with the dark-circled eyes who took the initiative. With a fluid gesture, he traced a complex symbol in the air, triggering a chain reaction in the overheated atmosphere. The temperature dropped abruptly within a fifty-meter radius, creating an ephemeral dome of ice that encased the fire hounds in a crystalline shell.

The extreme thermal contrast caused a catastrophic reaction in the physiology of the creatures, their bodies fracturing from the inside into a myriad of obsidian shards. The elemental trap had annihilated them by exploiting their very nature against them.

Isaac observed the phenomenon with professional fascination. Such manipulation of fundamental elemental principles was a testament to profound theoretical knowledge, far beyond mere combat techniques.