Starting out as a Dragon Slave-Chapter 163: Only One is Worthy

The room resonated with an infernal cacophony that seemed to defy the very laws of nature itself.

The screams, initially isolated like discordant notes in a macabre concert, had intertwined into a strident and dissonant symphony that rose toward the stone vaults. The millennial walls, still imbued with the humidity of centuries and witnesses to so many horrors, vibrated under the impact of cries, death rattles, moans, and the convulsions of tortured flesh consuming itself from within.

The air itself seemed thick, charged with a deadly essence that burned the lungs and stuck to the skin like a second epidermis. The flagstone floor, once noble and cold, was now covered with an ignoble mixture of sweat, coagulated blood, bloody sputum, and sometimes a strange black foam that spurted from the twisted lips of the unfortunate. The draconic blood, incompatible with their fragile human nature, triggered an irreversible chain reaction organs retracted in atrocious spasms, bones ground themselves from within with dull cracking sounds, veins blackened like burnt glass under the effect of infernal heat.

Mordred stood at the center of this chaos, impassive as a statue of black marble. His incandescent orange gaze, like two burning embers in the darkness, swept over the bodies on the ground one by one with clinical coldness. He knew this pain he had suffered it, endured it, transcended it in the flames of his own transformation. If they couldn’t do the same, they would not be worthy.

A first body froze in a grotesque spasm near the eastern wall. The man, a former mercenary with arms covered in tribal tattoos, had his eyes rolled back, his jaw dislocated in a scream frozen for eternity. Blood gushed from his ears like a crimson fountain, then his heart exploded in his chest with a dull and sickening sound, like an overripe fruit bursting. Dead.

Another followed almost immediately. His arms beat the air as if seeking to escape an invisible drowning, his fingers clawing at the void with animal desperation. His spine curved into an impossible position, defying all human anatomy, his ribcage broke with an atrocious crack that resonated throughout the room. Black blood flowed from his mouth like a river of death. Dead.

The deaths followed one another in a macabre dance. Each cry became shriller, more desperate, more inhuman. They fought by survival instinct, by powerless rage, by primitive fear. But the outcome remained invariable. Failure. Failure, then death in atrocious suffering.

In a dark corner of the room, Elena was now clutching her stomach where the draconic blood was creating unspeakable havoc. She raised blood-shot eyes toward Mordred, and in a hateful and desperate breath, she spat:

- "Monster... We shouldn’t have trusted you." Her voice was nothing more than a guttural rattle. "You have... condemned us... for your... morbid pleasure... I hope that... demons... drag you to hell..."

Her words were lost in an atrocious gurgling as her lungs filled with her own blood. Her gaze froze in an expression of pure hatred before death carried Elena away in its merciless arms.

On the other side of the room, Marcus was still trying to crawl toward the exit. His legs no longer responded, paralyzed by the failed transformation, but his iron will pushed him to continue. He left behind him a bloody trail, his entrails spreading on the floor like a sinister red riding hood.

- "Bastard..." he growled through his broken teeth, fixing Mordred with a gaze burning with rage. "You’re nothing but a... butcher... a sadist... My companions... they will come... make you pay... for each... each death..."

His voice broke in a spasm of pure pain. Tears of blood flowed down his cheeks hollowed by suffering, but the hatred in his eyes did not weaken.

- "You’ll die... like us... in... pain..."

Marcus didn’t have the chance to say more. His eyes rolled back, his body was seized with uncontrollable convulsions, and in a final breath, he surrendered his tortured soul.

Then came the man with the shaved skull, with a muscular torso covered in scars that told a life of violence. He had resisted longer than all the others, his robust constitution granting him a few precious additional minutes in this ordeal. Too long for his own good. His blood-shot gaze, driven mad by pain and rage, fixed on Mordred as he crawled pathetically in a puddle of his own entrails, his breath chopping into hateful whistles.

- "You... killed us..." he growled, black tears flowing down his cheeks deformed by agony. His voice was a mixture of suffering and pure hatred. "I’ll find your family... I’ll destroy it... slowly... I’ll do... to your loved ones... what you... did to us... I..."

He didn’t have time to finish his threat.

With a dry sound, almost clean, clinical in its precision, the head exploded like an overripe fruit. Mordred had just raised a hand with casual elegance and, with a single snap of his fingers, had used a mana compression so violent and concentrated that the man’s skull had burst like a watermelon struck by a hammer. Fragments of bone and brain matter splattered the surrounding walls, creating a macabre fresco. He hadn’t even deigned to turn his eyes toward him. Only an icy rictus, filled with infinite contempt, had brushed his lips.

- "Shut your mouth, your filthy mouth has no right to speak of my family," he breathed in a voice colder than arctic winter.

Silence returned... partially.

There remained only one breath. One tenuous rattle. One presence that obstinately refused to be extinguished.

At the center of the morbid circle, amid the smoking corpses that gave off an acrid odor of burnt flesh and coagulated blood, Livia was still there. Still alive. Still fighting.

She was on her knees, her gracile body twisted by pain but refusing to yield, her usually pale and soft skin now covered with luminescent veins that pulsed with the violence of the draconic blood transforming every cell of her being. Her labored breathing, interrupted by stifled moans, made her entire body tremble like a leaf in a storm. Her nails, now longer and sharper, had dug into the cold stone as she had gripped the ground to avoid screaming, to not give Mordred the satisfaction of hearing her beg.

Tears, mixed with blood and a silver substance that testified to her ongoing transformation, flowed slowly down her cheeks hollowed by suffering. And yet, despite the agony that devoured every fiber of her being, she did not scream. She did not beg. She did not curse.

Her gaze was fixed on Mordred with overwhelming intensity.

Fixed like the polar star. Burning like a brazier. Devouring like a bottomless abyss.

And there was in her green eyes, now streaked with golden filaments, that morbid fascination, that senseless devotion that transcended physical pain, that almost sublimated it. She was no longer fighting just to survive. She was fighting for him. She was fighting to be worthy of him.

Her lips, slightly swollen and stained with blood, trembled. A barely audible murmur, fragile as a breath of wind, escaped:

- "Mordred... I... I’m still here..."

Each word was a titanic effort, a victory wrested from pain.

Mordred stared at her for a long moment, his orange eyes probing the depths of her soul.

The room reeked of death, failure, the bitter price paid by the weak. The air was saturated with an essence of defeat and despair. But she, she still stood, fragile reed in the storm, in the shadow of this apocalyptic butchery. And what he saw in her eyes was neither fear, nor hatred, nor even love in the traditional sense.

It was possession. Absolute devotion. Adoration.

He approached slowly, his steps resonating on the floor strewn with corpses, knelt before her with feline grace, and placed a hand with slightly clawed nails on her burning forehead. Her skin was a brazier under his fingers, sweat glided along her temple like silver pearls on incandescent metal.

- "You’re still here," he murmured, and for the first time, his voice carried a nuance of... surprise?

Livia nodded with effort, this simple gesture costing her considerable energy. A trickle of black blood escaped from her lips, but she was smiling. A sick smile, certainly, but also proud. A smile of victory.

He rose slowly, his gaze dark and thoughtful, arms crossed behind his back, turning his back to the apocalyptic scene that surrounded him.

- "One survivor," he breathed into the oppressive darkness, as the last rattle of an anonymous dying person expired behind him like a sigh from beyond the grave.

- "Just one. But one worthy."

Silence finally fell on the room like a shroud.

A heavy silence, charged with odors of death and suffering, like an invisible pall covering the scene of desolation. Blood still smoked around the bodies frozen in pain, deformed flesh testified to aborted transformations, extinguished eyes remained fixed in expressions of eternal agony. But in the middle of this charnel house worthy of the worst nightmares, a light persisted. Weak, flickering, but obstinately tenacious.

Livia.

Mordred did not move, a statue of black marble with ember eyes, arms crossed, his incandescent gaze riveted on her as if witnessing a miracle. The rest of the world had faded, dissolved into insignificance. There was nothing left but this irregular but determined breath, this body shaken by spasms but refusing abandonment, this forehead bathed in sweat and blood but raised with pride.

And suddenly, under his attentive eyes, he saw her change.

The transformation, until then chaotic and destructive, suddenly seemed to find a balance, a harmony. Under his fascinated eyes, her muscles retensed with new grace, sheathed with a strength that was no longer quite human. Her breathing deepened, finding a slower, more powerful rhythm, her back arched in a final surge, no longer of pain but of acceptance. Her silhouette lengthened imperceptibly, as if her body finally accepted the dragon part that had been screaming within her since the beginning of the experiment.

Her limbs stretched with fierce elegance, dangerous sensuality, her skin covered in places with dark scales, fine as obsidian glass, almost invisible to the naked eye except under raking light that gave them bronze reflections. These scales did not disfigure her beauty; they sublimated it, conferring upon her an aura of magnificent predator.

Then it was the forehead. A pain of different nature seemed to cross it, sharper but less destructive. Her fingers, with now definitively clawed nails, gripped the ground as if seeking an anchor in this reality that was tilting. A bloody point slowly formed at the center of her forehead, then a small horn began to emerge, splitting the skin in a scarlet flash. Blood gushed on her cheeks like a crimson blessing, pearled along her nose with troubling beauty, and crashed on the ground like an offering to ancient gods.

Her eyes rolled backward, revealing for an instant golden irises streaked with flames. Her body tensed one last time in a perfect arc, like a drawn bow ready to release its arrow... then collapsed with the grace of a dancer finishing her performance.

But she was still breathing. Regularly. Peacefully.

Mordred finally approached, his steps resonating differently now in the transformed acoustics of the room.

He contemplated her for long seconds, standing above her like an impartial judge, but also like a master contemplating his work. He no longer saw a human broken by the experiment. He didn’t yet see an accomplished dragoness either.

He saw the in-between. A birth in progress. A magnificent anomaly. A success that exceeded his wildest expectations.

And for the first time in a very long time, a discreet smile almost imperceptible but real—brushed his lips. It wasn’t the rictus he usually wore, but something deeper, more authentic.

- "You fought well," he murmured.

His voice was low, almost tender in this murmur lost in the echo of ancestral stone. There was in these words a recognition, a respect he accorded only to very rare chosen ones.

He bent with surprising delicacy, slipped one arm under her legs that had become firmer, the other in her back where he felt a transformed heart beating, and lifted her effortlessly. Her body was burning, vibrating with a nascent power still unstable but promising, heavy with potential that made the draconic blood sing in his own veins. But he didn’t flinch. On the contrary, he held her as one carries a priceless treasure.

His steps resonated on the cold ground, rhythmic, calm, determined.

He left the experimentation room as one leaves a battlefield after a decisive victory. Behind him, the dead kept eternal silence, mute witnesses to the merciless selection that had just taken place. Elena, Marcus, and all the others had paid the price of their weakness. Only Livia had known how to transcend her mortal condition.

And in his orange eyes, as he carried his creation toward new horizons, the incandescence shone brighter than ever, nourished by personal satisfaction.

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