Starting out as a Dragon Slave

The first rays of sunlight bathed the city in a warm orange glow, slowly revealing an urban landscape that felt both familiar and oppressively foreign. Isaac walked through the nearly deserted streets, his steps heavy and slow, his thoughts still muddled by recent events. The inspectors had finally released him after a seemingly endless night of interrogation and tense waiting. Their condition had been clear: remain in the city, available to the justice system, or be immediately flagged as a high-level threat. Isaac hadn’t protested he knew this wasn’t the time to challenge authority.

The sounds of the city waking around him felt strangely distant. The sputtering engine of an old scooter struggling to start, the metallic groan of shop shutters rising, the muffled conversations of early commuters... All of it seemed to belong to another world a world he no longer felt fully part of.

He passed through the still-drowsy city center, with its elegant, well-maintained buildings and impeccably clean sidewalks, before turning toward the poorer neighborhood where he lived. The contrast was immediate. The buildings were dull and weather-worn, stained by humidity and time. The walls were covered in loud graffiti sometimes political, often just vulgar. The air smelled of overflowing trash bins mixed with the bitter stench of cheap cigarettes.

Isaac lowered his gaze slightly as he passed a group of teenagers loitering in front of a crumbling building. They watched him, but said nothing recognizing one of their own. He sighed and quickened his pace, feeling a familiar, almost painful tension building inside him.

Finally, he reached the building he shared with his sister. It was in particularly bad shape: cracked, filthy walls, creaking stairwells, poorly lit corridors. Climbing the stairs to the third floor felt like scaling a mountain, his heart pounding harder with each step, instinctively anticipating what awaited him.

When he finally pushed open the door to their apartment, he was met with an eerily cold, silent atmosphere.

- "Léna?" he called out hesitantly.

Silence answered him like a slap. He stepped cautiously into the living room, his heart hammering in his chest.

Léna stood there, arms crossed, her expression closed and stone-cold. Her dark eyes sparkled with barely contained fury.

Isaac swallowed hard, a bead of cold sweat sliding down his temple.

- "Hey," he said awkwardly, trying in vain to sound casual.

Without warning, Léna crossed the room in two steps and slapped him hard on the back of the head, hard enough to make him stumble slightly.

- "Are you out of your mind?!" she exploded, her voice trembling with rage. "Is that how you come home, Isaac?! You vanish into a dungeon for two days, the news reports your entire team is dead, and you show up like you just got back from a walk in the park?!"

Isaac instinctively raised his hands to defend himself from another blow, stumbling back and fumbling for words.

- "Léna, wait, I can explain..."

- "Explain what, exactly?" she snapped, advancing on him, her anger boiling over. "That you almost died—again? That you were the only survivor? I saw it on the news, Isaac! You have no idea what I went through! Why do you always do this?!"

Isaac tried to catch his breath, feeling overwhelmed with guilt and helplessness in the face of his sister’s raw distress.

- "Léna, it’s complicated... they... they classified the information. I couldn’t..."

- "Classified or not, you could’ve at least told me something!" she cut in sharply, her eyes red with unshed tears. "Even a damn text would’ve been enough, Isaac! But no, you vanish and come back like nothing happened!"

Isaac looked down. There was no way he could tell her he’d just been interrogated for murder—or reveal the truth about the dragons or what he had really gone through.

- "I’m sorry, Léna," he said softly, sincerely, almost pleading. "I didn’t mean to worry you, but I didn’t have a choice. Please believe me..."

Léna stood still for a moment, breathing heavily, her shoulders trembling under the weight of her accumulated stress. Finally, she looked away, shaking her head slightly, her arms still crossed like a shield against her own pain.

- "I don’t even know if I can believe you anymore, Isaac," she said at last, her voice cold and broken. "Every time you go into one of those damn dungeons, I wonder if you’ll come back alive. I’m tired of living in constant fear. Do you get that?"

Isaac stepped closer, carefully, placing a hesitant hand on her shoulder. She didn’t pull away, but remained tense—like a wire stretched to its breaking point.

- "Léna, I know it’s hard, but you have to trust me," he said gently, trying to hold back his own emotion. "I promise I’ll be more careful. I promise I won’t ever leave you in the dark like that again."

Léna let out a long sigh, visibly drained from the confrontation, her shoulders sagging under the weight of her worry.

- "I hope you mean it, Isaac," she murmured in a trembling voice. "Because next time... I don’t know if I could bear losing you for good."

Isaac nodded slowly, feeling the full weight of his sister’s pain. Guilt, sharp and relentless, tightened around his throat once more. He gently embraced her, offering what little comfort he could to the only family he had left in a world growing more dangerous by the day.

He knew he couldn’t tell her the truth, but at the very least, he could promise her that he would fight with everything he had to stay alive.

- "I promise you, Léna," he said, his voice carrying a cold, sincere determination, feeling the immense weight of that promise settle on his shoulders. "I’ll do everything I can to come back safe and sound every time."

Isaac gently closed the door to his room behind him. The soft morning light filtered through the dusty curtains, casting muted shadows across the cramped and cluttered space. After the chaos of the past hours, the tiny room suddenly felt strangely comforting. He let out a deep sigh, equal parts relief and lingering anxiety, before slumping into the chair at his old desk, where an aging computer sat buried beneath a mess of papers and books.

With a weary motion, he powered on the screen and slowly opened his browser, logging into his social media accounts. His brows immediately furrowed at the absurd number of notifications blinking wildly before him.

His inbox was overflowing.

Heart pounding slightly faster, Isaac clicked on the icon and cautiously opened his private messages. He froze instantly, lips parting in stunned disbelief as the flood of messages rolled past his eyes.

They were violent. Hateful. Brutally direct.

"Murderer! How can you live with yourself?!""Coward you should be ashamed to breathe the same air as the rest of us!""I hope you rot, you monster!"

Each message was worse than the last, pure hatred dripping from every word like a venom that slowly poisoned his already fragile mind. Isaac felt his pulse spike, a dull ache swelling inside his chest.

- "What the hell is this...?" he muttered, lost, overwhelmed by the onslaught.

Dizzy, he opened another tab and typed a quick search on the dungeon incident. In seconds, a wave of posts and discussion threads appeared. He began scrolling slowly, his brows knitting tighter with each new comment.

Theories were flying in all directions, with people speculating wildly about the reasons behind the massacre that left him as the sole survivor.

"How did he survive when everyone else died? Way too suspicious!""Did you see his face on TV? That guy screams guilty."

Then he stumbled upon a particularly explicit message—one that seemed to have triggered the entire media storm:

- "What if Isaac murdered his entire team? Think about it no monster has ever left one survivor in such a brutal attack. That guy’s a killer, obviously."

That single post had gone viral, exploding across every platform. Isaac felt a cold shiver run down his spine as he saw the staggering number of reactions and shares. His name was everywhere now—tied to words like murderer, coward, criminal. In the span of a single night, he had become the number one enemy of an entire nation.

His heart now pounded violently in his chest, his breathing quick and erratic. His fingers trembled on the mouse as he scrolled endlessly through the sea of hate accusation after accusation, each one more merciless than the last.

- "This can’t be happening... I didn’t do any of this... even if they’re not entirely wrong," he whispered in a faint, almost inaudible voice.

But his words felt hollow—powerless in the face of the tidal wave crushing him. He now understood why Léna had been so worried, so angry. She had seen all this before him. She had known exactly what awaited him the moment he walked through the door.

A cold anger began to bubble in his gut, mixed with a deep sense of injustice. He slammed the laptop shut, unable to take another word. The room returned to silence oppressive, suffocating. Alone now, he faced the brutal reality of his existence.

He inhaled deeply, closing his eyes, trying to calm the uncontrollable trembling in his hands.

- "Fucking bastards. I suffer every single day trying to figure out how to save your worthless asses from the dragons that are coming—and this is how you treat me?" he thought bitterly, his voice cracking under the weight of his rage.

His jaw clenched tight, the pressure of powerless fury consuming him from the inside out.

- "Let’s see who’s laughing when the invasion begins."