Chapter 13:

  My dreams were… Usually pretty strange. Or maybe it’s normal to me, because I’m used to their unhinged nature. I rarely remember them clearly, but sometimes I remember dreams as if they’re actual real-life events that I experienced. Those are always the most disturbing. Because they stay with you for the rest of your life.

  Sometimes dreams are long. Sometimes they’re super short. This time, it was somewhere in the middle. Not hundreds or thousands of years. But at least a decade, give or take.

  It started normalish. Reborn as a human child, I had a loving mother and father. At less than a year old, my parents were brutally murdered by bandits and I was about to be sacrificed in a crazy ritual involving a bunch of nuns being beheaded in a church. At one point, I got thrown by a certain eyeless bitch and almost died, but I caught myself, thankfully. Yes, this was obviously the same situation I encountered the other day, but from another perspective.

  Not particurly strange through. I have dreams like that all the time. I’m an author. This is what I did for a… Not a living, but I did it obsessive-compulsively as an addiction at least.

  Anyway, the events afterwards were blurred. Probably just a mixture of guesswork and imagination. Maybe hope?

  The cw marks on my chest and abdomen burned for a while, but eventually healed. No infections. I was totally fine. I didn’t really know what happened or why, but I was in a different pce after that. Somewhere warmer than the mountains. My new mother had bright green eyes, fair skin and fiery red hair.

  “Dragoncw.” My new mother named me. I wasn’t the only orphan from the vilge. The boy survived and was adopted as my older brother. There were also some other kids, but they stayed in other houses.

  “Mama, can I go outside and py with Yellowtail by the river?” I reached up to hold the gorgeous woman’s left hand and she smiled down at me gently.

  “Sure you can, Hatchling. Just be careful. I know you can breathe underwater, but your brother isn’t so… Special.” She leaned down and kissed my forehead, then gave me a tight hug. The sweat of her breasts smelled familiar. Simir to someone I used to know a long, long time ago… It always made me feel happy and safe.

  “Yay~! Don’t worry Mama, I’m always careful!” I dropped a death fg before leaving to go py outside with a little boy my age. He was called Yellowtail because he literally had a fluffy yellow catlike tail extending from his tailbone. No other strange features though, maybe a bit more agile than other 10 year old brats, but nowhere near as strong as I was.

  “Dragoncw!” He called out to me excitedly when I came over to the riverside to meet him. The weather was always nice and warm year-round. So it wasn’t much of a surprise to see some teenagers nearby, boys and girls, all swimming and pying by the river. Some of the adults were also pying, while the elderly were more often seen fishing instead.

  Yes, there were old people in that little vilge. No, maybe it wasn’t so little. Probably a thousand people in total? Spread out over a fairly rge area though. There were ancient stone walls that surrounded this little piece of paradise. But it wasn’t unguarded or undefended. There were lots of watchtowers and people always prepared for the worst, regardless of how nice things seemed on the surface.

  I looked at the blue sky and couldn’t help noticing the darkness beyond. I took deep breaths to calm myself down and tried to smile at my friend, “Yellowtail, say potato.”

  “Potato? I don’t get it.” The boy giggled and reached out his hand to me. I took it and noticed that the skin on my hands had some rge bck scales marring the otherwise pristine surface. I looked down at my chest and remembered why I had the name Dragoncw. I was scarred by that random dragon that saved me, but I was also… Infected. The scars near my chest transformed into gill-like slits, while the ones on my belly were just covered in bck scales like my hands. My fingernails and toenails were also pretty sharp and grew quickly, but they weren’t much different from a normal human’s. I didn’t really have draconic cws, unfortunately. But the gills and scales were still pretty neat.

  “It’s something my Mom told me.” I giggled and didn’t tell the boy that I thought this was all a dream for a moment there. I wanted to see whether he was ‘real’ or not. Whether he would have a normal reaction to the randomness or do something super weird and bizarre.

  We pyed in the river for a few hours and then each of us had other things to do… Yellowtail was already a hunter in the vilge. He went with his father and some of the older teens to go hunting every evening and sometimes at night. They never went outside the walls. The walls were huge though. Encompassing huge swaths of farmnd and even a lot of woods where the wild game could be easily found.

  “Please no! Forgive me! I’m sorry! I’m sorry! Aaaah~!” The screams of a somewhat familiar man attracted my attention on my way home! I rushed over and so did a bunch of other curious vilgers.

  “Let go of him! What the fuck are you doing Elias?!” My Mom was shouting now! I pushed the other people out of the way and made my way to the front of the house where I saw my older brother! He was a really big boy, no, I guess he was a man now. Already nineteen? He was grabbing that other man’s throat with his left hand and the other hand was umm… Well, it literally looked like he was gonna rip the naked dude’s balls off.The other guy was even bigger than Elias, but that didn’t really save his nuts.

  “Tell them what you did! Tell them what you did you sick fuck!” He smmed the back of the man’s head against the grass and then forcefully turned his face to the open door of that house… Wait, wasn’t that Yellowtail’s house?

  “Get off my husband!” A beaten and battered woman rushed out of the house, her brown tunic was stained with blood. Especially around her crotch and I could see a lot of blood running down her legs.

  “I didn’t do anything!” The man retorted, I think his name was Jon? Yeah, Jon was Yellowtail’s father! How could I forget something so crucial to the plot?

  “Gloria! Get your bastard son off my husband!” The woman screamed at my mother, who was one of the closest people nearby and was already trying to pull my brother off the bearded man.

  “How could you defend him after what he did to you?!” Elias looked at umm, Lori’s bloodied face in shock.

  “He didn’t do this to me! YOU did! It’s all YOUR fault!” She screamed and spped, even punched my brother in the face so hard that his lip was busted!

  “You, YOU RAPED my wife! That’s why! It’s YOUR fault!” Jon screamed as he pushed my shocked brother away, then started hugging and comforting his wife. Not caring that he was still naked and she was filthy.

  “What are they talking about, Elias?!” Our mother was horrified, and the other vilgers started getting incensed and shouting random things.

  “I didn’t! I didn’t rape anyone!” Elias tried to expin, but his voice was drowned out by the noise. Then he got hit in the face by a rock that was thrown by the battered woman!

  “He did! He raped me, got me pregnant and then, then he got scared and, and did this to me! He killed my baby!” She was obviously lying. Even the dumbest person should have been able to see through this shit, but people started hurling rocks at my brother soon enough, not just insults! They wanted to kill him! They always wanted to kill him… This was just the best excuse they got!

  “No! Stop! Please!” Then my Mom tried to block some of the attacks, but a few men grabbed her and dragged her off! They said they wanted to protect her, but they were actually dragging her away towards a house nearby…

  This is why we hate humans. This is why they’re so inferior to us. This is why they can’t be trusted. Such… Pathetic creatures. In constant need of guidance, control, manipution. Otherwise, they always devolve into mere beasts. It’s in their nature after all. Perhaps we aren’t much better either. After all, we just stood by and watched it all happen, as usual. Because what’s the point in saving them?

  They’re only humans. They will only ever be… Humans. Nothing more. They will never be able to truly understand and accept us. We will never avoid being bmed for their own mistakes. That is why Gods give up. Because we know it is inevitable. So why bother in the first pce?

  “It sounds like you’ve gotten zy.” The moment I spoke, there was a fiery explosion in that house where they took my mother. The wooden windows shot out fmes and there were men screaming their lungs out inside. The crowd was startled and stopped stoning or shouting at my brother.

  When I looked over, I saw my mother emerging from the house, literal fire in her eyes as she roared, “GET AWAY FROM MY SON!”

  Terrifying beams of fiery light emerged from her eyes and sliced through dozens of people, not caring whether they were men, women or children! Well, maybe she just couldn’t control that much in the first pce. Hard to fucking see when you’re shooting beams out of your fucking eyes, right?

  What do you do when your followers murder each other? Save a few, they end up murdering a few dozen. Humans are so… Predictable.

  “That’s why you need to do more than just empower them.” I sighed dramatically and watched my adoptive mother make her way over to my brother’s body. He wasn’t dead yet, but sticks and stones can definitely break bones. They can also leave deep gashes, puncture wounds and generally fuck a human body to the point of no return.

  On the other hand, I walked over to the source of this catastrophe while everyone else was trying to escape the crazy woman with eyes that were still glowing bright red. The battered woman looked up at me with tears in her eyes and was crying, “I’m sorry! I’m sorry, please God forgive me!”

  “No.” I grabbed her head with both of my small hands and dug my thumbs into her eyes as she screamed her lungs out. The eyes popped pretty quickly and easily. Then I pulled my hands apart and her whole skull was ripped into two uneven pieces. The helpless brain flopping down behind her back.

  “Goddess protect me! Goddess please! Please forgive me! Aaaah~!” On the other hand, the man tried to escape. Her husband, who obviously beat the bitch to the point where my nephew in her belly was destroyed. I took a deep breath and exhaled. The world slowed down around me. The air felt sluggish. Like I was swimming, rather than walking calmly towards the sprinting man’s back.

  Jon turned his head back slowly and his eyes widened in horror as he saw me approaching him at a leisurely pace. He couldn’t even follow me as I walked past his left side. My cws tore open his flesh so quickly that it was like a cannonball passed through his abdomen. When I reached a dozen meters in front of him, I saw his muscur belly bulge and expand, then explode open from the shockwave and pressure. His spine just barely kept him from being bisected, but without the muscles holding everything together, he quickly fell down and rolled across the grass.

  “So weak. So pathetic.” I sighed dramatically as ‘time’ returned to normal. There were still lots of people who had been torn apart by Mom’s sers. Someone actually got hit by a rock I accidentally kicked while walking. Their whole head looked like a burst watermelon and their body was twitching helplessly as people trampled on it to escape.

  I watched everything coldly for a moment, but then I started crying. Whimpering as I… As Dragoncw thought about how Yellowtail would react when he found out what happened? He would definitely hate her for killing his parents. The whole vilge would hate them for this, assuming they managed to escape and survive. It’s not like everyone in the vilge was here and it’s not like everyone in the vilge was so weak.

  This was the West after all. Any Cn this rge had quite a few monsters that kept the normies safe…