The sky above Washington had become an apocalyptic theater. The low clouds rolled in perpetual motion, charged with supernatural electricity that made the very air vibrate.

Gabriel Reed, S-rank hunter recognized as one of the most powerful human warriors, advanced through the chaos, his reinforced military boots crushing the debris of gutted armored vehicles and fragments of reinforced concrete littering the capital's main arteries.

The acrid smell of gunpowder and molten metal saturated the atmosphere, mixed with the metallic effluvia of dried blood.

He felt his heart beating strongly in his chest, a dull and regular rhythm that resonated in his temples. Each pulsation reminded him of the crushing weight of responsibility: the survival of his people, perhaps of all humanity, rested partly on his combat abilities. His leather-reinforced gloved hands mechanically gripped the handle of his sword, a gesture that had become instinctive after decades of war.

Gabriel was a forty-two-year-old man in the prime of his physical strength. His broad shoulders and dense musculature, sculpted by years of intensive training and fierce battles against the most dangerous creatures of this transformed world, testified to iron discipline. A deep scar crossed his forehead, a memento of a confrontation against an A-rank drake three years earlier. His brown hair, cut short according to military tradition, was now streaked with premature gray strands, the price paid to the constant stress of battles.

His cold blue eyes, accustomed to instantly gauging the dangerousness of an adversary, methodically swept the battlefield. Every piece of rubble, every shadow, every movement was analyzed, catalogued, evaluated as an opportunity to strike, to weaken, to kill.

It had become second nature, a dance of death that he had mastered for so long that it no longer required conscious thought.

A young dragon soldier suddenly emerged from a smoking crater, its green scales still soiled with dust and rubble. The creature charged toward him in a guttural roar, its fifteen-centimeter claws extended forward, each step making the cracked ground tremble. Gabriel reacted instantly, his overdeveloped nervous system allowing him to perceive the world in slow motion. His speed easily surpassed that of the inferior dragon, a rank difference that translated into a considerable physiological advantage.

He dodged with a fluid movement, his body gliding to the side with perfect economy of gesture, while swiftly drawing his long sword. The weapon, forged in an alloy of titanium and mana-enriched adamantium, was the fruit of three years of research by the Alliance's best artisan-forgers. Its ninety-centimeter blade shimmered with a bluish glow, a sign of the sharpness enchantment that made it capable of piercing most draconic defenses of inferior rank.

The movement was surgically precise. The blade cleanly severed the dragon's cervical vertebrae, cutting arteries and nerves in a fraction of a second. The warm, thick blood, darker red than that of mammals, splattered Gabriel's impassive face while the creature's massive head collapsed heavily onto the deformed asphalt, its yellow eyes rapidly losing their vital gleam.

His heart rate accelerated slightly, not from fear, but from that familiar adrenaline that accompanied each successful kill. This hormonal discharge, controlled and channeled by years of experience, amplified his confidence while sharpening his reflexes.

- "These bastards aren't so tough..." he murmured through his teeth, a smile without warmth stretching his chapped lips.

His voice carried that particular roughness of men accustomed to shouting orders in the din of combat.

He continued his progression toward the center of the combat zone, methodically eliminating each inferior dragon that crossed his path. His movements chained together in a deadly choreography: leap forward to avoid a flaming breath, rotation on himself to escape a tail blow, precise thrust between two scales to reach a vital organ. Each technique was the result of instantaneous tactical analysis, the fruit of combat experience forged in blood and pain.

His adversaries, despite their natural ferocity, cruelly lacked experience facing a fighter of his caliber. Their attacks, though powerful, followed predictable patterns that Gabriel had learned to decipher and exploit. A C-rank dragon always launched its breath after contracting its abdominal muscles in a particular way. Another telegraphed its charges by a slight flexing of its hind legs. These micro-signals, invisible to a novice fighter, were for Gabriel so many invitations to riposte.

Each successive victory reinforced his confidence, fed this deeply anchored certainty that he was capable of making a difference in this battle, however brutal and chaotic it might be. After all, hadn't he survived the Great Invasions? Hadn't he slain more draconic creatures than any other hunter of his generation?

But this confidence, built on years of success and survival, crumbled brutally when a colossal shadow fell upon him like a mortuary veil. The ambient temperature dropped several degrees in a few seconds. Gabriel instinctively raised his eyes to the sky and felt his blood transform into ice in his veins, a supernatural cold that had nothing to do with meteorology.

Above him, dominating the entire battlefield with its terrifying mass, stood Maélor. The ancient dragon was a living incarnation of destruction, a perfect predator sculpted by millennia of evolution and domination. Its black scales, each the size of a knight's shield, seemed to absorb not only visible light but also any form of surrounding energy, plunging the world into an unnatural darkness that defied physical laws.

The creature's wingspan exceeded that of a passenger aircraft. Its eyes, two braziers of deep red, contained ancient and merciless intelligence that had seen entire civilizations born and die. When this gaze fell upon Gabriel, the hunter experienced a phenomenon he had never experienced: the impression of being instantly evaluated, judged, and found negligible by an entity whose understanding of the world infinitely surpassed his own.

The hunter instinctively tightened his grip on his sword's handle, his knuckles whitening under the tension. He tried to regulate his breathing according to combat techniques learned at the military academy, but the air seemed to have rarefied, charged with a psychic oppression that made each inspiration difficult.

Maélor, with a detachment that bordered on insolence, dove toward him in a movement of terrifying grace for such a massive creature. Its gigantic maw opened with deliberate slowness, revealing successive rows of teeth the size of long swords, each capable of piercing modern tank armor. The dragon's breath carried the metallic odor of thousands of victims, a charnel house stench that immediately assaulted Gabriel's senses.

The hunter leaped aside, mobilizing all his S-rank supernatural speed, his mana-enhanced muscles responding instantly to his will. He barely dodged the deadly jaws that closed with a deafening crash, comparable to the noise of a train collision. The impact dug a three-meter-deep trench in the reinforced concrete, instantly pulverizing underground pipes and projecting tons of debris in a fifty-meter radius.

Without losing a second, conscious that his only chance resided in speed of execution, Gabriel gathered all his available spiritual energy. His mana, accumulated and refined over decades of training, poured into his sword's blade like a torrent of raw power. The weapon began to glow with supernatural intensity, its metallic surface becoming incandescent under the influx of concentrated magical energy.

He leaped toward the dragon's exposed flank, exploiting the fraction of a second during which Maélor was recovering from his missed attack. His technique was perfect: optimal approach angle, maximum speed, mana concentration at the point of impact.

It was the same movement that had allowed him to slay an A-rank wyrm two years earlier, an attack that had made his reputation among elite hunters.

The blade, charged with all his power, met the ancient dragon's scales. The impact generated a shock wave that made the surrounding air vibrate, but the result was of implacable cruelty: the weapon slid almost without effect against Maélor's natural carapace, leaving only a superficial gash of a few centimeters, barely visible on the immensity of the draconic body.

- "Impossible..." The word escaped his lips in an incredulous breath.

His confidence, built on years of victories and recognition, instantly fragmented into a thousand sharp shards that lacerated his ego with unheard-of violence. For the first time since his nomination to S-rank, Gabriel Reed found himself confronted with his own insignificance.

Maélor slowly turned its immense head toward him, a movement of hypnotic fluidity that betrayed perfect control of its body mass. Its red gaze stopped on the hunter with new attention, no longer that of a predator evaluating prey, but rather that of an entomologist observing a particularly presumptuous insect.

"Is this all you have, human?" The dragon's voice resonated directly in Gabriel's mind, bypassing his mental defenses as if they didn't exist. It wasn't vocal communication but pure psychic projection, each word imprinting itself in his consciousness with the force of a blacksmith's hammer striking the anvil. The timbre was of abyssal depth, carrying an authority that seemed to reach back to the origins of the world.

Gabriel then felt a feeling he thought he had definitively buried: a visceral, primitive terror that went back to the most archaic instincts of the human species facing the ultimate predator. His hands began to tremble imperceptibly, his pupils dilated despite himself, and cold sweat beaded on his scarred forehead.

But he didn't have the luxury of yielding to this panic. Maélor launched an attack of unheard-of violence, its right front paw crashing down toward him with a speed that defied the laws of physics for such a considerable mass. The air compressed under the impact, creating a pressure wave that exploded the windows of surrounding buildings.

Gabriel dodged by pure reflex, his body reacting before his conscious brain had even processed the information. But with each successive dodge, he felt his room for maneuver reduce like shagreen. His mana reserves were rapidly dwindling, his muscles were beginning to show fatigue, and above all, he understood with terrifying lucidity that his adversary was only deploying an infinitesimal fraction of his real capabilities.

The black dragon, manifestly annoyed by these repeated dodges that uselessly prolonged the confrontation, opened its maw to its full extent. The interior of its throat began to glow with a disturbing purplish light, a harbinger of the release of a destructive breath. Gabriel immediately recognized the symptoms: draconic mana compression, internal temperature elevation, polarization of dark energies.

The resulting breath had nothing comparable to the attacks of inferior dragons he had faced until then. It was a torrent of pure corruption, a manifestation of concentrated entropy that didn't content itself with destroying matter but seemed to attack the very foundations of reality. The liquid darkness that escaped from Maélor's throat corroded everything in its path: metal, stone, earth, and even the air itself seemed to dissolve on contact with this nightmarish substance.

Gabriel immediately erected his most powerful magical barrier, an S-level defensive technique that had required five years of perfection. All his remaining power poured into this translucent protection, creating a dome of pure energy around his person. It was a defense that had resisted the combined attacks of three A-rank dragons during the battle of Denver.

The protection was pulverized in less than a second.

Maélor's corrosive breath pierced the barrier as if it were nothing but a soap bubble, before striking Gabriel full force. The impact projected him violently through the air, his body crossing space for more than thirty meters before brutally hitting the remains of a half-collapsed office building.

The shock was of unheard-of violence. Gabriel distinctly heard his ribs crack under the impact, a dry and sinister sound that resonated in his rib cage. A searing pain exploded throughout his torso, each breath becoming torture. Warm blood flowed from his mouth, a metallic taste that invaded his oral cavity and confirmed the gravity of his internal injuries.

He collapsed in a heap of rubble and metallic debris, his combat armor deformed and partially melted by the corrosive residues of the draconic breath. His legs no longer responded correctly to his brain's signals, probable sign of neurological lesions due to the trauma.

Despite everything, despite the lancing pain that invaded every fiber of his being, Gabriel tried to get up. His principles, forged in adversity and tempered in military honor, forbade him to abandon as long as he had a breath of life left. He leaned on his bloodied knees, his arms trembling under the effort, and painfully raised his eyes to face his executioner one last time.

Maélor advanced toward him with deliberate slowness, each step making the ground resonate like a war drum. Its gait expressed neither haste nor anger, only absolute certainty about the outcome of this unbalanced confrontation. Its red eyes shone with an amused gleam, as if the pitiful resistance of the human constituted a passing entertainment.

Gabriel, in an ultimate surge of pride and despair, gathered the last vestiges of his power. His mana reserves were almost exhausted, his injuries seriously compromised his mobility, but he refused to die on his knees. Concentrating this residual energy in the fragments of his broken sword, he propelled himself toward Maélor in a final charge worthy of the last warriors of ancient humanity.

His blade met the impenetrable scales of the dragon again and completely disintegrated under the violence of the impact, its metallic fragments scattering like derisory confetti around the unshakeable mass of his adversary.

At that precise instant, Gabriel Reed understood the cruel and implacable reality of his situation. All his career, all his relentless training, his past victories, his decorations and reputation, all of that was only vanity in the face of the absolute power that Maélor represented. He was not a hero destined to save humanity. He was just an ordinary man who had gotten lost on a battlefield infinitely exceeding his capabilities.

The black dragon observed him with clinical coldness, conscious of the terror and despair that had just seized his human adversary. Slowly, with the patience of a predator sure of its domination, it raised a gigantic paw with claws long as swords, ready to definitively finish this S-rank hunter who had suddenly become as fragile as a child facing the fury of the elements.

POV Mordred:

Mordred left Paris at twilight, in that suspended hour when day yields its place to night with melancholic resignation. His mana wings deployed in all their supernatural splendor, their ethereal luminescence of deep blue contrasting violently with the dark clouds that progressively invaded the celestial vault. Each beat generated luminous undulations that propagated in the air like miniaturized northern lights, a phenomenon visible only to those endowed with developed magical sensitivity.

Behind him, Paris slowly receded, its lights gradually losing themselves in the growing darkness. The familiar monuments, the Eiffel Tower, the Arc de Triomphe, Notre-Dame under reconstruction, shrank until they were nothing more than luminous points in an ocean of urban shadow. But in Mordred's mind, a new determination crystallized, clear and merciless as a freshly forged blade.

He had spent hours methodically analyzing his strategic situation. The equations were simple and brutal: continuing to hunt inferior-rank dragons had become a derisory waste of time. Each victory brought him too weak, too diluted a power gain to hope to bridge the abyssal gap that still separated him from Maélor. And while the decisive battle was already unfolding on the American continent, each lost hour represented a missed opportunity.

His reflection had led him to a logical conclusion: he had to radically change his approach. Instead of nibbling at crumbs of power, he had to aim for a feast. And he knew exactly where to find it.

Syléane.

This name resonated in his mind like an obsessive incantation. Syléane, granddaughter of the draconic patriarch he had already slain in the Parisian underground, represented everything he needed to cross the next threshold of his power. The intelligence reports he had consulted were formal: she possessed a mana reserve equivalent to that of ten A-rank dragons, fruit of an exceptional genetic heritage and centuries of energy accumulation.

Killing and absorbing her strength would finally allow him to rise to the level necessary to face Maélor as an equal, or at least with a real chance of survival. It was a risky bet, Syléane was reputed for her ferocity in combat and her mastery of ancient draconic arts, but it was also his best, perhaps his only opportunity for rapid growth.

His flight organized itself according to a regular and economical rhythm. Mordred glided above continents with remarkable efficiency, invisible to military radars thanks to the stealth properties of his mana wings. The landscapes flowed beneath him: French agricultural plains, snow-covered Alps, Eastern European steppes, then Siberian immensities where human civilization left only sparse scars in the natural fabric.

Each kilometer traveled reinforced his determination. His jaw remained contracted, his facial muscles tense with absolute concentration. His orange eyes, true braziers in the nocturnal darkness, shone with an intensity that betrayed the implacable resolution that inhabited him. Nothing—neither fatigue, nor doubt, nor moral consideration, could divert him from his objective.

Chinese airspace welcomed him in heavy silence. Mordred adjusted his trajectory to avoid military surveillance zones, navigating between detection corridors thanks to precise knowledge of Asian defense systems. His previous military training, acquired in another life, still served him today.

When he finally reached the mountainous foothills of the region where Syléane had established her territory, night was deeply settled. He chose with tactical care an optimal landing point: a steep mountain more than three thousand meters high, covered with dense vegetation of centennial conifers that would provide perfect natural camouflage. The place was sufficiently isolated to avoid any human presence, but close enough to his target to allow rapid approach at daybreak.

Mordred landed with feline grace on a rocky promontory, his mana wings gradually fading until they completely disappeared. His feet touched the ground with a lightness that contrasted with the terrifying power he carried within him. The mountain air was pure and cold, charged with the resinous odor of firs and the humidity of nocturnal dew.

The silence surrounding him was troubled only by the discreet rustlings of nocturnal fauna: the distant hooting of an owl, the rustling of leaves under the muffled steps of a fox, the murmur of wind in the branches. This tranquility contrasted violently with the tumult of battles he had left behind, offering welcome respite to his overstimulated senses.

Slowly, with the grace of a monk accustomed to meditative rituals, Mordred settled on a flat rock with edges polished by centuries of weather. He crossed his legs according to traditional position, placed his hands on his knees, and closed his eyes. His face, ordinarily marked by permanent tension, gradually relaxed as he plunged into a deep contemplative state.

Meditation was for him much more than a simple relaxation technique. It was a process of energetic recentering, a method to optimize the circulation of his mana and repair the micro-damage accumulated during his previous combats. His breathing slowed until it became almost imperceptible, his heart rate adjusted to a minimal level, and his supernatural metabolism entered a phase of accelerated regeneration.

In this state of modified consciousness, Mordred let his mind drift toward future events. He mentally visualized his confrontation with Syléane, analyzing each known variable, each possible strategy. According to the intelligence gathered, she favored ranged attacks, perfectly mastered the ice element, and possessed exceptional movement speed even for a dragoness of her rank. This information was precious, but Mordred knew that the reality of combat would bring its share of surprises and unexpected events.

Hours flowed in this meditative immobility. His mana, dispersed and partially exhausted by the long journey, began to flow regularly again in his energetic circuits. He felt his reserves gradually reconstituting, each breath bringing its share of vital energy, each heartbeat distributing this restored strength throughout his supernatural organism.

In his mind, thoughts organized themselves with crystalline clarity. Syléane effectively represented considerable danger, her combat capabilities were largely superior to those of all the adversaries he had faced until then. But this very dangerousness was what made this confrontation so precious. The more powerful the adversary, the more important the energy released by their death would be. It was a fundamental law of the draconic world: power is acquired by challenging and slaying equals or superiors.

A part of him, the one that still conserved some traces of his past humanity, felt a certain excitement at the idea of this combat. It wasn't sadistic joy or thirst for destruction, but rather that particular anticipation of the warrior facing a challenge worthy of his capabilities. After months of massacring inferior adversaries, finally facing an enemy at his level represented a return to the sources of what he really was.

When the first glimmers of dawn began to caress the surrounding summits, Mordred slowly reopened his eyes. The process was gradual, his eyelids lifting with the slowness of a theater curtain revealing the main stage. His orange pupils, restored to their full intensity by the night of meditation, now shone with an almost supernatural brilliance.

These eyes braziers of pure determination seemed capable of igniting the residual darkness of night's end. They carried in them all the resolution accumulated during these hours of mental preparation, all the confidence of a predator perfectly prepared for his hunt. In this gaze, there was no longer any trace of doubt, hesitation, or moral consideration. Only the absolute certainty of one who knows exactly what he must accomplish and possesses the means to realize it.

He rose with perfect fluidity, his muscles responding instantly to his will without the slightest stiffness despite the prolonged immobility. His body, optimized by months of draconic transformation, now functioned according to parameters that largely exceeded human biological limitations. Each gesture betrayed contained power, a lethality ready to express itself at the slightest signal.

His lips parted slightly, letting escape a barely audible murmur that was lost in the morning breeze:

- "Tomorrow, everything changes."

The words, pronounced in a low voice but charged with unshakeable conviction, resonated briefly in the crystalline mountain air before being carried away by the wind. This promise, simple in appearance, carried in it all the weight of a destiny in motion, the announcement of an irreversible shift in the balance of forces that governed this world at war.

The nocturnal breeze, last manifestation of the ending night, carried these words toward the sleeping valleys, like a presage murmured in the ear of the world.