"Ah... ah..."
No matter how many times I checked, the fact that Cal was dead didn’t change.
“Ah...!”
“Salvia! Snap out of it!”
My body was yanked backward, and when I regained focus, Plato was standing in front of me, swinging his sword.
“Damn it!”
The massive dragon had crept closer.
It had broken through the gaps between the first squad and was thrashing violently with something clenched in its jaws.
“ROOOAAARRR!”
The dragon let out a deafening roar, shaking the ground beneath us.
“Second squad! Engage in combat immediately! First squad, fall back and regroup behind us! Move!”
“Why the hell is this thing so damn tough?!”
Plato, with aura surging through his sword, tried to slice through the dragon’s left leg, while Yuri attacked the right. But the dragon’s skin was so impenetrable that their blades had no effect.
The dragon lowered its head, snapping its jaws at Plato, trying to swallow him whole. But Plato managed to block its mouth with his sword and rolled out of harm’s way.
The dragon recoiled, letting out another furious roar, its mouth seemingly injured by the blade.
“Ah...”
Even in the chaos, I couldn’t shake the horrifying image of Cal’s death from my mind.
“What is... this...?”
“Focus! The dragon’s hide is too tough for blades, but its eyes and the inside of its mouth are vulnerable! Aim there!”
The platoon leader’s voice rang out from somewhere in the chaos.
Despite their attacks bouncing off the dragon’s rock-hard scales, the soldiers didn’t give up, hacking away relentlessly to slow it down.
“Stay calm, 18th Company! Hold your positions!”
“If that thing gets to the village, we’re all dead! Don’t forget what happened to the other company last time!”
The only way to prevent the dragon from reaching the village was to keep it occupied and slow it down, even if that meant risking everything.
Why... Why is this happening so suddenly...?
Fragments of the original novel began to surface in my mind.
Yes, there was a scene in the original where the heroine faced a Black Dragon. Unlike other romance fantasy novels where dragons were revered as ancient and awe-inspiring creatures, in this story, dragons were nothing more than beasts to be hunted.
That didn’t make them any less terrifying or powerful.
Typically, encountering a dragon during the standard eight years of military service was unheard of. But somehow, Dalin, the original heroine, ended up facing the strongest of them all—a Black Dragon.
This also meant that the original male leads—Aquila, Winter, and Isina—had faced dragons not just once, but twice.
“Ahhh! A d-dragon!”
Yes, in the original, the heroine had screamed like that when... How did they defeat the dragon again?
“Oh, Winter.”
In the novel, Winter had used his ice-attribute aura blade to deal a critical blow to the dragon.
His unique aura, unlike others’, was effective against the dragon’s defenses. After that, Aquila attacked with his fire-attribute aura, and finally, Isina finished it off with a gun.
“Salvia, pull yourself together!”
“Ah...!”
Plato’s shout snapped me out of my thoughts, and I began to regain my sense of reality.
It seemed that while I was frozen in place, Linia had been standing guard over me, holding onto my arm to keep me steady. Since Linia was positioned to the right of Cal, it looked like he had taken over the spot left vacant by Cal’s death.
Cal’s death...
The thought resurfaced, and a wave of nausea hit me. Linia, noticing my distress, glared at me with his one good eye and shouted.
“We have to survive! We have to stop it and live through this!”
Confronted with the sight of a comrade’s death, my mind was desperate to retreat into denial, whispering to me to shut down and avoid facing reality. But I clung to the last thread of sanity, knowing that ignoring the situation would only lead to meaningless death.
If I lose focus, I’ll die.
“Recruits, stay sharp! Do you want to die?!”
April’s commanding voice cut through the chaos like a whip. For the first time, the voice of the person who tormented me daily felt strangely reassuring.
Just a while ago, I thought the monsters were less scary than the seniors.
Right now, though, April’s voice was the anchor keeping me grounded.
“Light! More light! Get those torches up!”
This chapt𝙚r is updated by freeωebnovēl.c૦m.
At her shrill command, someone rushed forward with torches, illuminating the battlefield. With the additional light, the scene became clearer, allowing me to regain some sense of awareness.
The biggest obstacle in this fight was the darkness.
On this pitch-black mountain, not even a sliver of moonlight reached us. We were practically fighting blind, relying only on sound and instinct.
The faint light from our aura-covered swords helped a little, but the variety of colors only added to the confusion, making it harder to focus.
I used the coral-colored glow of my sword like a flashlight, but seeing the dragon bathed in coral light only made it look more terrifying.
The same coral light reflecting off Cal’s body earlier had been equally horrifying.
“Keep your eyes open! If you can’t see, then listen carefully!”
April shouted again, and I gritted my teeth, trying to track the dragon’s movements by the flickering torchlight.
“ROOOAAARRR!”
Suddenly, the dragon let out a bone-shaking roar.
It reared its head, thrashing its injured right leg. I caught sight of Aquila standing at the forefront, his blade glowing with fire-attribute aura.
Even in the chaos, Aquila had managed to land a critical strike.
The other soldiers, battered and bleeding, didn’t falter. They kept swinging their swords, determined to hold the dragon back.
Gritting my teeth, I tightened my grip on my trembling sword and charged forward.
Getting killed by the dragon would be horrifying, but if it reached the village, the consequences would be even worse. We wouldn’t just be dead—we’d be damned by the higher-ups.
“No, get out of the way!”
“Huh?”
For a brief moment, I thought things were finally turning around. But as April’s voice rang out—
“Agh! AAAHHH!”
“AAHH!”
I instinctively moved my trembling, coral-aura-lit sword toward the source of the screams, and what I saw froze me in place.
Two mangled bodies lay on the ground, savaged and discarded by the dragon’s jaws.
“No...”
They were my fellow recruits—Johann and Billy.
“Damn it! Maintain visibility! Don’t lose sight of the dragon’s position!”
Despite three comrades already lying dead, the remaining soldiers, seemingly accustomed to death on the battlefield, raised their swords and deflected incoming attacks without hesitation.
Aquila, who had been targeting the dragon’s legs and enraging it earlier, now stood trembling as he stared at the fallen bodies of his comrades.
For the first time, I saw emotion on Aquila’s face.
...Not that I was in much better shape. The shock had left me just as paralyzed.
“Rotate squads! Second squad, pull back! First squad, take over! Third and fourth squads, rotate positions!”
As the company captain and platoon leader barked orders, Linia grabbed me and dragged my unresponsive body into motion.
My legs felt like they would give out at any moment from the sheer weight of the situation. But there was no safe place to be in this mountain with a rampaging dragon.
Each time the dragon charged, soldiers were thrown to the ground, only to scramble back up and chase after it in a desperate attempt to slow it down.
Between the dragon’s deafening roars and the blinding flashes of aura from the soldiers’ blades, it was almost impossible to hear or see anything clearly. It was utter chaos.
And I wasn’t the only one lost in this nightmare.
“Hippo!”
In the confusion caused by the darkness, one of my fellow recruits, Hippo, lost sight of the dragon and was immediately caught and torn apart.
“No... no....”
The faint torchlight revealed a dragon whose wings had been shredded and whose legs bore deep wounds from the relentless attacks. Its speed had diminished, but its ferocity hadn’t.
Even as it was wounded and cornered, the dragon resisted violently, thrashing about in the darkness.
“No... this can’t be happening....”
I wanted to close my eyes and escape, but if I did, I’d lose track of the dragon’s movements in the shadows. I had no choice but to keep my eyes wide open, even as tears streamed down my face from sheer terror and despair.
Aquila... where is Aquila?
The thought crossed my mind, driven by the desperate hope that someone—anyone—would slay the dragon.
“A...”
But when I finally found Aquila, he was standing motionless, staring blankly at the fallen bodies of our comrades. He looked just as shaken as I was.
...What is he doing?
For the first time, I saw something in Aquila’s eyes—a brokenness I had never seen before.
But no matter the shock or despair felt by the recruits, the remaining soldiers continued to throw themselves at the dragon.
And the casualties weren’t limited to our platoon. Amid the flickering light, I glimpsed someone in Beta Platoon wailing over a fallen comrade.
The situation was spiraling out of control.
“It’s too high!”
The dragon’s weak points were its eyes and mouth, but its head was far out of reach, making it nearly impossible to land a critical blow.
“Damn it! Fighting this thing at night is impossible...!”
At the forefront of the battle stood April and Winter.
April, her golden hair whipping through the air, charged at the dragon with her sword.
Each slash of her blade, imbued with plant-attribute aura, left trails of green light and caused the dragon’s blood to spray. The wounds she inflicted didn’t heal—a testament to her unique abilities.
Beside her was Winter, enveloped in a brilliant blue aura.
The second male lead of the original story, described as one of its most skilled fighters, now leapt into action.
Using his ice-attribute aura, Winter scaled the dragon’s body, launching himself into the air with an almost superhuman force before bringing his sword down in a devastating strike.
Boom!
A thunderous sound echoed as the dragon let out a chilling, anguished cry.
The dragon’s eyes turned milky white as ice spread across them, and it thrashed its front claws wildly. Each time its claws slammed into the ground, soldiers attacking its legs were flung aside, their bodies hitting the earth with heavy thuds. Even as they writhed in pain, they clawed at the ground, trying to stand.
“ROOOAAARRR!”
Suddenly, an intense heat washed over us.
“Get down!”
The dragon’s mouth opened wide, and an enormous burst of flames erupted, heading straight for us.