The memories did not come in like a sublimation, but like the hellish FBI kicking the door down.[Memory Fragment 1]His name was Vorthras.
Twenty-one years old. A swamp black dragon.
He was, in the huge stratification of the dragon-family, only a little higher than the poorest white dragon—so low, too, that no one bothered to recollect his name.
[Memory Fragment 2]
It was your stereotypical world of swords and sorcery.
At the hatching of Vorthras his wings had been unattached to his forelimbs—a deformity.
And so the night of the full moon his own kin kicked him out of the nest.
Somehow, though, with pure perseverance and a survival instinct that was effective, almost in the nature of vengeance, he reached Level 30.
That made him the Young Dragon bracket- sixteen to twenty-five, Tier 3.
[Memory Fragment 3]
Had it been a normal situation, he could have been clawing through on the next few decades.
Perhaps even climbed to Mature Adult Dragon- Tier 6, 101-200.
But he committed the fatal error of most of the young black dragons:
He became in love with human novels.
Whereas other dragons amassed gold, he amassed books.
When they were counting coins, he was reading stories of how the dragons abducted princesses.
And at length he reached a brash decision:
A dragon without stealing a princess is not a dragon.
[Memory Fragment 4]
In the ecstasy of fantasy and false fancies, he flew to a small kingdom, and shouted in the presence of the king:
When I tell you to give me your loveliest princess, or I shall bring your palace down.
And the king smiled, and shook his head- and damned him to hell, the second he turned his back.
Then he contracted a Tier 3 archmage to lay a trap.
After three days Vorthras came, and there was the "sacrificial princess"...
And also an army.
And a battle ground all interwoven with magic circles.
He took the girl and fled, avoiding fire-balls that burnt him up like a half-cooked steak of dragon.
He reached this cave but barely managed to fall.
That is where the memories are terminated.
There lay Logan stunned, the dying throes of Vorthras still ringing in his ears.
And then it hit him.
What was here in the dead body, scalded and ashes, was no longer Vorthras.
It was his now.
This black dragon had somehow been possessed by Logan a college student on Earth. He had consumed the initial soul, sucked up the memories and could now put on the skin of the dragon like a second scaly birth.
And with the body was... instincts.
Greed? Probably.
Laziness? Almost definitely.
Lust? ...Yeah, no dodging that one.
Logan clenched his teeth, that is, his fangs, and made his pawed-to bits of a human body pull in a breath. Then in all the upright wrath of one who had just been roasted, body-jacked and humiliated by a fantasy cliche, he threw open his dragon maw and screamed:
"This is so goddamn stupid."
Instead of English, what came out was not English.
It was a snarling, grunting growl of a language—low and coarse, and as thunder rubbing on sandpaper. Dragon-tongue, apparently.
Logan blinked; then slowly lifted up his sore and heavy head and turned it to face the so-called sacrificial princess.
And at once began to think there was something very, very wrong.
That wasn't a princess.
There was no actual human princess with her fluffy white fox ears and tail.
This wasn't royalty. This was bait.
a weak, quailing allurement thrown away by a king who obviously believed that the dragons were as stupid as they were voracious.
Lying against the wall of the cave was the cuddled-up body of a small shivering animal, the girl herself. Her skin was pale—as white as a screen saver—white as a monitor that is not booted up. Her fancy dress, which at one time must have been suitable to a ball, was now streaked with ash and mud, the hem burned and torn as though she had been through a battlefield.
She was pale as though she might have fainted. Not crying—she had not even the strength to do that.
Something needed to be said to her by Logan. Anything. The grunt of assurance, the hoarse huff of the dragon, hey, I am not going to eat you.
but the instant he made an attempt—
His skin twitched like a short circuited machine.
And then, like a dying refrigerator himself, his great dragon head crashed in face first against the ground.
The face-plant of a dragon.
"Shit..."
The term vibrated out of him, deep and earthquake-like, and the adjacent pebbles were hopping as though they were endeavoring to escape the situation.
He lay there grovelling, half-cover himself with dirt, and well aware of one ugly fact:
He was so poorly off that even the universe was too much bothered to fool with him any more.
At this state, he was not supposed to speculate about his new identity and attempt to reassure the frightened foxkin girl in the corner.
No. Priority one was simple:
Survive.
And to have herbs brought or spells cast by a half-waking fox girl?
Well, that was as realistic as asking a Lee Sin main to leave your blue buff alone because he is jealous of your possessions.
In other words: not happening.
He set himself to make a second attempt, with stiffening muscles, fluttering wings—
Ding.
In his head he heard a jangy electronic sound.
He had not even time to think of it...
Ding.
Then again.
Ding.
It was like a slot machine in the basement of Dracula, how accessories the sound was in this medieval cave.
And just as a pop-up advertisement does, a barrage of mechanized messages illuminated his mind:
Ding! Hello, Host. War & Conquest System loaded well.
Ding! Hello, Host. Evolution System is on standby.
Ding! Hello, Host. Connected Villain Protocol System.
The brain of Logan was stopped in dead still, three seconds.
Then—
Ding! Multiple systems detected. Initiating fusion... Fusing...
Logan: "???"
He there was stunned as the mechanisms in his head were seemingly determined to conduct a corporate merger.
And all at once he found himself longing with a great pang of his college dorm.
Sure, it was messy. Surely, it was ramen and hopelessness. Admittedly, the cable Jungle beneath his desk was a time bomb ready to blow up.
But the wires at least did not speak to him.
And they were certainly not in his skull conducting board meetings.
...