Last Egg: Reincarnated as a Dragon in a Game

POV Vesuvius:

The mountain-sized dragon flapped his wings, and lightning crackled on both sides of his body, forming two rails forged out of pure electricity.

He felt the distant explosion and flashes of blue light beyond the horizon, sending ripples through the air.

‘Again?!’

The lightning crackled again, bridging his semi-metallic armor with the two lightning rails. An immense force pushed him from the back, his body accelerating so fast that he felt like a bullet fired from the gun. He shot forwards, accompanied by a loud sonic boom.

The mountains, the green pastures, and the clear lakes under him turned into a blurry colorful canvas.

‘These cowards! I can’t even leave for one fucking night without them using it to cause havoc.’

He kept accelerating more and more, one sonic boom after another exploding behind him and creating rings in the trail of black clouds left in his tracks.

The massive volcano and city appeared from behind the horizon.

Smoke was rising from multiple locations, the cries of humans and the growls of his minions reverberating through what was supposed to be a calm night.

‘This?!’ It was even worse than he expected as it wasn’t just a single attack, but absolute mayhem, ‘That vermin is everywhere!’

He braced with his wings, the lightning crackling as he abruptly stopped, his huge body looming over the city, submerging everything in the shadows and darkness. His aura and domain spread out of his body, moving through the city like a giant tsunami.

All the fires sizzled out of existence, and the sounds of explosions, cries of humans, and growls of his minions quieted. It became so quiet and calm that one couldn’t even guess how it looked just a few minutes earlier.

The dragon’s eyes brightly glowed as he saw the humans in black on the roofs and streets, their bodies frozen as if the time around them had stopped.

‘Here you are!’ The lightning crackled within the dark clouds around him, the bright light flashing within them.

Suddenly, the figures in the black collapsed, one by one, their bodies falling on the ground like puppets whose strings were cut. There were no signs of life, all of them dead.

‘No! You cowards!’, The dragon’s anger blazed even brighter, the whole sky igniting in neon-red flames with lightning crackling and sparkling everywhere. The ground rumbled with tremors, shaking with the buildings, walls, and people. Winds were loudly howling, snatching items from the streets while the clouds of smoke rotated around the dragon like a giant hurricane.

Nature responded to his anger.

‘They even took my revenge and my right to retaliate away from me!’ The attackers were gone, but the anger remained, slowly bubbling under the surface like a volcano before an explosion.

The rage intensified even more as he saw the humans shivering and crying on the streets, their bodies trembling as they lost control over their muscles.

The dragon’s voice boomed across the whole city with such force that the stone roads cracked, and the roofs of the buildings creaked and shook, “Get out, mortals! Your kind has defiled my city, the city my minions built for them and me! You have corrupted it and turned it into a den of anarchy!”

His aura exploded out, the stars and the moon vanishing from the sky as if someone had spilled black paint all over it.

‘They are not worthy. I ignored the lesser crimes, but that was a mistake. These humans are chaos incarnate. If I let them stay, they will spread their corruption and rot my beautiful city.’ He knew how well the city worked before and how it changed after the humans arrived

His power exploded out, and every human fell on his or her knees. The dragon’s golden eyes bore upon them from his dark clouds. Initially, he wanted his city to prosper and grow as fast as possible, even taking it as far as allowing the mortals to enter.

‘It was a huge mistake!’

“From now on, this city will be forbidden land for you! You will no longer trample its roads, and you will no longer infest it with your chaos and dirt like the rats that are infesting your cities.”

‘This city will be only for my minions. They deserve to live in peace without dealing with all the anarchy, petty crimes, and schemes humans brought with them. I will make this the real dragon city, the city of dragon kind.’

His eyes glinted in rage, fire creeping up his throat as his instincts screamed at him to burn them all and punish them for their actions.

‘No, lots of them are citizens of my kingdom. That remotely makes them my minions, even though they are just low-quality ones. If they were just foreigners, then…’

His voice boomed again, with such a ferocity that it felt like during an earthquake, the buildings and everything else shaking and vibrating, “Get out now!”

He finished in mind, ‘Get out before I lose my control.’

He didn’t care about their status or who he would offend. Nobles, merchants, and even farmers were all nothing but lowly servants when compared to a dragon lord.

The humans exploded into panic, the smell of fear and terror rising everywhere in the city. They moved like one, united in their fear as they rushed straight towards the gates, pushing as if they were running from a flood.

No, one stopped them as they ran as fast as they could, clouds of dust and ash rising behind them.

This was his last straw, ‘Not all of them might be bad. However, they are like abandoned dogs. You never know if they will bite you. Only these that prove themselves will be allowed to enter. Permits will be distributed, and maybe I will build an outer city for commerce.’

He no longer cared what they thought, ‘I am a dragon. I don’t need to care about opinions on thoughts of some punny, crooked mortals.’

His last qualms about his plan have vanished after he witnessed even more destruction of his city, ‘There will never be peace with them until I break them into submission. Those that are smart will join me, and those that are stupid will resist and die. They need to learn their place. It doesn’t matter that lots of them will die.’

He looked again through the city, scanning street by street until his eyes fell upon his minion, which failed again. She was lying sprawled on the hard stone road, almost looking like someone who lost the will to live.

His anger slightly subsided, only to flare again like a forest fire. He gave her one chance after another, and she failed him multiple times.

His aura smashed against her body in anger, ‘I can’t just let it slide after so many failures!’.

But then he shook his head after seeing her pitiful state and shivering body. She was curled on the ground, tears flowing down her face,

𝑶𝑣𝗅xt.𝒸𝔬𝐦

‘No, I shouldn’t take my anger on her. Maybe it is my fault. I kept throwing at her tasks that were far beyond her capabilities. She was never qualified for something like this. I wanted her to catch the culprits, but at the same, I didn’t give her enough manpower.’

The longer he watched her shiver and cry, the worse he felt.

‘I let Alesia warp my expectations. She managed to do all the unreasonable tasks I threw at her and did even more. However, she was always special, maybe even a genius. To assume that all my minions are like this was a mistake.’

He looked at his broken minion, ‘I threw at her the administration of the whole occupied kingdom, the weeding out traitors, the organization of this whole tournament, and now even police work. Yet she would never say no even if I was unreasonable as that is her nature to fulfill all my orders, the nature of a loyal minion and kin from my blood.’

His voice turned gentler even though he still felt the unending anger towards those that attacked his city, “Rest my minion. You have worked hard for decades. I relieve you from most of your duties. From now on, you will only manage the nobles of the occupied kingdom.”

‘This is what she was good at. She made some cruel but, in the end, correct decisions that extinguished the chaos and stabilized the kingdom.’

Vesuvius realized it was just a symptom of deep systematic problems brewing under the surface, ‘My whole command structure is in chaos, even I don’t know who is managing what. I must establish a proper government with properly organized and split powers and responsibilities. I wanted to eliminate the bureaucracy, but now I see that it is necessary. If I want to wage war, I must clean up my house beforehand.’

The humans have already left the city, slowly walking down the road between the inner and outer walls.

The whole city was finally quiet, all the chaos vanishing, leaving only a few smoldering buildings as the remainder.

The grim procession moved silently, their faces gloomy and pale after the shock.

‘Just a few days of humans, and my city is already in ruin.’ He flinched as he looked through the streets, garbage, and remains of food pilling in the side valleys of the inns and taverns frequented by the visitors.