The Golden dragon stood before me, a smug smile playing on its lips, as it transformed into a human-like form. Two golden horns adorned its forehead, its hair shimmering like molten gold, and its pupils burning with an intense, golden fire. Clad in a martial attire of gold and white, it lunged at me with a fierce cry, delivering a crushing kick to my gut, followed by a flurry of punches that rained down upon my face, blows I was powerless to evade.
[Thou art struggling well enough for an insect, verily, thy time hath come to an end.], A grin twisted the dragon's face as it spoke.
The dragon reverted to its feral form, unleashing a fiery breath that engulfed me in a maelstrom of flames. Consumed by the inferno, I stumbled forth, my body a blazing pyre, as I careened unseeing into the unyielding trunk of a tree. My form collapsed, writhing in agony, as the searing pain writhed and twisted, a living torment, within my charred and blackened flesh.
"Aaarrggggghhhhhh aaaarrrgggghhhhhhhh.", I screamed until my throat couldn't handle my voice.
[Kekeke, Thou doth scream well enough for one of thy mortal kind, and yet thou hast not yielded, albeit thy body doth burn in fiery torment.]
I stood tall, grasping my sword with flames-damaged hands, the inferno consuming my body refusing to be extinguished. I gritted my teeth, swallowed the bitter taste of pain, and launched myself at the dragon with the ferocity of the First Form of Broken Blade Perseverance. My sword arced towards the dragon's neck, but the beast caught the blade in its teeth and shattered it with a merciless crunch. A fiery breath, like a curse, cascaded upon me once more, and I collapsed to the scorched earth, my body a blazing pyre.
As I looked up, the dragon's smiling visage loomed above, its gaze reveling in my torment. It descended from the sky with deliberate slowness, its foot crushing my arm beneath the unyielding weight of its talons. The other foot tore at my remaining arm, rending flesh from bone with a cruel ease. The dragon's laughter was a cold echo in my mind as I lay helpless, my body a trembling, flaming wreck.
In a final, awful moment, the dragon opened its maw, and my heart convulsed in dread. I prayed, in the secret recesses of my mind, that it would not unleash another fiery blast – a prayer cruelly unanswered. The dragon breathed, and flames engulfed me anew, my body a holocaust of pain, a living, burning ruin.
"Aaaargghhhhhh aaarrghhhh.", I screamed with every fiber of my being, a raw, anguished cry that rent the air, as tears – or perhaps mere rivulets of molten pain – began to seep from my charred, blackened eyes. The dragon, with a detached curiosity, tore my left leg asunder, and then, in a gesture of cold mockery, staunched the flow of blood with a some sort of healing, a twisted benediction that left me gasping in bewilderment.
The dragon, a monstrous entity reveling in its sadistic delight, did not slay me outright, but instead protracted its pleasure, prolonging the exquisite torment of its prey. Once more, it parted its jaws, unleashing a furnace of flame that engulfed me, only to follow with a mocking whisper of healing, a macabre cycle of agony and reprieve that recommenced with metronomic regularity.
Time itself grew distorted, lost in the haze of unending pain, as I succumbed to a numbness that crept like a cold shroud across my tortured form. The dragon, unrelenting in its sport, continued to weave this ghastly pattern, until, at last, it stayed its cruel hand, gazing down at me with pitiless eyes as it anchored its massive foot upon my ravaged body, a symbol of its unchallenged dominion.
[Life, a stage of trials, doth present unto us divers fates, yet for thee, I behold but one destiny: to perish by flames. I, the arbiter of thy doom, hath decreed thy punishment: death by fiery judgement.], The dragon said while laughing and opened it's mouth and breathe it's fire.
"aaarggg aarrggg.", I shrieked with every fiber of my ravaged form, a hoarse, despairing cry that tore through the air, though the agony of burning had grown stale, a monotonous drumbeat in the cacophony of my suffering. The dragon's laughter, a cold, mirthless sound, finally guttered and died, and in its place came a silence more terrible still. It lifted its foot, a massive, scaled monolith, and brought it down upon my face with a crushing finality, pulverizing my skull, and with it, the flickering ember of my defiance.
***
[Verily, the humans of Hera's kingdom do possess a most stubborn persistence. I hath tormented that mortal for a considerable span, yet still he doth not beseech me to stay my hand. What a pertinacious insect doth he prove to be.]
The dragon's environs succumbed to devastation, laid waste by its mere presence, as if the very fabric of reality trembled before its monumental power.
[Me thinks my powers do wax anew; I must away from this realm forthwith.], The dragon soared into the heavens, where the sky itself was a maelstrom of flux, and with a swift passage, it vanished into that realm of shimmering disarray.
***
'Where am I? Am I dead?' I queried the void within myself, as I drifted, bodiless, upon a darkling river, its somber waters cloaking me in mystery. And then, like macabre puppets, countless hands breached the surface, straining, grasping, as if to snatch me into the depths. But suddenly, a lance of light, like a dagger of salvation, shot forth from my right eye, and those avid hands recoiled, vanished into the secret places of the river's dark heart.
Bewildered, lost in the labyrinth of my own disorientation, I had scarce begun to ponder my whereabouts when – with a velocity that defied comprehension, faster than light itself – my form was hurled through the void to a place unknown, a locus of radiance where a great light welled forth like a newborn star. And then my sight was extinguished, plunged into blackness, and in that midnight of vision, a voice I knew, a voice familiar as memory itself, spoke.
"Jangre.", The professor called out my name.
"Present sir.", I responded.
'Am I back at the starting place? And have I regressed? This is my second time already, so will I regress eternally when I die?' I asked myself.
'This is my second return.'