"My name is Lewis," the man said curtly. "Now leave. Go to your class."
Damien listened, though his body protested with every movement. He walked down the hallway, away from the armored stranger, his footsteps echoing loudly in the emptiness. The halls stretched before him, devoid of life—everyone else had already made it to their classrooms. Blood still dripped from his split lip, and his head throbbed where Jake and Michael's fists had connected again and again.
He was alone now, truly alone.
Suddenly, a voice resonated in his head, cold and ancient: *Shadow dragon: 50% completed. Power evolution starting now.*
Damien's eyes widened. Before he could process what was happening, his legs gave out beneath him. He collapsed hard onto the polished floor, the impact jarring his already battered body.
Then came the pain.
It started deep in his core and exploded outward, radiating through every nerve, every muscle, every bone. His entire body felt as though it were being crushed by a trash compactor—slowly, methodically, without mercy. Each second stretched into an eternity. A minute felt like an hour of pure, unrelenting agony.
Damien's fingers clawed at the floor, searching desperately for something to anchor himself to reality. His vision blurred with tears he didn't remember shedding. The pain was everlasting, all-consuming, a fire that burned from the inside out.
No one was in the halls to witness his suffering. He was too far from the classrooms for anyone to hear his cries through the heavy doors. The academy had abandoned him to this torment.
His body began to convulse violently. Then, without warning, sharp wings—dark as midnight, hard as obsidian—burst from his back. The sensation of his flesh tearing, his bones restructuring, his very being transforming sent Damien into a frenzy of screaming. He had never screamed like this before—raw, primal, stripped of all dignity and control.
The wings emerged fully, dripping with blood that wasn't quite red anymore. They were magnificent and terrible, a contradiction of beauty and horror.
Eventually, mercifully, the pain subsided. Damien lay on the floor, gasping for air, his body trembling uncontrollably from the agony he'd endured. Sweat mixed with blood on his skin, creating dark pools on the pristine academy floor.
He forced himself to stand, though his legs threatened to buckle beneath him. There was no mirror nearby, no way to see what he'd become. He reached back tentatively and touched his new wings. They felt strange—soft in some places, hard in others, covered in scales that seemed denser than before. The texture was alien yet somehow familiar, as though his body had always meant to have them.
Then a terrifying thought struck him.
His scales had erupted during the beating. Jake and Michael had seen them—those black, armor-like scales that covered his body. They hadn't seemed to care, too focused on pummeling his unprotected face. But Lewis... Lewis had been there at the end. Had he noticed? Had he seen the scales before Damien forced them back beneath his skin?
Damien couldn't remember retracting them consciously. The transformation had happened so fast, his mind too clouded by pain and humiliation. If Lewis had seen, if he knew what Damien was becoming...
The thought terrorized him. He stood frozen in the empty hallway, staring down at his hands, which now seemed foreign to him.
A strange aura pulsed from his body—dark, terrifying, ancient. It emanated from his very core, something he'd never felt before. The power was intoxicating and frightening in equal measure. It whispered promises of strength, of vengeance, of dominance.
Without warning, his mouth opened involuntarily. He tried to close it, tried to stop what was coming, but his body no longer obeyed him completely.
A primal, dragon-like roar erupted from deep within his chest.
The sound was catastrophic. The shockwave hit the walls with physical force, cracking plaster and tearing at the stone beneath. The walls remained standing, but barely. Even students in distant classrooms heard something—a faint but unmistakable noise that made them pause mid-sentence, mid-thought. The ground trembled beneath their feet, a subtle earthquake that lasted only seconds but left everyone unsettled.
Damien stood in the aftermath, breathing heavily, his new wings spread wide behind him. The dark aura still pulsed around him, growing stronger with each heartbeat.
Then he heard it—footsteps. Heavy, deliberate, echoing down the corridor behind him.
He spun around, wings instinctively flaring.
Lewis stood at the end of the hallway, his armored form silhouetted against the light from the entrance. But he wasn't alone. Three other figures flanked him, each wearing similar armor, each radiating an authority that made Damien's newly awakened power feel suddenly small.
"Dragon-blooded are forbidden in this academy," Lewis's voice carried down the corridor, cold and final. "By order of the Council, you're coming with us."
The four armored figures began walking toward him in perfect synchronization.
Damien's wings trembled. His body, still weak from the transformation, screamed at him to run. But where could he go? The hallway stretched endlessly in both directions, and these weren't bullies he could hide from.
The ancient voice whispered in his mind once more, deeper and more primordial than before: *Choose. Submit or fight.*
"Choose or fight?" Damien's voice came out as a dark, guttural growl he barely recognized as his own.
The voice responded with finality: *Choose to submit and be caged. Choose to run and be hunted. Choose to fight and embrace what you are.*
Damien looked down at himself—at the obsidian wings, at the scales beginning to creep across his arms, at the dark energy crackling between his fingers. His entire life, he'd been running. Running from his father's expectations, from the bullies, from his own power.
"I'm done running," he said, his eyes darkening to pools of absolute black as he stepped forward. "It's time to finally fight back."
The armored figures were twenty feet away now. Fifteen. Ten.
"Whatever comes at me," Damien said, his voice resonating with ancient power that shook the very foundation of the academy, "better learn the might of the dark dragon, Damien Rose Blackthorne."
His wings spread to their full, terrifying span. The dark aura around him exploded outward, extinguishing every light in the corridor. In the sudden darkness, his eyes blazed like twin infernos.
Lewis raised his hand, and brilliant white light erupted from his gauntlet, illuminating the hallway once more.
But Damien was already moving.
The clash of dragon and Council was about to begin—and the academy would never be the same.