Starting out as a Dragon Slave
Chapter 144: Dimensional Capsule

Chapter 144: Chapter 144: Dimensional Capsule

Days flowed with oppressive slowness in their discreet apartment in the heart of the 12th arrondissement. Mordred spent most of his time near the window, his orange gaze fixed on the daily choreography of passersby. Ephemeral existences that paraded by without awareness of the silent cataclysm preparing above their heads. He observed them their laughter, their tears, their ordinary frenzies with an icy detachment that wasn’t new. Something in him had broken long before his arrival in this world.

But now, another threat was eating away at him from within.

Since his arrival in Paris, a new fragility had invaded Mordred. His mind, once an unshakable fortress, now wavered like a ship caught in an invisible storm. The dissonance crises multiplied violent, unpredictable, increasingly difficult to conceal.

It was as if his soul itself was violently rejecting his body. A dull pain pulsed in his chest, a deafening rumble hammered his skull, and his vision fragmented into chaotic shards of superimposed realities. Sometimes, an entire limb would suddenly freeze, as if belonging to a corpse rather than a living being. He tried to mask these symptoms from Ygdrasyle, but his partner had the acuity of a predator.

One evening, as Mordred tried to fill a simple glass of water, his hand contracted in a violent spasm. The bottle escaped him, exploding on the tiles in a constellation of translucent shards. The water spread, forming a shimmering puddle under the pale lighting of their kitchen.

Ygdrasyle turned to him, his face carved in marble by an expression where concern mingled with calculating hardness.

- "It’s happening again."

It wasn’t a question, but a relentless observation.

Mordred clenched his jaw until he felt his teeth grinding.

- "It’s nothing. Just passing fatigue."

Ygdrasyle tilted his head slightly, his dark eyes scrutinizing every micro-expression of Mordred with the intensity of a silent interrogation.

- "I’ve been watching you for days. This isn’t fatigue." A step toward him, deliberately slow. "Your mind and body are in permanent conflict."

Mordred looked away, his heart pounding against his ribcage. How to explain the inexplicable? How to describe that he shared his soul with another body that of Isaac, the hunter imprisoned somewhere under Paris? That he existed simultaneously in two contradictory realities, two existences he no longer mastered? Impossible. Ygdrasyle could never understand this tearing duality.

So Mordred remained walled in his silence, kneeling to meticulously pick up each shard of glass, striving to control the tremors that ran through his fingers like electric currents.

The following days dragged on in suffocating anticipation. The forced inaction made the apartment’s atmosphere increasingly unbreathable. The tension between them thickened, made almost tangible by Mordred’s stubborn muteness and Ygdrasyle’s inquisitive glances.

Then, one night when Paris had fallen asleep under an inky sky, the collar around their neck gently vibrated. An icy sensation spread through their veins as a disembodied voice insinuated directly into their mind:

- "Your wait is over."

The voice was clinical, devoid of any emotion.

- "A secondary portal has opened in the industrial zone of Aubervilliers, northern periphery of Paris. Go there immediately. You will retrieve prepositioned dimensional capsules containing the necessary material to open a major dimensional portal. This operation is synchronized worldwide. The major capitals of this world will fall simultaneously under our control."

The message ended as abruptly as it had begun, leaving behind only a deafening silence.

Mordred felt a wave of adrenaline course through his body. He intimately knew the technology of dimensional capsules their architectural complexity, their formidable efficiency. In another life, he might have studied them with purely intellectual fascination. Today, their destructive potential filled him with terror mingled with unhealthy excitement. These devices would allow his world of origin to pour an entire army onto this one, a wave of destruction that would submerge the Earth.

He met Ygdrasyle’s gaze, whose features had hardened into a mask of implacable determination.

- "Let’s go," Ygdrasyle simply articulated.

The journey to Aubervilliers unfolded in a heavy silence. They progressed like shadows through the urban fabric, meticulously avoiding areas under surveillance, slipping between abandoned industrial districts where decrepit hangars were adorned with garish graffiti under the yellowish light of rare streetlamps.

The portal entrance was hidden in the heart of an abandoned warehouse. As soon as they crossed the threshold, they immediately felt the familiar magical energy heavy, pulsating, an almost palpable pressure against their skin. Before them, a tear in the very fabric of reality gently vibrated, projecting a bluish light with shifting reflections on the raw concrete walls.

They crossed the portal with an assured step, without apparent hesitation.

On the other side stretched a circular room sculpted from black rock, illuminated by luminescent crystals embedded in the walls. At the center, arranged in perfect geometry, three dimensional capsules awaited—massive objects with angular contours, covered with silvery inscriptions that gently pulsed, as if animated by their own breathing.

Mordred approached with involuntary reverence. His hand brushed the vibrating surface of a capsule, instantly feeling the colossal power it contained infinite space folded upon itself, compressed into a reduced volume, capable of housing a complete arsenal, devices of unimaginable complexity, everything his world had designed to subdue Earth in a single night.

But the precise moment his fingers closed around the object, a searing pain shot through his skull like an incandescent blade. He collapsed brutally, a knee hitting the ground with a dull thud, one hand clenched against his temple while the other desperately gripped the capsule. His entire body was wracked with violent convulsions, as if traversed by electric shocks.

- "Mordred!" Ygdrasyle’s voice reached him as if muffled by miles of distance, drowned under the deafening din that filled his skull.

In the hurricane of his fractured consciousness, two realities collided with unprecedented violence: Isaac, suspended in his dark cell, silently screaming, alone in abyssal solitude; and himself, Mordred, creature shaped by the dragons, gladiator, assassin, instrument of an imminent invasion. Two fundamentally incompatible identities, each struggling to impose itself as the only truth.

Ygdrasyle’s grip on his shoulder firm, almost painful, brutally brought him back to the present.

- "Pull yourself together, Mordred! Now!" The order cracked, imperious, cutting through the fog of his consciousness.

The pain gradually receded, leaving behind a dizzying emptiness. Mordred inhaled deeply, each breath burning his lungs.

- "I’m fine..." he articulated in a hoarse voice, barely audible. "I’ll be fine."

But he knew, with chilling certainty, that nothing was fine anymore. Every step toward the invasion, every gesture he would make from now on, would inexorably bring him closer to the complete dissolution of his identity. His soul was already fractured, his will wavering. And yet, he had to continue.

He slowly stood up, his face recomposing into a mask of cold determination.

- "Let’s retrieve these capsules," he decided. "And get out of here."

Ygdrasyle observed him for another moment, an indecipherable light in his gaze, before silently nodding.

They seized the dimensional capsules these artifacts that contained within them the potential annihilation of an entire world and crossed back through the portal, returning to the Parisian night, bearers of an imminent apocalypse.

Time seemed to have frozen in their apartment plunged into perpetual dimness. The hours stretched endlessly, each minute diluting into eternity. Mordred had renounced sleep, his nights now haunted by nightmares where Isaac’s face and his own overlapped in a macabre kaleidoscope.

He spent his days motionless near the window, contemplating with morbid fascination the daily ballet of unsuspecting passersby. At his feet, hidden under a carefully replaced board of the aged floor, the three dimensional capsules gently pulsed, a patient mechanism of a programmed end.

Ygdrasyle, true to his nature, methodically checked the state of the devices—their energetic stability, their contained power, their intact programming. But even more, he observed his partner with the sustained attention one gives to a time bomb, ready to explode at the slightest contact. Mordred had become an unstable equation, oscillating between icy lucidity and wrenching disorientation crises.

In late afternoon, barely a few hours after their return with the precious capsules, the heavy silence of their refuge was broken by a brutal vibration. Their collars activated simultaneously, transmitting directly to their minds the urgent orders of their command:

- "A cell has been discovered in Beijing. The initial plan is compromised."

The voice was tense, tinged with unusual urgency.

- "You must immediately install the dimensional capsule in the heart of Paris. Upon receiving the signal, you will trigger the portal opening. No delay will be tolerated. The slightest hesitation will sign your death warrant and the failure of the operation."

The message vanished as suddenly as it had appeared, leaving a dull, almost physical pressure on their shoulders.

Ygdrasyle rose with an abrupt movement, betraying for the first time a palpable nervousness.

- "They’re accelerating the plan. Beijing has probably already alerted all capitals." His gaze met Mordred’s. "We no longer have a choice."

Mordred slowly straightened up, his face partially illuminated by the last glimmers of the dying day filtering through the blinds.

- "Then there’s no going back," he whispered, his voice bearing the weight of a resignation that wasn’t quite one.

- "There never was, Mordred. Not for us." Ygdrasyle’s response cracked like a final sentence.

They exchanged a long look, each recognizing in the other’s eyes the crushing weight of a destiny that now completely surpassed them.

Without exchanging any more superfluous words, they knelt and carefully removed the capsules from their hiding place. Mordred grasped the most imposing one, feeling under his fingers the cold metal vibrating with contained energy, ready to deploy. An almost scientific fascination awoke in him facing this dimensional technology capable of folding space-time. But simultaneously, a deeper part of his being perhaps that humanity he had thought extinct violently revolted against the future he was about to trigger.

Night had enveloped Paris in a shroud of darkness when they left the apartment. The capsules, carefully concealed under thick coats, emitted a barely perceptible vibration against their chest. The icy wind lashed their faces as they progressed through the labyrinth of deserted alleys. The city, in its blissful ignorance, continued its nocturnal life, unaware of the fate that awaited it.

They walked for a long time, meticulously avoiding areas under surveillance, blending into the shadows, becoming invisible even to the security cameras that swept the main arteries. Mordred advanced with increasing difficulty, each step more laborious than the previous one, his breath forming small clouds of condensation in the cold air.

Their final destination proved to be an abandoned metro station, a forgotten vestige of the Parisian underground network, hidden in the heart of a maze of long-condemned galleries. The ideal place to establish a dimensional portal of this magnitude: at the nerve center of the French capital, right under the authorities’ noses.

Ygdrasyle arranged the capsules on the damp floor covered with a thin layer of dust, arranging them according to a precise triangular configuration, engraved in his memory by years of training. Mordred observed in silence, a strange tension inexorably growing deep within his being.

While Ygdrasyle proceeded with the meticulous adjustments of the installation, Mordred suddenly felt a new overwhelming wave of pain invade his skull. More violent than all the previous ones, it made him stagger brutally. He barely caught himself on a wall oozing with moisture, his knees threatening to give way beneath him. An icy sweat flooded his forehead, and his entire body was shaken by uncontrollable tremors.

His mind was submerged by a whirlwind of fragmented images: Isaac, prisoner in absolute darkness, his consciousness silently screaming, imploring a deliverance that would never come; and himself, Mordred, unwilling architect of the annihilation of a world he was beginning to understand. Two fundamentally antagonistic existences, repelling each other with the violence of identical magnetic poles, threatening to irremediably tear the very fabric of his consciousness.

Ygdrasyle interrupted his preparations, alerted by his partner’s hissing and erratic breathing.

- "Mordred?" A question where, for the first time, authentic concern showed through.

- "It will pass," articulated Mordred between his teeth clenched to the breaking point.

But Ygdrasyle slowly straightened up, approaching with calculated caution, as if facing a wounded and unpredictable animal.

- "These aren’t simple discomforts, Mordred." His voice had lost its usual hardness. "Tell me what’s really happening."

Mordred raised his orange eyes, crossed by flashes of pure suffering. In the darkness of the abandoned station, their supernatural glow seemed to reflect the titanic conflict being waged within his fractured soul.