Free Web NovelChapter 2: Weakest Hatchling
Ren woke up to the sound of cracking.
Not gentle cracking either, the kind that came with real force behind it, and it took him a disoriented few seconds to realize the sound was coming from around him, not near him. He was curled up inside something hard, something that smelled faintly of mineral and old stone, light bleeding through thin cracks spreading across whatever surface surrounded him.
’Oh,’ he thought, the realization landing slow and a little delayed. ’I’m in an egg. I’m literally inside an egg right now.’
He pushed against the shell experimentally and immediately discovered that his body did not move the way he expected it to. No arms. No legs in the way he remembered having legs. Instead there was a strange new awareness of limbs that bent in places his old body never had, small clawed feet, a long tail curled tight against his side, and when he tried to flex what should have been a hand, something leathery and thin unfurled instead.
’Right. Dragon. I picked dragon. This is what that actually means.’
The shell gave way with one final push, crumbling outward in jagged pieces, and Ren blinked up at his first real view of this new world.
It was not encouraging.
He was small. Comically small, the kind of small that made him feel less like a fearsome ancient predator and more like a slightly oversized lizard with delusions of grandeur. His scales were a deep, matte black, the same color as the orb he’d chosen, but dull where he somehow instinctively understood they should have shimmered. His wings, when he managed to half unfold them, looked thin and undersized even to his own untrained eye.
Around him, the nest was littered with broken shell fragments, far more than one egg’s worth, and scattered among them, much larger and much more alive, were several other hatchlings.
They were enormous compared to him. Easily twice his size, their scales already carrying a faint healthy shine, their movements steady and coordinated in a way his own clumsy first attempts at standing were not.
Looming over all of them, blotting out a good portion of the sky, was his mother.
She was massive in a way that made the word dragon feel almost too small to contain her, scales the color of old iron, eyes like twin furnaces, and when those eyes swept across her newly hatched brood, they moved with the cold, clinical detachment of someone conducting an inventory rather than meeting her own children for the first time.
Her gaze reached Ren last.
It lingered.
Ren felt something instinctual rise in him under that stare, some buried animal awareness screaming that he was being measured and was about to be found wanting. He tried to straighten up anyway, tried to make himself look bigger, stronger, more like the siblings flexing their wings proudly beside him.
It didn’t work.
His mother’s nostrils flared once, a low, dismissive sound rumbling deep in her chest, and without any further ceremony she lowered her massive head, closed her jaws gently but firmly around his small body, and lifted him clean off the nest floor.
’Oh no.’
She turned, wings unfurling, and in one smooth motion launched them both into the air. Ren had exactly enough time to register the dizzying scale of the world below, mountains and forest stretching endlessly in every direction, before she opened her jaws over empty air and let him go.
He fell.
He fell for what felt like an eternity, the wind screaming past him, his half-formed wings flapping uselessly, providing nothing close to actual flight, just enough drag to keep him from outright plummeting like a stone.
’This is fine,’ he thought, somewhere between terror and the absurd, detached clarity that came with imminent death. ’This is totally fine. I died once already today. How bad could twice in a row really be.’
He hit the forest canopy hard, branches snapping and tearing at him on the way down, slowing his fall just enough that when he finally crashed into the underbrush below, he was bruised, winded, and very much alive.
He lay there for a long moment, staring up at the broken canopy above him, sunlight filtering down in scattered patches.
[System Notification]
[You have survived a Critical Fall]
[EXP Gained: 50]
[10x Multiplier Applied]
[Total EXP Gained: 500]
[Level Up! You are now Level 3]
[+6 to all stats]
Ren blinked at the floating text.
"Okay," he muttered out loud, his voice coming out as a small, raspy croak that didn’t sound anything like his old human voice. "Okay, that’s, that’s actually pretty good for falling out of the sky and almost dying."
He pushed himself up onto unsteady legs, testing his balance, his tail dragging awkwardly behind him through the leaf litter.
His mother hadn’t even looked back. She’d simply assessed him, found him lacking compared to his much larger, much stronger siblings, and discarded him the way you’d cull the weakest of a litter, expecting nature to finish the job she’d started.
’Guess I wasn’t dragon enough for dragon mom,’ he thought, equal parts bitter and darkly amused.
He looked around at the unfamiliar forest pressing in on every side, the sounds of distant creatures rustling through the brush, the sheer scale of everything compared to his tiny, weak little body.
’Alright,’ he thought, steadying himself. ’Guess it’s just me, then. Me, and apparently a multiplier that turns near-death experiences into decent EXP.’
’Let’s see how far that actually gets me.’
He started walking, small clawed feet picking carefully through the undergrowth, completely alone in a forest that very much intended to eat him. For now, the plan was simple, he was a dragon in a new world, an infant dragon that was weaker than normal, but it didn’t have to stay that way for too long, after all he had the multiplier, he just had to gather some EXP.
The issue now was, was the EXP only gained through near-death experiences or more.
