Falsely Accused, I Started Plundering Monster Traits

The enormous shape passed over the street and disappeared into the fog.

For several seconds, everyone remained where they were, staring after it. Even Reeves’s operators had gone still beneath the sheer presence of the thing overhead.

Only when the last trace of its shadow faded did anyone seem to breathe again. Marcus slowly let out the breath he’d been holding, but the street stayed unnaturally quiet. No one spoke, and even the sound of breathing seemed subdued.

The dragon was gone.

Marcus turned toward Lin Yan.

"Boss—"

Nobody was there.

Marcus blinked, then looked farther down the street.

Lin Yan was already running.

With the M2A1 secured against him, he was already disappearing into the fog. Another few seconds and he’d be gone.

Marcus stared.

Then something shifted inside the fog.

A huge shadow was moving back toward them.

"FUCK!"

Marcus took off after Lin Yan.

Behind him, Reeves saw it too.

"Kill the lights! Disperse! Get off the street!"

The portable floodlights snapped off, plunging the staging area into darkness. The twelve operators immediately broke apart toward both sides of the street, with Coach, Rochelle, and Nick moving with them as everyone rushed for whatever cover the altered buildings could provide.

The shadow continued closing through the fog.

"Engage!"

Dense gunfire erupted behind Lin Yan as Reeves’s people opened up from both sides of the street.

Lin Yan kept running.

"System, a fucking dragon would’ve been useful to mention!"

[I did not know.]

"Of course you fucking didn’t."

The shooting behind him rapidly built into a wall of noise. Rifles cracked in overlapping bursts, a heavy machine gun began hammering away, and somewhere in the middle of it came the dull thump of a grenade launcher, followed a moment later by an explosion.

Then Lin Yan felt the vibration in his chest.

The gunfire was still going, but the sound seemed to sink beneath a deep, rough rumble that spread through the street and into his bones.

GRAAAAAAAOOOHH—!

Lin Yan snapped his head around.

The fog above the street was being torn apart in broad, rolling sheets, giving Lin Yan his first real glimpse of the creature inside it.

He had already put nearly a hundred meters between himself and the staging area and turned into a narrow alley. The buildings on both sides blocked most of his view, but somehow they still weren’t enough to hide the dragon.

As the fog tore apart, pieces of its body appeared above and between the rooftops.

One enormous wing swept across the gap overhead, its dark underside passing over several buildings before disappearing beyond the opposite roofline. Farther back, a thick stretch of scaled neck rose above the street, the overlapping black scales along it large enough for Lin Yan to make them out even from this distance.

Then the head turned.

It emerged between two rooftops almost slowly, not because the dragon was moving slowly, but because there was simply so much of it. A long, heavy skull. Swept-back horns. A jaw thick enough that the buildings beneath it suddenly looked much smaller than they had a moment ago.

The head alone was nearly as long as a car.

And that was still only the part Lin Yan could see.

The rest of the body remained hidden behind rooftops and lingering fog, while the wing he had just seen continued far beyond the alley’s narrow slice of sky. He couldn’t even tell where it ended.

Lin Yan slowed to a stop.

Marcus finally caught up beside him, breathing hard.

"Boss, you ditched me aga—"

Lin Yan didn’t answer.

Marcus glanced at him and followed his gaze toward the street just as the dragon opened its jaws.

The whole world abruptly turned orange-white.

Fire poured down the street like floodwater through a breached dam, filling it from one wall to the other. The storefronts were swallowed in an instant, the torrent rising over the lower floors until only the upper stories remained above the sea of flame.

Then the heat hit.

Even deep inside the alley, Lin Yan felt the scorching air press against him. Every breath turned hot and dry, as though the moisture in his throat were being baked away.

The fog peeled back in great sheets before the heat, then rapidly burned away. Block after block emerged from the mist, all of it drenched in the blinding glow of the fire.

Ten seconds passed.

The river of flame kept surging forward.

As the seconds stretched on, the shock and fear faded without Lin Yan quite noticing. The roar of the flames seemed farther away somehow, and his thoughts went strangely quiet.

A deep calm settled over him, solemn and almost sacred—the kind of silence that came over you beneath the vaulted ceiling of an ancient cathedral, where even a footstep felt too loud.

Nearly half a minute later, it finally began to die.

The wall of flame lowered and narrowed, the blinding orange-white glare retreating from the buildings as the torrent rapidly thinned. What had filled the entire street dwindled to a final stream—

and disappeared.

The street emerged again.

The fog was gone. Storefronts stood as blackened shells, exposed timber had been reduced to char, and warped metal lay beneath ash and debris. Heat distorted the air above the road, leaving the buildings beyond wavering in the distance.

Neither Lin Yan nor Marcus moved.

They stood there for a long moment, staring at the street as though neither of them had quite caught up with what they had just seen. Marcus’s mouth opened once, but no words came out.

The silence stretched.

Eventually, Lin Yan looked away from the ruined street.

"Move."

---

The convenience store was dark.

Lin Yan sat behind the counter with the M2A1 resting beside him and keyed his radio.

"Captain. You still there?"

Static.

He waited, then tried again.

"Captain?"

Nothing.

Lin Yan switched channels and tried the others one by one.

No answer.

He lowered the radio.

Marcus sat against one of the shelves nearby. After a while, he asked quietly, "Boss. What do we do now?"

Lin Yan looked around the store.

"Take everything useful. Food, water, batteries. Anything we can carry."

Marcus glanced toward the shelves.

"You think we’re going to be here that long?"

"I don’t know."

Lin Yan stood.

"So prepare like we are."

They started filling whatever bags they could find with bottled water, packaged food, and anything else that might last.

A faint scraping sound came from outside, followed a moment later by another slow, uneven scrape across the street.

Both of them stopped.

Without saying anything, Lin Yan and Marcus moved toward the glass storefront at almost the same time. They crouched beneath the window and edged up just enough to look through the lower corner of the glass.

Several figures were moving slowly through the fog. One dragged a foot behind it with every step, while another leaned heavily to one side, its head hanging at an angle that no living person would have tolerated.

The nearest wandered close enough for its face to become visible.

Half of it was gone. Gray skin sagged around an exposed jaw, dark stains covered its old wool coat, and one arm hung at an unnatural angle as the corpse shuffled past the storefront. More shapes followed behind it through the fog.

Marcus stared through the glass.

"...Those are zombies?"

Lin Yan watched the dead moving outside.

A fucking dragon. Now zombies.

"What the fuck kind of world invaded us?"

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