The feeling of fullness brought not laziness, but an urgent drive to store more fuel for the coming harsh winter and construction.
Balthazar’s huge dragon head lifted from the half-hollowed abdominal cavity of the old Triceratops.
Dark red plasma dripped from his jaw onto the muddy grass.
He did not linger.
With a powerful beat of his wings that stirred a strong gust, his massive body soared into the air amidst a spray of mud, once again reigning over this man-made prehistoric jungle.
This time, his radar—those keen vertical pupils and the unique Ore Vein Perception—were both activated.
In this primitive world awash with green, finding “metal” was no more difficult than finding prey.
Traces of human arrogance were everywhere—humans had once played God in defiance of nature, and then committed further transgressions in their attempts to tame this artificial wilderness.
Soon, at the edge of a vine-covered valley, his metallic sensory nerves picked up an anomalous magnetic field reaction.
Balthazar folded his wings and plummeted there like a black meteor.
It was a long-abandoned, overturned off-road tour vehicle by the roadside.
Years of erosion had peeled away the paint, revealing the rust-stained alloy skeleton beneath.
But for Balthazar, this was like finding high-purity chocolate in a salad.
“Crunch.”
The dragon claw effortlessly tore open the warped car door as easily as ripping open a soda can.
Fastidiously, he hooked out a relatively intact piece of the engine hood with his claw tip.
The lingering taste of modern industrial alloy on it made him snort with satisfaction.
[This is dessert.]
He was in no hurry to devour it.
Instead, he clamped the large metal plate in his jaws like a bone, and along with the axles and chassis, violently tore it apart into several large pieces as additional material reserves.
Just as he was about to return to the earlier “slaughter site” with this metallic scrap, an unusual disturbance deep within the jungle caught his attention.
It was not the sound of a natural hunt.
There was no roar, no frantic chase, only a chilling, silent slaughter that felt like the whispers of death itself.
Balthazar alighted atop a giant Redwood tree, concealing his entire presence.
His dark golden vertical pupils pierced through layers of foliage, locking onto a clearing several hundred meters below.
There, a white ghost was feeding.
It was a white behemoth, larger and more elongated in build than him.
It possessed the massive jaws of a Tyrannosaurus Rex and the sharp claws of a Velociraptor, with irregular bony plates covering its back.
At this very moment, it was pinning down an adult Ankylosaurus.
That armored tank, renowned for its defense—one that even a T-Rex would struggle to breach—now resembled a tattered doll.
The white monster had flipped it over in an extremely cruel manner and was tearing open its soft underbelly with its foreclaws.
What made Balthazar feel a twinge of alertness was not its strength, but its camouflage.
Just a moment ago, if not for the Ankylosaurus’s shriek, he would have thought there was only a clump of white bushes there.
The creature’s skin could blend perfectly into its surroundings, like a chameleon’s.
“So this is… that ‘Indominus’.”
The Indominus Rex—a technologically stitched-together monster dinosaur created by the humans of this world.
A white nightmare with an adult body length of about 15 meters, a height of about 6.7 meters, and a weight of about 15 tons.
Clearly, in this world Balthazar had arrived in, this pale reaper had not been killed but had thrived in the wild, reaching its adult form.
And Balthazar mentally tagged this potential adversary with a [High-Risk] label. Enjoying the story? Read on at g.com.
The white monster seemed to sense the gaze from the sky.
It abruptly raised its head, its orange eyes—filled with intelligence and madness—staring fixedly in the direction of Balthazar’s hiding place.
But Balthazar did not give it a chance to lock eyes.
He knew what his current task was.
While the white monster was still hesitating whether to abandon its meal for an unknown observer, Balthazar had already silently glided away.
For the next two hours, true black terror descended upon this jungle.
He did not engage with apex predators like the Indominus Rex again.
Instead, he set his sights on the plentiful, filling herbivorous dinosaurs.
A giant Parasaurolophus drinking by the river had its spine snapped by a descending dragon claw before it could even sound an alarm.
Two Stegosauruses that attempted to counterattack with their tail spikes were reduced to headless corpses under absolute, overwhelming force.
As the last glimmer of sunset was swallowed by thick rain clouds, the riverside meadow that once belonged to a Triceratops herd had transformed into a slaughterhouse.
In addition to the two Triceratops from the start, the pile now included one Parasaurolophus, two Stegosauruses, and half of a crushed off-road vehicle.
The thick scent of blood attracted countless small Dilophosauruses and Compsognathuses.
They peeked out from the jungle’s edge, but not a single one dared cross the line before the mountain of flesh presided over by the dark iron-colored dragon.
Balthazar stood atop the pile of flesh and metal, whose total weight now exceeded twenty tons, as cold rain washed the blood from his scales.
“Mission… achieved.”
As soon as Balthazar’s words fell, a blinding, pale flash of lightning instantly illuminated the dim jungle as bright as day, followed by deafening thunder that seemed to shatter the sky itself.
In that fleeting moment of light and shadow, the massive black dragon wings slammed against the air.
The resulting gust, mixed with rain, churned up a layer of mud from the ground.
Balthazar’s enormous body used this lift to soar upward.
The instant he left the ground, the mountainous pile of dinosaur carcasses shuddered violently—not from the wind pressure, but because something heavy and transparent had just tried to use the corpses as a launching pad for a surprise attack, only to miss.
Its heavy foot slammed into the rigid belly of a Stegosaurus with a dull thud.
The Ferro-Dragon hovering mid-air did not rush to gain altitude.
Instead, he lowered his head.
His vertical pupils, burning with a dark red light, pierced through the rain curtain, locking firmly onto the seemingly empty void below.
“Under… a dragon’s… perception…”
The voice was like two rusted iron plates grinding against each other—hoarse, deep, carrying a heavy, otherworldly authority.
“Even in… a rainy night… you… cannot hide…”
As this sentence, spoken like a verdict, fell, the void below—where only rain had been falling—began to warp eerily.
Like a watercolor painting washed out by rain, the “camouflage” that had perfectly blended with the surrounding mud, leaves, and bloodstains began rapidly peeling away from the massive outline.
First, a row of pale, jagged fangs appeared, resembling tombstones in a disorderly graveyard.
Next was the spine covered in spikes, and finally, that long, powerful tail.
In less than two seconds, the once-outlined ghost had fully materialized into a tangible nightmare.
The Indominus Rex.
It stood atop the pile of carcasses, its grayish-white skin appearing especially ghastly under the lightning flashes.
Its orange eyes, brimming with intelligence and madness, showed not a trace of panic at being exposed.
On the contrary, its massive head tilted slightly to one side, as if examining a novel toy.
A series of low “chuckling” sounds emanated from deep within its throat, a noise that sounded both like the cry of some bird and a distorted human laugh.
It did not roar immediately.
Then, it performed an action no purely wild beast could ever make.
It raised its forelimbs, which possessed long fingers and opposable thumbs, and made a grasping motion towards Balthazar in the sky, then slowly, with extreme provocation, clenched its fingers, leaving only one sharp nail pointing at the ground.
“Roar—!!!”
In the next second, that eerie silence was torn apart by a roar filled with a metallic quality.
This hybrid monster, which combined the Tyrannosaurus Rex’s strength, the Velociraptor’s agility, the Squid’s camouflage, and human cunning, suddenly lowered its body.
The incredible muscle groups in its hind legs instantly tensed, crushing the chest cavity of a Parasaurolophus corpse beneath its feet.
It was declaring war on the ruler of the sky before it.
Balthazar descended silently at a slightly greater distance, then looked directly at the man-made monster not far away.
No dragon could possibly fail to respond to such a clear and blatant provocation.
“My name… is Balthazar!”
The rain-soaked night was violently torn apart by that ancient and obscure roar.
The water molecules that had been drifting chaotically in the air seemed to freeze in an instant by some invisible force field.
“Boom—!!!”
Accompanying the release of his true name, a visible, translucent ripple rapidly expanded outward from Balthazar as its center.
It was the unique mental pressure of a high-tier creature.
Even the falling raindrops were shattered by this shockwave, turning into a sky full of white mist.
And in that very instant, Balthazar’s various attributes were enhanced.
Strength: 20 (Buff +2)
Agility: 10 (Buff +2)
Endurance: 23 (Buff +2)
Intelligence: 9 (Buff +1)
Perception: 12 (Buff +2)
Meanwhile, the orange pupils of the Indominus Rex, which was preparing to counterattack, constricted to the size of pinpoints.
Its muscles, originally taut like steel cables, experienced an extremely minute, uncontrollable stiffness in that instant.
It was the instinctive fear of an apex predator, engraved deep within the genes of all living creatures.
Even this genetically-mixed freak could not completely exempt itself from this soul-deep [Tremor].
In this fleeting opening, the black dragon’s shadow moved.
Dark iron-colored claws shattered the muddy water.
Balthazar’s massive body shot forward like a solid cannonball, carrying enough kinetic energy to smash city walls, heading straight for the Indominus Rex’s chest.
The Indominus Rex let out an angry roar, forcibly overcoming that moment of stiffness.
It opened its massive maw, large enough to swallow half a grown man, and bit down viciously at the oncoming black shadow.
However, the anticipated collision did not occur.
In the milliseconds before the two were about to collide, Balthazar’s dragon wings behind him suddenly spread to their limit.
A powerful airflow exploded within this confined space.
Utilizing the momentum of his charge and the beat of his wings, his several-ton body defied the laws of gravity, tracing a bizarre upward arc in mid-air.
“Crack!”
The Indominus Rex’s massive jaws snapped shut on empty air, its upper and lower jaws colliding violently with a teeth-grating crunch.
Immediately after, it felt a searing, tearing pain in its flank.
In the instant they passed each other, Balthazar’s retracted hind claws, like red-hot iron plows, precisely and cruelly carved three bone-deep bloody furrows into the Indominus Rex’s grayish-white, thick hide.