Chapter 3: The First
The city wasn’t burning. It was becoming a fuel source, a raw, screaming kind of timber that fed the furnace inside him. Every crunched spine underfoot, every collapsing spire, every muffled explosion from a ruptured gas main—it all stoked something deeper than rage. It was a biological imperative, a roar in his blood that synced with the percussion of destruction.
Alaric’s commentary from his shoulder was a constant, gleeful stream. “Their coordination is pathetic! Look, the response vehicles are gridlocked in their own panic!” He sounded like a sportscaster.
Kragor grunted, not really listening. He was focused on the feeling. The delicious resistance of reinforced concrete giving way under his palm. The way a high-rise, when pushed just right, didn’t just fall—it folded, with a long, metallic sigh. He felt a tight, hot coil winding in his gut, a familiar and deeply pleasing pressure building with every act of annihilation.
It was more than power. It was arousal, pure and simple. A primal feedback loop. The mightier he felt, the more the world broke, the more his body responded. The rough-spun loincloth, a museum-piece joke, suddenly felt unbearably restrictive, a faint itch against a gathering storm.
He hooked a thick finger under the waistband and snapped it. The ancient fabric disintegrated. The sudden, open air was a relief. The coil in his gut pulsed, heavy and urgent. Below, the canyon of ruin opened up before him. A surviving tower, a sleek silver needle, gleamed in the firelight a few blocks away. It was perfect. Pristine. A defiant spike in his landscape of wreckage.
He wanted to ruin that, too.
“A moment of inspiration,” he rumbled to Alaric, his voice thick.
He stepped over a flattened park, his shadow swallowing the burning streets. He reached the silver tower. He turned, his back to the broad, glassy face of it. The cool surface kissed his skin. He pressed against it, a slow, testing grind. The glass squealed, then popped inward in a cascading curtain. He braced a hand on an adjacent building, feeling it crack under his grip.
Then he thrust.
His cock, a monstrous, veined pillar of flesh, drove into the gaping wound of the tower. It wasn’t an act of sex; it was demolition by penetration. Interior walls, cubicles, elevators shafts—they vaporized. The structural bones of the building groaned a protest louder than any human scream. Each powerful, driving push of his hips sent shuddering impacts through the city block. His heavy balls swung, slamming against the lower floors with resonant, wet thuds, pulverizing everything within.
Alaric, clinging to skin now slick with sweat and dust, let out a shaky, amazed laugh. “Oh. That’s… efficient.”
Kragor didn’t laugh. His face was a mask of intense, focused gratification. This was a different kind of conquest. The building’s collapse was his climax. Steel buckled. Concrete dust poured from every seam like gray smoke. With a final, deep snarl, he pulled back as the entire structure began its slow, graceful topple into its neighbor, a chain reaction of sublime ruin.
The coil had tightened, but not released. The need was sharper now, hungrier. He scanned the smoldering horizon, looking for another worthy target, his breath gusting in hot clouds.
That’s when the new sounds came. Not screams. Not sirens. A sharp, insect-like buzzing that rapidly swelled into a deafening whine. Then, from between the towers to the east, they appeared. Not birds. Machines. Sleek, angular, and grey, moving with a terrible, unified purpose. They spat lines of fire from their noses. Streaking projectiles, too fast to see, slammed into his chest and thighs.
The impacts stung. Not like the security guards’ pellets. These burned. They dug. Tiny blossoms of pain erupted across his torso. He looked down, saw smoking punctures in his hide, oozing thick, dark blood.
Annoyance flared, hotter than the pain. An interruption.
“Finally!” Alaric shouted, pointing. “Aerial assault wings! Probably fusion-tipped penetrators! This is more like it!”
Kragor swatted at the lead machine as it screamed past his head. He missed, the wind of his hand buffeting it sideways. It spun, recovered, came back around. More projectiles ripped into his forearm. He roared, the sound blowing out the windows of every standing structure for a half-mile.
One machine, bolder than the rest, hovered directly before his face, a humming metal wasp. A hatch opened on its underbelly. A figure stood there, anchored by cables. It was a man in dark, form-fitting armor, his face obscured by a reflective visor. He held a weapon that glowed with a dangerous, blue light.
“CEASE HOSTILITIES!” The voice was amplified, metallic, and utterly devoid of fear. “You are designated Cataclysm-Level Entity! Stand down for containment!”
Kragor stared. The audacity was… interesting. He leaned in, his nostrils flaring, taking in the scent of the man: cold metal, sterile air, and underneath it all, a frantic, rabbit-quick heartbeat. The defiance was a costume. The truth was underneath.
“You shout,” Kragor said, his voice lowering to a conversational rumble that vibrated in the bones of the aircraft. “But your blood sings a different song. One of… surrender.”
The armored man—Adrian, though Kragor didn’t know that yet—froze. The weapon in his hands wavered, just a fraction. He’d trained for monsters, for disasters. He hadn’t trained for something that looked into him.
Kragor moved faster than anything that large should. His hand swept up, palm open. He didn’t crush the aircraft. He plucked the man from its belly, his fingers closing around the tiny, armored form with terrifying delicacy. The cables snapped. The aircraft, suddenly unbalanced, whined and shot upwards in a panic.
Kragor brought Adrian close to his eye. With his other thumbnail, he flicked the visor away. The face underneath was young, pale, splattered with soot. The eyes were wide, not with terror, but with a shocking, dawning revelation. He wasn’t struggling. He was staring.
“You see it,” Kragor murmured, the heat of his breath washing over the man. “The old truth. The only truth. The strong take. The weak are taken.”
Adrian’s lips parted. He dropped the glowing weapon. It tumbled, a tiny blue star, into the inferno below. He gave a single, slow nod.
A deep, approving chuckle vibrated through Kragor’s chest. The annoying coil of need twisted again, finding a new focus. This little, defiant thing had submitted. Had seen his glory and chosen to kneel in his mind. It was a different kind of conquest, intimate and complete.
“Good,” Kragor said.
He placed the limp, compliant figure on his other shoulder, opposite Alaric. Alaric looked at the shell-shocked soldier, then up at Kragor, a wide, complicit grin spreading across his face.
“A new recruit?”
“A new purpose,” Kragor corrected, his gaze sweeping over the remaining cityscape. The buzzing aircraft were regrouping for another pass. The stings of their weapons were a tedious irritation. The deeper, more pressing hunger demanded his attention. This city, this playground, was now just an obstacle between him and satisfaction.
“I am bored of this place,” he announced, his voice crashing over the ruins. “It is in the way.”
What followed wasn’t rampage. It was housekeeping.
He moved with a brutal, efficient speed that erased geography. He crouched, sweeping both arms across entire districts, gathering the rubble—steel, stone, and the tiny, moving figures within—into vast piles. He brought his fists down like compacting pistons, once, twice, until the piles were stable, flat plateaus of debris. He stomped in a methodical grid pattern, ensuring nothing in the designated zone still stood or twitched.
The aircraft dove at him. He ignored the stinging fires, snatching two from the sky and grinding them together in his fist before discarding the molten slag. The rest broke off, circling at a distance, their weapons silent.
Within minutes, the city core was no longer a city. It was a smoking, leveled plain, a testament to singular, impatient will. The silence that fell was absolute, broken only by the crackle of distant flames and the steady, heavy drip of Kragor’s blood onto the scorched earth.
He stood in the center of the desolation he had made. He looked from Alaric, the architect, to Adrian, the convert, both perched on his shoulders. The hot, demanding pressure within him was now a focused beam.
He turned, his footsteps leaving cavernous prints in the freshly-made ground, and began to stride toward the darkening hills beyond the city’s corpse. His pace was deliberate, purposeful. A predator returning to its den with a hard-won prize.
“Time for bed,” he said, and the promise in those words was darker and more possessive than any act of destruction.