I PICKED UP A CHILD IN A DUMPSTER

Chapter 161: Dragon Breath (III)

"MOVE!!" he screamed across the rooftop. "GET OFF CENTER— NOW!!"

The orange glow came first.

Deep inside the dragon’s throat, something built slowly— not fast, not explosive, just steady and pressurized like a furnace being fed from the inside. The air around its jaw visibly warped from the heat, shimmering in waves that made the entire rooftop feel suddenly, wrongly warm despite the open sky above them.

"Open sky..."

The words left Si Hon’s mouth almost absentmindedly as he tilted his head upward for half a second, eyes drifting past the rooftop chaos.

And then he paused.

Because the sky wasn’t open anymore.

At some point during all the screaming, collapsing buildings, dragons, emotional damage, and near death experiences—

The entire sky had changed.

Massive black clouds stretched endlessly across the horizon now, thick enough to swallow most of the sunlight overhead. Smoke drifted between them in slow moving layers, turning parts of the sky dark grey instead of blue while distant flashes of orange flickered faintly somewhere deep within the city.

The air smelled burnt.

Not just the school.

The city itself. (Explanation: the school is actually in the middle of the city.)

Si Hon stared upward quietly while the wind pushed against his hair, carrying ash across the rooftop in thin streaks.

(Wait.)

His eyes narrowed slightly.

(Isn’t this supposed to be Open Sky?)

Another explosion echoed somewhere far away.

Then another.

For a second, his exhausted brain tried putting the pieces together properly.

The dragon here.

The collapsing school.

The smoke.

The clouds.

And then—

Realization finally caught up.

(Right.)

This wasn’t the only place where monsters appeared.

Not even close.

Across the city, gates had probably already opened by now. Smaller creatures. Random monsters. Panic. Fires. Buildings collapsing somewhere beyond his line of sight while thousands of people tried surviving something they couldn’t even understand yet.

The smoke alone would’ve covered half the skyline already.

Si Hon stared at the dark clouds for another second longer.

Thinking.

Processing.

Analyzing.

Then immediately gave up halfway through.

(Yea, nevermind.)

A pause.

(It’s probably just gonna rain or something. ಠ⁠_⁠ಠ... cus I swear it did rain in the comic.)

And just like that, the thought died completely.

Because honestly?

His brain had already exceeded today’s recommended limit for processing catastrophic information.

Then, he remembered the dragon.

Si Hon stared directly at it.

(Oh that’s bad.)

Then to everyone around him.

"WAIT, FUCK! DID EVERYONE HEARD ME! I SAID MOV—"

He didn’t finish the sentence.

Because Seong was already moving.

Dark threads exploded outward from both her hands simultaneously— not the careful, precise lines she used on the dragon’s legs earlier, but fast and wide, whipping across the rooftop in every direction at once like something had finally snapped loose inside her control.

They caught Aeloria first, then her teammates, looping around waists and arms in less than a second before Si Hon felt one slam around his own torso and yank him completely off his feet.

The rooftop disappeared beneath him.

They were in the air.

All of them— Seong’s entire team, Aeloria, Si Hon... suspended maybe thirfy feet above the rooftop surface by nothing but dark thread while the wind hit them sideways and the dragon’s orange glow kept building below.

Si Hon’s stomach dropped immediately, legs swinging uselessly beneath him while his hands grabbed at the thread around his waist out of pure instinct.

Then the fire breath hit.

It didn’t roar out like an explosion. It poured— steady, continuous, devastatingly calm, a concentrated column of orange white heat that slammed directly into the center of the rooftop and just stayed there.

The concrete didn’t crack. It didn’t shatter. It melted, slowly and completely, the surface bubbling and sinking inward like ice under a blowtorch while smoke rose in thick columns from the edges of the impact zone.

The heat reached them even thirty feet up, rolling upward in waves that made Si Hon’s skin feel tight and dry against his face.

Nobody said anything for a second.

They just watched the center of the rooftop cease to exist.

Then the dragon lifted its head.

Slowly. Deliberately. The fire breath swung upward with it like a searchlight, It was looking for them.

Seong moved before anyone could process it.

The threads snapped and stretched all at once and then released— not gently, not carefully, just threw. Aeloria’s teammates scattered first, flung in different directions across the open air, some hitting the far corners of the rooftop hard and rolling across what remained of the concrete, others dropping onto the lower sections of the school building’s exterior and catching themselves against ledges and broken railings.

Not clean landings. Everyone hit something solid and stayed there.

Then the threads released Si Hon too.

The sky tilted sideways around him for half a second as he dropped— not far, maybe 15 feet, before his back and shoulder slammed into the rooftop surface near the edge and he skidaddled to a stop against the low concrete barrier at the perimeter.

Pain cracked through his shoulder immediately. He laid there for exactly one second staring up at open sky while the fire breath continued somewhere behind him, the heat still washing across the rooftop in waves.

He pushed himself up unto one elbow.

Seong and Aeloria were still in the air.

Still suspended by the threads— Seong controlling them both now, arms extended, jaw tight with focus while the dragon’s fire breath swept steadily higher toward their position. The gap was closing. Ten feet between the column of fire and where they were hanging. Then eight.

Seong’s eyes tracked it without blinking, calculating something Si Hon couldn’t follow from the ground.

Si Hon scrambled upright immediately.

His thoughts came fast and tangled and wrong. (Fuck— fuck if only I had eyes everywhere, if only someone could tell me where to go, where to be, what to do, if I could just SEE the whole picture from somewhere—)

He stopped.

His eyes snapped upward.

Above him, still banished above his head where he’d flicked them earlier, the stream chat floated in a distant cluster— tiny, hovering, completely out of the way.

Si Hon stared at them for one full second.

Then brought them back down.