Reincarnated as an Orphaned Dragon!

Chapter 23 - "Preluding Destiny"

Raze, Litz, Ria and Rulio were now in the nearby forest outside the city.

"All of you keep your eyes open! You never know what you're going to find out here." Raze warned them.

The trees remained silent as they made their way forward.
It wasn't until they got further in did something feel different.

"It's so cold, I hate being cold." Ria complains repeatedly.

"It's just a chill, get over it." Rulio scorns.

The group continued through the chill, not noticing any of the thin threads glistening in the air until Rulio hits one.

"Aaah! What is this?!" He screams in pain as he gets away from the thread he just ran into.

Raze takes a look at the glistening threads suspended in the air and knows exactly what is happening and starts cutting them down with her sword.
"Frostweave spiders! Don't get caught in their threads, they will freeze you to death if you let them catch you. They're coming, remember what you learned for monsters with restraining abilities!"

The spiders knew exactly where they were after their webbing was disturbed and destroyed, and furiously rushed towards the commotion at great speed.

Raze hid her presence before they could even see her, since this was to test the others ability in a real fight.

Rulio was the first to be directly attacked, but blew the attacking spider away with <Shockwave>.
The spider hit a tree with a thwack, but crawled up to a branch unharmed and tried to shoot more frozen thread to encircle him.

Rulio made a wall of wind to block the thread and cut the attacking monster in half with a slash of concentrated wind.
The spider fell apart and three more took its place.

Neither Rulio or Litz trusted Ria to fight in a way that wouldn't burn the forest to the ground, so they were ahead enough for the spiders to be three against two.
Raze didn't want Ria to raze the forest either.

One of the spiders was distracting Rulio so that the other two could gang up on Litz.
Rulio wasn't the brightest when it came to strategy, and was easily distracted.

Litz didn't expect much help from the bonehead in the first place, and was able to fight both at once by using magic barriers to focus on a single one at a time.
Now that he had the strength to put behind his plans, he was no longer completely helpless like he used to be.

There was just the one left that Rulio was getting angry at for dodging his attacks.

Litz laughed at him and trapped it in a box of Mana with ease.
"Come on, even an insect thinks you're predictable."

"Why, you! Take that back!" Rulio growls in anger and gets interrupted by a different voice.

"Hey, it's my turn!" Ria pushes by, "<Fireball>!"

"Nooooo!" Litz, Raze, and Rulio scream and try to interrupt, but the spider and the surroundings are already scorched.

"Everyone put out the fires before the forest burns! Even beasts that use fire regularly have more sense than this!" Raze commands quickly and they manage to contain the flames before they get too out of control.

Raze didn't want Ria to burn any more of the forest, and started leading them back.
Halfway to the exit of the forest, a commotion stirs.

*crash*

A tree breaks and is pushed aside in front of the group, revealing a giant reptilian body.

"A dragon- No,  a drake?! Everyone run!" Raze yells in terror.

Everyone was already reacting except the airhead they called Ria, who was just standing there while it growled.
"Dragons aren't bad, I'll be friends with it instead!" She squeaked like an idiot.

Raze grabbed her instead and ran off while she whined and fought to get back to it.
"No, you brainless fool! You would be dumb enough to try that on a dragon, but that's not a dragon! Drakes don't have intelligence!"

Raze hides behind some large foliage and hopes the beast leaves, knowing she wouldn't be able to outrun it with Ria even using magic.

"Don't worry! I know what to do!" Ria proclaims as the drake draws closer and detects them in hiding.

"What are you going to do? Flames won't do anything to that thing! What are you holding right now, is that a... scale?" Raze scorns.

"On the verge of danger, I beg my beloved Lava to lend me strength and defeat this monster, because that's what a sister should do; <Fire Lance>!" Ria shouts.

Raze is bewildered, both at why she has a scale and at her profoundly personalized chant that seemed to actually work, if the huge pole of compressed flames launched into the beasts chest was any indication.

In just a few moments the drake was slumped over on the ground.
It fortunately happened before the others got too far away to regroup, and they made it back to the city safely.

--- Lava

I was done for today's hunt.
The village hasn't had a food shortage for a long time since I arrived, mainly because of how easy it is for me to just go catch a bunch of food to bring back.
I can even cook it for them too.

It's been so long since they've had to starve that the children are less interested in the food and more in trying to get responses out of me.
They aren't as bad as Ria, though.
At least the adults can say thank you in a form other than trying to head pat me.

I felt a sudden drain from me and got dizzy for a few seconds, I wasn't sure what that was but I lost some Mana because of it.
I wonder what Ria is doing right now... I can't believe I'm actually missing her...

~~~
Long A/N

After 22 chapters of slow burning and making little plot progress, I finally have an outline for a plot and I think the next couple chapters are going to be crazy, at least for my skill level.

Because of how limitless I made the magic system it's really hard to power scale. But I don't regret it since I didn't want to make just another dragon isekai with levels and skills.

I regret how I started this because I just started on a whim and didn't give myself anything to work with. So I lost most readers and even if I manage to pick up quality in the later chapters most will stop reading if they think the ones up to this are trash (they are).

I tried hard to pick up pacing earlier and even made subtle hints that I didn't follow through on because I couldn't think of any realistic way for something interesting to happen yet.
I'm the kind of 'writer' that doesn't like making up random BS to move along plot. I also don't like unnecessarily flourishing up my words, which you've probably noticed everything being written informally and anything I didn't deem important to the scene was simply implied.
I also started a couple things like mc freeing the light spirit and having it help Litz that were basically just random things I used as filler since I quickly realized I didn't want to use it as a main plot line.

Other things that kept chaining me down was my lack of giving mc any kind of backstory, just kind of started the new world stuff right away.
As well as age of mc.
I didn't really like the time skip in this chapter, but I couldn't do anything interesting with the characters until they grew up a little.

I'm doing rather well at avoiding plot holes considering I haven't planned this at all and am just going with the flow.

I'm still going to finish this.
Even if I end up with 0 readers on later chapters I'm still going to finish it.
Because what I hate the most are unfinished stories.
Wattpad has too many authors that start stories and then abandon them.
No matter how bad something is there is always someone that wants to read it and would be devastated by a 5 year old hiatus chapter.
~~~