The world narrowed to a single eye.
It was vast, luminous, and mercilessly alive—an orb three times the size of Arlo's entire body, gleaming with the pale brilliance of frozen starlight.
Its iris burned an icy blue, crystalline and sharp, the color of glaciers under a sunless sky.
That eye pinned him where he stood, stripped him bare of every thought, every breath, every shred of composure he had managed to cobble together.
Arlo's mouth went dry.
His knees trembled as though they no longer obeyed him.
'Oh no… oh hell no… this is not happening.'
A shudder rippled through the mountain of treasure around him.
Gold coins clattered and slid down the heaps like a metallic avalanche, the noise deafening in the cavern's vaulting silence. Jewels rolled and winked in the darkness, and the air itself seemed to freeze with each passing heartbeat.
Then came the weight.
It was invisible yet crushing, like a mountain had been set atop his chest.
Arlo staggered, bent double, then collapsed onto his knees with a choked sound that was halfway between a groan and a squeak.
His ribs groaned under the pressure. Sweat pricked his skin even as the air grew frigid. His breath came short and ragged, vapor misting from his lips.
This wasn't gravity.
It wasn't even physical force as he knew it. It was… presence. Authority.
The kind of soul-deep oppression that made his instincts scream at him to bow, to grovel, to submit or be annihilated.
And then—then—the mountain moved.
The coins parted in a slow, deliberate cascade, tumbling down slopes of treasure as something massive shifted beneath them.
A ridge of scales like frozen marble surfaced, gleaming white with an opalescent sheen. The sound was titanic: metal grinding, gold spilling, stone groaning as the cavern trembled.
Arlo's heart slammed against his ribs.
When the head finally emerged from the treasure, his mind simply failed to compute.
The creature was colossal.
A muzzle as long as a carriage slid free, lined with serrated fangs that glistened with frost.
Horns curved back from It's skull like jagged shards of ice, catching the faint torchlight in ghostly refractions.
White scales, each the size of a shield, overlapped with crystalline precision, every plate etched with faint blue veins that pulsed like frozen rivers beneath the surface.
A mist of cold vapor seeped from It's nostrils with each breath, curling around the treasure like fog drifting across a glacier's edge.
It's eyes, twin lanterns of winter, never left him.
Arlo's lips quivered.
His brain was a static buzz of disbelief, denial, and sheer animal terror.
'Of all the fantasy tropes in existence… And of course i am going to get a final boss on my tutorial?!'
And the worst part was the Innovator System was silent.
Not even a ping. Not even a [Good luck, host].
Arlo swore under his breath.
He swore at whatever deity had thrown him here. He swore at every book he had ever mocked, every author he had insulted.
He swore at whatever cosmic bastard thought this was funny.
And then—like a knife sliding directly into his skull—he heard a voice.
Not through his ears. Through his mind.
A voice colder than glaciers and sharper than breaking ice reverberated in the hollow of his soul. It wasn't speech—it was domination.
It belong to a female.
"What do we have here. A trespasser dares sully my sanctum? And a human, no less…"
Arlo's throat seized up.
His tongue stuck to the roof of his mouth.
He couldn't even twitch a finger, much less reply.
His body was pinned under that invisible weight, a bug before a boot.
The dragon lowered her head with agonizing slowness, bringing that endless maw of teeth and frost closer, closer, until her nose alone was larger than Arlo's entire body.
She inhaled once, and the gust nearly toppled him flat, his hair whipping backward as frost rimed the edges of his clothing.
Coins rattled as her colossal frame shifted.
Her body unfurled from the hoard like an avalanche uncoiling itself, wings spreading in a languid stretch that shook the cavern.
The vast membranes were like glaciers turned translucent, veins of pale blue light tracing through the thin skin between the bony supports. Shards of frost fell like rain with each flicker of movement.
She began to circle him.
Her claws gouged into the stone beneath the gold with every step, talons gleaming like frozen spears.
The sheer arc of her neck made him feel like a rabbit trapped inside the coils of a python, the predator toying with him before the strike.
The sound of her scales scraping and coins sliding was deafening, drowning out even the frantic hammering of his own pulse.
And then—again—that voice.
"What should we do with you now, little insect?"
It was amused.
Playful, even.
But underneath that lilt was cruelty, the kind of cruelty that did not see him as a person but as a curiosity. A toy. A morsel.
Arlo's internal monologue went feral.
'Nope. Nope. Nope. This is it. I'm dead. Forget tutorial, forget Chapter 1. Author's Note: Thank you for reading Arlo's one-chapter journey. Please like and subscribe to my funeral.'
His face twisted into a grimace halfway between sobbing and hysterical laughter.
If he weren't frozen by her aura, he would've been pacing and flailing like a madman.
'Why couldn't it have been a slime? Or a goblin? Or hell, even a pack of wolves? Nooo, it just had to be Smaug's crazy ice queen cousin!'
The dragon's massive head tilted, one eye narrowing as though she could taste the panic rushing through his veins.
"You tremble," the voice purred inside his head, low and resonant. "Do humans break so easily now? Or are you simply aware of what is to come?"
Arlo tried to shake his head, to deny, to plead—but his neck refused to move under the suffocating pressure.
Only a strangled whimper escaped his lips, pitiful and small in the echoing cavern.
The dragon's chuckle was not sound but sensation—a vibration through his skull like glaciers grinding together. It was worse than laughter; it was the sound of inevitability.
"Long has it been since anyone dared set foot in my private hoard much less a human," she continued, circling ever closer. "Your kind learned long ago to fear the cold that devours all things. Yet here you kneel. Bold… or foolish?"
Her tail, ridged with icy spikes, slithered through the treasure with a hiss, scattering jewels like raindrops.
Arlo's gaze followed it in horror as it coiled lazily, as though even her tail could crush him to paste if it twitched wrong.
His thoughts raced.
'No, no, no, don't make eye contact. Wait—no, don't look away either! Crap, what's the dragon etiquette? Smile? Bow? Offer her a gold coin back as tribute? God, why didn't I binge more novels where the MC actually survived this part?!'
The damn System still offered nothing.
No tutorial, no quest, no survival tips. Just silence.
Arlo cursed the System too.
'Innovator, my ass. Innovate me a way out of becoming dragon chow!'
The dragon finally stopped circling.
Her colossal body arched above him, wings half-spread, her head lowering until her shadow swallowed him whole.
She was a cathedral of scales and ice, a goddess of winter rendered in flesh, and she was looking directly at him.
The silence that followed was unbearable.
Then her claw lifted.
It descended slowly, with the deliberation of a judge handing down a sentence.
Each talon gleamed like a spear, edges rimed in frost.
The weight of the air pressed harder, until Arlo collapsed fully to the ground, his palms scraping against coins that burned cold against his skin.
The massive palm settled over him with terrifying gentleness, though it pinned him with inescapable finality.
Her scales pressed down like stone columns, their cold seeping into his bones.
Her voice slid into his head one final time, silk over steel, almost thoughtful.
"It has been too long since I last tasted a human."
The words rang like a death knell, each syllable vibrating with cruel promise.
Arlo's eyes widened to saucers.
His jaw fell open.
Every internal swear he knew—every insult, every desperate plea—raced through his mind in a screaming cascade of profanity aimed at gods, systems, fate, dragons, and whoever was reading this cosmic script.
'Screw whoever is reading this and finds this situation amusing.'