Another world, a mythical place that exists only in books and minds of theoretical physicists. Isekai novels were one of my favorite genres. I dreamed of my own adventure in such a world. Who wouldn't want to be a hero, right? Yes, I wanted to be the heroine who will stand up to every evil in that world and annihilate it. Nothing could stand in my way, and all the villains would tremble at the sight of me. Well, now it's not just the villains who trembled when they looked at me.

I wish some king or his daughter summoned me to this world, and I became a heroine fighting the Demon king. With my cheat-like ability, I would gradually cut my way through demon armies to his castle. But that didn't happen.

I could also appear in this world in some mysterious way or just by chance, maybe by cosmic convergence or something like that, in the middle of a wasteland or a dangerous forest. That would be nice, too, but it didn't happen either.

Some kind of reincarnation would be tolerable too. Living as a child would be challenging but manageable. I would have parents, friends, and mostly normal life here. But there was a catch, a big catch, I never died. I didn't die of old age, I was still young, and I wasn't hit by a truck that fans affectionately call Truck-san. I really wish I could meet him.

No, I met something else.

After an extremely long day at work, I was returning home. The sixteen-hour shift wasn't standard, but everyone in the flower shop was needed on Valentine's Day. I was tired, I saw myself in bed, but first I had to stop by the supermarket to buy some food. I never got there. I took a shortcut through one back alley. It wasn't your typical urine smelling garbage overflowing back alley. On the contrary, it was a clean and widely used shortcut during the day, unfortunately, unlit in the evening.

I wasn't afraid to go through this alley, but I should have. I should have avoided it, but I was sure that I would handle the situation even if something happened. I took a few self-defense courses. But how do you neutralize a twenty-centimeters-tall creature with wings hovering in front of you? This wasn't something taught in self-defense classes. When I saw the creature, I was confused. What was the appropriate reaction in a situation like this, stay still, run, yell, or shake its hand? I didn't get a chance to find out. 

That small flying creature reached out to me, but not to shake my hand, which was in my purse searching for pepper spray, but to attack me. I was engulfed by a blinding white light. The next thing I remember is standing in a dark cellar behind bars, through which a wide-smiling man was looking at me. It wasn't a pleasant smile of people with good intentions, people who wanted to help you. This was the creepy smile of a man who was excited about his new experimental subject.

I wanted to run away or defend myself, but my self-defense training wasn't very useful here, and running wasn't an option either. I was locked in a damp cellar, without any windows and light. I had no idea where the place was and how I got there. Later I discovered that it was magic of that man on the other side of the bars, which kept me from showing the madman a few grabs I had learned.

Just like with the creature, I never got a chance. Before he opened the cell door, he bound my body with magic, and thus my destiny was sealed. I couldn't move, couldn't even scream as he put an iron collar around my neck. When he activated it, I was acquainted with the system working in this world for the first time. At that moment I got a new title and a new class. There was no blue box in front of me, a floating window with information. No, the information was only in my head, yet I could read them as if they were in front of my eyes. However, it was not a pleasant read.

My new title was [Slave: Master Frederic Dungreen], and I was forced to choose the Class [Slave]. Yes, there was a system of Classes in this world. After reaching adulthood, everyone could choose one of several classes offered to them according to what they had been doing until then. I could choose from a variety of them too, but that lunatic forced me to choose [Slave]. He was familiar with the concept of other worlds and knew that even though it had been a long time since I had reached adulthood, I still didn't have a Class. If he didn't know about other realms, he wouldn't pay the Fae for my kidnapping. That it was Fae who kidnaped me is information I was told later by the madman himself.

So I discovered that this wasn't a world full of singing birds, flying across the sky, which was crossed by a rainbow over the flowering meadows, along which beautiful unicorns ran. This was a cruel world full of suffering and pain, where slavery was a real thing that took away man's free will if his master wanted it. The freedom that has been a part of me all my life, and I couldn't even defend myself.

It was cruel but much crueler was what that psychopath wanted to do with me. He didn't see me as a human being, nor did he see me as a slave. To him, I was only an experimental subject, one of the lab rats in his basement that had the potential to achieve his goals. He didn't hide them. On the contrary, he often talked about his dreams and wanted us to understand how noble his vision was. Neither I nor the others in the six basement cells shared his opinion. Probably the same was true for the rest of the public, his idea wasn't as noble as he thought. If the people liked his vision, he wouldn't have to do his experiments secretly in some basement.

Or so I thought, but I was wrong. Partly. Someone shared his goal, someone high enough to be able to keep this maniac's experiments a secret. Someone with great interest in the outcome of these inhuman experiments. Someone interested in creating a new Class, new soldiers, to give people more power than they were given. Trick nature and cheat the system.

That lunatic tried to combine humans and beasts. Allow people to fly like birds and be as strong as bears with dragons' magical power. Fortunately, his experiments didn't involve stitching monster limbs to humans and things like that, but it wasn't far off. He prepared extracts from the monsters, the essence of what he wanted to put into people, what they were to gain. The first extract I received was to allow me to fly. I got an injection right in the back between my shoulder blades. This injection containing two deciliters of monster essence worked like all its previous ones with serious side effects. These were mutations.

That madman didn't use a scalpel, but he could. It was as if he was cutting into my body and operating on me while I was fully conscious during mutation. This mutation gave me wings and general ability [Flight]. The fool considered it a huge success and an incredible advance in his research. I was not the first to acquire this ability nor the first to grow a pair of wings. However, I was the first in whom the resulting mutation was relatively small and symmetrical. So the size of both my wings was the same, and the mutation was limited to a few exceptions on my body. According to him, a successful experiment, despite the fact that he stabbed me with that injection between my shoulder blades but wings grew in the area of ​​my hips, even though their span was only three meters and therefore incredibly little to allow me to fly. Their size and location made it completely impossible, even though I had full control over them.

As I found out over time, I was lucky to survive the experiment. Not everyone did. Although it was hard to tell if it was luck or a curse. Most slaves didn't survive more than two mutations. No one survived fourth except me. I survived eight of them, but I died five times.

During the fourth mutation, my heart stopped for half a minute. After the fifth, it was over a minute. It took my heart five minutes to start beating after the sixth mutation, and I was practically a quarter of an hour dead after the seventh extract injection. I did not see the light at the end of the tunnel, I did not go to heaven, nor did I fall into hell. I don't remember anything during my death. It was like sleeping but not dreaming. There was nothing.