An American soldier of about 20 so years old travels to Afghan to fight. He stays for a year moving through the nation fighting enemies he is told to fight. Then, as he platoon moves through a large town, they are forced to stay, only during the night, the town is attacked by something unknown, loud roars, fire everywhere, buildings being collapsed, people being taken, complete violent chaos. They can't seem to pinpoint the creature, and eventually most of the town is wiped out, very few survivors, this soldier is one of them. He gets out only to find his entire platoon is dead and he has no way of contacting anyone. Eventually goes around looking for nearby towns only to find them destroyed too, eventually comes upon a cave, where he takes refuge, only to quickly find something else living with him, he finds a rather large reptilian creature lounging around being stupidly funny. The soldier first thinks it dangerous and tries to avoid it, though eventually ends having it play with him (mostly without permission) until a larger reptilian-esque creature comes. Sensing the soldier, it starts to search for him and eventually he prepares to kill or be killed. He escapes however before it finds him, only for it to hunt him down, eventually finding him, except the smaller creature gets in the way. So the larger one backs down and doesn't kill him reluctantly. He eventually ends up spending three months, in that time he names the creatures, calling them 'dragons' and names each individual 'dragon', studies them, and tries to keep the adult, as he found, from going out to kill off towns. Eventually, he notices vehicles coming awful close to the caves, and ends up dealing with American forces preparing to attack the caves, assumed as being terrorist hiding place in his eyes. After the bombing, the adult gets mad and kills off most of the attacking forces. More military come and eventually he finds a way to negotiate and warn them, except they aim to only kill the beast.