The dragon's harem

All of Arad’s senses were compromised by the lava, making navigation beyond up and down near impossible. He had to create a new way to sense his surroundings in the absence of all of his senses. To achieve that, he checked each of his senses one by one to see what he could do.

The first one was his sight, which was the most debilitating. He can’t see through the lava due to how dense it is, and who even could see through molten rock? He sure can’t.

His hearing was also blocked. The boiling lava made it impossible to hear anything besides its bubbling and sizzling around his scales, creating a wall of gray sound.

He expected to be at least able to sense some vibration through the lava, but unless something was massive and close enough to him moved, sensing anything wasn’t an option.

He tried to use his nose, even though he already knew the result. The lava had burned all of the smells, leaving only the stench of sulfur and pumice.

^Licking the lava is a bad idea. Not going to try that.^

Any creature that wasn’t native to the lava pool couldn’t survive in it, and Arad wasn’t an exception. He might be able to endure the heat, but this place was still a death zone. It is simply not a place anyone should try to survive in.

But Arad wasn’t any other creature. He was himself. He was the monster that could live in the vacuum of space, a horror far beyond anything this world could offer. It didn’t matter where he was dropped. He was always the apex predator, and this lava pool wasn’t any different.

Arad shifted into a ten-meter-long dragon without counting his tail. It was time to tame a new hunting ground.

Arad closed his eyes and then opened them again. The whole pool was rich in mana, which even made his ability to see mana useless unless he got a bit creative with it.

First, his ability to see souls. He can use that power to look through the lava and find out all living beings around him through their souls. But, he had to be careful not to look directly at them. When he looks at a soul that is far weaker than his, that soul could sense him back. That is why he had to keep all of the souls he saw in his preferal vision.

Arad then started releasing dense pulses of mana in the same way he did to activate his expansion, but this time, he was integrating his magic into the mana already existing in the lava. Effectively working like magic sonar. To make sure that the monsters didn’t detect him, he didn’t let the magic pulses get close to them.

This allowed Arad to start swimming on the lava floor and mapped it. He wasn’t so arrogant to be beneath getting help, so he had two cartographers inside his stomach drawing maps. One was one of his vampires. The other was an old man from the humans he and Tempo saved.

Eris said that she would be able to swim with him in the lava since the heat wouldn’t hurt her, but Arad had to warm her that there was, in fact, something far deadlier than the heat. The sheer pressure of the lava at this depth wasn’t something that anyone besides him or the native monsters could endure. Eris is probably going to be crushed into a tiny ball of flesh if she were to jump out of his stomach.

After an hour of exploring, Arad finally managed to find the entrance to the main chamber where Damnation should be hiding. First, he sent small waves of magic to explore and map the tunnel and then swam through.

The tunnel was small, tight, and long. Very, very long. It took Arad around half an hour to reach the end and finally emerge from a tiny pool inside a massive hall made of pure white marble and illuminated by countless blue torches the size of a building.

With just one look, Arad calculated that the hall was at least fifty kilometers wide, enough to fit a small mountain inside. But to a Titan like Vulkan, who was around eighteen kilometers tall, that was the same as a five-meter room if she was 1.8 meters tall human. Relative to a Titan like her, this was just a tiny hidden room underground.

But to Arad’s surprise, Vulkan wasn’t in her full size. She was merely using a human-sized body, just around two meters tall, and sitting at the edge of a five-meter-wide lava pool with several lava tentacles licking her olive, naked body.

It didn’t take Arad more than a second to realize that those tentacles were like nerves, helping send and receive signals from the lava spawns on the surface.

She didn’t notice him and shouldn’t be able to while he was using his Void Presence. He wanted to attack her directly, get a good sneak attack on her very soul, but that tactic failed against Raptur. Arad had managed to get a sneak attack on the bastard and even ripped Zenia out of his soul, but that monster was still able to survive long enough to teleport away.

Eris looked through Arad’s eyes and found him staring intensely at Vulkan’s naked body. She frowned, ^Don’t you have enough of us?^

^I do have enough. What do you think about her? Doesn’t she look like a deer grazing peacefully in the forest?^ Arad smiled, and Eris laughed inside his head.

^Naked, defenseless, ignorant to the hunter plotting to turn her into a corpse.^ Eris smiled. ^So? What is your plan?^

Arad looked at the ceiling. He first expanded his magic on the walls and ground, sealing the whole area against all forms of teleportation magic that Vorvadoss’s spatial magic can block. Since Vorvadoss was the best teleporter that Arad knew, Damnation shouldn’t be able to escape. Of course, he didn’t spread his magic anywhere near Damnation herself or the lava pool she was using to control the Lava Spawns outside. That would be the last place he locks.

When the whole room was locked, he looked once more at Volcan’s body and barely prevented himself from trying to glance at her soul. “The only thing I know how to do.”

At that moment, Damnation flinched. Her red hair sparked with fire, and the tendrils of lava licking her body crumbled. All links with the outside world had been forcefully severed in an instant.

Looking into the shadows, she saw the topless Arad emerging with his skin glistening under the pale blue light of the massive torches, a wicked smile on his face, and a sword resting on his shoulder.

Her eyes opened wide, her pupils dilated, and the fine hair on her body stood. Every cell in her body sparked, crying in fear. She couldn’t mistake him this close.

She stood with a frown. “Let me get this out first. What can I do so you let me go?”

“Nothing,” Arad replied immediately.

“Are you sure?”