The dragon's harem

Arad and Claug kept clashing, splinters of stone, bone, and blood flashing through the pale stone engulfed in sparks of fire. As the ground rumbled, Arad flew backward through a bulging boulder and crashed down, cracking the ground.

He was suffering a bit too much, even for him. Fighting Claug alone wouldn’t have been a problem, but now, he himself had become a battlefield. Ironic, since he was also fighting Claug inside his stomach.

Claug’s plague waged war against Arad’s body from the inside and clashed with the Pricolici blood and the tarrasque blood, tearing Arad’s organs cell by cell.

It didn’t matter how much he breathed; his lungs were able to exchange oxygen with his blood, and even when they did, most of his red blood cells were dead, and those dead weren’t getting replaced since his bones were cracked and the marrow was ravaged a million times.

His organs failed one after another, then were forcibly restarted by his regeneration, only to shut down a second later like a dying car. All of his senses grew weaker, slowly thrusting him into a silent darkness of pure nothing.

But even with his body slowly turning into a corpse, Arad’s arms kept moving, flying straight at Claug’s face, only to get deflected or countered by her.

The longer the fight went on, the weaker Arad grew and the more frustrated Claug became, because the fight should’ve ended long ago. She expected Arad to be knocked out by now, but he wasn’t, which put his life at risk.

It was a huge problem, one that she must fix. At first, Claug expected Arad to lose consciousness the moment his organs start to fail, and that would be her sign to stop and pull her plague away. But this dragon wasn’t losing consciousness, but he was fighting with the same aggression of a dying animal.

She even had her plague pump him full of sedatives, but none of them seemed to be working. They only helped to make him even more aggressive. Whatever his liver and kidneys were doing, they had to stop.

Claug was certain that her plague would take hold eventually, the viruses and bacteria use Arad’s own cells to reproduce, which makes them able to deal with his void.

But Arad wasn’t falling down. It has been a few minutes already, and honestly, she was getting pushed back. Arad should’ve been growing weaker by the second, but after his first crashout, he was now slowly regaining his strength and speed, as if he was healing.

Only then did Claug realise what kind of monster Arad was, how the two curses and the tarrasque’s blood in him worked, and why he would ever fall down.

The first to come was the Pricolici blood; it was the center of his survival. As Arad’s two hearts stopped pumping blood and his lungs failed, the Pricolici blood started flowing on its own, driven by blood magic across his veins. And for oxygen, it sucked it straight from the air around his gaping wounds.

Claug could see Arad’s spilled blood turning bright in color, then flowing back into his wounds. He might’ve had two hearts as a Pricolici, but he didn’t need them to move blood; he didn’t even need his lungs. Claug noticed that this state was most likely a desperate measure that his body would rather not use, but it was a survival reaction baked into his Pricolici blood, setting him apart from the common vampires and werewolves.

But that didn’t explain how he could move with all of the toxins and sedatives she pumped into him. The answer to her question lay in her previous fight with Denki, and Arad had seen that fight.

It was terrifying. Arad had seen Denki use her electric pulses to control her body once, but with his extreme skill at magic and eyes that could see the flow of mana, he must’ve picked up on it and was now attempting the same, supplementing his failing nervous system.

Claug dodged a punch from Arad and then swung her claw at his neck, only for him to deflect it and retaliate with a violent kick.

The ground shook and trembled beneath them as tens of swings flew between them, each holding enough power to level a small city to the ground.

She fought hard, but Arad was even harder to deal with. He didn’t move like a human, he didn’t fight like a dragon, and he didn’t feel like anything other than a living being. She, who was confident in herself to take Tiamat down with her plague, was now having second thoughts, seeing Arad refusing to fall to what was supposed to be a god-slaying disease.

A massive war was getting waged inside Arad’s body, his blood, his immune system, the tarrasque’s violent blood; everyone fought the plague with all they had, as if they were sentient beings, a colony of billions of tiny living creatures fighting as one being to protect their massive empire.

It was almost the same when Arad treated Zul, but this time, he was the sick patient, and his body didn’t take kindly to that. It retaliated with violence and aggression. His white blood cells flew through the flood of invaders, ripped them to shreds with their long, reaching tentacles, and consumed their innards.

The killer cells took the front, causing havoc among both sides, killing anything that came close to them, friends or foes. Everyone stood at the frontlines, even the cells themselves fought, ripping their core out the moment they got infected.

Arad’s body was killing the infection and destroying itself in the process. The worst offender was the tarrasque’s blood, which ripped through everything and anything without care, then forced the cells to heal and regenerate.

Claug’s plague tried to infect the tarrasque’s cells first and use them to reproduce, but it found out that those cells were nothing like those of any other living being.

For the tarrasque’s cells to split and reproduce, they needed four cells, not just one, and not even two like living beings. Two are the mating pairs, the third cell confirms the identity of both of them, and the fourth confirms the identity of the newborn cell.

If the plague virus were to use the tarrasque cells, it needed to infect at least four at the same time, but even when it did that, the new cells came deformed and died before becoming usable. What’s more, each cell immediately screamed and sent signals when infected, causing the other cells to kill it on the spot.

Both Arad and Claug were aware of the violent war being waged inside his body. He was aware, thanks to his Pricolici blood, and Claug through her plague that she controlled. Neither of them could believe the ruthless and violent nature of Arad’s immune system; it was almost as aggressive as he was, if not even more.

Arad punched Claug in the chest, dropping her to the ground and sitting on her. She gasped, eyes open wide, seeing his massive fist crashing down, burning red like a meteor. She barely dodged the hit by moving her head a bit, but the impact still rattled her skull.

Arad’s arm shattered, tearing from the wrist to the elbow due to the massive internal damage, but it started healing immediately. His blood flew like worms beneath his ripped skin, pulling the muscles and bones together with a disturbing crunch.

Claug was losing; her plague wasn’t reproducing fast enough, and Arad’s immune system was winning. But that didn’t mean Arad was getting better; it just meant he was getting worse and worse, ravaged from the inside by the deadly reaction of his body.

But even so, this strangely felt familiar to him, as if this wasn’t the first time he suffered from such a thing, getting eaten from the inside out by something foreign. In fact, for some reason, this kept reminding him of the abominations invading the universe, calling upon a primal rage that hid deep in the back of his head.

As the plague expanded, it hit Arad’s brain, damaging it more and more, and after all of those minutes, he almost wasn’t there, delirious with only one thought: to survive and win.

“Bastards…” Arad growled, glaring down at Claug with real malice burning in his eyes, “Abominable vermin… Get out.”

At that moment, Claug felt something strange and terrifying. One of her plague bacteria got blasted away by a white blood cell, using divine magic. And it wasn’t Kali or Eris’s divine magic; it was a foreign one that Claug didn’t recognize.

Then, there was another one, and another one after, tens of Arad’s immune cells started using divine magic, fighting back the invaders to get them out of their universe.