The dragon's harem

“Why am I even here?” Ryan looked forward with a frown, seeing Kory stretching and getting ready for a fight. “Hoi! How about we don’t fight?”

Kory looked at her, “I don’t mind, but it’ll be your loss, not mine.”

Ryan’s frown grew deeper, “I didn’t lose. We agree to not fight; there is no winner or loser.”

Kory smiled, “But I need to win, and Arad said we two should fight.” Her eyes flashed white with cold magic, “Wait, I don’t even need your opinion.”

As Kory took a stance, flames burned beneath her left foot while the right one was engulfed in ice. “Arad wants me to beat you, and so I shall do it.”

Ryan sighed and started slowly lifting her hands, “Fine, if you want me to beat you, I’ll gladly break a few of your bones.”

As sodium dripped from her fingers, it crackled and sparked into fire. Soon, ten hulking mummies rose from the ground, growling and snarling at Kory.

The first one to attack was Kory, swinging her hand in front of her, sending a massive wave of ice flying forward.

While Ryan’s mummies were weak individually, all of them were covered with the highly volatile sodium. That is why Kory wanted to get rid of them first and turn this fight back into a one-on-one.

By eliminating them each time Ryan summoned them, Kory would make the necromancy strategy too expensive to be useful and force a direct confrontation.

Kory also wasn’t worried about whether her attacks would destroy the mummies; they will, and she doesn’t even need to put any effort into them. Her ice was just frozen water, and those mummies were burning with fire. When her ice melts into water and contacts them, the sodium would explode and wipe out Ryan’s army in a single swoop.

As the wall of ice and snow washed over the mummies, countless roses of fire exploded and painted the arena red, washing the ear with a deafening rain of explosions.

From the ice and fire, Ryan flew out at blinding speed, aiming directly at Kory’s head with a kick. This was what Kory wanted, a fight where she could rely on her best weapon, her good old hands.

She caught Ryan’s fist and pushed aside, looking at her with a smile as the two clashed in a vision hand-to-hand confrontation. Strangely, they were both extremely skilled fighters, dancing around each other with grace and violence. One was trained by her mother, and the other was trained by god-knows who.

Ryan unleashed a barrage of punches, her hands moving too fast for Kory to see, which forced her to lift her arms into a boxer’s guard and endure the assault for a second. In that moment, Ryan’s feet froze solid to the ground by Kory’s ice, and a thick, spiky spear burst from the ground, aiming to give her an extra hole in her body.

Ryan wasn’t a fan of letting anything come between her legs, so she bent her knees and fell backward, allowing the spear to fly right between her thighs and into the sky. Which, sadly, put her in a prime position to get stomped by Kory.

Kory took the chance and stepped forward, sending her foot crashing down on Ryan’s chest. In that short moment, she didn’t have enough time to take more than one step, and her legs weren’t long enough to reach Ryan’s face.

Ryan had a way to dodge Kory’s painful kick, but she didn’t. She waited just a fraction of a second and let the stomp hit her. She could feel Kory’s foot hitting her chest, cracking some of her ribs. It didn’t feel nice to be crushed like a bug, but Ryan had a plan, one that Kory never expected.

Ryan’s hands flew like lightning. One grabbed Kory’s foot by the ankle, and the other hand clenched into a fist and hit the shin bone, shattering it like she was an alien girl who loves pickled seaweed.

Ryan twisted Kory’s leg, spun around to shatter the ice around her feet, and then kicked her away with a single move. “My breasts are already small! So stop trying to make them smaller!”

She growled at Kory, watching her stand up with a shattered leg.

Kory looked down and froze her foot in place with ice so she could keep moving. She looked at Ryan with a smile, “What? Did I hit a nerve? Sorry, didn’t know you even had breasts to begin with.”

Kory flew at Ryan with a clenched fist, “You came out of nowhere, so fuck right back to whatever hole you crawled out from!”

As Ryan blocked Kory’s fist, a storm of fire exploded from it and washed over half of the arena, sending Ryan rolling away with several burns.

Kory stood in the middle of the flames with a crazed look on her face. Her blue hair was now striped with several red strands as flames burned beneath her feet and from her left eye.

Ryan giggled, and her eyes flashed with a deep orange light as shards of sodium started erupting from beneath her feet. Each of those shards burst into bright orange flames, melting the ground around her.

“Time to rain!” Ryan pointed a finger at the sky, and her water and wind magic took effect almost immediately, spawning a rainstorm just big enough to engulf the whole arena in a torrent of rain.

The sodium beneath Ryan’s feet smoked for a second and then exploded into a violent detonation, sending her flying forward at blinding speed through the rain. Before she could reach Kory, she took a deep breath and unleashed a massive sodium breath that engulfed a hundred-meter-wide cone.

The cone of sodium exploded into a shattering firestorm, and Kory was nowhere to be seen until the raindrops froze into sharp daggers and all of them flew toward Ryan.

Ryan dodged the ice daggers, only to see Kory suddenly appearing behind her, flying with jets of fire burning beneath her feet.

“Die!” Kory pointed one finger at Ryan’s back, and her nail flashed with enough light to swallow everything in sight. All of the heat that Ryan’s sodium explosion generated was absorbed by her, who was a temperature dragon and was now unleashed out through a single small point.

The scale was far smaller, but this was the same move that Isbert used to blast Arad away. But even with the attack being cast by a much weaker being, by Kory, who was just an adult drakaina, the main purpose was sucking the power of a fire attack, its heat, and sending it back at the caster, which didn’t rely on Kory’s own power.

Ryan didn’t expect the full power of her breath to be redirected at her, all concentrated on a small point no larger than Kory’s nail, and at point-blank range.

In that flash of light, Ryan disappeared for a second, and when the flames faded, she was half charred and stuck to the opposite wall to where she was blasted, already unconscious and in no shape to keep fighting.

The battle ended as quickly as it started, and Kory was the winner, thus advancing to the next stage and leaving Ryan behind.