The dragon's harem

“Yes, yes, yes! If you’re with us, then we can finally put them all to rest. They’ve tormented the people far too long, and even suffered themselves for several decades.” Pollo’s eyes flashed golden as the fine hair on his arms grew a bit longer, and his beard became thicker.

“Before that.” Arad sighed as he looked at Pollo, then turned toward Alcott, “Who are they? Those people you two are talking about.”

Alcott looked sad for a second, but then smiled. “Old comrades from the old days and some acquaintances. When you adventure for several decades, you’re bound to meet a lot of lovely people who sadly have a screw or two loose. Some end up like Pollo and me here, able to endure the harsh life and rise to the top. Some find their calling and quietly hide away like Dalla, but those who couldn’t endure, those are the ones we’re going to hunt down.”

“So… the case of what if someone like Merlin or Nina lost it. I can imagine it.” Arad frowned. What if Merlin’s body couldn’t support her any longer, and all of the modifications she did backfired and turned her into an insane chimera? What if Tina lost control of her Tarrasque blood and turned into a rampaging herald of the world’s end?

“Yes, in fact, I really thought Merlin was going to lose it sooner or later, but she seems to have stabilized. I mainly stayed in Alina with them so that I could kill them if they went berserk, albeit I myself was on the verge of breaking.”

When Arad first met Aloctt, his father was already reaching the end of his life due to the lycanthropic and vampiric curses eating away at his body. With Alcott’s powerful body, it was unlikely that he would just drop down and die, and it was more likely that the two curses would mutate him into a rampaging monster.

Just imagining it made Arad’s scales itch. What if Alcott had turned into a werewolf-vampire hybrid with the skill and power to kill any dragon, then went crazy? Who could stop such a thing? Not even Arad himself was confident that he would have won.

Arad was indeed far stronger than Alcott, both physically and magically, but the skills and knowledge that Alcott accumulated were hard to account for.

“So? Who is the first one?” Arad asked. As long as they weren’t anything like Alcott, he could probably pick them all up in a single afternoon.

Pollo paled for a second. “The closest one to us is her, your cousin.”

Arad froze, and Alcott’s eyes opened wide. “His cousin… are you talking about Poppy? No, she was the sanest of us all.” He growled, and Pollo looked away. “She was fine until recently. She had worked diligently in the past few years to try and find a way to reverse her vampirism, and I’ve heard she came to a breakthrough a few months ago.”

“Then why?” Alcott gasped and Pollo shook his head.

“I don’t know. I recently heard that she violently murdered the entire village and went missing. Then, I started getting reports about an un-child prowling the night and feeding on humans. I tried contacting her, but I never found success.” He looked at them. “I was in fact willing to ask that lich if he has a spell that could track vampires.”

“Wait, aunt? I have an aunt?” Arad stared at them and Alcott looked at him, then smiled. “Step-cousin might be better. Ginger had a little sister, and Poppy is that sister’s daughter. Even in their case, it’s not close. To be exact, Ginger’s half little sister, they are both Vlad’s daughters, but have different mothers.”

He then looked at Pollo, “He isn’t Scarlett’s son, his mother is scarier. So technically, he and Poppy aren’t related.” He then looked at Arad with a stern face. “Can you locate her?”

“I’ll try. She should be pretty obvious since she is directly related to Vlad.” Arad closed his eyes and focused on his blood.

It didn’t take him longer than a few seconds to lay his eyes on her, a ginger child, barely looking seven years old, but behind her blue eyes hid an infinite bloodlust and hunger. She was washing the blood off her clothes in the middle of a desolate forest, having just finished slaughtering and feeding on a whole caravan of merchants.

At that moment, and not a second after Arad sensed her blood, her eyes opened wide, flashed red, and she glared right back at him with a ravenous frown. He felt a sharp headache, and the link was quickly severed.

“Arad! What’s up? What did you see?” Alcott cried. Arad had absorbed all of Vlad’s power, added Akasha’s power on top of it, and is even a powerful dragon and werewolf. There was no way that Poppy just resisted his blood control.

“Damn it, she almost fried my head.”

Arad growled and looked at the wall. “That forest is empty. She ran away.” He then looked at Alcott. “Give up, you two can’t hunt her down. She isn’t a simple vampire anymore. I sensed werewolf blood in her as well; in fact, she is like me, a new being that has far surpassed both vampires and werewolves.”

A few months ago, Arad was forced to evolve past vampires and werewolves in Yog’s world and became the first Pricolici to ever walk the universe, and following in his footsteps, the universe reacted to that and now allowed several rare genetic mixes to stabilize into a pricolici instead of crumbling down.

In short, when AO had brought something new into reality, it was now made available to everyone else, as long as they met the extreme, rare, and harsh conditions.

At the time, Poppy had been doing several experiments on herself, trying to cure her vampirism, and one of the methods she used was the application of werewolf blood, since it countered the vampires pretty well.

Right now, Arad only knew that Poppy was the same kind of creature as him, a Pricolici, albeit with the base of a human instead of a dragon. But that didn’t affect her ability to resist his blood manipulation and domination.

“What do you mean?” Pollo stared at him. “I saw how powerful you are, and I know she can’t stand a chance against you.”

Pollo was right; if it were a direct confrontation, Arad would just stop her and end the fight. But this was still technically his cousin, and a Pricolici to boot. All of Arad’s instincts and experiences screamed at him that she was going to be a problem.

When he looked at her blue eyes, he didn’t sense hunger, thirst of malice, but only felt an insatiable curiosity, pride, and a spark of magic so powerful it might’ve rivaled that of Merlin.

“What did she do before?” Arad asked, and Alcott looked at him with a serious face. “She was an alchemist and supplied us with all kinds of potions, elixirs, poisons, and even rare medicines that we couldn’t find anywhere else.”

Pollo added with a serious face. “It was more like alchemy was the tool she used to try to cure herself. She only remained a child because if she hit puberty, vampirism would become impossible to get rid of, so she developed a poison to stunt her own growth. She is a genius, if a little unhinged at times.”

He looked at Alcott, “Remember that potion Merlin gave you? The one that turned you into a woman, I believe, Poppy tampered with it to mess with you. I don’t think it failed like that because it was designed for Merlin.”

“Did mom meet her before?” Arad asked, and Pollo finally asked. “Who is your mother? Was it with Alcott before.”

“Vasilissa.” Alcott was the one to reply, and Pollo’s eyes opened wide. “Wait, that reserved witch?”

“A reserved witch?” Arad smiled. “Just to let you know, she can kill ten of me without breaking a sweat.”