The dragon's harem

When the maids returned with Gamond’s tools, Merida’s clothes were almost ready. The seamstresses in the workshop had taken Merida’s measurements and done the finishing touches on her pants, but the blouse and short leather jacket were still not done yet.

The leather jacket should be done in just a few minutes, but the blouse itself was a huge problem because it would be in direct contact with Merida’s skin. They didn’t want it to be too tight, since even a single move would tear it. A normal human would be able to wear a tight blouse or shirt since their skin and flesh would bend and mold, but Merida’s body was as hard as steel, and just her twisting her torso was enough for her breasts to tear the poor blouse in half.

It was better to treat her as a moving steel statue than a flexible human, which caused the seamstresses to undo the entire blouse and sew it back larger than before. It was a hard lesson that they learned with Arad in the past, and now had to learn again with Merida. Never take exact measurements since a single flex would cause their clothes to rip.

The cargo pants were doing a great job holding Merida’s backside and thighs, but the seamstresses were certain that if she were to squat a bit too hard or throw a high kick, they’d just burst.

Her body was just too dense, too hard, and too powerful to be contained in regular, mundane clothes, even if they were made from power, mystical materials.

Looking at Merida’s body, if one of the seamstresses were to describe it, she would call it an alluring demonic depiction of unholy beauty. It was unlike Eris and more like the beauty of Kali. Her thick, powerful legs, dense and woven arms, and oppressively dense and hard chest, all had a strange beauty to them.

When looking at Eris’s naked body, the seamstresses could feel a faint sense of attraction and awe at her divine beauty, but when looking at Merida, they felt a sharp sense of urgent terror. Standing beside Merida felt like staring at a marvellous bomb that could explode at any second.

It was the same with her hair, which, while it looked smoother than silk, was in fact so smooth that it became deadly sharp, with each hair being able to slice a whole finger off without much resistance.

They handle Merida’s body with extremely delicate care, not because her body was fragile, but because their bodies were too fragile to handle her. This should’ve been a problem with Arad’s other wives, but strangely it wasn’t. The only one besides Merida who had troubles with their obscene inhuman strength was Nina.

As the maids brushed her hair and polished her nails, Merida looked at them for a second, and then closed her eyes. ”Take care of my body for a moment. I’m switching focus somewhere else.”

Unlike Arad, who could easily control multiple incarnations at the same time, Merida struggled with two and couldn’t even hope to control three at once. Right now, she needed full focus on her incarnation in the abyss.

When Merida opened her eyes again, she was in Kino’s body and sitting on her throne in the abyss, feeling every single infected demon crawling across the entire layer. She wasn’t a part of the hivemind; she was the hivemind itself.

”I knew that she was behind it.” At the edge of her layer, an army of heavily armored humanoid had breached the walls, ripping and tearing their way through her demonic horde with large cleavers, burning torches, and massive cannons.

Those were paladins of peace, thousands of them. At the moment when Merida returned to her throne, those paladins were cutting through her demons like butter, and for a second, it almost looked like they could easily wipe the entire layer.

But that was indeed before Merida took control of her demons, and when she did, the unorganized and frightened demons regained their courage, took formations, and started to move as if they were controlled by a single mind.

The small, human-sized demons were weak, but extremely fast. Most of them were made from the corpses of mortals infected by Merida’s fungus, so they looked like morbid, fungal undead creatures as they ran hunched forward.

The small demons jumped at the paladins’ formation and went into a mad frenzy, trying to bite them through their heavy armor. The paladins seemed to immediately notice the shift in the demons’ behaviour, and they also changed their tactics as a few of them screamed. ”They got a general somewhere!”

Merida could see through the eyes of her demons, and when the paladins started cutting them down one after another, she sent an order to the demon moles. Those creatures were twisted horrors that looked like the unholy child of a human and a naked mole rat.

The demon moles’ job wasn’t to attack the paladins, but to burrow beneath them and cause the ground to crumble, and they were good at that. In just a few minutes, the demon moles had dug hundreds of large tunnels beneath the paladins, causing the ground to crack open.

When the paladins noticed the ground opening beneath their legs, they all jumped back, flying with wings of divine magic as they cut all of the tiny flying demons swarming them. A single swing from a paladin’s greatsword was enough to cleave nine demons in a blinding flash and shine brighter than a sun in the darkness of the abyss.

”Sir! They are swarming us!!” One of the paladins roared, and many others replied with roars. ”Let them; It’ll be easier to cleave them all at once!”

”Young one! Demons are barbaric monsters. The fact that we forced them to start using tactics means we’re winning.”

”Yeah! They are chaotic and violent monsters, we’re winning, just keep pushing!”

Ten became a hundred, and the hundred became thousands. Untold numbers of Merida’s infected demons were dying left and right, yet not a single one of the paladins had yet fallen. She had identified the reason for that.

At the outer edges of her layer, only weak demons lived, so they were easier to deal with. The paladins also were tanky and had a lot of healing spells to keep them alive; it was almost impossible to kill one of them unless they got separated from the entire force.

So why didn’t she just send her powerful demons to fight? Well, the answer was simple. Merida was wary of them, trying to confirm if there were any Lydia-like nutballs among their ranks or not. The last thing she wanted was to have her strongest demon one-shotted by a crazed, fanatic paladin.

But after observing the paladins for a while, she didn’t notice anyone who could match or even get close to Lydia’s power, even in her early days. They lacked the single-minded and sheer steel will the madwoman had.

If Lydia were among them, she would’ve made a run straight for the fungal tree like a blinding spear of divine light. She won’t sit back and take a slow, methodical approach like they were.

Then, Merida noticed something else... those paladins were strange in a weird way... their divine magic was jagged, rough, and harsh. The divine magic Merida knew and saw from Amaterasu, Kali, Mira, Eris, and all the divines she ever saw was silky, smooth, and beautiful. If that divine magic was like clean golden flames, the divine magic those paladins use is like rough metal sparks.

”Something is off...” She mumbled, sitting at her throne as tens of powerful demons knelt in her hall.

”Our Lord, please give us orders, and we’ll make sure they’ll serve you as spores for all of eternity!” One of her demons growled, and Merida glared at him. ”Shut up. Something is off about their divine magic. I thought they belonged to the goddess of peace, but that divine magic isn’t like any other I’ve seen.”

One of the demons that was silent until now, a thin demoness with three horns on her head and the legs of a cow, lifted her head and looked terrified. She was a female minotaurus. ”My Lord, may I speak?”

When Merida glared at her, the demoness pissed herself and passed out. She couldn’t handle a single glance of the demon lord; she was that weak a demon, having been born just a few decades ago and not fought a single fight.

When she woke up a few seconds later, Merida asked her, having fully turned her aura off. ”No time to rest, speak up.”

She was confused, but after getting yelled at by another demon, she finally managed to open her mouth and speak. ”In the previous demon lord records, there had been a few cases of devils and abominations impersonating gods and their servants to trick us.”

”So you’re saying that someone is trying to frame the goddess of peace?”