The dragon's harem

As Kory’s white head sucked in heat to freeze the Thunder Bird flying above her, her red head spat that heat right back up, heating the air enough that it combusted into crimson flames. The dangerous part about a temperature dragon wasn’t their cold or heat outputs, but the speed at which they can switch between them, causing everything, especially metals, to cool and heat rapidly, making them brittle.

The Thunder Bird dodged Kory’s flames, but was caught by her cold breath, getting chilled until the moisture in the air started freezing on its steel plates. But it seems that the heat from the machine’s powerful engines was enough to protect it from completely freezing, and something cackled inside its beak.

Isdis and Kory didn’t know if it was laughing or what, but in the next second, when the beak opened up, they still couldn’t tell what they were looking at. Several barrels lined together like a cylinder, spinning rapidly... that was a machine gun.

As the machine gun roared, a hail of thousands of bullets flew out of it each second, and they all reached Kory in the blink of an eye. They hurt a lot, but none of them managed to pierce her scales. To her, it was as painful as getting showered naked with paintballs.

”Kory, are you okay?” Isdis growled from her back, and Kory replied in a hoarse voice. ”They hurt... a lot. Are those bullets?”

They were indeed bullets, but special ones. They were made of a special alloy of iron, adamantine, and tungsten, and instead of gunpowder, they were fired by a powerful magnetic field. That machine gun was a rapid-firing, high-power, advanced railgun.

The barrel turns at blinding speed, loads a bullet in the already running magnetic field, and it immediately gets ejected outward at nine times the speed of sound. While usual machine guns can overheat quickly, this one, as long as the magnets are super cooled, can fire almost indefinitely.

Here in the frozen Arctic North, and when fighting Isdis and Kory, there was no shortage of cold, and so the Thunder Bird could fire its guns as much as the orcs want, and as long as they’ve got ammo.

”Isdis...” Arad spoke out of Isdis’s shadow, and she threw a glance down for a second. ”I can sense a second small rift inside that metal bird. It’s probably as large as one meter wide, I bet they are using it to replenish their ammo and supplies.”

Arad expected Isdis to freak out about the Thunder Bird’s infinite ammo, but he was shocked that she noticed something he didn’t. ”Wait?! Can the rift move? It’s not just stationery where it spawned?”

That was the real point, the orc’s rift didn’t need to be fixed to a single spot in space. That should’ve been obvious from the start. The mortal world is a planet, and it’s spinning on itself, the planet is orbiting the dual suns, and everything is floating in the universe’s void inside the stomach of Arad’s mother.

Nothing was stationary, not even the mountains, so it didn’t make sense for a space rift to just float in one spot here on the Arctic North if it was really stationary. What Isdis noticed had just made Arad think, trying to figure out how the rift works before Merlin could close it.

Arad sent Mira back to the private quarter and turned back into an endless void, seeping beneath the army of the orcs to listen to them. Even with his vampires working nonstop to translate the orcs’ tongue, Arad found himself hitting a wall quickly.

The soldiers knew what the rift and the Thunder Bird were, they knew what they could do, but none of them seemed to understand how they worked or why they worked as they do. They weren’t the ones who made the tech they are fighting with, and it seems that those creators aren’t going to leave their world any time soon.

Arad should’ve expected this as well. The scientists and wizards who made those weapons possible will never step foot outside of their safe labs back in the orcs’ worlds. They are too valuable to die, and so, would never be sent here.

If he wanted to find out how the Thunder Bird works, he would need to both capture the bird in the sky and go hunt down its creators in the orcs’ world. But for now, he had to focus on helping Kory and Isdis, as he didn’t know if they could face the bird on their own.

It was then that Isdis made her move. She let go of her harness and rushed up Kory’s white neck. When she reached the horns, she jumped into the air, flying directly toward the charging Thunder Bird.

The orcs inside the Thunder Bird saw her, and they immediately knew not to take any risks. Without hesitation, they lifted the Bird’s head up and aimed the machine gun at her. If those bullets hurt Kory, they were able to tear Isdis’s body and armor apart with ease. Getting hit meant death, yet the Ice Queen didn’t look scared, not even one bit.

[Frozen World] With a roar, the entire world seemed to freeze around her, and the bullets froze mid-air. She smiled and took a step forward, stepping on the bullets as she jumped from one to another, quickly reaching the Thunder Bird’s head.

As she landed on the Thunder Bird, her back was already smoking, and her face had turned bright red. She had already reached her limit and was about to burst and unleash all of the heat she had stored inside her.

Yet, Isdis didn’t; she stood there, holding the world frozen for as long as she could, enduring the pain and overcharging her heat. Each extra second was ten times as painful as the one before, yet she endured, and then pointed her palm down.

”You came prepared for the cold... and I’ve seen you dodge Kory’s flame breath.” She smiled, ”It’s time to give you a nasty surprise.”

The moment Isdis felt her skin crack from the heat, she let time flow once more and then unloaded all of the heat she stored down at the bird. The orcs inside didn’t notice anything. To them, one second, they were looking at Isdis jumping from Kory’s head, and in the next, they were at the core of a thermal explosion.

A titanic ball of fire and light emerged in the sky for a fraction of a second, blinding anyone who looked at it and burning everyone within a 100 km radius to ash, and in the next fraction of a second, it detonated like a nuke, shaking the entire Arctic North and unleashing a shockwave that was heard across the entire world, echoing three times.

Arlo’s team saw the burst from afar, and what their instrument picked was so horrifying that Beatrice almost wet herself reading them. That thermal pulse had carried as much as 1200 Grad( An orc unit, 70 megaton of TNT)

What scared her wasn’t just the number, but the fact that the Alien unleashing such harrowing heat was an Alien they thought could only freeze things down, not burn them.

Back in the middle of the mushroom cloud, Kory flew out with Isdis on her back, rushing to find a place to hide. At this point, Isdis was naked, her entire back burned black, and in a critical condition as she pushed herself over the limit.

Of course, the safest place to hide in was Arad’s stomach, and they landed right on the battlefield and disappeared into the snow. At this point, the entire Orc army that was watching had perished, and on the rift stood in the middle of the devastation.

As Kory landed and shifted back to her humanoid form, she put Isdis down, and Arad started healing her. ”Are you stupid? Why charge it for so long? You should’ve been fine if you just unleashed it the moment you reached your limit.”

Her injuries weren’t because of the blast, but because the heat she had accumulated inside her body surpassed what she could control for a fraction of a second and escaped through her back for a bit, which caused the burns and blew her armor and clothes to pieces from the inside out.

”I wanted... to lose some weight.” She smiled, sitting up as her wounds closed thanks to Kali’s divine magic that Arad channelled. ”And look, it worked like a charm.”

”Sorry to inform you, but the bird survived.” As Arad spoke, both Isdis and Kory paled.

”What?!” They both cried, and he sighed. ”I don’t know how, but that steel bird transformed the heat into lightning and escaped through the rift.”

”Hold up!” Isdis cried with a horrified face. ”We let it escape?!”

”Well, I got one of my incarnations inside it.” Arad smiled, ”Focus on recovery, I’ll handle the rest.”