The dragon's harem

”This rift is a problem...” Merlin sighed as she looked at what remained of the rift after the orcs locked it. Her face twisted into a frown, and her hair sparked with magic as she slowly lifted her long and jagged staff.

Bright purple sparks of mana bolted out of the tip of her staff as the entire area around her flashed with light, the air vibrated violently, and the rift twisted, groaning like a titanic beast. She could feel it resisting her magic with a horrifying force that was far beyond magic; this was the pure law of the entire universe at work, and to twist it, a power that surpasses the divines must be used.

Her staff crackled, and the skin on her arms tore open as she gasped and reeled back, yet still forced a single step forward with an angry growl. ”Behave! Your dammed self!” Planting her staff firmly on the ground, she forced even more magic out and started forming a titanic barrier around the rift, pushing down at it with the violent tenacity of a wizard who refused to bow to the laws of nature.

If the fabric of space itself was like a three-dimensional fabric with interlocked lines on all three axes, the rift itself was a knot, a defect that formed when the fabric was first created by AO for one reason or another, and that knot ties two whole different threads, turning them into one. The first thread is here in the mortal world, and the second thread is in the orcs’ world.

Those two threads were titanic and extended through several dimensions, holding multiple worlds together. Cutting them or untangling the mess itself was impossible, so the rift itself would stay until opened again.

Merlin knew that she couldn’t entangle them, so she had another plan in mind, one that could only be described as insane. She wanted to glue the threads together, then cut them so they wouldn’t just snap. But doing that would require so much energy that it would be impossible to achieve. That is why she had to get creative.

First, cover the threads of space with her own space magic, and then try to bend them slightly to straighten them up. Then, at the moment when they are stabilized, she flicked her arms and swung the staff, covering them with an entire labyrinth so the structure itself seals the rift.

That was her plan, but the moment she tried to straighten the threads, her staff shattered, and she could feel both of her arms almost ripping apart. All of the magic that was surging inside the staff exploded outward in a massive shockwave, which blasted Merlin back as if she had been kicked by a titan.

The first try had ended in failure. Arad did have one of his incarnations with her, so he tried to catch her, but before he could reach her, Merlin teleported to him and landed on the snow, growling in pain. ”GAH! That hurts!” She looked at her shattered arms, and then a tiny healing potion flew to her lips from her chest, which she drank.

”You were ready for that?” Arad looked at her, and she smiled as she finished gulping the entire potion. ”Yeah, that is one stubborn crack.” She looked at her arms as they healed, and then flicked them to get the numbness away. ”But... I lost one of my best staves; now I need a new one.”

”That wooden one? Was it that good?” As he asked, she frowned, ”I’ve spent the best part of a year enchanting it. To think it just exploded under the load...” She then threw a sharp glare toward the rumbling rift. ”That thing is just too rigid to contain.”

”So... you want to contain it, not seal it?” As Arad asked, she smiled. ”Of course, trying to seal or close it is just foolish. The same way you cannot stop the sun from dawning, you can’t prevent this from staying open.”

By this time, her arms had fully healed, and she cracked her knuckles. ”I can’t even build a labyrinth around it without the entire structure shattering. It is like trying to build a castle on an explosive, fragile foundation.”

She then reached down, picked up a stone, and showed it to Arad. ”Imagine this stone as my labyrinth. What do you think would happen if the fabric of space twisted in the middle while I want the stone to retain its shape.”

Using spatial magic, Merlin twisted the stone, but also used earth magic to bind its shape, forcing it to try accommodating both states, and in the end, the stone just exploded.

As much as Arad wanted to say he understood what she was talking about, he didn’t get it at all. If space itself is bending, then the stone’s shape shouldn’t matter; it should bend with space, and it would never shatter like that. It was the same with a drawing on a paper, which would bend as you fold the paper without breaking.

”I don’t get it... It shouldn’t shatter.” Arad crossed his arms, and Merlin blinked several times. ”What? You’re a void dragon; you should understand this more easily than anyone else. Or are you focusing too much on those four?!” She could see him violently pounding Isdis on the frozen throne through her scrying magic.

Arad still didn’t get it because, unlike fragile humans, he had scales, and no matter how fast his muscles grew, his outer skin always remained flawless like polished marble. With a single move of his arms, he removed his shirt and stood there in the snow, slowly flexing all the muscles on his body, and he flexed so hard that the ground started shaking beneath his feet from the fast and faint tremor of his flesh.

”What are you flexing for?” Merlin stared at him with a tired face, and he gave her a strange look. ”Trying to see if those stretch marks would show up.” And as expected, they didn’t. That wasn’t the way to get them, and Arad was, in fact, incapable of getting them.

”Now look at that!” From far away, a loud voice boomed. ”That’s what I would call a dragon.” Gamond crawled on the snow in her titanic draconic form, following behind a large steel truck as she guided them toward Arad and Merlin. Those were Arlo and his group.

After the war with the orcs ended and the rift was closed, they were stranded here, and the only way for them to head back home was for Arad to take them there. But he wasn’t going to just send them back. Arad needed information, and at least Arlo would be willing to talk.

As they arrived, the ATTR’s door opened up, and Arlo jumped out with a deep frown on his face. He studied Arad, Merlin, and the titanic drakaina in the back for a long while, and couldn’t even believe what he was seeing.

An alien woman who looked like a wizard and had far more magic than Beatrice by several orders of magnitude, a mountain-sized, talking lizard that could swallow entire cities at once, and now, this giant.

He approached and gulped. He had to choose his words carefully, since a wrong one could cost him and his comrades their lives. As the lizard mentioned, this giant is the king, so he’d better show some respect at least.

”Why do you have breasts bigger than any woman I’ve ever seen?!” Arlo growled, and Arad stared at him with a grin, fists resting neatly on his hips, head slightly tilted to the side.