The dragon's harem

Standing at the pearly gates, Beatrice’s eyes glimmered with neon lights. What she could see wasn’t gold or divine light, but the glimmer of neon lights, titanic skyscrapers, and the industrial machine world the orcs had created. There were no angels around, just drones and airplanes, titanic spaceships with enough power to wipe life from small planets, and glowing galactic chains that could even enslave the stars and suck them dry.

Her soul shook, and she could feel her body burning to ash as the unimaginable current of the mech’s electric brain stressed her nervous system above its limit. The chains binding her soul to her body were already crumbling, yet death never showed up. The gates in front of her closed, and an angel stared right back at her from behind the blinding gate.

She was still alive.

The entire layer shook and quacked as Merlin’s golem smacked the mech on the face hard enough to force it to take a few steps back. The mechanical joints groaned, and the lights of its titanic spine flashed blindly.

Seeing the light flashing up from the mech’s tailbone to its neck, Merlin immediately made her golem jump back, but she was a second late as the mech’s jaw opened wide, and a titanic beam of pure energy flashed forward in a deadly burst.

The golem tried to block it with both hands, but that was useless. The beam burst right through the fragile stone arms and blew a hole in the golem’s chest. That was an energy breath similar to what Arad and the void dragons could use, but much, much weaker... It was released from the mech’s power source, a titanic Orc Reactor.

”You got all of that energy?!” Merlin growled as her golem regenerated, and she gave it a sad look. ”Mine can regenerate, but yours can’t. Still, that won’t mean I’ll forgive you for damaging this perfect masterpiece modeled after my man.”

Even if Merlin said that, she was still a bit worried. This mech consumes a lot of mana, and it’s on the verge of shattering the labyrinth just by existing. What made everything worse is that Merlin now has to match it to be able to fight, which doubles the load on her labyrinth.

She absolutely cannot let this thing escape to the mortal world, as that would be a cataclysmic disaster... unless Arad sees it and busts it back to scrap. Knowing him, he’ll probably give it a bear hug and crush it.

First, Merlin started baiting Beatrice around and trying to buy time. If the mech is running after her, it won’t be attacking, meaning that its mana consumption is at its lowest. That would give Merlin the time she needed to think, and think she did. She has two ways to disable the mech, and neither is easy.

She took lightning magic, reversed its functions, and then tried to use that to counter the mech. Essentially, she tried to create a spell that erases lightning by forcing all of the electrons to either settle or dissipate into heat, which could also destroy the mech. In scientific terms, that spell simply increases the electric resistance of all metals.

The spell was quite effective, but not for long, as Beatrice hit right back with her own magic, cooling the entire mech down with magic while creating new channels for the power to flow through. But as that alone won’t be enough, she was also reserving quite a large chunk of her mental power to interfere with Merlin’s powerful magic.

Hanging by the cords jammed into her spine and head inside the cockpit, Beatrice coughed blood and glared forward with bloodshot eyes. ”The bitch... what kind of brain does you have in that skull of hers?”

Merlin was using such a vast amount of magic that even Beatrice found it horrifying. Not even a supercomputer would be able to keep up with all the matches and calculations needed for the casting and maintaining of such arcane arts. Yet, here she was seeing a single alien pulling it off.

But the most horrifying part was that Beatrice knew well that the fight hadn’t started yet. Until now, they’ve only been throwing elemental magic around, and not one of them has used any spells of substance. She was afraid that Merlin would pull something outside the laws of nature, and that fear came true a second later. Her atomic clocks detected something strange, time started to dilate, and in a single nanosecond, the entire mech went into overdrive.

[Time Stop] Merlin froze time and rushed around the mech, trying to hit the spine and crush it. Due to the stress on her labyrinth, she will only be able to maintain the stopped time for two to three seconds, but that is enough for her to deliver a hit. Or so it should have been.

The mech’s spine flashed again, and it moved in the stopped time, accelerating to dodge the strike of Merlin’s golem. That was such a sudden action that Merlin was left baffled, and the time ran out before she could even figure out what Beatrice did.

The mech froze for a second as steam exploded out of its back like a train, and Beatrice inside puked a mouthful of burned blood as the links on her back and head smoked. Merlin’s spell didn’t fully stop time; it slowed it down to nearly a full stop, which meant that with enough speed and magic to compensate, Beatrice was able to move. But that wasn’t without a cost, since to do all of that calculating she had to suddenly overclock the entire mech.

She could feel her entire body crying in pain, and what was worse was her mind, which was already sinking into delirium. The mech was literally frying her brain while she was still alive, and she had already forgotten most of her memories.

As her eyes pulsed, her entire vision flashed with light. She could only see Merlin in front of her and the darkness behind her. She had already surpassed her limits, and now she didn’t even know why she was still fighting.

Arlo and the rest are probably dead, and she is the only one left on this alien world. She can sleep; she can rest. This fight was just too exhausting, too painful, and too meaningless. She was the most fragile of the group, their coward and crying, baby.

Why keep fighting? Why keep bleeding? Her will was failing her, and the mech hunched down for a fraction of a second, as if finally giving up after almost burning up to escape the stopped time. But then... a golden spark burned above its titanic head.

Beatrice was glaring at her own feet, lost in dreams, and then... she screamed hard enough that her eyes popped out of their sockets. The entire mech screamed with her, and Merlin saw the most horrifying image in the entire universe taking shape in front of her.

Beatrice believed in one thing, and it was her own work. Having reached her breaking limit, her only choice was to have faith in her own will, effort, and creation, to push forward even if she could not remember why she was fighting anymore, and that faith, coupled with the great machination of the mech’s circuits.

Beatrice believed in one thing, and it was her own work. Having reached her breaking point, her only choice was to have faith in her own will, effort, and creation, to push forward even if she could not remember why she was fighting anymore, and that faith, coupled with the great machination of the mech’s circuits, was about to give birth to a horror.

There was already a god of machines out there, and his name was Milleniumus. But what Beatrice was going through was completely different, and it didn’t have anything to do with the orcs’ god either. This was her own thing, not something that only she could do, but something that only she had achieved so far.

The same way the insanity and dedication of a mortal can create a divine artifact like Arad’s Exploding Nipple Knife, the will of a single life could still burn brightly enough to eclipse even the gods.

When the mech started bleeding and growing wings of eyes and flesh, Merlin knew that this had long since eclipsed anything she had ever seen in her life. This wasn’t a machine anymore but a weapon of mass destruction, an angel of steel, born of the dedication and will of a single mortal, one soul that only sought to be reunited with its loved ones.

The entire labyrinth cracked as titanic cogs of divine light impaled the ground, and the mech, now a nightmarish excuse of an angel, screamed into the heavens, cursing the existences that shunned its own creator.

[Time Stop] [Teleport] [Shadow Break] [Prismatic Shattering]

Merlin stopped time and teleported into the angel mech. She then swam through the shadows of its cracks and cut her way through the titanic steel plates, blood and bones with a rainbow hue of light, reaching Beatrice in less than a fraction of a second.

”Sorry, but I can’t let this thing be born. It’s too dangerous to let live.” With a single swing of her arm, she cut the cords linking Beatrice’s broken husk to the mech, and then stabbed her in the heart and skull with a spear of stone.

Merlin was still shaking, having seen the formation of something so horrifying and deformed; the very laws of nature were violated, and the will of a single mortal had matched the lowest shores of divinity. She knew that if enough people believed in something, that thing could gain divine power from their faith, but she never knew that a single mortal could do it.

With a second teleport, she dragged Beatrice’s corpse out of the dying angel mech and landed with her on a destroyed, half-sunken shore. ”I’ll admit, you’re scary. Just... how could you retain such will?” As Merlin asked the lifeless corpse beside her, the dying angel mech replied in the distance.

”They shall know fear.” All this time, the lightning storm never weakened, and the lightning bolts had been breaking down the salty water into hydrogen and oxygen. This entire layer was filled to the brim, and the only reason Merlin didn’t notice was that Beatrice had tried to mask it, and Merlin herself used so many spells to survive that she didn’t even need to breathe air.

The entire layer ignited into a blinding blast, and the labyrinth shattered to pieces at almost the same time that Arlo died and Samantha’s batteries exploded into a thermonuclear blast. From the mushroom cloud, a titanic nightmarish angel screamed, floating above the destruction as wings of veins and eyes expanded from its mechanical back, shaking the very sky.

Apotheosis, the same way artifacts are created, the same way the dark elf goddess once ascended, and the same way man demigods were once born in the past. But unlike all of them, this one didn’t need more than one soul to be born.

Yet the horrifying angel wasn’t the only scary thing emerging from the dust and destruction, as a raging black dragon roared.