The dragon's harem

The mech angel grew bigger as flesh and bones engulfed it, while Arad, who had just had his human soul shattered, roared at the sky. The entire Arctic shook, and the very laws of nature were about to break apart. Two abhorrent horrors had suddenly appeared, and neither of them was going to calm down.

”I’ve gone for just a few seconds!” A voice roared from the ashes, and a moment later, Merlin burst out of the ashes with her entire body charred black as she flew into the sky, eyes still burning with a bright pink light. ”What did happen here?!”

The entire place was irradiated, burned, and turned into a hellish landscape from the nuclear explosion of Samantha’s batteries. She could sense everyone around, and that only made her even more worried.

First, even though he was the biggest and loudest one here, Merlin couldn’t sense Arad at all, and he didn’t seem to cast a shadow anymore. His human soul was gone, so she could only feel the horrifying draconic presence. Any regular mortal would’ve died the moment they came near Arad’s oppressive aura and radiation.

Altair was still around, injured, but the radiation seemed to help her recover a bit faster. At least she was fine, and should be able to escape this disaster zone, which made Merlin only hope that Gamond could do the same. Unlike Arad and Altair, she didn’t have any radiation immunity, so this could kill her as well.

But to Merlin’s surprise, Gamond was fine as she took her draconic form and jumped between Arad and the Mech Angel, pushing them apart with her titanic arms. She looked to be burned a bit, and most of her body was black with soot and ash, so Merlin shouted at her. ”Get out of here! The Death’s curse would get you!”

Gamond laughed as she smacked the Mech Angel with her tail and turned toward Arad. ”I won’t die that easily; my scales are thick enough to block most of it. This level isn’t much, and I’ll be fine as long as I don’t ingest any ash.”

Arad, who was roaring, glared back at her and swung his claw right at her face, ripping five massive gashes into her skull. The wound looked fatal, but Gamond still moved and punched Arad right back in the face. ”Come on! Throwing a tantrum? What’s gotten into you?!” She opened her titanic arms up and taunted him. ”Come, if you want a fight, then I’ll give you what you want!”

”Gamond!” Merlin shouted with magic. ”He lost his human soul and shadow; that isn’t the Arad you know. Imagine it as if he is drunk or walking in his sleep.”

”I know!” Gamond replied with a growl as she headbutted Arad and pushed him back. ”Get us inside a labyrinth, quickly! If we fought here, we’d destroy this entire world before one of us falls.”

”I can’t!” Merlin’s voice boomed again, ”I’m all out of mana and too injured to create one!”

Gamond glared right back at her. ”Bitch! Did I ask if you can? I said do it, so fucking do it! Otherwise, you and this entire world would be corpses soon.”

Gamond was right; this wasn’t the time to think about what she could and couldn’t do. Merlin didn’t have a choice but to act and force the limits of her body and magic to expand. So, she did just that, and a labyrinth started to form as Gamond tried her best to restrain Arad.

She stripped everything from the magic. Its shape, color, form, and what made it beautiful. She only left the hard limits, the bars, the cages, and the shackles of her own masterpiece. Only what was needed to function, and what ended up showing up, was a titanic bird cage that locked both Gamond and Arad inside, allowing them to fight without affecting the outside world.

The stress on Merlin’s body and soul was unimaginable, yet she found herself still needing to push forward as the Mech Angel wasn’t going to let her escape so easily, and so, before Merlin could even breathe, the titanic horror punched her right back to the ground.

Hitting the ground, hearing her barriers crack, and feeling her body dying, Merlin had finally lost all fear and hesitation. She had long since stopped being human, and no matter how beautiful and pristine she kept her body looking, she couldn’t hide the horrific crime against nature that she had turned herself into.

Organs from multiple creatures, a heart that wasn’t hers, cursed blood, and skin so marred with ink that it could fall apart like wet paper at any moment. Even if most of Arad’s wives counted her as one of their most beautiful, Merlin herself saw herself as the ugliest, the most disgusting of them all. All the magic and spells she used to polish her body didn’t change what mattered most: her own true existence.

Her blood flew black, her flesh was rancid and purple, and her soul was nothing but a patched monstrosity, one that cannot ever be accepted by anyone. She was just a horrid, accursed, failed magical experiment to fix what cannot ever be fixed.

”Dark embrace... flowing blood, caged god, the never-ending hunger. Call, call, shift, and draw the power from the unknown...” As she started chanting, Yog appeared by her side, looking down with a stern face. ”Are you sure? You’ll stop being everything that matters.”

Merlin’s eyes shifted, and she gave Yog a nasty glare. She couldn’t care less about what Yog wanted after she refused to help earlier, and now, when Merlin was pushed to the limit, she came to stop her? She can fuck off right back to where she came from.

The Mech Angel was coming down with crushing force, and so, Merlin had to finish the last rites.

”Ginnungagap, Ginnungagap...” As she mumbled, Yog’s eyes opened wide. ”Where did you hear of those words?”

”Don’t you already know? Or is this forbidden knowledge even to you? Yog.” A dark flood gushed out of the cage where Arad and Gamond were fighting, and that flood fell directly on where Merlin lay as Yog flew far away.

From the black blood, a second horrid monstrosity floated to face the Mech Angel. It was the upper body of a woman, with her intestines extending downward like tentacles. She had empty eyes, four arms, and a withered, almost rotten, ashen skin.

This was... an Abominable Chimera.

With her mana running dry, her body breaking apart, and her patience at its limit, Merlin draws magic directly from Arad, from his eldritch reserve. With that magic, her grafted body expands and transforms into a nightmarish monster, an Abomination. After mastering magic, the only way forward for the great wizard Merlin was to push into the uncharted depths of eldritch magic.