The dragon's harem

Chapter 1442: The Harrowing Angel

Arad cracked his neck, ”But they never said anything about a fight.”

Mathilde smiled. ”I see.”

She lifted her foot up and dropped it to the ground, cracking the ground. Arad could swear he saw sparks; the sheer power she could generate was enough to vaporize the World Tree’s indestructible wood, which only meant that his poor scales won’t hold out any better.

Dendron said that Mathilde is a kicker, which should make her fighting style obvious, but still, when an angel fights, it’ll be anything but simple to deal with.

The first to move was Mathilde. After a tiny lean forward, her body flew at a blinding speed toward Arad, her foot accelerating toward his face with a deafening shockwave.

Arad could see her move, but that was it. He could understand earlier that she was as powerful as Diana, but only now did he feel it. She wasn’t someone who could be easily fought.

He had seen her kick evaporate Dendron earlier, so he couldn’t risk taking a direct hit. While most angels were powerful, there are a rare few who boast enough harrowing power to even kill the gods they serve, and Mathilde is one of them.

A flash of light filled the crack in the branch, and the entrance exploded into a roaring shockwave and a storm of dust and wood splinters. From the chaos, Mathilde flew out, her massive white wings flapping behind her back, drowning the world in radiant light.

She slowly lifted her hand up and rubbed her right cheek, feeling the dull pain radiating behind her back teeth. A faint smile appeared on her face as she looked down, ”I never expected that a day would come when I would be thrilled to be slapped.”

Arad was already on one knee, panting as he had already lost his right arm blocking her deadly kick. But thanks to Dalla’s moves, he managed to sneak in a counter slap at full force. As expected, the angel took almost no damage at all.

”I see.” Arad took a deep breath and healed his arm in an instant. ”That explains a lot about you, angels. I already felt something off about your kind.”

Mathilde blinked several times and then giggled, ”You can see me?”

Behind the human face, the radiant, beautiful figure, and divine magic, Arad could see Mathilde’s true form. She wasn’t a living being of flesh and bones, but a divine being of strange origin.

A massive mass of divine light, conjoined feet, eyeballs, and enough feathers to drown the world, existing over several dimensions, soaking in the radiant power of Sylph, the elvish goddess.

The only reason angels show up to people the way they do is because the people love to see them like that. Angels weren’t even people; they were neither men nor women, just masses of divine energy given sentence and will.

”Interesting, how did you see me? Most see what they want in angels. Those who want to see a beautiful woman would see that, and those who want to see a bulky man would see that. But, not even the gods can peek straight into our true forms.”

Even if Mathilde knew the answer, she still asked the question. Arad was the one who created the angels, starting with the first divine Lucifer. At that time, the only purpose the angels had was to be weapons against the overflowing tide of abominations. That’s why they were made to resemble them, to be able to fight them better.

”I always felt that there was something wrong with you angels. Ever since I saw one of Kali’s angels up close.”

Diana felt off to Arad for several reasons, the first was that he never once saw a man among Kali’s angels, and the second was that even the women didn’t feel like women. Each time he looked at them, he only got a sense of lacking emotions, like he was staring at a bunch of really immaculate dolls put up for show and nothing else.

”Are you by any chance talking about the one called Diana? I can see traces of her divine magic around you. That one is a formless mass of pure chaos and destruction, a nebulous cloud that would rip anything it touches.”

Mathilde lifted her foot, and her toes were already on Arad’s shoulder. What mattered while fighting an angel wasn’t dealing with their apparent image, but fighting the real them, the mass of divine energy that is their real self, and now, Arad was already in the middle of Mathilde.

”So it’s not a transformation spell or anything.” Arad extended his arm and grabbed her by the neck. ”It’s just how reality translates your existence.”

”That’s true. This allows us to be immune to most of the abominations’ attacks and spells. For example, Vorvadoss won’t be able to run away from me as long as he’s been touched once.”

Arad smiled because knowing what angels are now allows him to counter them.

Arad’s skin started turning darker and darker into he was blacker than tar, shinier than a statue of onyx, and a faint rumble escaped from his insides. Mathilde’s eyes opened wide as she slowly moved her foot away from him.

Arad’s Elemental Expansion already engulfed the whole area, and Arad now doesn’t even have a body; he melted into his own void. This was the form that allowed him to survive Lunara’s moon, and the same form that his mother used to erase gods from existence.

But unlike his mother, Arad chose not to keep a humanoid shape, but instead, melded into his massive Elemental Expansion to mimic the angel and become a swirling mass of pure nothing.

As the void rushed forward like a raging tide, Mathilde’s harrowing body twisted and contorted, flowing through the void and clashing with it in a cacophony of violence and death.

Seeing an angel in a humanoid form and thinking of defeating them by attacking that form or blocking their attacks was inherently wrong. That human form was merely an illusion created by reality and the universe as it hopelessly tried to translate their true nature into something that could work.

That’s why Mathilde’s first attack ripped Arad’s arm and dealt so much damage. He tried to block what he saw, the kick coming to his face, but instead got ripped apart by the true body of the angel.

So now it came to one question: why can Arad see the angel’s true form? The answer was simple: Because he can see their souls. As much as some people thought of angels having actual bodies, they were, in fact, just massive and powerful souls. They were more similar to Arad’s Void Creatures than actual living beings; the only difference is that instead of using void to make bodies for themselves, they use the divine magic of their god.

This also explained how the angels can’t be self-sufficient, as they need someone to constantly produce divine magic for them, and by their nature as angels, they can’t become gods. This was why Alexander’s angels were so weak, their souls had starved for eons, growing weak.

As Arad and Mathilde fought, an outside observer, if they could see through Arad’s dark void, could only see Mathilde standing alone, shadow-kicking the empty air with a serene look on her face as Arad watched her in his full void form.

Soon, Mathilde’s moves turned into an alluring dance, taking on the form of a performance. But in reality, Arad’s hungry void ate at her real body, ripping it apart, at the same time, she ripped and tore him apart, clashing with Arad like the two of them were wild beasts eating each other alive.