The dragon's harem

Chapter 1454: The Real Wasps

Getting past the first few layers of branches had led the group into the first major section of the canopy. Besides the Terror birds, some rot, bald eagles, and the occasional flocks of flies, nothing seemed of note.

Except when Mathilde suddenly stopped the disk and asked everyone to wake Arad up.

Everyone looked at her with worried faces, looking around and following her gaze. Soon, their eyes lay upon a large lump in the branches, sitting a fair distance away from a plump lemon.

The large lump looked strange, shriveled, and filled with holes. It looked both creepy and disgusting.

“It’s the gall wasps, we’ll face hundreds of them soon, get him standing up.” Mathilde moved forward and stood in the front, looking around for the swarm of wasps. “Make him take you inside his stomach so I can deal with the wasps without protecting you all.”

“No one is waking Arad up.” Cerilla stepped forward, took a deep breath, and waved her fingers, conjuring a strange, massive bow out of nowhere.

The bow resembled a warbow with multiple intricate patterns and engravings on its side. The string was dull gold, and the whole thing radiated a faint divine aura.

That was Cerilla’s bound bow, the weapon she got from her contract with Sylph, the elvish goddess. The bow had two enchantments, which Cerilla only started to fully understand on this trip.

The first enchantment made the bow stronger the closer it was to the World Tree, which at first didn’t make sense in Cerilla’s mind, except probably because the bow was made with the World Tree wood. But now, she found out that the higher they climbed, the stronger the bow got.

The bow got stronger the closer it was to Sylph, and it just happened that Sylph was living above the World Tree. Which also explained why the bow suddenly grew weak.

The second enchantment was quite convenient, but taxing. It accelerated time for the archer when aiming, which made them see the world in slow motion. The trade-off was that accelerated time is time. The longer they spend aiming, the shorter their lives would seem to anyone else. In reality, they just spent that time aiming.

Cerilla opened her palm and pointed it at the ground, causing bits of the World Tree wood to move like water and swirl upward, forming an arrow that spun beneath her palm.

When Sylph was just a mortal, she was known as a sadistic queen who only worshipped the World Tree and used wood magic as her main weapon. She wasn’t much of an archer, so the best power she could give Cerilla was only related to wood.

Right now, the bow in her hand had the draw weight of several thousand pounds, which was impossible to draw, but since it was made of wood, Cerilla could force it to bend with wood control magic.

But even with that, when she knocked the arrow in and pulled the string, the back of her elegant dress ripped open, and the lock of her bra snapped as the muscles on her back and chest tightened, rippling like steel wires.

She aimed at the air, waiting for the swarm to show up so she could start focusing and accelerate her time to aim. But then she heard it, a buzz. Was it the wasps? No, it was just Plum landing on her head.

“Excuse me for a moment.” Plum dropped from Cerilla’s head onto her arm, then walked to the arrow and stepped on it. “I’ll just get comfortable inside if you don’t mind. It’s a bit tight, who doesn’t love a bit of a snuggle?”

Plum disappeared into the thin shaft of the arrow, charging it with both a massive amount of wood magic and weight. For a moment, Cerilla got worried that she wouldn’t be able to carry the arrow, let alone fire it. But she was wrong, because soon the arrow returned to its normal weight.

The wasps then showed, swarming from beneath the branches like a black cloud. Each one of them was massive, several tens of meters long, and boasted harrowing mandibles and translucent wings.

Anyone would’ve been scared at the sight. Many humans would run away from a normal wasp, let alone hundreds of massive ones. But Cerilla wasn’t like anyone else; she started getting sharper, and her eyes were glued to the swarm, finding the center point.

Time flew faster around her, and the world seemed to slow down. Her fingers slowly opened up, and the string started moving, pushing on the back of the arrow and driving it forward.

The bow pulsed, and the arrow flew like a flashing meteor, leaving a green trail behind it of fairy dust. It struck one of the wasps in the middle of the swarm, right between its eyes.

The wasp froze for a second, and then the arrow exploded into a storm of splinters, branches, and sharp leaves, ripping the wasp and many of its brethren beside it.

As Plum flew out, she took control of the shards and splinters, spinning them around like a massive blender, ripping and tearing the wasps as she flew around.

“Send me up there.” Jasmine pulled a long rapier and ran forward, tapping Grace on the back.

The drakaina sighed, lifted her foot up, and stomped on the ground. In the next moment, Jasmine fell through her shadow and appeared above one of the wasps, right from the shadows formed by its brethren flying above.

Jasmine stabbed the wasp in the back, ripped its head clean off, and jumped to the next wasp, dancing in the middle of the air with her blade flashing, leaving a trail of purple blood and guts everywhere.

Jasmine avoided killing the wasps outright; she needed them to bleed externally. She avoided the heart and organs, going for where major veins would be to get the strongest blood splash.

When the purple blood splashes away, she would step on it and run toward the other wasps, jumping with ease. The Dark Elves have learned the art of walking on water with magic, and that could be translated to blood with ease, allowing them better aerial mobility if they understood how to fight well enough.

The previous Dark Elf goddess had created an art called Blade Dance, which could only be learned by a Dark Elf woman like her, and she was the only one who could truly master it. Because she made that art to work with her body, and only optimised it for that.

Most Dark Elf queens had one wish, and it was to become like their goddess and ascend to godhood. And they weren’t stupid. None of them had tried to copy Blade Dance, that was the art of the goddess, not theirs.

Jasmine, like the queens before her, had tried to create her own art, the style that suited her, and only her, the best.

Those wasps were the perfect practice target. Fast, but big enough to be a valid target with plenty of blood.