The dragon's harem

Chapter 1750: The Dreamer

Facing four of Arad and Gojo all at once wasn’t easy; in fact, it almost seemed impossible. They worked like one, communicating telepathically and instinctively to coordinate each move, tactic, and attack to plug all of Nyar’s counter options.

Void dragons are usually solitary in the war, because Nyar used the Dracorage Mythic meteor to make sure they are. He knew that having two void dragons work together was a problem because they effectively think as one, and they wield the power to manipulate the very principle of AO’s world.

Arad’s destruction spear was their main source of damage. It was the embodiment of Kali’s destruction taking form, and anything that touched it had no other possible option but to get obliterated into nothing. Just a single tap was enough to erase Nyar’s flesh from existence and damage his core, which made dodging those attacks a matter of life or death.

Even Nyar didn’t want to deal with a full-power Kali. Back in the Labyrinth, she had to hold back, but here, she is only taking a spear form to allow Arad to take the lead.

The morning star was a weapon made from two parts: Damnation’s chains and Eris’s purple sun, granting the weapon a divine spark and a will of its own. Eris might not be able to keep up in this fight on her own, but Arad, with his mastery over space magic, could use her powers better than she. The gravity of the purple star twisted and bent the fabric of space and time, turning it into something akin to a sinkhole, drawing anything in, and dodging it was almost not an option if Arad knew how to attack.

Eris was initially nervous about giving her power to Arad as she didn’t think her sun would be able to stand against Nyar, but she was wrong. Kali and Amaterasu were there, the goddess of the sun and the goddess of destruction. Eris was a sun, so Amaterasu’s existence protected her from damage, and Kali was the goddess of destruction, so destroying Eris’s sun in her presence was just as difficult.

The sledgehammer of creation, on the other hand, looked like a bludgeoning weapon, but Arad never used it for that. That incarnation of his never challenged Nyar in close combat and instead focused on using the hammer, alongside divine magic from any of his wives to heal. Getting rid of Nyar’s eldritch magic was near impossible, but with Isabelle being an abomination now, she could clean it off.

Isabelle was once ago Creation, a being of the same level as Kali, but she tried to create peace and negotiate with the abominations, which eventually led her to get infected and turn into an abomination. That caused Kali to kill, shatter, and destroy her. Now, she was nowhere near her peak, so being a support was her only place.

Isabelle didn’t hate Kali for destroying her like that; in fact, she loved and thanked her many times. If Kali hadn’t crushed her down so much, Isabelle might’ve lost her mind and become a twisted abomination, losing her sense of self and merging into Nyar’s mind.

So right now, all she could do was get rid of Nyar’s magic and heal any injuries or damage Arad and Gojo sustained.

That left one last weapon unused, and that is the exploding nipple knife. Arad didn’t know who made it or for what reason. But one thing was clear about the unassuming, mundane butter knife. Whoever created it was mad, insane, and utterly unhinged. Whatever witchcraft or cures he put on it was alien to the universe, and consumed by hatred.

Arad just pulled the knife since he didn’t have anything better to use. Of course, it didn’t work on Nyar, who had no nipples, but it was durable enough to slash through his skin. Just seeing the knife performing so well had made Arad want to explore its origin later.

Such a peculiar and mastercrafted weapon had to have more to it, and Arad was certain that making nipples explode was just a strange byproduct of the weapon’s true power. Arad being able to aim the explosions toward the heart and lungs made that clear.

But for now, he had to deal with Nyar first and get back to his wives in one piece, which was easier said than done. First, he threw a glare at Amaterasu, who just watched from above, not lifting a finger. He then glared back at Nyar and had to come up with a plan.

To Arad’s luck, Gojo already came up with something and immediately sent him a thought through their telepathic link. Out of them, Gojo was clearly the smartest, and he had access to the cheat sheet called Yog inside his head.

To win this fight, Gojo thought it was necessary for them to understand how Nyar’s biology works and how he could keep fueling his avatar. Even if they couldn’t destroy him, they could cut his energy path and kill him that way.

The first thing Gojo looked at was studying the outer void. Right now, they were standing on the universe’s outer crust, looking up at the endless darkness. Space and time existed, but they shouldn’t be here. That only meant the universe has something akin to an atmosphere of space and time around it.

If space and time didn’t exist outside the universe, then everything is everywhere at all times, thus Nyar can’t be beaming energy or whatever through distance or time. He and his avatar are one and the same.

It was then that Gojo came up with a theory. If Nyar wants to consume the universe to feed his kin, what if the abominations weren’t really other beings, just an extension of Nyar himself? He was the enemy of AO, the creator of the universe, so he had to have similar powers with different rules.

What if Nyar is a second universe on his own, and the abominations he sends are the worlds inside his body? That’s why they return to him after death. What are his rules if he doesn’t work based on space and time? It didn’t take Gojo long to make a guess and call Yog to make sure he was right.

To his surprise, he was spot on. Nyar’s true nature was a being similar to AO, an existence capable of birthing a whole universe from nothing. Unlike AO, who created space and time, set rules, and made a hard universe, Nyar was the opposite of that: he was a dreamer.

Nyar’s universe was unstable, chaotic, and volatile like dreams; he was asleep, an outer horror that never woke up, and the abominations were just figments of his nightmares. That is why they all were different, had strange powers, and almost made no sense.

If Nyar was asleep and dreaming, and his nightmares were coming true, then this avatar was just that, a lucid dream of that outer horror. So, how to defeat it? Wake him up.

Gojo immediately told Arad about what he found out and made it clear that they have to either surprise, hurt, scare, or baffle the avatar enough to shake Nyar’s true self and cause the nightmare to end. Of course, that was simpler said than done; they didn’t even think Nyar could feel pain or understand it.

That meant they had one choice, and that was to scare him. And of course, scaring an eldritch horror like Nyar was impossible enough to sound like a joke. Which once again caused Gojo to return to Yog and ask her about how to go about it.

As expected, it was impossible. Nyar has no emotions similar to those of the people of AO’s universe, and it was the reason Yog didn’t hate the bastard; she just wanted him gone. Usually, an avatar could be killed by waking the host vessel, killing them, or doing whatever was needed to break their connection to Nyar’s mind. The problem today is that they didn’t know who Nyar is using as a vessel, and Nyar seemed to be willing to waste a lot of his energy out of spite.

To win this fight, they had to either figure out who Nyar’s vessel is and reach them, or make this entire mess not worth his effort.