The dragon's harem

Chapter 2074: The Fuse is Lit

With how fast everyone moved, one second felt like several minutes long, and the ten-second clash that took place before Kali could make it there felt far too long to be endured. As the thousands of tentacles thrashed like a storm of whips, Merida lifted her sword to block just one of them, but she was far too slow to catch it.

Her arms moved, but they were too slow. The tentacle approached her head at blinding speed, and there were still hundreds of tentacles coming after. Her muscles tensed, and her tendons endured enough force that they were on the verge of tearing, yet she still couldn’t accelerate fast enough.

She, who was a powerful demon lord whom the maids couldn’t even touch without getting hurt, now found herself unable to keep up. She was too slow, too weak, too fragile to stand on this battlefield.

Then, it came, a massive fist moving fast enough to ignite the air and shatter its structure. Arad punched the coming tentacle with enough force to blow it to pieces, and then moved his arms so fast that they became a blur to Merida, and the sound they made ripping through the tentacle swarm was loud enough to drop her to her knees.

Arad wanted to swallow Merida into his stomach to keep her safe, but that won’t help in this situation. Her body here was nothing but a projection of her true nature. She was the entire layer, the mycelium hivemind controlling this entire place.

Arad, Nyar, and Cain were technically clashing inside her body, and if they were to burn this entire layer to the ground, she could very well die.

Arad glared at the clash with a raging frown and grabbed one of Cain’s tentacles instead of tearing it apart. "GET THE FUCK OUT!" With a single pull, Arad put as much force as he could, but before that force could pull Cain toward him, the slimy former overcut cut that tentacle like a lizard and saved himself.

Cain wasn’t getting out of this layer willingly, and Nyar’s avatar couldn’t use his all since he needed to both keep Cain at bay and make sure they didn’t wreck the layer and kill Merida. The endless and violent storm of daunting black tentacles grew harsher by the fraction of a second, as for every one of Cain’s tentacles that they destroyed, ten more showed up.

The ground ripped apart, the area around them was minced, and with each tentacle moving faster than any whip could, the force generated by their tips was enough to evaporate anything they hit. This was far from what Nyar’s avatar used against Eris’s butterflies, and by this scale, they’ll soon reach a critical point where neither can hold back.

To fight against tentacles and whips, getting close was a must, so Arad didn’t need to tell Merida what to do. She immediately followed him as he started moving closer and closer to where Nyar and Cain were clashing, and she found herself unable to even react to the tentacles.

Could she take one hit if she blocked it with her sword? Probably. But there is no way she can react in time with how fast and weird they moved. The fact that Arad was already blocking, deflecting, and slashing tens of them each fraction of a second made one thing clear.

He was built differently from anyone else. Arad wasn’t fast enough to react to the tips of the tentacles that moved near the speed of light, but he could clearly see their base, predict their paths, and use that information to just barely be able to hold them back. He was operating at a level that none of his wives could understand.

Another second had passed, and Arad had already returned to his full size of five meters. In his hands, he held a sword longer than his own body, swinging it with harrowing speed that Merida couldn’t even see it. To her, it was just a dark blue that twisted the very fabric of reality.

That was the blade made from his black hole, and of course it was. Arad had no other weapon that could handle the harrowing stress of this titanic clash. Any other weapon would’ve shattered after blocking just a single tentacle.

At this point, fighting with hands alone was getting difficult, and Arad knew that he wouldn’t be able to keep resisting for long, and by long he meant another second. He was already pushing himself too far by fighting in his relatively weak human form, and it wasn’t like he could just turn into a dragon. First, that would take a long time by the scale of this clash, and it would just make him a bigger target.

When fighting Eris’s butterflies, he pulled Nyar’s avatar out to swat the butterflies down with his tentacles, and he intended to make the gods think he was the one doing the work. It worked that time, but now, even Nyar’s avatar cannot easily hold Cain back.

If Arad wanted Merida to survive this fight, he had to take drastic measures. "I SAID. GET OUT!" Arad growled with his eyes burned with pure darkness, and for that fraction of a second, Cain looked toward him, and then, blood gushed out of his nose, eyes, and ears.

The entire layer shook, the ground trembled, and darkness started burning out of the cracks as an endless flood of demonic magic started bursting out. That flood of demonic darkness turned into a writing flood of flesh, blood and bones that expanded like a tide, pushing the tentacles back and swallowing all of Merida’s demons, then birthing right back up as stronger demons.

This all happened in just a fraction of a second, so Nyar’s avatar couldn’t even understand what Arad just did, but Cain was smart and quick enough to find out even while getting actively rejected out of the abyss. Arad’s words were an absolute order to the abyss itself, and the abyss now was overreacting to try to get rid of Cain as fast as possible.

Even Merida found it hard to understand. At this moment, she was no longer the demon lord of this layer. Arad had forcefully robbed that title from her and taken command of the demons, but what was felt stranger was that his dominion over the layer was far greater than hers or that of the previous demon lord.

Arad was doing what only Kali should be able to do. Even if he was her husband, he shouldn’t be able to directly command the abyss. To Cain’s eyes, that only meant one thing. Arad was already fully aware of his own existence.

"The Abyss alone won’t be able to slow me down!" Cain shouted with a smile on his face, and it was then that he became paler. Arad was no longer a man, a woman, or a dragon. He had already soaked the abyss’s demonic magic and had now become a writhing mass of black void and darkness.

Twelve arms, three heads, a jet-black body, eyes of pure darkness, and a soul so foul it didn’t even need to shine.

The abyss had the power to kick Cain out, but its vessel, Kali, was still far away and wouldn’t make it in time. To solve that, Arad had suggested that the abyss use his own body as a vessel, and what was born was something that hadn’t seen the brilliance of existence since the dawn of time.

When Nyar’s avatar saw that form, he recognized her immediately. This was the body of the first demon god, the being that died and whose womb became the abyss itself. Kali is Destruction herself, but this life of hers, Kali, isn’t her first life. She had existed as far back as the dawn of time, and of course, at that time, she wasn’t called Kali, or just Destruction.

"Myno..." Cain growled, and Nyar’s avatar gasped, "Cousin?!"