The dragon’s harem

As Arad remained on the ground, Nyar’s tentacles whipped around him faster than sound, deflecting the butterflies’ attacks and killing the weaker ones and bringing their corpses closer, and the abomination growled.

“You know… it is hard even for me to fight with such a lower power.” Nyar’s avatar growled, and Arad looked at him. “Only use the power I gave you. The fight is between Eris and me; it would be cheating to use your own power.”

Nyar chuckled, “You say that, but you used Kali’s spear to kill Katal’s incarnation. But I do understand. It is just that… there are a lot of those bugs for me to handle with such a puny amount of energy.”

Arad looked at the blood splashing around them, the endless swarm of titanic butterflies, and the raging black tentacles of Nyar. Even at such a low power level, Arad was able to output enough destruction to rival S-rank monsters, which was a big problem. He even summoned a fragment of an Eldritch God.

It meant that even if he was still mortal, his power clearly didn’t reflect that. Yet, he was still going to show off more. The more butterflies he killed and brought him, the more energy Arad could regenerate, and now, he could start summoning them, his soldiers.

From his shadow, dark creatures started emerging in groups. They were the monsters, bandits, and abominations he killed before and absorbed; those souls, he had now granted them void bodies to fight.

A fat black rat, a titanic snake, a dark shadow, and millions of horrifying scorpions and flying demonic monsters. But what shifted the scales of the battle was that Damnation showed up, and with her came torrents of incandescent flames. Today, she was thrilled, as not only was she fighting for AO, but by her father’s side as well, or at least a piece of him.

While Damnation was happy to get a piece of the universe, no matter how small it was, she was even happier to know that AO was even willing to extend that back to Nyar’s avatars. It meant that even if her father was to perish one day, the abominations he leaves behind might not have to perish with him.

“Arad.” Nyar’s avatar walked toward Arad as his tentacles still moved all around the place. “We’ve gone past the threshold. From here on, your army can hold on without me. But I’ll warn you.” He threw a glance up toward the divines.

“Don’t stare too much at them, just listen to me. See how Yog is holding her staff and how the gem on her forehead is dark blue? She knows what I am, and she probably knows that you’re aware of yourself as AO.” Nyar smiled beneath his hood. “But it isn’t the way you think it is.”

Nyar approached Arad and whispered in his ear. “She cannot see or know of what AO is doing, of what you’re doing or going to cause. But she can simulate and guess your actions and their outcome by studying the empty void you leave on fate. You can trust her to a certain extent, but one wrong move and she’ll turn on you and wipe your memory. In fact, I believe she might’ve already wiped your memory a few times by now, or at least did something to change the course of your life. Look back, and try to guess since I can’t do that for you.”

As Nyar faded away back into Arad’s soul, the second phase of Eris’s arm was already ramping up. Instead of just attacking, the butterflies were actively trying to drag Arad into the afterlife, into the river of death.

The way they did it was both strange and horrifying. The will of murder itself helped. The first aspect of Eris’s power seen in the past was the ability to magnify wounds and injuries into more gruesome and fatal wounds, and that was exactly how the butterflies were now trying to do.

Every wound, no matter how tiny a scratch, would fester and explode into a torrent of blood. That had made all of the butterflies’ attacks fatal, and even the strongest and most durable of Arad’s void creatures ended up dead after one or two hits, forcing him to waste more energy to give them new bodies and summon them.

The only ones who managed to survive the butterflies’ onslaught were Nyar’s avatar and Damnation, who were on a whole other level of power.

To combat that, Arad decided to shift all of his focus and power away from himself into his army, so they could easily challenge the butterflies. At this point, his body, this one incarnation, had fully healed physically, and so, he used a constellation that he hadn’t touched in months.

[Taurus] This was the constellation that sealed all of his magic and gave him a massive physical boost. But today, Arad decided to use it in a more creative way that might seem like cheating. What if one incarnation used the constellation, and the others didn’t?

It was just as Arad expected: that incarnation would get a physical boost, and other incarnations would still be able to use magic.

Arad stood, roared, and summoned a massive hunk of raw iron, reinforced it with the barriers Kayden taught him, and then activated [Taurus] on himself while hiding one incarnation among the endless soldiers of his army to keep supplying them with magic.

Almost four meters tall, built like a muscular bison, and with the attitude of a chainsaw. Arad’s scream boomed across the entire battlefield, drowning the cacophony of the horrid battle as he leapt into the sky and shattered the head of one of the massive butterflies with a single swing of his blade.

“That was a smart idea. Those butterflies would find him harder to track as a small humanoid without any magic, and they won’t even find the body controlling the army unless Eris herself returns to the battlefield, at which point Arad can just ambush her from the chaos.” Yog stored her staff away as she sat on Amaterasu’s cloud.

“Of course, that would work. But what comes when Eris returns is the deadly part that killed me. Arad can wither this stage, but he’ll suffer in the next one.” Amaterasu looked at Kali, “I hope you trained him well.”

“Well, I had one of my archons show him to vibrate!” Kali said proudly, and Yog looked at her with a smug face. “I’m pretty sure that’s useful in bed, but not here.”

“You can say that all you want, but let’s see how you laugh when he punches something a thousand times a second.” Kali puffed her chest, and Yog chuckled.

“I know what a jackhammer is.”

Kali and Amaterasu looked at her, confused, “What’s a jackhammer?”

“Ah, you two won’t know. It’s a tool that can be used for demolition. I can ask Mellinimus to build one, since that thing is a machine.”

The butterflies’ swarm was massive and had no end in sight. Arad slashed them one after another and jumped from one wing to another, tearing apart anything in his path. He was fast, strong, and nimble. Having all of his draconic power compressed into a humanoid body allowed him to move in inhuman ways, and Taurus only powered him further.

It seems that he was right; those butterflies have good eyesight, so even while hiding his magic signal, they were still able to track him relatively well. So, to combat that, he started breaking the constellation’s power and abusing it even further.

By constructing and deconstructing his incarnations, he could remove the constellation’s effect and reactivate it as many times as he wanted, so… he’ll fight with amplified raw power when he wants, and then switch back to magic the moment he needs it, which was already putting a huge strain on his mind.

And it was then that the entire battle froze as a titanic being emerged from the pure darkness, a dark shape so massive that its mere eye looked bigger than many worlds. “So, you’re Orion’s little fucker. Aren’t you abusing my power a bit too much?”

That massive thing was a void dragon, an Elder Void dragon, and the one called Taurus. Out of all the void dragons, he was the largest and physically strongest.