The dragon’s harem

As the blinding pulsar flashed, it washed over Arad and evaporated the outer crust of the universe in an instant. As it roared into the dark outer void, Amaterasu and the other goddesses had to back away to safety, as such a release of power was something that not many of the gods could display. In fact, if any other divine saw Eris pull that out, they would’ve shat themselves and run away.

At this point, everyone knew of Amaterasu’s power, but due to how powerful she was, they were already numb to it and couldn’t fathom it. But for Eris, it was a different matter. This pulsar she had just unleashed had such a powerful magnetic field due to the charged particles that it could evaporate the mortal world if it were anywhere nearby, and from sheer power, she could probably send even someone as powerful as that Void Dragon Taurus to the infirmary if he were hit directly.

The Neutron Star’s mass was also powerful enough to bend space and twist time. It had such a powerful gravity that escaping it was impossible, and that beam had already extended to millions of kilometres long in just a few seconds.

Eris had shown enough power that if she were to walk into the front lines, the Elder Void Dragons and the archons would bow to her, and even other lesser gods wouldn’t have a choice but to follow her orders. The other dragons can’t even see her as a potential partner or a woman any longer, because she has just eclipsed them all.

But if even the gods’ armies had to dodge the pulsar, then what of Arad? What happened to him? He got hit directly, and it didn’t look like he tried to dodge the relatively thin beam. To know what is happening to him, we must go back a single second into the past, when the beam first launched as the Neutron Star exploded.

Arad didn’t see the flash yet; since the beam moved near the speed of light, it would arrive at the same time Arad sees the burst. But what he could sense was the collapse of space as a result of the Neutron Star’s gravity failing to hold it together.

As the black hole rested in front of him, its immense gravity bent the fabric of space and time, forming what looked like a shield that sucked everything into the black hole, but Arad knew that it wouldn’t be enough. A black hole the size of an apple is just not wide enough to effectively absorb the entire pulsar at once, so Arad can’t just hide behind it.

Using everything that he knows about magic, the black hole, and his elemental expansion at the end, Arad compressed everything into a rose shaped shield of countless layers of dense void, and since using this level of magic wasn’t possible in his humanoid form, he had turn back into his massive draconic form and use every scale on his body to form the barrier, make it bigger, denser, and stronger.

In a flash, the pulsar washed over him, and his void endured at first, refusing to be filled with the dense matter beam. The black hole stood effortlessly, consuming everything that dared touch it, but Arad himself was quickly heating up and feeling his void about to be blown away.

This was the weakness of his void, and it was a copious amount of matter. He has a limit to how much matter he can consume and devour that is linked to his draconic age, and if he were to be hit with more matter than he can eat, it’ll overwhelm his void and damage him.

He could feel his limbs, which were made of nothing, being filled and torn apart by the dense matter beam, and it was painful, far more painful than Dalla’s slaps. He couldn’t maintain the stability of space with the pulzar’s gravity and magnetic field interfering; he couldn’t use time magic since the fabric of time itself was torn apart, and what was just a fraction of a second felt like years to him.

The black hole still endured, and if not for it, Arad would’ve died long ago, but with it in front of him, he was able to endure and keep his form, pushing forward with his claws with a silent roar that was muffled by the loud pulsar.

Then, his body was blown away, erased even if he was in his void form, so he made another incarnation, and it was blown away as well, a while after. One after one, Arad kept losing bodies and creating new ones, forcing himself to stand in the beam and waiting for it to end, but it never did.

To him, what was a single second in reality had lasted over ten years, with how messed the fabric of time was, and it was so long that at some point, his mind stopped working, and it was only his instincts that remained active, resisting the power of the pulsar.

His energy ran dry, his mana was consumed whole, and even his mental fortitude had weakened, but when he thought he had been squeezed dry, power started to flow back into him out of nothing. His soul burned, and his body swelled with an energy that once was his primary power source.

It was dark, heavy, alien, and familiar at the same time.

Then, as quickly as it started, the beam, the deadly pulsar, stopped. Eris’s charred body fell, and she was already fading away into golden dust, having exhausted all of her power and abused her divine body beyond its limit.

She should’ve won. Arad should be dead. He should be burned and not even his ashes should’ve survived. She was worried about him, but he has an incarnation in the abyss, so he should reappear there.

Amaterasu saw her falling, so she floated down to catch her with her cloud. If Eris were to hit the ground, she’d probably splatter into ashes, and Amaterasu wanted to speak with her a bit before she had to recover in her heaven.

But at that moment, Eris fully disappeared, and even Amaterasu couldn’t track where she had gone. She froze for a second, then shouted. “ERIS! ERIS!”

Kali and the other goddess immediately understood that something had gone wrong, and it didn’t take them a second to realize what it was.

Down on the ground, a massive five-meters-tall man was standing, holding Eris in his arms. They saw him, and paled.

That titanic body, those chiselled muscles, the long and bushy black beard, and the hair that reached his shoulders. When he glared right back at them, they only saw endless darkness burning in his eyes, a darkness so deep that it dwarfed the abyss.

Eris disappeared into golden sparks in his arms, and he absorbed them into his stomach as he looked at the endless outer void, then at the universe at his feet.

“Who are you?” The one to speak first was Zaleria, the daughter of the Flame Goddess and one of the heroes of the old war. She was the one to cripple Nyar’s true body, and here she stood, glaring at Arad with burning eyes.

Unlike before, Arad’s body wasn’t engulfed by either mana, divine magic, or anything that belonged to the universe. All that dripped from his body now was a dense, rock-hard torrent of tar-like eldritch magic, one that rivaled the Avatars of Nyar and might even surpass them.

The eldritch energy was so dense that the armies of the gods were already swarming the place, thinking that Nyar had finally shown his true face, and it was dark enough that while looking at Arad, Zaleria could barely see his face.

Standing alone, surround by the majority of the gods’ armies, Arad looked at them, and many where just shitting themselves. Was this even the Arad they knew?