The dragon's harem

Arad put his hand on the scorpion’s head and closed his eyes. The monster froze and shuddered, sensing something immense touch his soul. It was a strange feeling, it was neither painful nor pleasant, just… it felt like nothing, drifting into a slumber.

The monster’s body fell to the ground, soulless. Arad was surprised, he had just tried to reach forward and touch the soul, not consume it. But before he could feel sad about killing the little scorpion, he could feel something stirr inside his soul.

Closing his eyes, Arad quickly looked at the massive black hole that was his soul. Orbiting it, he could see the scorpion’s soul.

Just like how he could put food inside his stomach and not digest it, he could now also put souls inside his soul without consuming them. He flew closer and looked at it, seeing a faint crack on the scorpion’s burning soul; the extraction must’ve damaged it a bit.

Arad then opened his eye and extended his hand forward, testing if he could drag the soul out. If he could do that, then he might be able to just put Shi and Doma in something that isn’t his soul.

To his surprise, at that moment, a black wave of nothing rushed from his fingers. Consuming the air and ground, erasing everything until a black silhouette of a massive scorpion appeared.

Both Arad and Nina stared at the scorpion with open eyes. This was the same thing he did earlier when he stored Kussuth’s flame in a sphere of void before giving it to Mira. But he didn’t expect that it would take the shape of a scorpion if he put the soul of a scorpion inside.

With the cave being crammed now that two towering scorpions were inside, the poor void scorpion looked at its dead body… another crack immediately appeared on its soul from the sheer terror of seeing its soul-evacuated body.

Before the scorpion could start panicking, Arad snatched its soul again and took it inside his soul. He then touched the scorpion’s corpse and shoved the soul back in it. Quickly, the creature came back to life, plagued by a harrowing agony, and its soul cracked.

The scorpion weezed and dropped to the ground. He glared at Arad with a sad, terrified face. He, at least, wasn’t dead, and he had suffered worse before.

^Doma, what do you think?^ Arad immediately asked the only one beside him who knew anything useful about magic, and she replied after a long pause.

{You were first able to consume souls, now you can take and give them back. You can also give souls a body made of the void, but I doubt that thing would feel like a real body, more like a shell of nothing.} She paused for a while.

{I take that back, I don’t think I understand that shell well enough. But one thing was clear: everything you did had damaged the scorpion’s soul. The monster is strong and its soul is powerful, but it was still damaged. Either you’re clumsy, or it is just a fact of the process. This means that if you tried this with the soul of a mundane human, you’ll end up shattering it.}

^You’re strong enough to withstand it, right?^

{I won’t risk it. At least until we find a suitable way to repair the soul, and understand what the damage might do in the future.}

Doma was right, but they have a case of someone whose soul got damaged, and he is now fine. Arad himself. He stated that, and Doma sighed.

{Arad, do I have to tell you that you’re abnormal? I’ll sleep on this and see what I can think of. You have another PRESSING matter to attend to.} Her voice quickly faded from his mind.

He blinked and looked back at the fire.

“What did you find?” Nina asked, and he came back to his senses. After a long pause, he explained everything to her, and she gave him a long look. What he did indeed sounded like an extension of his ability to consume souls. But that power still didn’t look like something that anyone should be able, or allowed to do.

The two of them remained silent for a while, thinking about that power. But after several minutes, they both calmed down, and a realisation came to Nina. “I… lost the fight.”

Arad looked at her and thought about it for a moment. “Depends on how you see it. I defeated your body, not you. Even as cunning as that was, it wasn’t driven by a human’s mind and desire. You can say that you still haven’t lost to me yet.”

Nina looked at him in silence, and then a smile appeared on her face. “No, I’ve lost. This is a first in a long, long time.” She looked at the fire, “How many years has it been?”

Her face then turned toward him, “I know I promised, but we should go… You know, the others?”

A smile covered Arad’s face, “They already know. A lot happened.” As Arad explained everything that happened since they headed to the beast land, Nina rose from the bed and slowly approached him and sat on his thigh. It was then that she interrupted his story with a pale face.

Arad couldn’t tell if she was excited and blushing, or if she was terrified and pale. But he understood one thing: something had stunned her for a few seconds.

“I’m a pretty huge woman, you know?” Nina gasped. She was indeed tall and muscular, standing at almost 1.9 meters (6 feet 2 inches). Yet, she somehow looked small on his thigh, “How…”

It was then that Arad remembered that he wasn’t making himself smaller with size magic. The barbarian clothes he had were flexible enough to stretch and fit him. He was now a three-meter-tall giant (10 feet)

She jumped down and pulled him by the hand to stand. There, she finally got a look at him. Her face was right at his belly button. Several thoughts raced through her mind, some scary and some confusing. But one thing made her giggle. “Is this how Betty sees normal people?”

Arad smiled, and his body grew smaller. Soon, he was as tall as Nina, and then he grew even shorter until he was the height of a halfling. He looked up at her with a smile. “You’re right, this is a strange view at the world.”

By that time, the scorpion had crawled outside to feast on the corpses of the dead monsters. He also needs to rest and recover after Arad ripped his soul out of his body.

Nina sat down on the bed and closed her eyes, thinking. “Give me a few moments.”

“What is it?” Arad grew back to Nina’s height and sat beside the fire.

She looked at him with a serious face. “A matter of pride.”