The dragon's harem

Arad flew through the obsidian tower like a shadow, unseen and unheard. The halls were painted red by the faint glow of the marching Lava Spawns patrolling the area. Even when putting all of its focus on facing the demon army, Damnation never let her guard down, making sure she had eyes to watch the only entrance to the volcano’s throat.

This whole place, the Kingdom of the Volcanic Titans, was built above one massive volcano called the Boiling Hell. Its crater spanned over ten thousand kilometers across and was full of lava. That was the Lava pool the Kingdom was built upon.

This obsidian tower rests directly above the hole where all of that lava comes from, the hole that leads directly to the bowls of the earth. That is why the throat of Boiling Hell was also called Gaia’s throat. Some Titans even speculated that it leads straight into the underworld.

“Gaia’s buttcrack and Gaia’s throat, are the Titans serious? What’s next?” Arad looked at the boiling pool of lava in front of him. Inside the Obsidian tower was a smaller pool of lava that was only two kilometers across. Massive for humans and just a tiny tube for the Titans.

Doma laughed in Arad’s head, {Well, of course, Gaia’s Perking Nipples.}

Arad froze, “Stop it! They aren’t that stupid.”

{You know what’s funny? I’m not joking. That’s where the Stone Titans live.} Doma couldn’t stop laughing. {It’s hard to believe, I know. But now, please focus on killing Damnation first. We’ll then go and see what that place looks like, OK?}

Arad shook his head and reached down, putting his hand into the boiling lava. It was so hot that even the most fire-resistant clothes that he had would burn to ash. This only left him with one choice: to swim without them.

Arad was quite lucky as his scales could shift to look like clothes, even though no one was around. He had gotten used to wearing clothes when in his humanoid form, even though he wasn’t wearing any in his draconic form.

Arad then jumped into the lava and started swimming downward at a horrifying speed, considering the density of lava being close to molten metal. He had one thought in mind: this was sure easier than digging through solid stone. The only problem was the heat.

Arad was unnaturally resistant to heat, thanks to his void. All of his vital organs are not in the cavity of his humanoid body but are stored in the deep void of his stomach. He can then use ice magic inside his stomach to cool the blood flowing out of his heart and into his limbs to make his blood work as a coolant.

Arad’s resistance to heat and fire was even stronger than that since heat needed a medium to travel through. This means that if he slowly releases some void through his scales to coat his body, he can reduce the heat damage even further- as if he is wearing a protective suit.

That tactic quickly proved almost fatal to Arad. He needed to cool his blood to an extreme degree and accelerate his heartbeat to keep cooling his limbs, which in turn meant that ice-cold blood was flowing to all of his organs and gave him the most painful brain freeze he felt in his life.

Being forced to stop, Arad took a few seconds to think of a solution while enduring the pain. It took him almost half a minute to realize that he might be able to do something. As a Pricolici, he has two hearts, and his blood control is far superior to any vampire. He knows that because even Akasha can’t match him.

Arad decided to try something daring. One heart would pump cold blood to his limbs, and the other would pump warm blood to his organs. He had to carefully control the blood flow with his blood magic, but it wasn’t something impossible, just painfully hard and daunting.

To an outside observer, Arad seemed impervious to the heat, immune to its searing thermal energy. He swam in it as if he was born in the depths of the volcano, but that was far from the truth. Most of his unimaginable power was just the combination of his skills and improvising.

The swim to the bottom of the volcano won’t be short, but Arad was nothing if not a great swimmer, an all-terrain assault monster. A predator that can hunt in the sky as well as he could on the ground or in the depths of the sea.

Of course, the throat of the volcano was filled with monsters. Several Lava Krakens and massive sharks swam through it. There were even some baby bloops swimming around like sardines. Arad preferred to avoid them by both changing the color of his to bright orange like the lava and activating his Void Presence whenever he could.

Arad finally reached what looked like the bottom of the volcano’s throat, a hard floor of strange bedrock that was filled with holes like Swiss cheese. Each hole was about three to four meters wide, far too small for any Titan to slip through. It was a good thing that Arad could turn into a human, and it was even better that he was a master of size magic as well.

But that had left him worried a bit. Arad thought that the throat of the volcano was a straight line downward based on what Tempo told him. Damnation was large since that thing took over Vulkan’s body. From what Arad saw, she was at least eighteen kilometers tall. Even her hair won’t fit through those holes.

Did Damnation go through here? Is there a secret passage that he missed? He might as well be swimming into a trap that’s made to filter anything that isn’t her. Only she knows the way, so anyone who gets lost isn’t here on her command.

Arad stopped and didn’t venture further into the holes. Instead, he tried to carefully expand his senses forward, making sure not to trigger any magical traps or let anything notice his magic. Soon, his fears were confirmed.

Those holes end in a relatively large room filled with monsters, magic traps, and killing arrays of incinerating heat. He had missed the entrance along the way.

^Can you blame me? I can’t see through lava.^