The dragon's harem

Arad and Core clashed, sending shockwaves across the whole battlefield. For now, their fight was purely physical, with magic used as support only by Arad, because Core didn’t need buffs to match his speed.

Arad was already faster than most people, but he was getting faster each second. The longer he fought Core, the more he saw of the first elf’s dance and learned from him.

Arad had long realised that he couldn’t match Core in speed and strength, and that even with Dalla’s slapping art, he had no chance of winning. His only hope of achieving victory was to learn Core’s dance and use it to slap him back.

Right now, Arad’s main strategy has shifted from trying to win to bolstering his defences to endure as much punishment as possible while observing Core’s every move.

Core moved like a dexterous snake, as if he had no joints. His arms twisted in weird ways, his knees turned backward, and he seemed to be able to turn his head all the way back and fight Arad backward.

But as Arad was fighting him, he made the unfortunate mistake of forgetting what this slender elf was made from: wood, vines, and twigs. Because the moment Arad tried to get some distance to allow his blood healing to regenerate his torn muscles, Core’s arm elongated to over fifty meters and smacked him in the face.

“Your limbs can extend?” Arad gasped, and Core landed with a large smile on his face.

The drummer above them started drumming, and Core laughed, “Of course, have you forgotten? I’m the child of Yggdrasil, the Great World Tree of space that extends to every world. Do you think my arms can’t reach you just because you’ve got a few feet away?”

Core started spinning his arm with a grin and then threw his fist at Arad, causing his arm to extend like a piece of dough. Arad dodged the first, only to see Core bolting toward him like a ball shot from a slingshot.

Arad spun, engulfed his whole arm in a tough barrier that blocks almost all bludgeoning damage, and tried to cut Core in half with an elbow slam.

Core didn’t dodge the attack because he was the one flying at Arad. Instead, his body curved around Arad’s arm like a U, and his two halves elongated like an elastic band.

Core’s body then spun around Arad, trying to contort around him like a snake. Arad had to move fast and strain his joints to slip out before Core could catch him. Hearing the man’s high-pitched giggles, the weird sound his muscles and bones made while stretching that resmbled tearing wood, and feeling the strange magic he inherited from his mother, Arad knew that he was in for a long fight.

As Core’s body contorted on itself, failing to catch Arad, the elf looked at his empty hands with a smile. “You slipped out?”

Arad clenched his fist and swung at Core’s hand with his full might, hitting him right in the temple and sending his head flying back at blinding speed. At first, Arad thought that he had beheaded Core, but soon he saw that the man’s neck was still attached to his head, just stretched over a hundred meters away.

In the short time it took Arad to process that an elastic band would just shoot back, Core’s head was already an inch away from his nose, and he got hit with the nastiest headbutt he had ever received in his life. The full power of Arad’s punch was shot right back at his face.

Unlike Core, Arad was both heavy and resilient. He didn’t get sent back, and only his head recoiled a bit. “Shat hursh!” Arad growled through his caved nose and glared at Core, only to see his head bouncing back and coming for a second hit, then a third, and a fourth. By the fifth headbutt, Arad’s body was on the ground with his head drilled into the wooden floor.

“Come on. I know you can do better.” Core smiled, his whole body pulsed and burned with radiant emerald divine magic, the holy power of Yggdrasil.

Arad growled, and his crushed face healed. “AH, it’s not simple to understand your move set and find counters when you’re moving like a rabid snake.” Arad’s muscles expanded, and the veins on his legs and arms bulged.

He stood, the ground beneath his feet shattering as purple flames burned from his whole torso.

Core smiled, his long golden hair dancing with the wind. “This is more like it.”

Arad suddenly disappeared. He used a void step to teleport behind Core to smack him down. Core turned around at terrifying speed and glared at Arad with a grin that extended from one ear to the other. He could see it, Arad’s arm extending backward, growing to be several meters long.

Gravity magic pulled Arad’s fist and Core’s face closer at blinding speed, causing a shockwave powerful enough to throw Diana and Mathilde back.

The void was effectively shapeless; only Arad’s shapeshift into a human form gave it a semblance of order. Even Arad’s void form, which took a rough humanoid shape, didn’t need to look human, as Arad only needed to turn into pure void.

Arad and Core kept fighting; now Arad was trying to mimic Core’s dance, including his stretchy body and elastic limbs. Diana could only watch the fight with a pale face. This was her first time seeing Arad’s harrowing learning speed working in real time, but Mathilde wasn’t that surprised.

Mathilde understood exactly what Core’s goal was. He wanted to give back to Arad what he learned from him.

It was AO who taught Core how to dance when he was young; he was the one who created the elaborate dance in the early days of the universe. Right now, Core only wants to make his grandpa remember the dance.

After seeing this, Mathilde found herself guessing another thing about the gods’ plan for Arad. The reason they were sending him around the whole universe wasn’t to save the countless worlds; they needed to create a situation where they could teach him back his powers, just like how Core is doing now.

All of those lessons will condition Arad and get him ready to regain his full power. The only thing getting in the gods’ way is that they couldn’t tell Arad what they were actually doing or who he was.

She only then understood that Sylph had used her to force Arad to grow by asking her to fight him earlier, and the data they got from that was most likely relayed to Core so he could figure out if Arad is strong enough to learn his dance or not.

“I’ll kick her in the face!” Mathilde growled, and Diana looked at her with a confused face. “Who?”

“Sylph! Who else? She is behind this whole mess.” Her goddess or not, Mathilde wasn’t going to remain silent.