The dragon's harem

After several minutes of contentious fighting, Arad finally found himself managing to match Core’s fighting style and speed. But even with that, it was extremely hard to keep up with Core’s weird moves.

While Core seemed to be able to morph his body effortlessly, Arad, on the other hand, struggled to maintain his sense of self while constantly changing shape.

You’d think that only making his limbs longer wouldn’t affect his mind, but it did, and it had quite the impact. His mind was already used to piloting either a draconic body or a humanoid shape; anything outside that range was quite hard to get used to on the fly.

To add to Arad’s problem, he was forced to be in his void form to be able to match Core’s moves, which only increased the stress on his mind.

But even through all of the mental load, Arad had still managed to hold his own against Core’s dance and masterfully dodged most of the attacks while giving several punches of his own.

Arad then realised that just making his body extremely flexible wasn’t enough; he needed to extend his senses as well. Core seemed to have a way to see through the walls and ground, which allowed him to perfectly control his hands and legs even when they were out of his field of vision. In fact, Arad sometimes found it harder to deal with Core’s punches when Core himself wasn’t looking, because he couldn’t see Core’s eyes and predict his moves.

To compensate for his lack of senses, Arad used his elemental expansion to engulf the area in his magic and perceive the world in that way. That seemed to work, but Arad knew it wasn’t enough. Just because Core was holding back and not move at the speed of light, which he proved that he can do, that didn’t mean he wouldn’t. The speed of mana was capped at a third of the speed of light, which meant that perceiving something with magic was effectively three times slower than just seeing it.

That lag is usually unnoticeable in most fights, but Arad was already feeling it here. Core was intentionally slowing down and holding his attacks to throw Arad’s parries and counters out, which only added another layer to their convoluted dance.

Arad wasn’t going to lose, so he started doing the same and tried to throw Core off by changing his speed with each attack, and he even tried to mix in some void steps and time slow spell in his moves, which gave him an advantage for a while.

Core wasn’t struggling that much to keep up with Arad, but he was slowly finding it harder and harder to adjust himself to Arad’s rapid learning speed without releasing all of his power at once.

Core wasn’t here to win or prove anything; he just needed Arad to learn his dance and understand it, and he was trying to achieve that in the fastest way possible, putting Arad in a fight that forced him to learn.

Core was quite thrilled to meet his grandfather for the first time in several thousand years. He would’ve loved to sit and talk with him about everything that had happened, catch up, but neither of them was that lucky to have such a luxury. Especially Core.

Core’s whole existence and body had long since degraded, and he could only wake up and be conscious for several minutes at most each century. The best use of their precious moments was to give back the skills that his grandfather had once taught him.

Not once in his life had Core expected that a day would come when he would be the one to teach his grandfather something, but here he is, clashing with him, showing him each move and skill, forcing him to come up with solutions and tricks to further enhance his powers.

Core didn’t mention it, but not using his light speed wasn’t just for Arad’s sake, but so he could hopefully stay awake for a few seconds longer, so they could possibly have even a small conversation at the end.

Sadly, there was too much for Core to show Arad, all of the moves, their counters, uses, and effects with spells like Time Slow.

Soon, Arad’s move grew sharper as he decided to mix two things into Core’s dance to gain an advantage. He took the skills and fighting style of Dalla and Mathilde, mixed them together with the dance, and shoved them all in Core’s face.

Arad’s whole body moved with Core’s flexibility, speed, and complexity, while his hands slapped with Dalla’s fighting style, and his legs kicked with Mathilde’s martial arts, turning Arad into a walking storm of violence, deadly attacks, and unpredictable outbursts of rapid combos.

With all of that power and speed, he was still lagging behind Core. Each kick or slap that Arad tried to throw ended up with him being either countered or completely dodged. The one thing that Core had and Arad didn’t was several thousand years of combat experience. Core seemed to know a way to counter almost all of Arad’s attacks as if he had seen them before, which was quite frustrating.

He wanted to use magic in an offensive way, but didn’t know how Core would react to that. With Arad knowing that Core is holding back from using his light speed, he would be just asking for trouble if he went overboard.

But, there was something that Arad found to help him a lot in this fight, and it was the rhythm of the music the band of angels were playing above them. Core was dancing to its tunes, which should’ve made his whole moveset predictable, but it wasn’t.

That didn’t have anything to do with Core’s power, but it was Arad’s fault. Even though Isdis was a bard and had a lot of knowledge about music, Arad didn’t. It was a language that he failed to understand. He could ask Isdis for help, but it’s already too late. There is no way she can teach him anything useful in the middle of this fight. He isn’t even sure that she can keep up and understand Core’s music.

^I should get Isdis to teach me to play some tunes later.^ He dodged Core’s attacks, sensing that their battle was reaching its end. The music grew louder and faster, Core’s whole dancing style had changed, and he seemed to be ready for one last move.

“I see, we’re ending this now, aren’t we?” Arad stopped moving and took a stance, ready to strike back at anything that Core would throw at him.

Core, on the other hand, smiled, “Yes, this dance, it can’t last any longer.”