The dragon's harem

As the fairies advanced, the Great Thundercloud Plum World Tree above them flashed with pink light, letting its flowers fall like rain. A thousand billion blossoming pink petals of radiance danced like blades, washing over the land in a flood, cutting and tearing everything in their way to pieces.

Some petals were no bigger than a fairy’s fingernail, and some were as massive as city blocks, all rained down like a flood, shredding the lands and mountains into fine sand, painting the crust of the plant red with the clones’ blood.

As the world-ending puff of petals passed and spread, the fairies rushed into the devastated land to save lives, their eyes gleaming with sadistic malice. They weren’t here to grant the clones respite, but they were to make sure they never die and become something stronger.

It was already a violent and cruel blood bath. Only with this, Plum was already displaying her power as a Spirit Queen, flexing the power of her magic, armies, connections, and unadulterated lack of human morals.

But the one who was most terrified, to the point of shaking in her throne and almost pissing herself from horror, was Plum herself. Watching her own power causing unimaginable carnage made her rethink and regret every single word and breath she spoke in front of Yggdrasil. If she could do this, what in the ever-living hell would Yggdrasil be capable of if she went off the deep end and snapped?

One would shudder to imagine her doing just what Plum is doing, but to the entire universe at once instead of just one world.

Plum’s right and left hand spirits were standing beside her, looking at a massive wooden branch.

“Mana output stable at 10%, shall we increase it?” The right-hand spirit asked with a stern face.

“Give it another second, our troops need to move out of the way. They are slow because they need to move the captured clones.” The left-hand spirit added with a sweaty face.

Both of them were shaking, their knees barely holding them upright. Plum had become a Spirit Queen only recently and recruited the plant spirits of Yog’s world to her service. None of them had seen a Spirit Queen going all out; they only thought they were powerful spirits.

Now, they were seeing the true might of their queen unveiling, and it made them shiver. They remember the days they were going around the forest together as pixies, fooling around, pranking people, harvesting nectar, and singing. But now, she was able to do so much violence that it made them barely able to see her as the same person.

“Everything is clear; raising the mana output should be safe.”

Plum growled in the back, shifting uncomfortably on her own throne.

“This feels like needles are going beneath my nails. It hurt like hell. Guess I’m not used to my full power yet.” As she sucked more and more power through her roots, the pain only grew stronger. But at the same time, the horror she was unleashing outside was about to reach a new height.

Where the flowers were, buds emerged, rapidly growing into plump and juicy plums, and those plums didn’t last long either; they withered, and the seeds fell off, spread across thousands of kilometers like meteors.

The seeds were massive, twenty to thirty meters wide on the high end, and they were dropping from above 10 kilometers in the sky, which caused them to rain like meteors, moving so fast that they evaporated the ground upon impact, causing millions of explosions to rattle the continent and shake the planet.

From the ashes and chaos, those seeds took root and rapidly grew into new plum trees. Some were titanic, standing half as tall as Plum’s World Tree, and some were as small as a regular plum tree.

But size didn’t matter; all of them were made of Plum’s Steel-hard wood, razor-sharp leaves, and roots far stronger than steel ground beams.

In minutes, an endless forest of plum trees covered thousands of kilometers around Plum’s world tree, forming a safe haven for the fairies and the green wall standing against the flood of the abominable clones.

From those trees, some moved. Pulling their roots out of the ashy ground with uncanny speed and power. They walked on two legs, turning into treants, living trees that marched forward, millions of them trampled the ground beneath their massive, calloused wooden feet.

And just when the clones thought that they saw the true horror, as if all of the devastation, torture, and seeing an endless army of marching titanic trees stomp their world flat wasn’t enough, Plum’s World tree blossomed once more, and soon, all of the forest beneath it turned pink as well, signalling the true extent of a Spirit Queen’s world ending power.

The forest would keep growing in size until it consumes the whole world.

As the clones stared at the growing plum forest consuming their world, their pale faces twisted and their eyes bled in fear. From the trees and treants, Plum was watching, glaring right at their faces with an angry glare.

Her voice boomed across the forest like the eerie rustle of leaves and the crackle of branches.

“Crush them… Crush them all!”

She could see him through their eyes, and the abomination stared back at her.

“Don’t leave a single abomination alive! Until My Arad is Found!”

The forest advanced, growing bigger with each blooming cycle, covering more of the world and ripping any clone it found to pieces, then displaying their moaning remains on its branches.

From north to south, looking from above the clouds, a sea of trees masked the world like a moss blanket, pulsing with pink veins of magic each second, with Plum’s World tree its beating heart.

“Look at her, does she even need our help?” Nar said with a grin, sitting on the back of a crying burned clone. She was the powerful witch she faced before, and now she was degraded into a crusty chair.

Gaia looked at her with a smile. “Ask another stupid question and Zephyr might just blow your flames out.” She was sitting at the summit of a mountain, looking down at the expanding forest.

Zephyr flew down from above the clouds. She had just finished spreading the seeds further away to where the trees couldn’t reach quickly.

“To answer your question. Plum can win this war on her own, but if our guesses are true. Once all the clones are dead, the true abomination would be reborn from their rotten corpses as a being that accumulates all of their power into a single horror.” She smiled. “Plum would be exhausted by then, so it’s our job to kill that thing.”

Nar frowned, punching the moaning chair witch to relieve some stress.

“Kill that thing? We can’t recover our mana, and I’m sure you noticed it; all of the elements here are poisoned with eldritch magic. We’ll die if we try to use them.” She looked at the horizon, spotting Rilyeh, who was swimming through the ocean to lift its floor up and allow the forest to spread through it.

Zephyr looked at her with a grin. The air around her shifted and moved strangely, swirling up like mist.

“Do you remember my name?”

Zephyrus Anemoi Enlil of Mei, that name alone explained why she was unlike any of them, a being of a whole different class.

Zephyr flew down and sat beside Gaia.

“I’ll be fine. But for you all, you can pull power through Plum’s roots as you want. She can endure the pain, so don’t hold back. Losing this war would be much worse for her.”

The Queens watched and waited for their time to attack, preserving their power so they won’t need to recharge as much and hurt Plum more than needed. Once the abomination shows its head, the true rampage of spirits would paint this world with fire and brimstone.

****

While Plum and Eris were fighting their own harrowing battles, Arad and Gojo finally managed to reach the new land Yog made. The shore was a whole nine hours away.

Arad and Gojo jumped down from their floating, crystal clear barrier platform and looked at the silver sand, the jagged stones, and the rustling oak trees, trying their hardest to shake the ice from their branches.

“Don’t tell me!” Gojo gasped with a wide, massive, nervous smile on his face.