The dragon's harem

Arad went far away to chop some wood’ the nearest tree was at least two hundred meters away. They could use magic to keep warm, but that was an important fighting resource.

Gojo was going to use magic to build the two stone shelters, but he still wasn’t going to use more mana than what he would recover at night. The last thing they wanted was to get attacked by a monster while they were out of mana.

That Kraken, for example, if it decided to somehow crawl out of the sea to attack them at night, Gojo and Arad would need to be at their peak to fight it off.

Gojo looked at the ground and then waved his hand, sending pulses of magic across the snow. The soft and white fluff moved, twisted, and then condensed, growing taller and larger. Using a massive amount of snow that was already on the ground, he created two ice golems to help him build and be the guards through the night.

They were massive, standing at around two meters tall each, with wide shoulders and jagged edges, gray in color, and heavy. Gojo would’ve loved to make them with better details so they could be more flexible, but he couldn’t waste the mana. As long as they can do their job, they are perfect.

Many wizards seek perfection, but Gojo seeks function. If a spell works, then it works. If it isn’t broken, don’t fix it, and if it’s not underpowered, then don’t overpower it.

But that didn’t mean he didn’t seek perfection. When he was a dragon, those snow golems would look exactly like him and be powerful enough to fight adult dragons. He could even make them in the shape of other people, like Liliana.

Seeing them looking like actual golems felt a bit sad.

“I’ll get rid of the snow around here. You two, go clean some space there on the gravel beach. I’ll use those stones to build the houses.” The golems looked at him, twitched for a moment, then turned around, their massive and hulking bodies swaying from left to right.

They moved a bit too slowly, their joints must be frozen. He could fix it, but he doesn’t need to. As they move, the friction will melt the ice just enough to make their joints slippery enough to function.

Gojo watched the golems until they started working, and he made sure they wouldn’t break or shatter. If they had one small crack inside their icy bodies, they could very well crumble at the first impact.

He then turned to his work, first clearing the snow.

There was still a ton of snow everywhere, and he didn’t want to just pile it away, as that would be a waste. That snow had to have a use, and Gojo got just the right idea.

He started compacting it into slabs, turning them into hard ice, and then formed a perimeter around the area where they wanted to camp. Those slabs would be perfect to build a massive wall to block the wind and funnel monsters if they attacked.

But moving the slabs by hand would waste his time, so he conjured another set of golems, but this time, they weren’t full golems.

The snow in the ground grew pale hands, and those hands started passing the slabs between them to build the walls like an army of ants.

Liliana watched him work for a while. There wasn’t another wizard that worked like him, and watching him had slowly become one of her hobbies.

She didn’t have many hobbies after all, but the few she had filled all of her free time. At first, she was a massive, obnoxious, and utterly insufferable siege weapon nerd. Just seeing Gojo building ice walls around the camp made her think of how she could trap it so no army could take this tiny little fort down.

She also enjoyed dressing and trying on new clothes. For much of her young life, she was too poor to afford clothes, and even at times ended up wearing trash baskets to stave off the cold in the unforgiving streets.

Just seeing this much snow would’ve given her a heart attack if Gojo hadn’t helped her get over that fear in the past.

For the past months, she had a new outfit for each morning, afternoon, and night. She had maids brush her hair and paint her nails in all kinds of ways, and she even had a metric ton of jewellery collecting dust in her room.

Thinking of that, she started getting pissed off. At the start, she had spent two months picking clothes each day to impress Gojo, only for him to tell her he didn’t like how they looked. When she finally snapped and asked what he would like her to wear, he said he would prefer seeing her naked in his room instead.

As the wall was getting built, she approached Gojo and asked. “Want me to make some traps around the wall?”

He looked at her, and smiled. “What do you think?”

She sighed. “Without my tools, I can only dig holes. But… I suspect you already did that, so…” She looked at him. “Don’t need my help?”

He chuckled and smacked her on the back, almost causing her to fall.

“What?” She growled at him, and he was just laughing.

“Don’t tell me that Lucy is smarter than you? Come, think about it?” He wrapped his arm around her neck, trying to drop her down in a chokehold. Sadly for him, she was far more skilled than he was in hand-to-hand combat, so he ended up on the snow with her sitting on his chest.

She glared at him for a long minute, then looked at Haru. “What is this fool thinking about?”

Haru shook her head. “You’re a bit dense, aren’t you? Liliana. He wants you to do your job and keep the strongest weapon ready for battle.”

“Heard her?” Gojo tried to wriggle his way out of her grasp, but his arms were pinned beneath her knees.

“Just tell me what he wants! We have no such weapon here that I can work on, and I don’t even have my tools!” She growled, and Haru pointed at him.

“He is the weapon, a magical and extremely powerful weapon of mass destruction. You’d better keep him fed, well rested, and cared for.” Haru smiled.

“Like a soldier?” Liliana finally laughed and stood above Gojo.

Haru shook her head. “No, more like a horse.”

In the back, the two ice golems were doing their job, mostly.

The two golems shoveled the snow with their massive arms, then dug the gravel, but even with how rough and shaky their moves were, they looked like they were dancing, and often threw the gravel to each other before getting back to work when Gojo looked toward them.

The reason behind it was the way he piloted the golems and snow hands. Most wizards would rely on a pre-recorded set of moves and conditions, but Gojo didn’t do that. He instead allocated a part of his brain to each of his creations, meaning they got a real intellect behind them.

The catch was that to keep himself smart, he couldn’t allocate too much, which resulted in the golems being stupid and barely useful for what they were made for.

Just like how Gojo ended up wasting some time playing with Liliana, the golems also had the same tendencies, never taking anything seriously unless they were in mortal danger.

When Gojo was a dragon, those golems would have an uncanny and terrifying level of intellect. But now… Liliana watched the two ice golems throwing snowballs at each other, then jumping away when they found Gojo glaring at them. One of them even tried to blame the other.

“That’s… not much mana for how complex those spells are.”

Haru asked, sitting on the sledge and moving her head as if she were watching. She was blind, but her magic sense was strong. Even with that, she found it hard to sense the golem’s mana presence in the world. That’s how little mana they used, and they almost faded into the natural background mana.

“What consumes the bulk of a spell’s mana is the creation aspect. Since I used the already existing snow to make them, the cost was lowered a lot.” Gojo looked at her and smiled. “It’s simple.”

So those golems didn’t have any more mana inside their bodies than the natural mana that is in the ice. The only extra mana there is what he is using to control them, which makes them like invisible ghosts controlled by thin spider strings in the eyes of mages.

He then started turning the gravel into stone bricks, lining them up, and welding them together by using the gravel. The stones turned into dough in his palms, and they froze back when he pulled his fingers away.

When Arad returned, Gojo had already gotten out of the ground and gotten the walls up. Now, all he needed to do was make a roof. Arad had also brought a lot of wood, five trees’ worth, which he dragged using the sledge’s ropes.

“This should last us until morning.” Arad looked at Gojo, “Do you need help?”

“No, just get a fire going so we can cook something for dinner. I’m starving.”