The dragon's harem

Lydia’s hands moved, and a divine blade of compressed divine magic burned between her fingers, reaching Nyar’s with a deafening thunderclap. The air burned, the ground shattered, and light washed over the battlefield like a tidal wave.

Nyar flew out of the light, burned and charred, only to get grabbed by the face and dragged on the ground. His magic worked on everyone except her, and he had to find out why if he was to get rid of her.

Angels were one thing, but all archons had a theme, a type of power they dominate, akin to a lesser portfolio. Mathilde, for example, was an archon of legs, kicking and stomping, which means her true form was a mass of legs, and that she mainly used kicks to fight.

So, what was Lydia’s theme, what is her true form, and does it have anything to do with his magic not working on her? For a while, he couldn’t tell. Lydia still fought with a sword and smites, but that should be just due to her being new and not having developed her powers.

That led Nyar to theories that her power had something to do with blocking his magic, and he was on the right track. He kicked Lydia away and prepared hundreds of tentacles. “You won’t live for long.”

As he sent all of those tentacles at her, Lydia started slashing them one by one and even burned some with waves of divine magic. As she was busy, Nyar concentrated his magic at her and tried to overwhelm her, only to fail.

No matter what he did, he couldn’t deter her from attacking; she didn’t falter, nor flinch. Amaterasu had ordered her to kill him, and no one can change that now. Not even Amaterasu herself. That was a huge problem, and Nyar had to solve it.

He knew for a fact that such an impossible mentality shouldn’t exist, and that something had to be able to break Lydia down. The essence of intelligence is a sense of self, value, will, and desire to live, and anything that lacks that is an inanimate object.

Watching as Lydia slashed all of his tentacles and flew into the sky, Nyar engulfed himself in a cocoon of flesh and got ready for the next attack. Lydia’s wings grew bigger, flashed white, and a rain of pure divine energy fell down like a wall, crushing everything flat.

Nyar felt his flesh crack and tear apart, and he had to dig underground and run away. Upon emerging, he realized that Lydia’s divine smites didn’t harm anyone else, meaning she is still actively conscious and avoiding unnecessary damage. She didn’t turn into a puppet or machine, which made him even more furious.

“Are you telling me… that just your human sense of self is powerful enough to resist my magic? My eldritch magic that can freeze gods in place?”

Lydia glared at him for a second, and her sword disappeared. She stood in place for a moment and then took a deep breath. In her left hand, a blinding shield of divine magic emerged, radiating enough warmth and holy aura to both protect and heal her. In her right hand, a jet-black sword of smoking black curses appeared, its mere presence causing the ground to rot, wither, and melt away into ash.

Her wings shifted, and their light faded. Her left wings turned black, while the right ones remained white, showing a harrowing balance between divine magic and curses.

Nyar’s furious face faded away, and he smiled. “I see, you are like Asmodeus. But while she is a cleric at heart, you’re a paladin. You can access both of Amaterasu’s aspects, but in a battle-oriented way, unlike Asmodeus, who is more of a support.”

What he said was effectively true. Lydia and Asmodeus are now similar beings, albeit one of them is still far too inexperienced. Amaterasu had two types of power that relate to her sun portfolio:

The radiant sun that grants warmth, comfort, blesses the lands, and is the reason life could even exist. The other aspect is what would happen if that sun refused to freely give its power, how the lands would rot in its absence, how cold it would get, and how death would spread in the endless night.

While most knew of Amaterasu’s good powers, the darker ones were far less known and shrouded in obscurity. Almost no one knew that she was the one who rules and fuels hell, gaining curses in exchange, and no one could even remember when she killed her brother Tsukuyomi for abusing the eclipse, and got that power for herself.

And it was then that Nyar saw it, a red blazing sun in the sky, slowly getting covered by a moon, and dripping crimson curses as thick as blood.

[Elemental Expansion: Eclipse]

As the eclipse blood drowned the ground and created a massive lake, deformed devils and sinners started crawling out from the shores, all rushing at Nyar with hungry eyes and bloodied maws. He frowned and flew away, finding his flesh rotting and blistering just from being bathed in the eclipse’s crimson light.

Lydia didn’t let him escape, though, and she flew right in and smacked him down with her shield, dropping after him with a stab. He dodged, but she still followed with a kick, a slash, then another shield slam.

At that time, the deformed devils reached Nyar and drowned him with their bodies, all crying and moaning as they ate him and their kin alike in a mad frenzy.

Lydia watched in silence for a second, then made her shield and sword disappear. It was time she finished this abominable parasite. Lifting both of her hands up, she started forming something absurd. Divine magic rushed out of her right hand, and curses flew from her left. They combined and danced around each other, quickly merging into a single flow of gray matter.

[God Shattering Star]

The gray matter in her hands turned into a blade, then came crashing down at Nyar’s head the moment he emerged from the mass of devils. Flames engulfed the entire battlefield, the sky cracked, and the Labyrinth split in half. Everyone was free as Nyar’s eldritch magic stopped, and even Damnation could be seen rolling away, still alive but almost vanishing.

Lydia fell to her knees, and her wings faded away. She panted, looking at the ground with a pale and sweaty face. Her new body was powerful, but as usual, she abused it a bit too much. But this was it, the fight was over.

From the ash, Nyar emerged. “How much would it take for you to realize that destroying my body isn’t enough?” He glared at her, and she didn’t even bother looking at him.

“But you’ve done well, newborn Archon.” He lifted his arm, ready to swing down. But then, behind him, from ash and mangled corpses of the devils Lydia summoned, a single man emerged, covered with guts and torn organs. Jack took just a few steps in silence, masked away by the hum of the wakizashi in his hand.

TAP! He extended his hand and touched Nyar’s back with one thing, a cube of solid obsidian. “Checkmate.”

Before Nyar could even turn around, the cube flashed and sucked him inside. This was a cube similar to the one Vlad sealed Zephyr in, and it was one of the artifacts that Yog made in the past so mortals could temporarily seal powerful abominations.

As the cube dropped to the ground, becoming too heavy to hold, Jack ignored it and went to check on Lydia, finding that she was just exhausted. No wounds could remain on her divine body anymore. The fact that she had become a three-meter-tall giant now would probably give him the most trouble in the future, not that he minds it.

“How are you feeling?” He asked, and she smiled. “Tired.” She replied, looking at the cube.

However, the cube then started cracking. Jack frowned, “Damn it! She said this would hold him long enough!” He stood between Lydia and the cube, “What’s now?”

The cube shattered, and Nyar emerged from it with a furious scream. “Another mortal?! You dare put me in such a cage?” He didn’t waste a single moment and swung his fist at Jack’s face.

CRACK! It was then that reality cracked, and an arm grabbed Nyar’s wrist. “ONE MORE MOVE AND I’LL BURN YOU AND YOUR PEOPLE TO ASH!” Arad stood there, glaring at Nyar with eyes that burned dark purple.

“FORGET HIM MOVING! LET’S KILL THEM ANYWAY!” Gojo was there as well, standing right behind Nyar with a hand pointed at the abomination’s neck, and two radiant blue flames in his eyes.

Reality shifted, and the scene in front of Nyar started wildly shifting from the eclipse to a blue sky, an urban city, wilderness, space, then an endless ocean of raging waves, only to find himself standing on a limitless silver wasteland, a black sky devoid of stars above, and nothing of note for millions of kilometers in each direction.

“You made me wait a lot.” Above them, Amaterasu floated on her cloud, having gotten so bored that she had two angels dance naked to entertain her while she waited. No, those two weren’t angels, but abominations that she captured and brought here, then made them look like angels.

“I even had a gift.” Then, from nowhere, billions of abominations emerged, all morphed to look like angels. “All abominations in every camp, base, and colony that I could find nearby.”

Nyar growled. “Taking my people as hostages? Do you think that works on me?”

Amaterasu giggled. “Do you really think I’m that nice?” In that moment, a titanic sun appeared a meter above the abomination’s head, and they all burned to ash. “I captured them so I can kill them in front of you. Cain is gone, so I’m ruling the universe now.” She floated down and then growled at Nyar, her voice sounding deeper and harsher than any voice Arad had ever heard, like the hammering of a massive anvil.

“Your kind aren’t welcome in the universe, or anywhere around it. For every single bug I find inside, I’ll massacre a million outside.”