The dragon's harem

As Camilla wore her maid outfit and sat back down, Isdis also took a seat and looked at her for a second. “To be honest with you, since you can fight, I’m more interested in that than anything else.” She pointed at her papers.

“For now, tell me more about it.”

Camilla went on to tell a story of the days she spent sneaking out of her home to go and hunt monsters, how she washed the blood in the river or seaside, and how hard it was to keep her adventurer career hidden from her parents. How that by the age of fourteen, she found that she was already far stronger than her father was, and how her life slowly changed the older she grew.

On the day Vlad attacked, her father was working at the castle, and she was home with her mother, cooking dinner right after dusk. The ground shook for a split second, and a beam of compressed blood came out of nowhere, two of them in fact, one heading toward Camilla’s heart, and the other toward her mother.

It all happened in the blink of an eye. Camilla’s mother didn’t even notice, but her daughter was already moving. She picked a kitchen knife, dodged the blood beam coming at her heart, and slashed the one aimed at her mother with a single swing.

Camilla, at the time, didn’t know what was going on, so she immediately grabbed her mother by the clothes and jumped out of the window. Blood means a vampire, and Camilla knew she couldn’t defeat such a monster. Her only hope was to run away, and that’s what she did, and took her mother away with her.

It was painful. Running across the dark streets in her home clothes, barefoot, her screaming mother on her back, and the screams of everyone dying around them filling the air. At first, she was going to run to the guild or the guards’ post, but when she realized the entire city was getting murdered, she had to flee, and thus ended up taking her screaming mother all the way to the mountains, knocked her out, and hid her inside a safe cave.

But Camilla’s horrifying day wasn’t over; her mother might be safe, but her father wasn’t. At this moment, he could already be dead. When she made it back to the city, things were far worse. The guards and soldiers who stood to fight were already dead, and the people who were still alive all screamed, moaned, and called for help.

Camilla had to scream herself to drown their cries. If she kept listening to them, her heart won’t allow her to ignore them, and she’ll get distracted from the reason she returned to this hell in the first place. She had to find her father in the castle and get him out.

In the end, she found him. Her father was injured; that first blood attack hit him in the shoulder. He was fast enough to notice and avoid a fatal hit, but he still got mutilated by it. He seemed to have hastily patched his wound and went on to help people escape, but in the end, the bleeding got him and knocked him out.

Among the halls of the ruined castle, surrounded by rubble, blood, and the moaning cries of dying maids, servants, and even nobles, Camilla had to calm herself down and save her father’s life. She had never done such a thing in her life before, but now, she had to scavenge the corpses.

After crying and searching through a dozen corpses, she found that of a nun. The mere sight made Camilla puke. The vampires had gone too far. Even just remembering the state the nun was in made her gag.

In that nun’s torn and bloodied robe, Camilla managed to find two things: a tiny steel canister usually used for water, but the nun had holy water in it, and a half-full healing potion. What made Camilla even more devastated was that she couldn’t even remember to which god the nun belonged.

Camilla used that potion to stem her father’s bleeding, and the holy water to hopefully keep the vampires away. But sadly, that holy water wasn’t enough. She ended up needing to use all of the skills she learned as an adventurer just to hide from the vampires.

She crawled through the rubble with her armored father strapped to her back, hid with him beneath piles of corpses as vampires flew by, and even watched people getting violated and killed from the shadows, holding her breath in fear that the vampires might sense her.

When she finally made it to the street, she saw him. Arad punching Vlad in the face, and ripping hordes of vampires to shreds with his bare hands. Meryem was there too, but Camilla was more focused on getting out of the capital alive with her father, to notice her.

The capital had turned into a living hell, and there seemed to be no escape. Each hit from those two erased several buildings, and soon, their battle would consume the entire capital and everything around it.

Still crying and crawling on the ground, dragging her father with her, Camilla started to lose hope. One stray hit and they are dead. But then, that hit never came. She looked at Arad fighting Vlad once more, and then noticed something strange.

While Arad always dodged Vlad’s attack, he sometimes took them head-on or deflected them away, even though he could’ve moved out of the way. Even she, just a B-ranker, could tell he wasn’t fighting that smartly, or was he?

It took her a second to notice, but when she did, she started to crawl away even faster, crying harder, and pulled on the ground so hard that her nails ripped off.

While fighting, Arad was actively protecting her and everyone else around the battlefield who didn’t get to escape. They were a weakness, they were holding him back, she was a harm to the one man fighting.

In the end, she made it out with her father and ran all the way to the cave in the forest where her mother was, and had woken up. After being alone in the cave for hours, the mother seems to have calmed down a bit, and since she could see the flames raging in the capital from afar, she understood the magnitude of the situation.

When Camilla returned and dropped her father, her mother tried to ask her about what happened, but all Camilla did was cry, weep, and curse herself. She could still hear them, the cries of those she refused to listen to, all the people she ignored and let die. She could smell the corpses and feel the warmth of their blood on her hands.

Even when the fight was over, and after a whole day of crying, she couldn’t stop. Each time her exhausted eyes closed to sleep, that nun would come haunt her dreams, berating her for pillaging the corpses and stealing what was hers.

She could only sleep after three days, but even then, life had lost its meaning, the guilt was crushing, and she didn’t have the courage to put it all to an end.

Weeks passed, and then months. They moved to the new capital, and her father was back in his post in no time. Life moved on, but she didn’t. That was until she heard of maid selection for the private royal quarter, the place where the man who fought that day, and the queens of the newly forming empire live.

There, she might find a purpose for her life. But she was a commoner, the daughter of a humble guard, and had been depressed, holed up in her room for a long time. When she heard of the selection, it was because it was about to end.

There was no time, so she had to scramble, and to her luck, she was accepted in the regular maid test, and even made it to the private royal maid selection, as the last maid to be tested.