The dragon's harem

In the Raventhrone Forest, fifty men surrounded a fire and several locked cages at midnight. Beneath the faint light of the moon, one of them stared at the flames and took a deep breath.

“This week’s haul was pretty sad, wasn’t it. Just twenty of them.” He picked a branch and threw it into the flames. “Those pixies are getting pretty smart. Do you think they changed their routes, or at least the place they scavenge?”

“I don’t think so.” A tall woman in rags and hide clothes replied. “I’ve lived in this forest for a while now. I would’ve noticed if they did that.”

Another man spoke from the back. “And I burned all the flower fields we could find. If they want any nectar, they have to come to the usual spot. Otherwise, they’ll starve.”

“Fairies can sustain themselves for a long time on mana alone, but they still need to eat. The pixies are probably suffering now.” A woman spoke and waved her staff. “Soon, they’ll be forced to come out and look for food.”

“Shouldn’t we worry about an attack? We’ve starved them a bit too much this time. Won’t they retaliate?” A fighter in full-plate armor asked, “I’ve heard they are stronger than their size.”

The mage in the back smiled. “I won’t worry about starving bugs, and my barriers aren’t reacting to anything yet. I’ll know long before they attack us.”

The man beside the flames sighed. “But… only twenty of them, that’s quite a low haul.” He looked back at the wizard, “Say, can’t we breed them or something?”

“We can try, but their wings won’t have as much magic and power as naturally growing ones that lived in a mana-dense grove. There is also the rite of blessing, where a high-ranking spirit blesses the weaker pixies and fairies when they are born.” He waved his hand, drawing the image of a pixie in the air with magic. “Ours would be of lower quality; whatever magic their wings offer, it would be easier and cheaper to just use herbs.”

The man by the flames once again sighed. “If you, a wizard, say that, then we probably won’t sell anything even if we breed a lot of them. We’ll only end up losing customers.”

The flames flickered, the wind stopped blowing, and silence fell for a second. Everyone looked calm and relaxed, except the wizard in the back, who was sweating like a hog, his eye dilated, and the hair on his balding head stood.

The wizard’s lips opened and closed like he was a dying fish, he tried his best and lifted his hand, pointing at the sky with a shaking finger. “Coming! Coming!” As he growled, everyone stared at him, confused at what he was mumbling out of nowhere.

The armored fighter looked around, trying to spot any monster that might’ve got the wizard scared, but he couldn’t sense anything, except a foul smell. He looked to his side and saw the woman in rags and hide clothes looking as pale as a ghost, and she had just soiled herself.

“You! What is going on!” He reached and touched her on the shoulder, trying to get her to snap back to reality. But instead, she just screamed her lungs out and bolted away as fast as she could. “NO! NO! NO!”

As the panic started spreading, one of the men finally shouted, pointing at the sky. “Look! Something is above the clouds!”

Black palms the size of castle keeps with five fingers ending in sharp obsidian claws, tenebrious scales, wings mirroring the starry night sky, and a torso as wide as a mountain. From above the clouds, a massive draconic head glared down at them with fiery purple eyes, and when the jaw opened, showing several rows of jagged teeth, a deafening roar crashed down upon them.

“It’s a black dragon!” The fighter screamed his lungs out the moment the roar died down, and quickly pulled his sword. “Mages! Drop it down with spells!” But his screams fell on deaf ears. The mages were all terrified to the bones. They have sensed the black dragon’s magic, and now they were shitting themselves out of sheer terror.

The black dragon slowly floated down without flapping its wings so it wouldn’t damage the forest, and the mages got even more terrified as they sensed the extreme gravity magic the dragon was using. None of them could mimic a fraction of that power, let alone hope to stand a chance of fighting this terror.

“Get a grip! We have to drive it away!” The fighter shouted, and all of the melee combatants armed themselves and got ready; even their leader was ready to fight.

“No…” The old wizard mumbled. “It isn’t about winning or losing, it’s not even about driving that thing away… It’s about how many would survive, if any.”

The fighter glared back at him and shouted. “You coward, are you saying that thing would kill some of us? We’ve fought many dragons before, and this won’t be our last.” He turned toward the black dragon as it landed. “Come! Bring it on, foul beast!”

Landing, the black dragon’s claws dug deep into the ground and shook the entire forest. Its massive size eclipsed the moon, and its tail extended all the way to the far mountains. With just one look, some of the men there could tell that it would take them a whole day to walk from the dragon’s hind legs to the tip of its tail.

The black dragon growled, and the mere wind pressure coming from its massive maw was enough to bend the trees and send two halflings flying back. The fighters had to anchor themselves to the ground using their swords and spears, and they watched as their tents and the fire were blown away by the wind.

The dragon’s maw remained open, and from it, a long and disgusting tongue extended out several tens of meters. Just seeing it move made some of the men gag, but what horrified them more was the sharp and scary-looking needle at its tip. Calling it a needle was an insult; the thing was more like a massive bone harpoon dripping with black tar.

“The tongue is just a few meters wide, cut it off and make that thing bleed!” The fighter shouted and rushed forward. He was strong, fast, agile, and skilled. Unlike everyone else, he was courageous, and most importantly, dumber.

He jumped, landed on a tree branch, and used its flex to propel himself into the sky. He wanted to slash the tongue with one powerful swing, but it didn’t go the way he hoped. The tongue moved at a harrowing speed, and the fighter barely managed to block the stinger with his sword.

“You monster!” He growled, twisted his stance midair, and swung his sword at the base of the harpoon, aiming at the soft flesh.

When the blade hit the tongue’s flesh, it shattered with a loud ring as if it hit a piece of solid titanium. As the fighter’s eyes opened wide, the stinger flashed and twisted, piercing him from the lower abdomen to the throat, and released enough poison for a man to swim in.

Everyone watched in utter terror as the black tar oozed out of the fighter’s wounds, every orifice, and even his eyes and nose as he moaned. The poison itself was an overpowered version of a neurotoxin with several extra properties besides attacking the nervous system.

The fighter’s muscles were all instantly paralyzed, his pain sensors went ballistic, his organs started getting digested, hallucination consumed his crumbling brain, and what’s more, his flesh and bones started rapidly mutating out of control due to the toxin rapidly healing him while irradiating all of his cells.

Everyone, as the fighter slowly turned into a rotting blob of cancerous flesh, slowly getting brought up to the dragon’s terrifying maw, and getting eaten like a piece of marshmallow.

“RUN AWAY!” The leader finally shouted and turned to run away. The wizards were all right; this isn’t something that can be fought. They are nothing more than bugs to it, food. They have to get out of here as soon as possible and hope it won’t eat all of them.

“Damn it! Druid! Can’t we reason with that thing? Bribe it or something? Is it even intelligent?” As everyone ran away, the leader stared at the druid.

“It is intelligent, I can sense that. It can even speak our language. It is just that it doesn’t see us as worth its breath. To that thing, we aren’t human, we’re just food waiting to be eaten.” As the druid gasped, the leader growled back. “You know all that? How?”

“That thing is a druid like me!”