The dragon's harem

Moments later, Arad found himself outside the castle and standing beside the new great church of Amaterasu. It was the biggest church in the entire region, dwarfing the second biggest one by almost twice its size. Beside Arad’s castle, it stood as a prominent landmark.

The opal wall, colorful windows, and the large sundial at its bell tower faintly burned with divine light, acting like a towering lighthouse that illuminated the night sky. That light wasn’t there before; it only started once Amaterasu decided to stay in the church. From what Arad heard, that was her divine light illuminating the darkness. It was a beacon of her life, and the capital is expecting thousands of pilgrims soon.

As he stood outside the church’s steel gate, one of the nuns who was still walking out in the garden saw him, froze in place for a second, then rushed to open the gate. “Your majesty! We weren’t notified!”

The nun was only out to feed the stray cats who took residence in the church’s garden; she never expected anyone to dare approach a church where Amaterasu herself is resting. For the first time in thousands of years, a divine god had come to the mortal world in person. But their emperor, Arad Orion, was the last person she expected to meet.

“Because I never sent it. Of course you weren’t notified. It is sudden, a bit urgent, but I came to see Amaterasu.” As he looked at her, the nun paled.

“I’m sorry, but I’ll have to ask the angels first, and hope they relay that to her divinity. I myself am just a humble nun; I cannot hope to even talk to her.” The nun bowed slightly, “I’ll lead your highness to the church’s guest room and call the high priestess, she has more authority than me.”

Arad followed the nun across the garden and into the church. This place was indeed massive, with doors almost four meters tall of pure steel, meter-thick stone walls, and a majestic hall that looked out of a divine heaven.

Seeing the scrawny nun push that titanic door open with her thin arms made Arad realize that this entire place was enchanted, and all of the rooms were locked by keys of faith and not mundane means. Each door is locked shut and would only open to those authorized by the priestess and who have sufficient faith.

Even the entire inside of the church was suffused with Amaterasu’s divine magic, constantly weakening and watching anyone who wasn’t of her faith. The nun bowed to him, then left. Minutes later, the priestess who ruled this entire church approached.

While this place was technically a church with all of its bells and whistles, one thing was different, and it was that it ran mostly like a shrine. Even though Amaterasu was the most prominent divine being in the universe, she never actually cared about having people worship her. This church wasn’t for them to come pray and present their faith, but it was instead a shrine where they could present offerings and ask her for help.

The priestess, or as Amaterasu calls her, the Miko who came to see Arad, was the heights-ranking mortal in this church, and that was because she offered something no one did.

She was a tall woman, standing over six feet tall, with silky golden hair, from which only a few strands showed up from beneath her headset. Her face was as pale as snow, and her eyes, were two burning orbs of pure divine inferno. It took Arad a second to realize it, but this priestess was blind, because instead of eyes, she had two miniature suns burning in her sockets.

“Arad Orion, son of Alcott Demorian and Violet Orion. Her divinity Amaterasu, heard your request and temporarily rejected it. To meet her, she asked me to perform a test and explore how well you’ve developed so far.” She turned around, and started walking. “Follow me.”

Arad stood, waved his hand to the terrified nun, and followed the priestess deeper into the church. This was what the nuns were afraid of, their priestess knew no respect for anyone who wasn’t Amaterasu. She didn’t address Arad properly, and even seemed annoyed to have been called because of him.

As they walked into the inner darkness of the unilluminated church, the priestess’s eyes flashed like headlamps, illuminating their path like car lights. “To be honest, Amaterasu told me to do whatever I want. This test is coming from me, not her.” She suddenly stopped walking and turned around toward Arad with her blinding eyes.

“If you are worthy of her attention, then reach me behind those gates.” She walked past Arad and left the room, locking the massive steel door they just walked through. Arad looked around and found himself locked inside the church’s main hall, and he was confused for a second.

He already wasn’t in the mortal world. What he could sense from outside the church wasn’t the capital, but a vast, endless sunny desert that burned with Amaterasu’s divine magic. “Just what kind of power she is granting her faithful?” He smiled.

But then, Lydia exists, so that implies others who are just as crazy as she might exist or have existed. The only clear difference between the priestess and Lydia is that one is based on a cleric who doesn’t fight, and the other is a paladin who fights.

Arad approached the steel door and touched it, feeling the searing heat. The outside was a flaming desert, and this door was so hot that it would’ve burned any normal being. In fact, the church was so hot right now that dying of heat was a threat to anyone besides him.

“Is this what bread feels when thrown into the oven?” Arad looked at the door, saw the flow of divine magic, and frowned.

The entire door was infused with endless threads of Amaterasu’s divine magic, and so was the entire church and the air within it. The higher someone’s faith is, the more that divine magic would be able to protect them from the elements. So, even a mundane nun with no powers but moderate faith would be completely unharmed, and she could even open the door and pass the priestess’s test.

Arad smiled as he looked at the door and clenched a fist. “So, you’re saying that you can’t trust me with Amaterasu unless I have the bare minimum of faith in her.”

Arad pulled his back, and his entire body flashed with radiation. “Crumble!” With a whisper, his fist flew forward with a thunderclap so fast that it set the air ablaze, and when his knuckles hit the door, a loud burst of fire and light overwhelmed the whole church.

The priestess standing outside flinched, her eyes opened wide for a second, and cuts appeared across her entire body as she felt Arad punch the door thousands of times in a split second. One fist after another, each punch hit the unyielding steel door like a nuclear explosion, and the entire continent quaked.

An unstoppable force met an unmovable object, and the priestess who never knew just how powerful Arad was had just gotten a glimpse of the power he holds. His punches weren’t normal, and they weren’t just backed by raw physical strength; but all of his space magic was behind each hit.

As Arad threw more punches than he did in a year, each one of his fists hit the very fabric of space the door existed in, and attempted to shatter it. Then, using both time slow and his barrier magic, Arad poured all of his magic to face against Amaterasu’s divine protection.

The door cracked, the space around it crumbled, and Arad’s fist kept pouring out as he twisted space itself, ripped the wall open, and suddenly disappeared from the immolated desert.

The priestess screamed at the last moment as she got caught in the nuclear devastation, and when she came to, she was back in the mortal world, dropped on the church’s floor with torn clothes, countless wounds and burns, and Arad’s massive, hulking body towering over her.

But he wasn’t the one she looked at, but at Amaterasu, who was standing right beside her head. “Now, do you understand? He isn’t a faithful, but an asset that I can’t ignore. While you mortals don’t have the power to negotiate with gods, he does.”

Arad looked at Amaterasu with a passive face. “You knew she would lose. There is no way a mere priestess, no matter how much you grant her, could ever hope to overpower me… I won’t say the same for a paladin, even though I don’t want to feel a smite from Lydia.”

Amaterasu smiled. “She fought even with a dying and injured body, punched a lord of hell with her bare fist, and cleaved Nyar in half with her sword as a mortal. Lydia is a one-in-a-million gem.”