The dragon's harem

Jack sat up and rubbed his still-hurting chin. When Lydia bashed him with her shield, she must’ve hit both his chin and chest, knocking the wind out of him and putting him down in a single move. It felt like getting slapped by a titan, and if he wasn’t a demigod, he would’ve died on the spot.

The reality was clear; he was nowhere near as physically powerful as Lydia. But he could still feel it in his bones, even without believers; the upper limit of his strength and durability had increased. If he trains hard for a long time, he is bound to reach her physical level even as a demigod.

The only problem was divine magic; right now, Jack had no way of reaching Lydia’s level because she was drawing directly from Amaterasu. Comparing them is like comparing a tiny pond to an ocean.

He stood and put his hands together. “I know! If I use the serpent’s power.” His eyes flashed with divine magic, and his arms were engulfed by a flow of golden divine power.

When Jack parted his arms, seven blinding orbs of pure divine magic remained floating in front of him, and Lydia stared at them with a worried face. “What… are you doing?”

“Let’s say I have 50 divine magic, and I use a spell that costs 50, then I should be left with 0. But with the serpent’s power, I’m left with a perfect 50, so I can cast the same light spell again.” He looked at her with a grin. “I cannot create a single massive spell, but I can cast as many tiny ones as I want, as long as I have the brain-power to think about them all.”

He smiled. “This means, I can do something like this.” He made the orbs of light disappear, and then flung his arms, conjuring a rain of divine stars, tiny balls covered with sharp spikes, like the ones used to make horses trip.

“With my full divine tank, I can create three hundred of them at once. But if I use the serpent’s power, I can create three hundred of them at once, seven times a second. That’s two thousand and a hundred stars each second.”

He then threw the stars away and looked at Lydia with a grin.

“No one would trip on them.” She told him, and he pointed a finger. “Let’s see about that.” At that moment, her body flew in the stars’ direction, and she tripped on them. “The same way I pulled you toward me earlier, I can use it force people to get into my traps.”

Lydia looked at the stars for a second, then crushed one of them beneath her boots. “But as you can see… they aren’t strong enough. Someone like Arad or me could just ignore them.”

Jack shrugged. “Well, I have to plan around them. Like use this.” He pulled Amaterasu’s wakizashi, “With this thing’s darkness, and a few tricks, I might even be able to slay a god… if I got a weapon that could actually hurt a god.”

“So, you’re going to fight physically and use your divine magic for traps and support. But, if you gather believers and ascend to godhood, you’ll be able to fight gods directly since Susanoo’s portfolio is powerful.” As she looked at him, he nodded.

“Indeed, it’s even more with the serpent’s power.” He then pulled the Blade of Solace. “But with this thing, it might just work. Arad said it was sharp enough to cut throughs his scales and barriers, so it’s a really powerful weapon.”

As Lydia looked at the Blade of Solace, she could sense the divine power still lingering within its edge. “It’s sharp, but that’s all. This blade is fueled by the wielder’s divine magic. The stronger the divine magic, the sharper and stronger this blade would cut.”

“Can it cut a mountain?”

“No, the blade isn’t long enough.” Lydia sighed with a wry smile, “But, with enough divine magic, it should even be able to cut through space. Like that sword Gojo created with magic, and Mira made real.”

Jack looked at the blade of Solace. “So, similar power, different fuel types. One uses mana, the other divine magic.” He frowned, “It means I can’t use its full power all at once due to my limited divine magic.”

He put the Blade of Solace away, and then looked at Lydia. “What about a second round?”

“No way.” She waved her hand. “You don’t have enough physical strength and durability. Train first, we fight later.” She pointed at him. “You might’ve gotten a bit fuller after becoming a demigod, but you’ll need to gain a bit more muscle and a lot of endurance.”

“That reminds me, how did you train?” As Jack asked, she lifted an eyebrow. “Trained? Me? I never trained. Since I first became an adventurer, I picked the heaviest and most durable armor I could get so I won’t get hurt, and I then started smacking things with a stick, since I’ve wasted all of my saved money on armor.”

She looked up with a smile. “I could barely move in that armor at first, but slowly, I got used to its weight. Eventually, I became a paladin and started taking more jobs to slay the undead. So, I never had any formal training.”

Jack chuckled with a worried smile. “That explains a lot. Seeing how reckless your fighting style is.”

“I could heal all of my wounds with divine magic later. Paladins are good at healing themselves, not others.” She puffed her cheeks, and he chuckled. “Then what about the pain?”

Lydia shrugged. “I’d rather get hurt once and defeat my enemy than risk getting hit and injured multiple times. Besides, paladins’ divine magic gets stronger the more they believe in their god…”

She approached a boulder, lifted her sword, and spoke. “For example, when I first became a paladin, I heard stories in the church about how powerful a divine smite is, so I went to test it out on a boulder just like this.”

Lydia swung her sword down and slashed the boulder in half.

“I was still young, and the boulder was massive. It was impossible even for mages to destroy it with powerful spells.” She smiled, “But, Amaterasu is a powerful goddess, her divine smite should be able to destroy it without a problem… So, I swung my sword down, let the divine magic loose, and cut it in half. My arms did break, though…”

She smiled. “It doesn’t matter how powerful a monster or someone I face is; Amaterasu should always be stronger than them, and her divine smites should be able to one-shot them. It doesn’t matter if it was a huge monster, a devil, or another god; all I needed to do was hit them as hard as I could and let Amaterasu deal with the rest.”

Jack chuckled. “Why do I feel like Amaterasu is the one who was getting scammed? A little girl goes around swinging a sword and thinking that the goddess would just magically make them die.”

“It worked, didn’t it?”

Back in the church, Amaterasu giggled. She could remember Lydia’s early days; at that time, she was praying to her son and not her. But she could clearly remember that boulder. She was but a little girl with sparkling eyes and a dull blade, looking upon a boulder five times her size.

Pitying the little girl, Amaterasu decided to give her a lesson. She knew that if she granted the weak little girl such a power, her arms would end up broken, but this was also good, this way she would learn her limitations and be more reasonable next time.

But Amaterasu was wrong; the little girl learned the wrong lesson. Instead of understanding her limits and being more careful, she saw the divine smite as her most powerful weapon, and started taking on larger and larger monsters, each time swinging her blade, fully believing that Amaterasu would just make them vanish.

From that day onward, Lydia’s story of throwing divine smites at everything that faces her started, and due to the harsh nature of her fighting style, she rapidly grew stronger and stronger.