The dragon's harem

All of the moon elves charged at Arad at once, and he jumped over their shield wall with ease. Compared to them, who were all around six feet tall, he was twice the height and almost four times as heavy, yet was faster and far more agile than they, moving like a wild beast of pure vicious brutality.

Clad in his black armor and glaring at them with burning red eyes, he moved like a harbinger of darkness and death. Each of his moves was heavy, deadly, and utterly unforgiving. He landed, shattering the stone-paved street, and his foot flew forward at one of the knights. She lifted her blade to block the kick, but that didn’t help at all.

Her sword shattered, her arms broke, and Arad’s kick hit her square in the chest, bending her armor, cracking her ribs, and sending her flying through an entire building with a shockwave.

“Release the beasts!” The general shouted, and the knights in the back opened several massive cages, unleashing more than ten massive white tigers at Arad. They have finally realized that fighting this unhinged demon directly was impossible for them, and so they had to rely on their warbeasts.

Those tigers were five meters long each, boasted skin as hard as iron, and fur charged with lightning. They were true monsters tamed by the moon elves for warfare. Each of those beasts had lived for several decades and survived countless bloody battles. To them, Arad seemed like just another giant slab of meat they’ll feast upon.

“So, you released those cats?” Arad smiled, and his body started swelling with darkness. “Then I’ll show you what a true monster looks like.”

In a dark flash, Arad charged forward, and four of the large tigers were slashed in half, torn into pieces as blood splashed everywhere, and Arad landed behind the terrified soldiers, looking like an actual demon. They weren’t fighting a vampire, but a pricolici. A Vampiric Wyrmwolf in the flesh.

Arad looked terrifying, and it made the moon elves run away immediately. A twelve-feet-tall, four-armed, black-skinned, and fur-covered demon with six eyes, two tails, and four harrowing wings. He looked very similar to Kayden, which made him smile.

“Even if this tree tries to slow me down, it’s only a matter of time, ironically, before I neutralize its power.” He now carried four black swords, one in each arm, and glared at the moon elves with a body burning with magic.

This Qliphoth is now growing in the mortal world, a place ruled by her sister Yggdrasil. That meant the nebulous time tree couldn’t exert that much control over a lad it didn’t own, and thus turned to directly affecting people instead of the world. That itself was fine; the tree could easily accelerate the moon elves, and probably anyone else, besides Arad himself.

Arad is a void dragon with an entire world inside his stomach, and thus, this tree could’ve quickly infected his world and controlled it, thus winning the fight by invading him from the inside, but it couldn’t just do that, because the world inside him was already claimed by Plum.

This sapling already couldn’t affect the mortal world due to Yggdrasil’s influence, and was now rapidly losing its ability to affect Arad directly, thanks to Plum resisting from the inside of his world.

An entire building crumbled down as Arad charged at one of the large tigers and kicked it. Soon, he and the beast were clashing on the streets, causing more damage than an entire storm. Each passing second, Arad regained more and more of his power as Qliphoth’s grip on his time loosened, and each of his attacks now wielded more of his devastating draconic strength.

The moon elves’ general stared at the bloody devastation with a pale face. The heads of her tigers were all impaled on the support beams of the destroyed buildings, and Arad himself sat in the middle, drinking blood from their corpses.

“Casualty, how many died in that collapse?!” The general screamed as she saw the destruction, but the answer that came from her soldiers shook her to the core. “Zero! Only the beasts died! That bastard even saved some of the soldiers who almost got caught in the chaos!”

Arad smiled from ear to ear as the shadows around him grew darker, “So, there is one here as expected.”

Black chains burst from the ground and surrounded him from all directions. The moon elves jumped back, and the chains came clashing down faster than sound. Arad himself wasn’t going to stay still either, and he swung those four muscular arms he had like cannons, ripping and slashing the black chains around him like he was a storm of blades and violence.

As the chains fell apart, Arad looked back through the destroyed building toward the Qliphoth sapling. “Would your spirit kill me first, or would I chop you down first?” He lifted one of his arms and pointed his sword forward. “I’m a lumberjack by trade.”

More chains exploded from the ground, and Arad dodged them with a single swift step, only to notice that they were far bigger than normal chains now. Each ring was almost two feet wide and as thick as a man’s wrist.

“Size magic, the spirit queen protecting Yggdrasil was called Dendron, so what is your name? Spirit of Qliphoth!” He looked at the ground, lifted one of his swords, and stabbed the floor.

Through the sword made of his own void, he unleashed a destructive wave of pure energy at the ground, shattered it, and burned the roots that spread under the village, forcing the spirit out.

The moon elves weren’t fighting him anymore; they were getting caught in the deadly onslaught of Arad fighting the tree’s spirit, and right after the explosion, they saw that a quarter of this village was already burned to the ground.

From the ground, she emerged, a one-foot-tall fairy with skin as black as coal and hair burning white like ethereal flames. Unlike all the spirits he fought, this one looked weird. She didn’t have a physical body, but was just a soul formed of pure elemental energy.

“That body of yours is made of Qliphoth’s black bark, and that hair, burning time. Your elemental is time itself? How strange, I never saw such a spirit before… But…” Arad took a step toward, and the tree’s roots exploded from the ground, turned into chains, and tried to restrain him. But with a blinding step, he used his four arms to dice all of the chains in a single move, and reached the spirit looking like a demon.

“You aren’t a queen, just a spirit, even for spirits, your magic is far too small.” He stared at her with six glowing red eyes. “You’re the spirit of a mere sapling after all.”

At that moment, everything exploded into pure violence. The spirit didn’t say a single word; instead let her actions speak for her. The ground shattered, the moon elves were blown away, and the entire area was almost blown to the sky.

The moon elves glared at their village in horror and only saw destruction. But that wasn’t what scared them; it was the fact that Arad was now fighting the tree’s spirit, a sacred creature that should’ve been as powerful as the gods.

The earth was torn, the sky was set ablaze, and buildings were being thrown around left and right as Arad ran across the streets at blinding speed while being chased by an avalanche of black chains and burning time. Each passing second, he was growing faster as Plum’s influence resisted that of Qliphoth, but he was still nowhere near a fraction of his full power yet.

A massive section of the wall surrounding the city was torn apart by the clash. A piece of stone more than ten meters high, fifty meters wide, and five meters thick was sent flying, and it was now heading straight toward the retreating moon elves.

Their general looked up in that fraction of a second in fear. The mages should be able to defend against such a thing, but the problem was time; they didn’t have much, and the tree wasn’t paying attention to them anymore.

It was the end; they’ll die crushed by that wall before their mages could even start casting their magic. Is Arad that big of a threat that the tree needed to focus on him this much? To the point of letting its people die? The destruction of their village spoke enough of Arad’s power; this creature was indeed powerful enough to threaten and kill the sacred tree.

But a moment before the wall could crush them, it was split into eight pieces as Arad appeared behind it with his four arms spread open and a large grin on his face. The general blinked and cried, and by the time she realized it, Arad had already disappeared as the wall shattered and fell to the ground.

“Did he… save us?” As she gasped, the other moon elves were already too terrified to understand a single word, but all of them screamed at the same time. All because Arad was already standing right behind their general, glaring down at her with burning red eyes.

“Elf, that abomination had taken control of the tree’s spirit, and with it, he manipulated both your people and the tree itself. That spirit doesn’t have a body, so I can’t directly link with its magic… but I can use you.” As she heard him behind her, she turned as fast as she could, swinging her sword at Arad’s hips, but that blade just shattered as if she hit a boulder.

As she took a few steps back, pissing herself in fear, Arad reached forward and grabbed her by the wrist and lifted her up. “I’m going to drink your blood and use it to track where the abomination is. It’ll hurt as hell if you resist, so relax your body and mind.”

“No…nooo!” She screamed, and Arad glared at her with a tired face. “That wasn’t a request; I’m telling you what I’m going to do so you can prepare yourself. Your life, and the lives of your people, depend on this. It is either I fix this problem today, or the gods would burn this entire place to eradicate the abominable infection.”

She was crying and screaming, but Arad didn’t have any time to waste. His fangs closed at her neck as she screamed in agony, and he could already see the spirit flying toward them at blinding speed; he only had a fraction of a second left.

But then, something else drew his attention. He could feel it, a tiny worm flew into his throat alongside the blood he drank, and his entire body jolted as it ate at the wall of his mouth, and made its way to his blood.

This abomination was a type of parasite.

“Trying to use my veins to quickly reach my brain and kill or control me…” Arad dropped the general and stumbled back. “How foolish…” He smiled.