The dragon's harem

Nina only left the room after taking a quick shower and getting herself cleaned up by the maids. Even she didn’t want Isdis yelling at her, and that happens a lot. But for some reason now, when walking through the hallway followed by Meryem and several maids, she could feel her entire body throbbing.

Her toes on the cold floor, her thighs grinding against each other, and the tensing muscles of her back and neck all felt as clear as her fingers. She could hear her blood sloshing in her own veins, hear her muscles contracting, and sense every pulse of her own nerves.

For a second, she just felt really, really hot. The sweat that formed on her skin immediately evaporated, and Meryem saw it as a haze of mist that surrounded Nina’s body and escaped out of her head like a candle flame.

For a second, the maids who were masters of magic almost mistook the sweat mist as a magic aura, and they weren’t completely wrong. This floor, this entire place, was saturated with enough mana that wizards don’t even need to spend their mana to cast sixth-tier spells, and Nina’s mana-reflecting skin was grinding against that, heating up.

But it didn’t end up with that, even while walking, even when relaxed and happily imagining the fun she just had with Arad, being in the safest place in all of existence, Nina’s body refused to let its guard down.

She never trained, but her muscles and bones did, all of the time. When she is walking, talking, sleeping, and working. Every single second, all of the fibres of her being contract and relax at full force, straining both themselves, her bones, and organs to a level that mortals cannot even begin to imagine.

Lifting weights was meaningless, swinging a blade was outdated, and fighting itself wasn’t worth the time. To Nina’s biceps, their best training method was to strain against her triceps, and they did that hundreds of times each second.

The maids could see Nina’s back muscles and calves cramping like waves at the sea, moving at horrifying speed as if they were infested with snakes, but that was the muscles themselves training until they tore apart, and then healing with her horrifying regeneration.

But that wasn’t the only horrifying part about Nina’s biology, as it went much, much deeper to a level that only a mad god could’ve created.

Nina’s eyes, even though they looked still and like any normal human eyes, were anything but that. Every fraction of a second, they whipped in her sockets at supersonic speed, looking at every detail in the walls, every moving grain of dust, and every droplet of evaporating sweat around her. Their muscles weren’t slacking at all, and so were the nerves themselves as her retina acted like a magnifying glass, greatly amplifying her visual range.

That golden glow to her eyes wasn’t magical at all, but pure light amplified by that retina.

She could also smell well, as while her lungs pulled air for her to breathe, so did her own skin. All of the pores on her body allowed her to absorb oxygen directly from the air and diffuse the waste out. She didn’t need to breathe with her lungs anymore, but used them still, because she could smell emotions.

With one sniff, she could tell who the maids behind her were, what they ate the whole last week, what kind of clothes they were wearing, their emotions from the pheromones and hormones that their bodies released, and she could even match their smell up with their relatives that she smelled in the city and put all the links up in her head.

She could even smell Betty, who was running around the layer several kilometres away from the tower. But it didn’t end there. She could even see scents like a haze in the air thanks to how her nervous system is wired.

Then was her skin, her steel-like, stupidly durable skin, which was far more sensitive than she had any right to be. Nina walked barefoot most of the time, and especially indoors or if she was fighting. That was because she could use her feet to listen to the faint vibration in the ground, and that gave her tremorsense. If that wasn’t enough, every single, tiny, microscopic hair on her entire body acted as a radar, detecting all vibrations in the air, allowing her to literally hear sounds with her skin.

Then there were her ears, which were able to even listen to the blood sloshing in the maids’ bodies without much trouble, and Nina could even count how many of the maids’ muscles had contracted each second just from the sound alone. But if she was that sensitive, wouldn’t loud sounds burst her eardrums? Well, they would. In fact, her eardrums are so sensitive that they can burst from even regular sound. They just regenerate so stupidly fast that even looking at them directly, it would be impossible for the human eye to notice that they burst.

Then there was her sense of taste, which was as powerful as her other senses. Like a snake, she could taste and smell in the air, feel the tiniest fluctuation in temperature, and her tongue was strong enough to bend steel, as it was just another muscle of her body that carried her horrifying Tarrasque might.

Those were the reasons Merlin couldn’t stop studying Nina’s body. It was the exact opposite of her, who had a dying body. Nina literally couldn’t die even if she wanted to. Like a true Tarrasque, Nina was immune to death, a bad joke that AO made on death herself, creating something that even she can’t reap.

But if it ended there, then Nina would’ve been just another Mystical, overpowered monster. But that was just the start, as her most impressive features were inside her body, hidden away. First, even though she had a heart, she didn’t need it. All of her veins could easily contract and expand like intestines to pump her blood, meaning the heart itself was just there for show. The same could be said for most of her organs. As stated before, she doesn’t need her lungs.

It was the same for her liver, as its job was now taken over by her own acidic blood, which cleaned and regulated all of her hormones, cleared poisons out, and even digested itself and foreign substances to recycle energy. Her kidneys, she didn’t need them either, as her muscles barely released any waste, and that waste could be easily sweated out.

The list goes on, but the most important ones were her nerves, which had turned into a collective, merging her entire nervous system. That meant that her memories, thoughts, and actions could be processed as well in the nerves in one of her toes as they are inside her brain.

If her body were to be completely erased, leaving only her tiny toe. It would take that toe less than an hour to secrete blood out, digest the ground around it for energy, reform the entire body, and Nina wouldn’t even lose her memories.

And even if she were reduced to ash, Death can’t claim her soul, so she would just retreat to the bowls of earth, where she would just respawn from the natural stone there. It might take her a few years to do that, but that was still an option.

Merlin was certain that even if they blew the entire planet, Nina would still find a way to come back to life. There were some powerful spells that could use a wish to change the laws of the universe and fate, and such magic could be used to kill Nina, who was now a Tarrasque, but once again, like a bad joke by the creator himself, when the wizard dies... the Tarrasque would escape the wish and revive. So even if Merlin were to wish Nina dead, when Merlin dies, Nina would respawn.

Merlin had even gone as far as to ask Kali about it and try to find out if the mother of all demons can birth Nina back into something killable... which, as expected, still wasn’t possible. The mother of all demons, the Pale Night, cannot do anything about it.

Then came the truly scary part: Nina was still growing stronger and more durable, which only accelerated even further as she started consuming Arad’s flesh.