The dragon's harem

Mana was a form of energy comprised of countless tiny particles as small as a photon, yet far slower because they have mass. But they had the unique trait of being unable to interact with the fabric of space in their raw form. This means that while mana has mass, it isn’t affected by gravity and is a great source of energy.

When a wizard casts magic, they either use the mana stored inside their bodies, the outside mana, or a combination of both, and then force those particles to either temporarily take the form of regular matter or push regular matter to create spells.

For example, using those particles to push electrons around in the air creates lightning, and using that lightning, a wizard can break down the moisture in the air into oxygen and hydrogen and then burn that to cast fireballs. It was also possible to directly use those particles to agitate matter in the air to heat up and ignite flame.

The problems start when a wizard uses a lot of mana and agitates those particles a bit too much in a short time. Already agitated mana particles can interact with regular matter, which is the basis of how they work, but that also means that gravity could affect them as well, which is where the real danger is.

If those particles are overused and abused, they could get stuck in a state where they can passively interact with matter and thus end up causing countless disasters, like a spell plague that causes all magic to shatter and fail, or a mana demonification where the excess of active mana particles turns animals and humans into raging monsters by mutating their bodies.

Of course, the fabric of mana is highly resilient and has been like that for eons. Breaking it and causing a disaster is easier said than done, and the vast majority of wizards can never shake it, no matter how many spells they cast.

What hurt the fabric isn’t raw power, but the precision and technical aspect of the spells cast. It was like forcing a human to run for ten miles, or forcing them to attempt a backflip. One costs far more energy than the other, and one can land them with a broken neck or six feet under the dirt.

As Merlin stepped to face Lilia directly, her unenchanted shoes burst and tore apart the moment her magic started crackling like lightning from her toenails to her fingernails, and her robe barely stayed on due to how enchanted it was. Merlin’s eyes had turned completely white, and each of them leaked more mana than ten wizards could ever hope to be able to control. Her while hair stood up, and the air around her vibrated as the pressure of mana she was commanding grew to a horrifying scale.

"This is my house; get out." Merlin growled, and Lilia started floating in front of her as mana crackled around her like lightning as well. The half-halfling’s entire body started to glow, and her red hair burned like flames as her entire body seemed to heal and reform into a healthy state.

"Worry not, child. I’ll not touch Yog’s power. You draw as much as you want from Arad. It is only fair, for I am older and I have spent far longer refining my craft." A tall wooden staff emerged in Lilia’s hand, and Merlin immediately summoned a wand of her own; that staff was the void staff Mira made for Arad.

A bolt of lightning exploded out of Lilia’s staff and flew right toward Merlin’s face, but before it could hit, countless barriers formed and absorbed it, even though they quickly shattered. That lightning bolt wasn’t made of lightning, but condensed mana, and it disintegrated any mana it touched.

Merlin slowly lifted her palm with a passive face. With the staff, and being linked directly to Arad’s stomach and soul, she was able to pull things from there with ease, and what appeared on her hand was enough to even scare Arad.

It was a baseball-sized black hole, and it was utterly unrestrained, releasing an endless wave of heat, light, gravity, and radiation enough to easily engulf the entire white space they were in. Arad knew that it wasn’t a regular black hole immediately, and in the next second, the black hole had turned into a fully grown, muscular man.

That man was Baal, and he glared directly at Lilia. "Give her even more scares." Merlin growled, and Baal clenched his fists. "As you order, Mother." In the next second, he had disappeared, and his fist was already racing at the back of Lilia’s head.

Lilia teleported away to dodge the attack without even flinching, and she threw a glance toward Baal. "You don’t have enough skill or power to dominate an archon and summon them, so I guess you just opened a path for him to come here." She swung her staff and shattered the link that allowed Merlin to keep Baal around, aiming to force him back to where he came from.

But the moment that link shattered, Baal didn’t disappear and instead kept fighting, chasing her all around the place as Merlin emotionlessly fired an endless rain of magic missiles toward them. Seeing that Merlin didn’t need the magic link to remain active after being used once, Lilia quickly shifted her strategy.

One thing was clear, and it was that Merlin was operating on a level far from any other wizard could ever reach. "Arad’s stomach is now a part of my domain, a labyrinth that I control, and here, I am a literal goddess. No, that is a lie, a false truth."

The entire white space started shifting into Merlin’s world. The whiteness turned into an endless night sky, and the hard ground beneath her feet into a calm sea as the blazing purple sun raged above in the sky.

A blazing sun in the middle of the night didn’t make any sense, but that gave Lilia enough to understand that regular laws of nature didn’t work here. This was a separate space completely under her own rules. She wasn’t facing a simple wizard, but something more akin to AO on a smaller scale.

The sun descended, and it landed in front of Merlin. "Murder her." As Merlin ordered, Eris stared back at her. "And here I was wondering who got you calling me. She looks harmless; are you sure about this?"

"Don’t kill her; the universe needs her alive. Just help Baal skin her alive. We need her out of Arad’s stomach." Merlin didn’t need to explain all the details, so she immediately sent a fragment of her memories to both Baal and Eris, giving them a full rundown of everything that happened.

Without wasting a second, the two charged at Lilia without hesitation. Having understood that this whole thing was a test to see if Merlin could act as the magic goddess of Arad’s inner world, she had to prove her magical capabilities and skill by kicking the goddess of magic and her influence out.

But what happened next, no one expected. As Baal tried to grab Lilia by the face so Eris could blast her away, Lilia grabbed him by the thumb as she dodged his hand -due to how large he was, and how small she was, that was all that could fit in her palm-, and flipped him right to the ground before stomping his nose into his skull, and then kicking him toward Eris in the next fraction of a second.

There was no magic in her moves, just pure martial prowess. "I used to spar with Cain, Amaterasu, Kali, Sofia, Sylph, Selena, and many more. I taught them magic, and they taught me how to break bones."