Demonic Dragon: Harem System-Chapter 426: Multiply.

The silence was dense.

Not like the end of a battle. But like the instant before the truth.

Spiritual dust danced in the air like ashes from an ancient fire, and the Guardian's body lay, shattered, immersed in a collapse of light and emptiness. The ethereal field oscillated, breathing unevenly, as if reality itself was trying to understand what had just happened.

"Fuck..." Scarlet gasped. Blood dripped from the corner of her mouth, evaporating into crimson mist returning to her body with her overhealing.

"What the fuck." Strax stood firm, sword still in hand, but there was a tension in his gaze - as if his instincts, the oldest ones, were telling him what his mind couldn't yet accept.

And then... a tremor came from the Guardian.

He breathed.

Not with his lungs.

With the world.

Reality shook.

The spiritual ground broke into shafts of black light, and the surrounding particles began to be sucked into the Guardian's shattered body. Not as a cure - but as an invocation. As rebirth.

The cracked halves of the mask levitated, orbiting around the deformed skull. And then - SHHHRANK! - merged with a dry snap, no longer as a face... but as a symbol: three vertical eyes superimposed, surrounded by rings of living runes, blazing purple and white like red-hot scars.

He stood up.

But it was no longer just the Guardian.

It was something else. Something ancient.

A voice spoke - but not from his mouth.

From the world.

From the blood on the ground.

From the bones buried under forgotten ages.

"The illusion of victory..." A thousand voices joined in. "...is the sweetest of deaths."

Scarlet shivered from head to toe. 'What the fuck!'

The sound wasn't just heard - it was felt. Inside the skull. In the stomach. In the heart. The words vibrated through the fabric of her soul.

"You think you've won? You've destroyed flesh. You gave form to your fury."

He raised a distorted hand - each finger made of shadows condensed into translucent bones. "But we are more than that. I am the echo. I am the tomb of a Kingdom that never died."

Thousands of voices whispered in unison, coming from everywhere, as if the air had a tongue."You... who carry this garbage..."

A spectral finger pointed at Strax. "...will be killed by us."

Artorias' sword vibrated - not from fear. But of memory.

Strax didn't move.

But his shadow on the ground changed.

There were claws.

And then he spoke. Low. Tense.

"Scarlet." Strax called out with a tense smile, he had already imagined that something like this would happen, after all, he had seen some memories of Artorias when he released Tiamat and Ouroboros.

Scarlet, who looked at him, understood what he wanted. They weren't using everything they had, nor were they pushing themselves beyond their limits... So she just asked a simple but easy-to-understand question. "No limits?"

A smile grew on Strax as he nodded. "No limits."

Something exploded inside him. A dry sound, like ribs breaking, like chains snapping. And he roared.

ROOOOOOARRRRRRRRRR!!!

The spiritual field shook with the sound. The echo didn't stop - it reverberated throughout the plane, making the Guardian's eyes narrow for the first time.

Strax's body began to twitch, not with pain, but with release. Bones lengthened. Muscles expanded. Curved horns sprouted from his forehead, and his skin was covered in gray-black and red scales, with gray-red veins shining like rivers of magma. The wings opened with a snap, immense, majestic, covered in a living membrane that pulsed with every beat of its heart.

The perfect metamorphosis. A Humanoid Dragon form focused essentially on battle. A form of War.

Scarlet watched him. Her breathing slowed. "Every time you change your body, it gets more and more beautiful... However..." she murmured. Then she closed her eyes.

"It's my turn." The blood in the field reacted. All the blood came towards her.

Droplets began to rise like liquid serpents. The air changed. It became colder. More solemn.

Scarlet floated.

Her body began to change.

Her skin whitened until it was as white as moon bones. The veins under her skin glowed pulsating crimson. Her eyes - black as the abyss, with red pupils like two dead suns. His clothes dissolved and were replaced by a living cloak, a fusion of dark silk, organic leather and silver chains that tinkled with a spectral sound. From his chest to his neck, an armor of black plates pulsed with ancient runes, and a crown made of thorns of coagulated blood grew over his head.

Her feet no longer touched the ground.

She was wicked beauty, a Queen of War, a goddess of unlamented death. Her red hair flew back as two broken bat wings grew.

"Vampire Count transformation." The words came out like a decree.

Like a sentence. And then, thousands of spectral bats rose up around her, swirling like an infernal ring, a living storm of death and enchantment.

Strax, in his draconic form, steadied the flaming sword over his shoulder. She hovered beside him, eyes burning.

"It's amazing how beautiful my wife always is, I'm a lucky guy. Don't you think?" He asked the Guardian who looked into his draconic eyes.

The Guardian... smiled. "Have you turned into monsters to face a god?"

The sky cracked behind him. A thousand eyes opened in the firmament. The ground bled. The air became too thick to breathe. "Convenient." he spoke.

Voices came from everywhere. A choir of the dead. Of spectres. Of memories. "Show the Lost Kingdom what you're made of..." free𝑤ebnovel.com

Strax let out a roar that made the eyes of the heavens dim for an instant.

Scarlet opened her arms, the storm of blood swirling around her like a whirlpool of bone and sin.

And then...

Hell descended on the world.

The Guardian raised his arms, and the sky screamed.

The clouds shattered like burning paper. From the celestial rift that opened from the ray of Light where the Guardian had left earlier, swords of inverted light fell, each carrying a trapped soul from ancient times - screams and wails fell along with them, piercing reality like daggers of despair.

The spiritual explosion crossed borders.

In the Kingdom of the Elves to the south, towers made of living jade shook. The bells of ancient trees tolled in agony. Priests fell to their knees, bleeding from the eyes, feeling the echo of ancient war being unleashed again.

"Myr Letha... He has returned!" cried an old woman, as the roots of the forests tried to retreat, as if nature itself recognized the horror reborn.

"The spirit realm... has returned?" The old woman stared in disbelief... She was one of the people who trusted Queen Frieren.... "Let's go to the Queen! Right now! Everyone!"

On the battlefield, Strax advanced first.

His body - a living arrow of rage and power - launched itself at the Guardian, breaking the sound barrier with an impact that tore through the spiritual field in waves of gray and scarlet energy. Each step shattered the unearthly ground, scattering black embers.

Artorias' sword, now alive and conscious, screamed in war runes. The Guardian blocked with a gesture, creating a shield made of bones and souls, but the impact threw him backwards like an uncontrolled marionette, passing through three spectral pillars before stabilizing in the air, levitating with his arms outstretched.

"You still don't understand..." Thousands of eyes opened in his flesh. "...this battle is an execution."

Scarlet appeared behind him.

In an imperceptible movement, teleported in crimson mist, she drove her claws into the Guardian's spine, who roared with a thousand voices simultaneously. The sound that escaped was inverted thunder, which cracked mountains in neighboring realities.

The Guardian's blood gushed out - not red, but silver, and the falling drops created deformed spectres as they touched the ground.

Scarlet smiled.

"Do you feel that?" She licked some of the blood off her finger. "The taste of your eternity falling apart..."

But he exploded.

Literally.

The Guardian imploded and reappeared in three versions of himself, each representing a phase of his existence. A golden warrior. An oracle in ruins. A corpse crowned with stars. The three merged again into a titanomorph three hundred meters tall, made of liquid shadows and the scales of time.

He walked, and each step redrew the landscape.

Entire forests on the outskirts of the Elf Kingdom aged a thousand years in seconds.

Lakes dried up. The moon lost color. The elves fainted

Strax flew up with a roar that set the very air on fire. He spun his sword like a comet and descended with titanic force, aiming for the Guardian's heart. But the Guardian raised a colossal arm, blocking the blow - the collision created a shockwave that swept away entire trees to the north, turning valleys into craters.

And then the Guardian spoke inside the mind of every living being.

"You ingrates have sealed our kingdom. I will destroy yours."

Scarlet rose to the heavens. Her arms spread wide, her body wrapped in a spiral of souls. Thousands of bats merged into a spear of solid, living, pulsating blood, which she hurled with the force of an angry goddess.

The spear pierced the Guardian's skull, sending the colossus reeling - but instead of falling, he multiplied again.

A thousand versions of him.

All deformed. All hideous. Each carrying the burden of a lost kingdom.

Strax and Scarlet were now surrounded. An army of echoes of the end.

But they didn't retreat.

Strax steadied his sword, his eyes blazing.

"I think you're quite arrogant." Scarlet hovered beside him, her eyes dark as tombs. "Come here, girls." She called out and then...

"I was tired of just watching," Cassandra said, appearing behind her mother, next to Daniela and Belatrix. "It's a pity those humans can't fly," she said.

SHRKKKI!!!

Two bolts of lightning struck them. "Flying is easy," Monica said as her lightning bolts whizzed around her body, "Right, child?" She said before another bolt of lightning screamed and appeared beside her.

"Exactly." Beatrice said smiling.

But it wasn't just the two of them... "Bummer. Using fire to fly is a lot easier than I thought." Samira said, appearing beside them.

"Hm... where are those two?" Belatrix said, "Over there." She pointed at the beam of light.

"Oh..."

Rogue and Cristine were helping Ouroboros and Tiamat.

"Well... now, multiply." Samira looked into the Guardian's eyes. "I want to see you multiply, you little fucking worm."