The dragon's harem

The shadow drakaina swung her head, throwing Ganta away before she could punch her in the eye. But the vigorous ape wasn’t going to fall down so easily. Ganta’s foot grabbed one of the drakaina’s horns and swung around at blinding speed, sliding down her back with a spend and then using the wings as leverage to fling herself back to the drakaina’s head.

Like all the warriors of her clan, Ganta had been trained from when she was a little girl on how to fight dragons and maneuver around them. To her, a dragon’s body was no different than one large tree.

By this time, Ganta was considering her weapons. She has several dragon scales hidden within her pocket that she could use without counting Arad’s scale that he just gave her. The pocked was tied around her waist and not that easily accessible with her large ape hands, especially when those two powerful arms were her only way of moving around the deadly drakaina.

All that Ganta could do now was try to get away from the drakaina’s attack zones, keeping to her back and trying to find an opportunity to deliver a deadly attack. The problem was that she was dealing with a shadow drakaina, which very much wanted to catch her alive, not dead.

The fact that the drakaina needs her alive means that as long as she is just annoying and not threatening, the drakaina would prefer to let Ganta exhaust herself.

Right now, Ganta doesn’t need to worry about the drakaina banishing her to the shadow realm and instantly ripping her very being apart. But the moment Ganta manages to deal a painful enough attack to create an opening to escape, the drakaina would stop pulling punches.

There was one problem. Ganta was sure she didn’t have an attack strong enough to harm the drakaina. She could gamble on Arad’s scale, but that is a move too risky to take. That only left one option.

For Ganta, there was only one source of power, which she was 100% enough to harm the shadow drakaina. The drakaina’s own power.

Ganta dodged the drakaina’s bites and claws, dancing on her back and rapidly feeling her stamina draining away. The wounds left on her body from the shadow teleportation opened again, causing blood to rush out like rivers.

Even though it had been less than a minute since she started fighting, all of the blood loss and exhaustion had already started taking a toll on her body, making her both slower and weaker. She would’ve usually been able to fight for at least half an hour non-stop, but her wounds were just too great.

Ganta smiled, not because she was happy, but because she was angry, sending a clear threat to the drakaina and trying to taunt her to move.

She knew that her only advantage in this fight was that the drakaina was like what Arad said, insane. She might still be able to form crude plans and even show a level of cunning, but she is far too deteriorated to understand feints and rationalize decisions on the spot.

Ganta could only blame herself for taking Arad’s words as they were. He clearly didn’t understand the difference between someone crazy and psychosis. The drakaina was the latter, she had long since lost touch with reality and was trapped within her rotten mind, driven by whatever twisted sense she had left.

This means many things for Ganta. The first is that the drakaina is still able to show 100% of her power. The second is that she is immune to mind tricks and tactics as she lives within the conjured reality of her twisted mind. The third was that the second trait can be exploited by someone smart enough.

The drakaina still sees Ganta as a weak little world that she is using as bait for the much stronger Arad. It didn’t matter what Ganta did or how hard she fought. The drakaina could never feel fear or a sense of threat from her. But, what if Ganta changed that? What if she managed to make the drakaina see her as a powerful monster in the illusory reality her mind is trapped in?

The answer was simple, she could. In the blink of an eye, Ganta scooped some crushed cobblestone from the shattered ground and threw it at the drakaina’s head. She then took that chance to jump back and pull a tiny plue scale from her pocket.

It was time to go all out, even though she knew her body might not be able to take while injured like this. It took Ganta just the blink of an eye to swallow the scale, and her whole body flashed with lightning.

Her hair turned a pale shade of blue, her eyes flashed white, and her hair stood with countless sparks of crackling lightning. She pounded her chest, roared into the ceiling and a blinding bolt of lightning burst from between her fangs.

The pillar of lightning illuminated the whole room, causing all of the shadows around them to move and dance. Some disappeared and new ones were born. In the blink of an eye, Ganta had influenced all of the shadows that the drakaina controlled in the room, stunning her for a fraction of a second.

While what Ganta did was simple, the drakaina imagined her being able to control the shadows as well, which created a large enough opening to allow Ganta to jump at the drakaina’s back and grab onto her scales with both hands.

The drakaina jumped away at her full speed, violently throwing Ganta away.

Ganta hit the ground like a meteor, coughing a mouthful of blood. But her plan had worked. She now held a shadow scale in each of her hands, so without wasting a second, she swallowed one of them.

The bright lightning engulfing her body disappeared and was replaced with waves of pure darkness. The shadows around her danced, her eyes flashed red, and her body felt as light as mist. Ganta had never felt such power before, her whole body surged with might that she had never known existed. The power of the shadows, the might this drakaina held was far above anything she imagined.

Ganta knew that she could now fight the drakaina, maybe even wound her. But, she wasn’t going to take that risk. Without even thinking twice, she sank into the shadows and teleported away, landing in a dark cavern far away.

She shifted back to her humanoid form and gasped for air, blood gushing down her mouth and neck as she held the gaping wound in her stomach shut with her hand. Looking to her right, she saw a terrified gnom woman sitting on the ground, shaking in terror.