Demonic Dragon: Harem System

The sound of the colossal sword cutting through the air echoed throughout the training arena.

Samira spun and swung the blade at one of the reinforced pillars. The strike never touched the stone. She stopped the motion a few inches before impact, pulled the sword back, and tried to turn the return into an upward slash. The weapon rose with enough force to produce a gust of wind that struck the ceiling, but the movement ended too wide, leaving her abdomen completely exposed.

She noticed the mistake and cursed.

"Shit."

She took two steps back, adjusted her hands around the hilt, and tried again. Horizontal slash, turn of the hips, change of direction, and vertical strike. The sword’s weight made the floor tremble beneath her feet even though Samira wasn’t using enough energy to destroy the arena.

She was still strong.

Still fast.

Even so, the memory of Zi Bai deflecting her sword with a single touch remained lodged in her mind.

"Damn mare."

Samira unleashed another sequence of attacks against an imaginary opponent. The colossal sword passed close to the ground, rose toward the neck, and returned in a blow meant to destroy a guard. She repeated the combination with more speed, then with more strength, but always reached the same result.

The opening appeared.

Her balance was lost.

The next strike took too long to begin.

She stopped in the center of the arena and rested the sword’s tip against the floor. Sweat ran down her face, crossed her neck, and disappeared beneath her simple training clothes. She had already been there for hours, repeating the same movements until the muscles in her arms began to burn.

Normally, that would have been enough to satisfy her.

That day, it only increased her irritation.

"I was massacred by a horse."

The sentence sounded worse when spoken aloud.

Zi Bai hadn’t merely won. She hadn’t needed to use enough strength to make the defeat acceptable. She had deflected Samira’s first attack, taken advantage of the force behind the blow, and thrown her across the field as though she were dealing with a novice.

Samira squeezed the hilt until her fingers hurt.

"A fucking horse."

She raised the sword again and charged. Her body surged forward with brutal force, her legs driving all her weight into a diagonal slash capable of splitting a gigantic creature in half. The blade struck the reinforced training dummy in front of her and passed straight through the entire structure.

The two halves fell to the floor.

Samira remained in the final position, breathing heavily. The strike had been powerful, but it brought no sense of progress. It was merely another display of strength against something incapable of defending itself.

She looked at the sword.

"This enormous wall won’t get out of my way."

The wall wasn’t physical.

Samira had felt it for a long time.

At first, all she needed to do was fight. Every battle taught her body something, every stronger enemy forced her instincts to evolve, and every injury revealed a mistake she shouldn’t repeat. That was how she had grown, facing people, monsters, and situations that gave her no time to study.

For years, it had worked.

Now, it no longer did.

She had reached a point where brute strength, speed, and combat experience were no longer enough to make her evolve. Samira could keep training for days, weeks, or months, but her movements remained practically the same. Faster, perhaps. Stronger, certainly. Even so, they were the same.

She couldn’t climb that wall.

Nor could she destroy it.

And for someone as proud as she was, accepting her own stagnation felt worse than losing a battle.

Samira was a dragon.

She could cover entire battlefields with her presence, face armies, and wield a sword that would crush the body of almost any warrior. Even so, a woman who, until recently, had possessed the form of a horse had passed through her guard without any difficulty.

It made Samira feel like absolute trash.

She swung the sword again.

She thought too much.

Acted too little.

And when she did act, she trained without restraint, attacking dummies, pillars, and the air itself as though the sheer number of strikes would produce an answer that her technique couldn’t provide.

It was during another sequence that a voice came from the upper floor.

"You’re doing it wrong."

Samira stopped her sword in the middle of the movement. She didn’t look back. She recognized the voice, as well as the presence standing on the observation platform.

"Then come down here and teach me."

She rested the sword on her shoulder and took a deep breath, trying to contain her irritation before continuing.

"Because I’m starting to lose my patience, and I can kill you with one strike."

Kryssia rested one hand on the platform’s railing.

"You can’t hit me."

Samira turned her face just enough to see her from the corner of her eye.

"Come down."

Kryssia didn’t answer.

She simply jumped from the second floor.

Her body fell toward the arena without any spell to slow her descent. In the instant before impact, she bent her knees slightly and touched the ground with a softness that didn’t match the height. Dust rose only around her boots.

Kryssia wore light training clothes. An ordinary sword remained fastened to her waist, narrow and far too small compared to Samira’s colossal weapon. She straightened, walked to the center of the field, and drew the blade in a single motion.

Then she looked at Samira’s back.

"Come."

There was no provocation in her voice.

That irritated Samira even more.

Kryssia had been a general. Not merely an officer or field commander, but someone who had reached the highest rank in the kingdom she served. She had grown within a military structure, surrounded by instructors, weapon masters, and veterans who corrected every flaw before it could become a habit.

She had studied formations, strategy, distance, and swordsmanship from a very young age. Her learning hadn’t depended solely on surviving battles. There was a method behind every part of her strength.

Samira was the opposite.

When Strax had met her, she had been a mercenary. She fought for money, survival, and pleasure. She had never received a formal military education. She hadn’t followed a school of swordsmanship and possessed no ancient technique to guide her every movement.

Her swordsmanship had been built around her strength.

Her way of fighting had been born from battle.

Compared to Kryssia, Samira was a commoner.

She hated admitting that.

Kryssia raised the sword in front of her face and adjusted her feet.

"Use only the sword. No energy to increase your strength, speed, or endurance. Don’t use aura, mana, or draconic traits."

Samira turned around completely.

"You want me to fight like a human?"

"I want you to fight like a swordswoman."

The answer struck a particularly sensitive part of Samira’s pride.

She removed the colossal sword from her shoulder and gripped the hilt with both hands.

"Don’t complain when it breaks."

Kryssia merely repeated:

"Come."

Samira advanced.

Even without energy, her natural strength remained far above that of an ordinary person. The colossal sword crossed the distance with enough speed to produce a heavy whistle, descending toward Kryssia’s shoulder.

The former general moved her left foot.

That was all.

She left the weapon’s path by the smallest of margins and touched the side of the colossal blade with her own sword. The contact wasn’t meant to block the blow. It merely altered its direction by a few inches.

The weapon’s weight did the rest.

Samira tried to stop the motion, but the tip struck the floor. Before she could raise the sword, Kryssia stepped inside her guard and rested the blade beneath her chin.

"One death."

Samira knocked the sword aside with her forearm and retreated.

"That was luck."

Kryssia returned to her initial stance.

"Again."

Samira attacked with a horizontal slash. This time, she kept her arms closer to her body and positioned her feet to correct any deflection. Kryssia lowered her sword, received the colossal blade near the guard, and twisted her wrist.

The impact seemed small.

Even so, Samira felt the strength leave her fingers.

The colossal sword was deflected upward, leaving her body completely open. Kryssia touched the point of her weapon to the center of Samira’s chest and withdrew before she could react.

"Two deaths."

Samira ground her teeth.

She adjusted her grip and attacked for the third time, now using a sequence. The first strike came from above. Kryssia deflected it. The second came from the side, taking advantage of the weapon’s return. Kryssia stepped back half a pace. The third would have been a thrust, but before Samira could complete the transition, the general’s sword struck her fingers.

The pain made one of her hands release the hilt.

Kryssia entered the short distance again, struck the side of Samira’s knee with her foot, and placed the blade against her neck while she was still losing her balance.

"Three deaths."

Samira shoved Kryssia and managed to recover her footing before she fell.

"Stop counting."

"You would die every time."

"I understand."

"It doesn’t seem like it."

Samira took a deep breath and tried to calm herself. Her anger made her arms grow stiffer, but lowering the sword felt like admitting defeat. She returned to her stance and attacked once more.

Kryssia knocked her down.

Samira stood and tried a different approach.

She was disarmed.

She tried using the sword as a shield so she could advance with her body.

Kryssia trapped the blade, redirected her weight, and threw her onto her back.

In less than ten minutes, Samira was struck in the neck, chest, wrists, legs, and abdomen. None of the blows caused a serious injury, but all of them marked points where a real sword would have ended the fight.

Kryssia wasn’t using superior strength.

She wasn’t faster.

Nor did she possess a physical advantage.

She was simply always in the right place.

Samira attacked again, now with far less confidence. She tried to conceal the direction of her slash, but Kryssia watched the movement of her shoulders, stepped in before the blade could gain speed, and slammed the sword’s pommel directly into her nose.

Samira fell onto her backside.

Blood began to flow slowly.

Kryssia remained standing before her.

"Enough."

Samira wiped the blood away with the back of her hand and looked at her sword, which had fallen several yards away. It was the first time in a long while that someone had defeated her that way. Zi Bai had made it look simple because of the difference in power. Kryssia made everything even worse.

She won without power.

"How?" Samira asked.

Kryssia sheathed her sword.

"You can’t evolve because you know nothing about your own weapon."

Samira raised her eyes.

"I’ve used that sword for years."

"Using it doesn’t mean understanding it."

Kryssia walked to the colossal blade and placed one foot on its flat.

"You know how much it weighs, but not how that weight changes during each part of a movement. You know its reach, but not the distance at which that reach becomes a disadvantage. You know it can cut through anything, yet you can’t recover your guard when a strike misses."

Samira remained silent.

"You call all of that a style," Kryssia continued. "But there is no style. There is a collection of habits that worked because you were always stronger than your enemies."

Samira’s expression hardened.

Kryssia didn’t back down.

"You used magic to compensate for your lack of talent."

"I have talent."

"You have a talent for fighting. Not for the sword."

The distinction struck Samira harder than any blow she had received.

Kryssia pointed at the weapon on the floor.

"Your energy increases your speed when a movement begins incorrectly. Your strength keeps you from losing the sword when your grip fails. Your endurance allows you to ignore the openings that should kill you. Every time your technique presented a problem, you covered the mistake with more power."

Samira slowly stood.

"So Zi Bai won because she noticed that."

"Zi Bai won because you handed her the entire fight with your first strike. She deflected your sword, and the rest of your body went with it. After that, you were no longer fighting. You were merely falling in the direction she chose."

Samira retrieved the sword and studied the hilt.

For years, she had held that weapon as though it were merely an extension of her strength. She had never thought she needed to learn how to converse with the blade’s weight, shape, and reach. When something failed, she increased her energy. When an enemy resisted, she struck harder.

That wall didn’t exist because she needed more power.

It existed because Samira kept trying to break it with the same movement.

"What do I do?" she asked.

Kryssia removed her own sword from her waist and placed it on the floor.

"First, you unlearn."

Samira frowned.

"Unlearn what?"

"Everything you believe you know."

Kryssia approached and corrected the position of her feet with a light kick. Then she adjusted her hips, lowered her shoulders, and moved her hands along the hilt of the colossal sword.

"You’ll begin with your stance. Then you’ll learn how to raise that sword without using your arms unnecessarily. You’ll discover where its center of balance lies, how much time you need to stop a slash, and which movements cannot be combined."

Samira looked at her.

"That sounds basic."

"It is basic."

"I’m stronger than almost every warrior on this continent."

"Then it will be even more humiliating when you realize you never learned the basics."

Samira clenched her teeth, but didn’t answer.

Kryssia moved a few steps away and crossed her arms.

"Raise the sword."

Samira obeyed.

"Slowly."

The blade began to rise.

Kryssia struck the side of her leg with the scabbard.

"Your feet are wrong."

Samira corrected them.

"Again."

She raised the weapon.

The scabbard struck her shoulder.

"You’re tensing too much."

Samira relaxed her muscles and tried once more.

Kryssia watched the entire movement before nodding slightly.

"Better."

It was only one word.

Even so, Samira felt something she hadn’t felt during all those hours of uncontrolled training.

Progress.

Small, almost insignificant, but real.

She lowered the sword and returned to her initial position.

"Again."

Kryssia smiled faintly.

"Now you’re beginning to learn."

[...Not far from there.]

"Am I seeing what I think I’m seeing?" Xenovia asked Beatrice, who stood beside her.

"Yeah... being humiliated does have its benefits. Even Samira can accept help," Beatrice murmured.

"To think I’d ever see this," Nyx murmured.

"You should stop gossiping and focus on getting stronger." Frieren appeared beside them.

"Where were you?" Beatrice asked.

"Hm." She thought for a moment. "I went to see my daughter for a little while, to make sure the Elven Kingdom was doing well."

"And?"

"I discovered that I’m a terrible queen."

They all looked at her.

"What?"

"That damned child expanded the kingdom by eight hundred percent."

"E-Evelyn did what?" Beatrice choked.

"You heard me," she murmured. "That child actually unified the elves."

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