Demonic Dragon: Harem System - Chapter 741

Capítulo 741: Ready for her to be born

The fireballs stopped, suspended in the air, like an artificial firmament about to collapse.

The ice salamanders began to retreat—but it was too late. Their movement wasn’t escape. It was instinctive reaction. Reflex. Panic mixed with aggression.

And Strax?

Strax simply lowered his fingers.

A small gesture.

An absolute sentence.

The ceiling descended.

Not literally—but the fireballs plunged like inverted rain, shattering the air into incandescent trails. The hall echoed with a roar of sudden heat, so violent that Mercedes felt her skin protest, even in the intense cold.

The salamanders reacted en masse.

A million blue eyes lit up at once.

The swarm advanced.

And Strax advanced too.

Not hastily.

Not furiously.

But with the cruel tranquility of one performing a natural duty.

He opened his mouth.

And exhaled.

Not ordinary fire—it was a concentrated, pure white beam of heat that expanded like a jet of light. Everything it touched melted instantly. Ice turned to vapor. Crystals turned to dust. Salamanders… turned to shadows.

The roar filled the hall.

Mercedes screamed, not from pain, but from the force of the heat explosion that pushed her hair back.

The egg in her arms pulsed—not from pain, but from pure contentment.

Strax moved.

One step.

Another.

It was almost a dance—predatory, inevitable, ancestral.

The salamanders, once a cohesive and living mass, broke into disjointed waves. Some tried to attack directly, launching jets of cutting ice.

Strax raised his hand and a circle of flames exploded around him, melting the attack as if it were snow in the sun.

Another salamander, larger, leaped from the ceiling with a shrill cry.

Strax swung its tail.

The creature was split in two before falling to the ground.

Mercedes’ eyes widened.

“STRAX! YOU—”

He didn’t hear her.

Or rather: he couldn’t hear anything but what the egg showed him.

The instincts of the offspring.

The demands of the tomb.

The silent order to clear the territory.

The spheres of fire followed his command like disciplined soldiers. Each gesture of Strax transformed the air into blades of heat, incandescent trails that cut, burned, vaporized.

The salamanders screamed—a sharp, crystalline sound—and vanished in light.

In three minutes… yes, three minutes… half the hall was clear.

Molten crystals dripped down the walls.

The warm mist mingled with the continuous cold of the chamber, creating swirls of blue vapor.

Mercedes trembled, no longer from fear, but from something indefinable.

Something between horror and fascination.

Because Strax… Strax didn’t seem to be fighting.

He seemed to be reclaiming a place that had always been his.

The egg in his arms glowed intensely blue—so bright that the light pierced his coat, his skin, his vision.

And suddenly, all the remaining salamanders stopped.

Not because they were defeated.

But because they realized.

They realized who was there.

They realized what was about to be born.

The entire hall froze.

Strax took a deep breath, still illuminated by the flames evaporating into the air.

“There,” he murmured. “Now they understand.”

Mercedes looked around. The floor was covered in small, burnt shadows, still freezing again at the edges.

The melted ice formed bluish puddles.

The steam rose like sacred smoke.

“D-do you understand… what…?” she whispered, almost voiceless.

Strax turned to her, his eyes burning with incandescent red.

“That this hall no longer belongs to them.”

He pointed to the egg.

“It belongs to her.”

The egg pulsed one last time.

And then… silence.

Not like someone fading away—but like someone waiting.

Strax raised his face, still bathed in the blue glow and the last sparks of the massacre. The salamanders frozen in the hall—some still whole, others reduced to white outlines like ice ash—gleamed with a ghostly light.

Mercedes barely breathed.

“Strax…? What are you going to—”

He raised his hand.

And everything around responded.

Not with heat.

But with cold.

A cold so intense that it made the air vibrate, cracking like glass about to shatter.

The salamanders’ bodies began to glow with an inner light—not fire, not life—but the remnant of their essence: the primordial energy that each creature there carried, inherited from the tomb, from the Empress, and from everything that slept beneath that ancient ice.

Light emanated from them like bluish threads, like luminescent mists ripped from the very air.

“Strax… STRAX… what are you doing?!” Mercedes clutched the egg, as if that could protect her from whatever was happening.

Strax didn’t answer.

He was… connected.

His eyes stopped glowing red. They became completely blue—the same blue as the runes on the tomb, the same blue as the egg, the same blue as the salamanders that agonized in silence.

Their energy detached from their bodies, forming currents that floated through the air like ethereal serpents. Each small dead salamander became a blue spark, a cold ember, that went straight to Strax’s outstretched hands.

And he absorbed it all.

Mercedes took an involuntary step back, her heart pounding.

“This… this isn’t normal, Strax! Not even for you!”

The energy kept coming—an ever denser, ever colder flow. The floor was covered in a thin layer of newly formed ice, as if the heat itself had vanished from the room.

Strax opened his fingers.

The energy accumulated between his hands swirled.

First a point.

Then a circle.

Then a sphere.

A huge sphere—the size of the egg itself—formed of pure icy, blue-white energy, spinning in complex spirals like a small frozen planet.

Mercedes could barely see Strax behind the light.

But she saw… something transform.

Something beneath the skin.

For a moment, his outline seemed larger, more defined, closer to the dragon he always denied being entirely.

His tail glowed with runes.

His arms gained veins of pulsating blue light.

His fangs lengthened.

And the air around him grew so cold that Mercedes saw her own breath freeze into tiny crystals.

Strax finally spoke, in a voice that seemed to come from a place much deeper than his chest:

“Don’t worry.”

She felt her stomach sink.

“I’m not… worried.”

Mercedes stared at him, offended and terrified at the same time.

“That doesn’t reassure me!”

The sphere in his hands grew larger—now floating a hand’s breadth above his claws, spinning so fast it seemed to bend the space around it.

The last salamanders dissolved into bluish dust.

Nothing remained of them.

Nothing but pure power.

Strax opened his arms.

And the sphere rose slowly, pulsing like a frozen heart.

“This belongs to her,” he said, pointing his chin at the egg. “All of this. All of this memory. All of this strength. All of this ice.”

Mercedes gripped the egg even tighter.

“And you’re gathering all this for… for WHAT?!”

Strax smiled—a smile very different from the previous ones.

An ancient smile.

A smile that seemed to precede language and history.

“To feed the egg.”

Strax took a step forward.

Slow. Deliberate. As if each movement needed to exist in absolute harmony with what he carried in his hands—that sphere of icy energy, immense, compact, alive in a way that no element should be.

The blue light pulsed like a primal heart, beating in a rhythm that the hall itself followed. The runes on the walls shimmered in sync, as if the tomb were… waiting.

Mercedes instinctively recoiled as Strax approached with the sphere.

“Food…? Strax… STRAX, THIS IS VITAL ENERGY! YOU— YOU CAN’T just—!”

“I can,” he replied calmly. “And I will.”

“That’s not feeding, it’s—it’s—it’s an infusion! You’ll explode the egg! Or—or I don’t know, wake it up with an overdose of ice!”

Strax didn’t look away.

“She asked for it.”

Mercedes stifled a sob of pure terror.

“W-W-What?”

“Not with words.”

He raised his chin, indicating the egg in her arms.

“But she asked for it.”

The sphere in his hands vibrated—as if reacting to its own name, as if the offspring inside the egg had answered from afar.

The sound wasn’t a roar.

Nor a crack.

It was a call.

Mercedes felt the weight in her arms shift. The egg, once heavy and inert, now seemed… hungry.

“Strax, I—I don’t know if—”

“You don’t need to know.”

He stopped directly in front of her.

So close that Mercedes felt her skin burn with cold.

The sphere shone even brighter… and then began to shrink.

Strax placed his hands around it, like a predator holding something infinitely fragile. His fingers closed slowly, compressing the energy with brute force and absolute control.

The sphere resisted.

It cracked.

It vibrated.

And then… it yielded.

The light, once immense and chaotic, was crushed until it became a compact core, the size of Strax’s palm—so dense it looked like a fragment of a frozen star.

Mercedes felt the air leave her lungs.

“Strax… this is dangerous.”

“For you?”

He tilted his head.

“Perhaps.”

He lifted the core.

The blue light reflected off his skin, his fangs, the scales that appeared and disappeared like echoes of what he truly was.

“For her?”

He smiled.

“Never.”

Mercedes held the egg with both arms, as if she could protect it—or protect herself from Strax. She was trembling so much she could barely speak:

“Strax… don’t do this if—if you’re not sure…”

“I always have been.”

He placed his hand—the hand that held the core—on the egg.

The contact was instantaneous.

And devastating.

The energy core didn’t enter the egg like light flowing into a container. It wasn’t smooth. It wasn’t slow.

It was swallowed.

The egg pulled the energy into itself like a gravitational collapse, as if it had opened an internal fissure, a hungry vortex.

The sphere vanished in a single, sharp jerk—shoom—accompanied by a blue flash that extinguished all other light in the room for an instant.

Mercedes screamed, clutching the egg to her chest.

But the egg was… warm.

Warm.

For the first time.

Strax took a step back, breathing deeply, his eyes still luminous.

The entire tomb sighed with him—a wave of dry heat that then dissipated, replaced by a chilling, deep, expectant cold.

Mercedes looked at the egg.

At Strax.

At the hall.

And realized.

Everything there was in absolute silence.

The silence of something about to awaken.

Strax smiled with a restrained, fierce, almost reverent satisfaction.

“Ready.”

Mercedes swallowed hard.

“R—ready for what…?”

Strax tilted his head.

The blue glow reflected in her eyes, making them almost identical to those of the egg.

“For her to be born.”