Is it Wrong to Have a Harem in DxD

The fifth Boost hit like swallowing a live coal.

The first four had been uncomfortable in the familiar way, the pressure building under my skin, my muscles tightening and my joints going hot. I'd learned to breathe through those. But five was a wall. My knees buckled and I dropped to the grass in Issei's backyard, one hand braced against the ground and the other arm, the gauntlet arm, shaking so hard the red metal rattled against itself. The green gem was throwing light across the yard in a strobe pulse and my vision was tunneling at the edges and my heartbeat was in my ears, too fast, and I could feel the power straining at the seams of my body.

"Hold it."

Ddraig's voice, low and flat, no sympathy.

I held it. My teeth were clenched and my jaw ached and sweat was running down my temples and dripping off my chin onto the cold grass. December air hit my skin and evaporated the sweat and the contrast between the cold outside and the furnace inside made my whole body shiver.

"Ten more seconds."

I counted. Badly. Each second stretched and my arms were shaking and a vein in my left forearm was pulsing visibly, the green light from the gem making the skin look alien. The grass under my gauntlet hand was scorching. I could smell it burning.

"Release."

I let go. The power drained back and my body went slack and I collapsed flat on my back in the yard. The stars were out. It was cold and clear and my chest was heaving and the grass was wet against my back and for about fifteen seconds all I could do was breathe and stare at the sky. Orion was up there. The belt, three stars in a row. My old astronomy professor would have been proud that I remembered.

"Five Boosts," Ddraig said. "Held for twelve seconds. Your body absorbed approximately eighty percent before breakdown began."

"Is that good?"

"It is adequate. Two weeks ago you could hold three. The Gremory energy doubled your baseline and your body has been acclimating. Five is your current ceiling."

"How many do I need for Riser?"

A pause. "In Scale Mail? Ten sustained. Without it? You cannot beat a High-Class Immortal with five Boosts."

I lay there. The grass was making my shirt damp and the cold was settling into my lower back. Inside the house, Asia's light was on. She'd been studying Japanese, her dictionary spread across her desk, and she'd looked up and waved through the window when I'd started training. The curtain was drawn now.

"Then we keep going."

"We do. But not tonight." Her voice dropped lower, the vibration settling in my chest. "I want to show you something, Partner. Close your eyes."

I closed them.

The backyard disappeared.

One second I was lying on cold grass with a wet shirt and aching arms. The next I was standing in a void.

Red and gold. A vast empty space that extended in every direction with no floor and no ceiling, the air tinted crimson, and light came from everywhere and nowhere. Gold veins ran through the red, pulsing with a rhythm that matched my heartbeat. The space was warm, oppressively so, and it smelled like hot metal and smoke.

"Where is this?"

"The inner world of the Boosted Gear." Her voice came from everywhere, reverberating through the red space, vibrating in my ribs. "Your mind is here. Your body is still in the yard. This is where I live, Partner. This is my cage."

I turned. And looked up.

She was there.

The true form. The dragon. The actual Welsh Dragon, the Red Dragon Emperor, the Heavenly Dragon that had fought gods and been too dangerous to let live.

Her body filled the void. Her head alone was the size of a building, her neck curving upward into shadow, and her scales were crimson and gold and they caught the light in the void and reflected it in patterns that moved. Green eyes, each one larger than I was, slit-pupiled and ancient. Wings that stretched beyond what I could see, membranes of translucent red between bones thicker than bridge cables. Her body was coiled in the void, tail disappearing into distance, claws the size of cars resting in the nothing.

Terrifying. Beautiful. Both at the same time, and I meant both.

"This is what they sealed," she said. Her mouth didn't move. The voice was the space itself. "This is what lives in your arm."

I couldn't talk. My throat was working but nothing was coming out. She'd been in my head while I fumbled through high school and had sex on office furniture, and this was what she actually was.

"I am showing you this for a reason." The green eyes shifted. Her head lowered, slowly, and the heat of her breath washed over me. Smoke and copper and old stone. "You need to understand what you carry. What I am. What we can become together."

The form began to change.

The dragon shape compressed. Scales folded inward, mass concentrated, the enormous body contracting. The green eyes stayed. They shrank but they stayed, burning in the shrinking form, and the wings pulled in and the tail shortened and the neck compressed and the body that had filled a void was drawing itself down into something human-sized.

She stood in front of me.

Humanoid. Tall, taller than Kalawarner, maybe 180 centimeters. Red-scaled skin across her shoulders and forearms and collarbones, fading to warm bronze at the stomach and thighs. Crimson hair that fell past her waist, thick and wild and moving in heat that came off her body. Horns curving back from her temples, smooth and dark red. Green eyes, slit-pupiled, glowing with the same light as the Boosted Gear's gem. High cheekbones, a strong jaw, a mouth that looked like it had never smiled at anything it didn't want to eat.

She was naked.

The automatic assessment ran before I could stop it and I'd stopped trying to stop it. Strong shoulders. Full breasts, heavy, the skin transitioning from bronze to red scales along the outer curves. A waist that tapered and hips that flared and legs that were long and muscled. Her body radiated heat. I could feel it on my face from six feet away, dry and intense.

She was staring at me. Her green eyes locked on mine and her nostrils flared once. She could feel my reaction through the link. Every thought I'd just had. The assessment, the appreciation, the arousal I hadn't tried to suppress because suppressing it would have been lying and I'd stopped lying to her weeks ago.

"I am a Dragon God," she said. Out loud, with a mouth, with vocal cords. Her voice was deeper than it sounded in my head. Rougher. It resonated in a chest that was right there in front of me, real and physical and naked.

"You're a Dragon God who's naked."

Her eyes narrowed. The vertical pupils contracted. For a second I thought she was going to hit me, and in this space she could probably atomize me. Then scales erupted across her skin, flowing outward from her shoulders and down her torso and legs, forming armor. Red scales overlapping in rows, covering her from collarbone to ankle, leaving her arms bare from the elbows down and her neck and face exposed. The armor was organic, part of her, and it fit her body like it had been grown rather than worn.

"Better," I said.

"You are the strangest host I have ever had."

"You keep saying that."

"It keeps being true." She rolled her shoulders and the scale-armor flexed with the movement and the muscles underneath shifted and I was still staring and she was still reading my reaction through the link. Her jaw tightened. "Stop that."

"Stop what?"

"You know what."

"Can't. The link goes both ways. You want to feel what I'm feeling, you feel all of it."

She looked at me. Then she moved.

Fast. She closed the distance in a step and her fist hit me in the sternum. The impact launched me backward and I hit the nothing-floor of the mindscape and skidded and my chest compressed and all the air left my body.

"In this space," she said, walking toward me, "I can train you properly. Physical laws are mine to set. Pain is real but damage is not. You will learn to fight like a dragon, to sense killing intent before it manifests, to move before your mind has finished deciding."

I got up. My chest hurt. The pain was sharp and real and my ribs ached and I was already breathing hard.

"That's one," she said. "Get up faster."

She hit me again. Open palm, across the jaw, and my head snapped sideways and I tasted copper. She followed with a low kick that swept my legs and I went down and the nothing-floor was hard when I hit it and my shoulder screamed.

"Sense the strike. With your body, not your eyes. Dragon-sense extends through the link. Your muscles know where the threat is before your brain processes vision. Stop thinking. Start feeling."

I tried. She hit me. I tried again. She hit me harder. The third time she came in with a straight punch to my solar plexus and a lurch fired in my gut, a wrongness that pulled me sideways before I'd registered her fist moving, and her knuckles caught the edge of my shoulder instead of center mass.

"There." She was close. Her breath was warm and it smelled like fire and old metal. "That is dragon-sense. The body responding to killing intent before cognition catches up. Again."

She hit me fourteen more times. I dodged three of them. Partially. Enough that the strikes landed on shoulders and arms instead of center mass, enough that I stayed standing when I should have gone down. Each time the instinct fired it was a fraction earlier, a fraction cleaner, jerking me away from danger I hadn't seen yet.

On the fifteenth she came in with both hands, grabbed my shirt, pivoted, and threw me. I hit the ground and rolled and came up on one knee, gasping, and she was already there.

She caught my arm, twisted, and put me flat on my back. Her knee pressed into my chest and her hand pinned my wrist above my head and she leaned down. Her face was inches from mine. Her hair fell around us and the crimson strands were warm against my cheeks. Her green eyes were bright and slit-pupiled and they filled my vision.

Her breath on my face. Smoke and copper. The heat radiating off her skin through the scale-armor, dry and intense. Her knee pressing down on my sternum, keeping me flat, and her hand on my wrist was strong enough that I couldn't have moved it with three Boosts. This close, she smelled like a furnace, like the air above a forge, but underneath that was warmth that was alive and female and my body responded and the link was wide open.

Her pupils dilated. The vertical slits widening.

She held the position. Longer than she needed to.

Then she stood and turned away. Her hair swung and her shoulders were rigid and she didn't look back.

"Again."

She hit me six more times. I dodged four. The dragon-sense was sharpening, each activation faster. By the end my arms were shaking and my breath was ragged and every muscle was screaming and I was standing only because falling would have been worse.

She stopped.

I stood there, swaying, bleeding from a split lip that was real here even if it wouldn't be on my actual face. The void pulsed around us, red and gold, and Ddraig stood five feet away with her arms crossed over her scale-armor and her green eyes on me.

"You'll do," she said.

My legs almost gave. I was shaking and my arms were dead weight and my chest was one continuous bruise.

"Was that a compliment?"

"It was an assessment."

"From you? Same thing."

She looked at me. The corner of her mouth moved. Barely. The muscles tried and didn't know what shape to make. Close enough.

The void dissolved. The backyard came back in a rush, the cold air and the wet grass and the night sky with Orion still up there and my body was lying exactly where I'd left it. No bruises. No split lip. My chest was fine, my arms were fine, the pain was gone. But the memory of it was vivid. My muscles remembered being hit even if the damage wasn't there.

I sat up. My shirt was damp and the grass was cold under my hands and the house was dark except for Asia's room, where the light had gone off while I was under.

The Boosted Gear's gem pulsed on my arm. Green, steady, warm.

"Same time tomorrow, Partner." Ddraig, from inside my skull. "And stop thinking about the armor."

"I wasn't."

"Lie."

I went inside.