Meanwhile, I went to my secret lair, a deep underground gallery at the base of the dam. My wyverns accompanied me, as did my artist aunt. Kratos kept a watchful eye on the area and I didn't trust anyone - well, rather the Lich, whose unpronounceable name kept escaping me. Vechenatte? Vernat? Grr. Yes.. Vechna..

She had some interesting tormenting and howling spirits. especially as they were invisible to mortals. Banshee! (Or White Ladies according to tradition)

Well, I say Elle for a Liche, but it's a male Liche. Well, he was male when he was alive, sir. I should call him Squelettor, that would be easier but I doubt he'd appreciate it!

In fact, all these monsters were 'sticking' to me and I knew that sooner or later they would turn against me, the day I denigrated my status as Demon Lord.

I didn't show it, but I was terrified. I wanted to cry and run away to a hole in the deepest volcano where the lava would protect me... but not from Squelettor and his ghosts... they'd get past Alpha's crust and suck out my soul, even if I was sheltering on an island of rock surrounded by magma.

I didn't want to die. I didn't want to die any more. I wanted to fly, to be free, to be a bird! and to shit on the heads of all those idiots, assholes and rat-faced bastards. I wanted to chew them up and spit them out so they'd get off my back and stop seeing their ugly faces smiling hypocritically at me.

And to hell with the Earthlings and their military. When I'm gone, they'll just have to deal with it. I can imagine the marines stuck on a tower with hordes of monsters wanting to climb up and watch them machine-gun, throw bombs and explosives in endless carnage while I'm on a rock in the sun with my females crawling at my feet to ask me a favour and have little wyverns climbing on me admiring their daddy and enjoying an innocent life again, far from these worries.

The seat was a sort of immense quartz surrounded by coils of copper pipes cooled by pressurised water from the dam.

Large lamps with rheostats were used to adjust the many amperes and an oscillator was used to transform the alternating current into a high-frequency current.

It was a sort of inductor, and the quarter, a huge radio transmitter.

So I was sitting on a sort of galena set, but I didn't want to do amateur radio... The quartz was a kind of crystallised mana crystal.

And the radio waves... they were artificial mana.

So I had an infinite source of mana that I could exploit. That's how I transmuted products, parts and anything else that could contribute to the rapid construction of my weapons, otherwise it would have been impossible with the best will in the world.

One of my favourite spells was 'cloning' and then 'transmutation'. Even if one day I was no longer a Demon Lord, I'd still know how to use these spells.

In fact, I'd noticed that all runes in magic were based on logical functions used in programming, with the implementation of fields and alternative dimensions, a bit like complex numbers where I indicated the location of runes in magic and the result was the manifestation of that magic.

So all I had to do was see a spell cast once to analyse it, copy it and modernise it.

And all the magicians were making blunders, aberrations and wasting energy by using keys or runes that contradicted each other without knowing why or how.

That was what made me so fearsome and more powerful than the enchantress. I didn't really have more powers than her, but I knew how to optimise power at least four times better than she did.

I opened one of the cases and by telekinesis, the sphere appeared in front of me.

"CLONING

Then the seat lit up and so did I.

I felt the immense pressure of mana and had a crystallised mana copy of Plutonium's heart between my paws.

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"TRANSMUTATION"

All my mana was drained at once, but immediately replaced by artificial mana.

I repeated the operation about twenty times until my snout poked out towards the ground, collapsed.

I had 20 copies of plutonium spheres!

I was already imagining the face of the Enchantress when her underground world collapsed on her and her henchmen, dragging Magincia and her tower into the bowels of this world.

And the other Demon Lords burnt to the ground. Gods, demons, grimacing creatures and even stone men reduced to vitrified sand.

Blanche arrived at my paws, at the back of the lab.

"MIR!!! my dragon! Are you all right? "

"Argh! headache!"

"I saw you fall. Are you alright?"

"Don't touch those spheres, they burn!"

"Ah.. ok!" (Blanche).

She helped me up and we went to the acid lake to rest.

She worked on my lower abdomen and I was too exhausted to resist her.

She soon felt my genes passing through her body and we stayed like that for a while, mating, before I lost consciousness.

Several hours passed and my sisters had joined me.

"Mir... ready for a second round?"

The day ended with us sticking together and smelling the wild beast.

My legs were shaking with exhaustion and the wyverns were licking each other in a sort of erotic wave after the act.

They were all bleeding a little from the fat of their necks, where my teeth had caught, but they weren't complaining. It was a less sensitive area or perhaps erogenous? I was a male but I wondered what it would be like to be a hermaphrodite? I knew that reptiles could change sex under certain conditions but I very much doubted it.

Recharged, I returned to the crystal throne and started the procedure again

"ACCUMULATION"

The plutonium sphere absorbed the mana like a sponge and began to glow and heat up.

It wasn't infrared but radiation that 'warmed' me, but it didn't affect me too much.

When it became unbearably hot, I thought it was 'recharged'.

I did the same for the 20 spheres in addition to the 3, which took me all night.

Meanwhile, in Magincia.

The enchantress was looking at her alchemists and technicians.

"So, what progress have you made?"

Dwarf: "We've riveted plates of the hardest iron onto the turtles' scales and put on runes of strength to compensate for the weight."

We've tried using the most powerful projectiles, like their cannons, and the armour resists.

Good!

"We can use them as mobile siege engines or assault towers!

What about flying monsters?"

"We've managed to make hot air bubbles in paper bags! In clusters, they can raise a cable and an assassin could jump on the flying monster."

But, majesty, come and see our greatest achievement.

He held up a barrel of black powder.

A candle hit the powder and the barrel exploded.

"Our arrows will explode like theirs and look. We've managed to make a trombelong. A funnel, a round or lead stone and an iron tube. We've got 3 times the range of the bows!"

The enchantress was pleased, but entirely satisfied. More was needed to crush the wyvern and she wondered how it would go with the allies in the sky.

A few days passed and a parcel arrived at the palace of Magincia

It said on the box: Last warning.

She used spells to protect herself and an experienced thief opened the box. There was no poison, no trap. Only pictures.

When she picked them up. Her hand trembled.

On them were burnt people on a path with all nature burnt. Wood, grass, shrubs, houses... everything was in ashes.

One little girl had the design of her kimono imprinted on her flesh, with second- and third-degree burns.

The other photo showed huge iron ships firing shells like mountains and a ship rising and falling underwater.

Another showed the city of Hiroshima before and after, the same for Nagasaki and finally, a colour image of the Tsar Bomba exploding and devastating an entire country.

It said.

If I have to demonstrate, which city would you like me to raze to the ground?

Your country and your underground sanctuary will not protect you.

There was a photo of a spray of fire coming out of a mountain, an underground explosion in Algeria.

The whole mountain had risen up.

She had a vagal reflex and her liquid meal ended up on the ground.

She screamed for her godfather, who came running a few minutes later.

The images were accompanied by a file showing the Manhattan Project, the bomb and the various tests without giving anything away.

Next, a military parade of the 3rd Reich showing an army of 6 million (retouched) soldiers, tanks of ruined cities, "broken faces" and armadas and computer-generated images of space destroyers on their way to Alpha (error-free 3D montage made by AI.)

The old man dropped the images.

It's worse than I thought.

Xayda, release the dragons immediately, look at the quality of these images. They're perfect.

The views and plans of our cities are perfect. And the numbers, I think they're real.

We must submit and beg their forgiveness.

With weapons like these... Even with all the united people of Alpha and all their magic and even the legendary Dark Stars, generators of Tsunami, we'll have a deluge of fire coming down on us.

The ships are well proportioned and calculated. Centuries of calculation have gone into the assembly of this infernal mechanism.

Their world, they're ahead of the game and they're coming! Even if we kill everyone in the empire, just look at those monsters of steel.

What do I have to do?

What are the conditions?

And if we release them, what guarantees do we have that he won't use these weapons against us?

"Xayda, according to our spies, Mir is a wild beast! He's mad and doesn't obey any logic. He is a dragon and the space humans fear him too!."

"I will surrender! I love my people too much. I'm not a criminal and if they're civilised. They'll understand!