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Draconicon's Rule 34 Harem Chapter 15: Into the Underground Sponsored by BlazingPelt By Draconicon

The air shimmered and swooshed around him as the portal opened in a place where the wind had not touched for all too long. The dragon stepped through, bare feet and toe claws clicking on the earth beneath him, the stone dark and dusty and cold. White eyes glowed in the dark as he looked around the abandoned city at the end of the Underground, taking in the empty homes and the occasional glimpse of ghost-like monsters that moved from one home to another in long-held habits.

He turned his eyes towards the ceiling of the cavern, seeing the flicker of lights that came from the great barrier in the distance. There were still souls down here, still people that lived in this ancient, abandoned place of New Home. One particular person - if one could call them that - would be watching for intruders...but only for human intruders.

It's a good thing that I'm not human, Draconicon thought, shutting the portal behind him with a wave of his hand. A bit unfair, I guess, but it'll be worth it.

It was the rule of the world, he supposed. They believed that humans were the only ones with souls, the only ones with the power that they needed to harvest to be able to escape this great Underground. The fact that he wasn't from this world meant that he was an exception to that rule, an exception that had a soul that could be of use. As he looked more like a monster than a human, though, nobody would notice...

Except one. Not the man that kept watch over the barrier, but the one that would be sneaking around in the shadows, the one that would be looking for some chance to bend the rules themselves to get out. He knew that they were in the darkness, that they would feel that something had changed. All he had to do was wait.

Shaking his head, the dragon pulled at his robes, shuffling the black cloth and silver runes along his frame. He made sure that it settled comfortably over his shoulders, the hem running down to his ankles before coming to a rest there. The silver runes ran around his collar and then down the middle of the robe, binding them together and giving them a surge of magical power to keep the various enchantments in the cloth running properly. It meant that it made him look like there was a band of silver around his neck and around his legs, connected by a line up the middle of his body, but it worked well as a deterrent for those that would cause him harm.

And this one...this one would try and harm him, if he wasn't careful.

Asriel...

Draconicon looked at the great roof of the cavern again, waiting patiently. His magic extended out from him in a wide circle, and he could feel something besides the regular monsters moving through that area. It was sneaking from alley to alley, from building to building to avoid being noticed. It would dart out of the ground, then duck back under it, always keeping itself from being noticed by anything that might stop it.

But not by him. The dragon smiled, shaking his head. This little one was not as skilled at magic as it thought it was, not quite so invulnerable as it acted. It was going to have a rude awakening when -

There.

He lifted his foot just as a thorned tendril reached for it, avoiding getting snared at the last second. The flower snarled, tried to pull away, but the dragon was quicker. His tail snapped out, coiling under the petals before the little thing could dart underground once more.

"Ah ah."

"Agh! What are you doing? Let go of me, you little -"

"Is that any way for you to try and greet someone? What about all those friendliness pellets that you threatened those little girls and boys with at the start of the Underground?"

And with that, the flower went still. No surprise, either. Nobody was supposed to know about that. Not Toriel, not Asgore, not anybody in the Underground. Just as nobody was supposed to know the rest of the story.

The dragon smiled as the flower twisted up, petals spinning, eyes slightly mad with anger and fear. Tendrils and roots writhed beneath the ground, restrained only by curiosity tempered with fear.

"How do you know about that?"

"I know more than you think, little flower."

"That's impossible. Nobody knows me."

"Trust me, I know more than anybody that you ever knew. I know more than Chara ever did..."

It was not possible for a flower to pale, but this one made a valiant attempt. The petals wilted, the yellow-white core tried to fall apart. The eyes were half-mad again, jagged as the mouth in the middle had become. Leaves twitched slowly.

"...That's impossible...Chara...Chara is gone."

"Not quite. But that's not the point of my visit, anyway."

"What is, then?"

"I came here to find someone important. Someone that would be very, very helpful to me. Someone that has been missing for a very, very long time."

"..."

"I came to find Asriel."

As expected, the flower hissed at him, suddenly growing to near-person size. It tried to loom over him, and almost succeeded as its leaves and stem surged in size. He could feel the power that this flower was expending to do it, though, and he didn't feel particularly worried. Not when he had faced something like this so many times before.

"Don't use that name! You don't know that name!"

"I know you."

"No, you don't! Let me go. Let me go, or I'll hurt you!"

"Try."

And the flower did.

The roots that the dragon had felt under him suddenly surged upwards, thrashing about like mad snakes. Thorns adorned each one, and they lunged for him en masse. The flower's petals twitched, and bullet-like seeds burst from him, shooting through the air.

Draconicon merely smiled.

As the plant tendrils came forward, they slammed off the shield that the runes on the robe created, bouncing off of him and rebounding away. The bullet-seeds hit, embedding themselves in mid-air for a few seconds before they fell, flattened, to the floor. The thorns on the tendrils cracked, shattering like the teeth of a predator trying to bite through something too strong for its jaws, and the bullets were rendered completely harmless.

He took a step forward, the barrier around him pushing the various tendrils out of the way. The storm of bullet seeds continued, the flower panicking more and more.

"No, no, you have to die! Why won't you die?!"

"Because I'm not here to die. I'm here to help you."

"You can't! Go away! GO AWAY!"

The flower redoubled its attacks, but all that did was batter the tendrils down all the further, smoothing away the spikes and spines and thorns that adorned them. They were broken, almost shredded away as the poor plant continued its assault that had no point.

Draconicon shook his head as he closed the distance, forcing the flower against the wall of the nearest building by the time that he was done. The bullets no longer fired, and the tendrils barely slapped against his shield. The flower was panting for breath, eyes still wild, but no longer having the energy to scream or flail. It wilted back, almost looking like it wanted to cry.

Shaking his head, the dragon leaned down to be on its level, cupping the back of its petal-head.

"You don't have to do this."

"If I can't hurt you...just kill me."

"That's not what I'm here for, either."

"Just get rid of me. No mercy."

"No."

"I...Just..."

The flower tried to run, but he held it too tight for that. It tried to throw him back, but he was too strong for that. It tried to hurt him, to grow thorns on the back of its head, but it didn't hurt enough to make him let go.

Instead, he knelt there, holding the flower for as long as he needed to, letting it get its anger out, making sure that it couldn't run from him...or from everything that it was made to feel right then.

Choked cries turned into little whimpers, and that, in turn, became little sobs. Those transformed into the little heaves that took crying people down into sleep, and he shook his head as the flower finally gained its rest.

He reached out, opening another portal. This one didn't take him home, but rather to another part of the Underground. For now, he wouldn't leave. Taking this flower back home would not help the little guy. Asriel needed to take his true form before they left the Underground, or it would all be for naught.

The flower woke up, eventually, and immediately seemed to take umbrage about the fact that it had been placed in a flower-pot. Leaves pushed down against the clay sides, and the earth was thrown around petulantly before Draconicon noticed that the little guy was awake again.

"Ah ah. Let's not make a mess."

"Where are we? What do you want, really?"

"I already told you. I want Asriel, and that means helping you, first."

"I don't want help. I have a plan."

"I'm sure you do, but do you think that it's actually going to work?"

"It's gonna."

"Really?"

He chuckled, shaking his head as he looked up from his book. The little chamber that he'd brought the flower to was in the back of a waterfall, the running water in the distance a small crashing echo compared to what it would be further down the tunnel. The rock all around them wouldn't keep the flower from running away if he got out of the pot, but the waterfall would keep him from going too far.

He tapped his fingers as he counted it off.

"You need a soul to turn yourself back to normal, or the bodies of the entire Underground population of monsters to create something that you can inhabit. You are bound into this form by a power that is greater than yours, barely surviving, and you are mostly living off of spite for everyone else at the moment. You think that you can see your father killed just so that you can get the souls that he is taking care of, so you keep winding up humans to take him down, and have kept failing and giving him more souls to work with.

"How am I doing so far with how things are going for you?"

The flower said nothing, merely glared at him over its petals. In other words, he was getting it completely right. So, he continued.

"Your greatest desire is to reset the timeline, make things better so that you can get through this without seeing everyone dead, or everyone in pain, or make it so that the bad thing never happened in the first place. Yet, every time you do it, either you get stopped, or you hurt someone worse, or you make things that much more difficult to recover from. How many times have you reset so far?"

"..."

"I'm going to guess you're still in the single digits."

"What?! There's - what are you talking about? Are there more of me?"

"Countless, and most of them are still just as hopeless as you are. Persistent, though. I found one flower that had tried this place over a million times, and he still hadn't figured out a way to make it work."

The flower stared at him, mouth agape, or at least, as agape as a flower could manage in the grand scheme of things. Draconicon shut his book, leaning back further in his improvised chair.

"The more that you try, the worse things are going to get. The more that you reset, the more you rip things apart. You've seen it. The first time, I imagine, you tried to get a single soul from Asgore. You thought that you could steal it, maybe, or that you could get it at a bargain. It didn't work, and you couldn't try again, so you reset. The next time, several people got through, and Asgore had several souls. You tried to manipulate things, and it didn't work, and you tried resetting again.

"But every time that you reset, you found yourself weaker, like some bit of your power was used up trying to get back to the reset. You were struggling to keep yourself going, and each time, Asgore had more power that you could try and steal, but your tricks were no longer working the way that they were supposed to, and you no longer had the power to attack people directly.

"And now, you're desperate for the souls that he has, because you're thinking that the last reset might be coming, and you don't know if you can do it again."

This was half-guesswork, half evidence that he had managed to work out by observing the worlds of the Underground. It was a bit more tricky considering the sheer amount of time travel that was going on down here, and it meant that the different worlds collided and slid against each other much more often than the other parts of the multi-verse. However, that didn't mean that it didn't have some serious possibilities.

The flower stared at him, regardless. The little thing was obviously trying to glare at him, trying to get angry, trying to hold out and be furious, but there was enough truth and rightness to the dragon's guesswork that the petulant little thing couldn't entirely hate him. For the first time in all too long a period, the flower had someone that knew it...that had a chance of understanding.

It wilted slightly, looking down.

"Don't pity me."

"I don't."

"Why not?"

"Because you did this to yourself, for one."

The flower glared, sneering slightly, but the dragon shrugged it off.

"You can't say that I'm wrong."

"..."

"I'm not here to blame you, though. I'm not here to rescue you, either. I'm here to make you an offer."

"I don't take deals. I make them."

"Then let's make one together, hmm?"

The dragon held up his hand. A bit of black fire swirled between his fingers before it pulled together in the middle of his palm, forming a ball of blackness that then expanded outwards, swirling, shimmering, creating sparks as it ran against itself. Soon, it was glowing white-yellow with the energy that it created, spinning and whirling about until -

WHOOOSH!

The ball of white-yellow suddenly exploded, creating a shimmering, wispy thing where it had been burning only moments ago. He smiled as he held it out, the energy coming off it making the little flower tilt towards it almost like a sunflower tilted towards the sun.

"That...that's..."

"It's a soul," the dragon said. "Not a living one, but a soul, regardless. A soul of fire, a soul of power, a soul of life."

"How did you...what is..."

"A friend of mine taught me the power of the soul a long time ago. A necromancer, ironically enough," he said with a small chuckle. "He taught me how they are made, and what qualities they have. And from that, I learned how to summon other souls from the world. Souls from things that would not miss them, that had never had souls to begin with."

"What's this one?"

"A soul of fire."

A soul, rather than the soul, but no less powerful for that. To summon the full soul of an element would be to risk destabilizing the element in question, if one didn't end up killing themselves in the process, but to summon a partial soul, to give it power of his own and to give it shape and form? That was easy enough.

One might have put this soul into a weapon, or given it voice and created an avatar of the element, but that was not his goal. The flower had been weakened, pushed to the brink. It was barely holding its existence together, and the cracks in reality were already showing through in its body, barely able to keep the different pieces from falling apart.

Draconicon held out the soul, and the little flower both leaned in and tilted away, its body craving the substance that it would have again with the soul, the mind within shrinking back from the kindness offered. The dragon shook his head.

"I need you to be Asriel. I came here for him, and you...you are not the goat."

"I was."

"Yes. And you turned into this in order to survive. But that time of survival is over. It's time for you to be yourself again."

"...I don't know if I can."

"You can't find out until you try."

"But..."

"But what?"

"Everything..."

Everything that the flower had done. Everything that it had ripped apart. The existences that it had put in peril. The pain that it had caused. Draconicon shrugged slightly.

"I doubt you feel guilt, now."

"...I feel something like it."

"You'll feel it more with the soul in you. I'll tell you that now; it's going to hurt."

"..."

"But it's the only way that you can make it better."

"I don't want to be better. I want to be me again. I'm...I'm so tired of being a flower..."

"Everything has a price. This is yours. If you want to be him again, if you want to be Asriel rather than this flower, then you have to accept that."

"What if I just take it? What if I take it and run?"

"You can try."

The flower hissed softly, and he knew that if there had been less precautions taken, the little flower would have surged out, attacked him right then and there in an attempt to take the soul and then run off with it. He knew that the little guy had been penned up with his anger for far too long, and that there was some genuine darkness in him that would take a long time to break down.

But at the same time, the flower-pot kept all those roots tangled up with him rather than out in the open, and the dragon had already proved that his barriers would stop the bullet-seeds. There was no real option for the flower to take.

He held out the soul, still, the glowing soul of fire burning above his palm.

"Do you want it or not?"

"...I do."

"Then hear my terms. I will give you the soul, and you will give me yourself. I came here for Asriel, and I intend to leave with Asriel."

"That's not fair."

"I didn't say that I was going to play fair. I said I was going to make a deal. And it's a good deal. I fix all the problems that you've made, and you come with me when I leave. That seems fair enough, don't you think?"

"..."

"Then again, you can just stay here. The darkness is a fine place for someone that hates the light. You can give in, try and make it out of the Underground on your own one last time. You can try and kill Asgore when the kid makes it through the various obstacles that you set up. Maybe you'll get lucky and they'll get it wrong, and they'll be the one to do a reset instead of you.

"But I don't think that you're going to get that lucky. Not after so many times of having it go wrong."

He was being a bit cruel, and he knew it. The hopes that the flower had were the only thing that had sustained it against the consuming anger that had been building again and again and again through its tormented existence. Much more, and the poor thing would lose out completely, be consumed in one last run through the Underground, one last attempt to hurt as many people as possible in its final reset.

And then...well, he had seen the way such things had gone in other Undergrounds that hadn't gone the flower's way. Blue light would come, and it would purge everything. There would be no more Asriel, there would be no more flower. And then he'd have to find another universe to try and get his sorcerer from.

He held out the soul once more.

"I will not treat you badly. You will have power, and you will be able to use it. I will guide you onto paths of greater magics, and I will give you a place of peace. If you side with me, I will even give you the chance to have your family again."

"...That's impossible."

"Not as impossible as you think. I have many ways to bring them back, and to put you all back together. But. You have to listen to me. And you have to do what I say. Everything I say. I am trying to do something big, and if I'm going to make it happen, then you need to follow my orders."

"I'm a prince."

"I'm an Emperor. Don't even try titles with me."

"I'm a sorcerer."

"I'm a better one."

"I'm the god of hyper-death!"

"I'm the god of creation."

"I'm entropy."

"I'm hope."

"...That's not fair. That's so not fair."

"Eh. It works. Neil Gaiman came up with that one, though, so I can't entirely claim it." He chuckled. "So...do we have a deal? Your body, for your service?"

"..."

"When I leave, I take this offer with me. I can only spend so long here with you, Asriel." The flower winced. "If you do not take it, then I will have to move on. I am sorry, but that's the way that it works right now."

"I...can I think..."

"No."

"I have to decide right now?"

"I'm afraid so."

"...That's not fair. Why can't you be fair?"

"I'm starting to understand that you think 'fair' means that you get to win. That's not how it works." He shook his head. "Sometimes, I don't get to win, either. But that doesn't mean it's not fair."

"..."

"Yes...or no?"

"...Yes."

"Then take it."

The flower reached out with its leaves, wrapping them around the glowing light of the soul. As soon as they made contact, the light surged brighter, and it flowed into the green tips, making them turn white and bright. The flower pulled back, screaming.

"It hurts! Why does it hurt?!"

"Because you're feeling things again."

"AAAAGH!"

The flower swayed back and forth, screaming at the top of its lungs until it threw itself to the side. The flower-pot fell from its perch, falling to the floor and shattering. The hidden roots pushed out, growing longer, thicker, less tendril-like and more like a single solid mass. The flower head grew outwards, pushing against the ground, and the leaves at the sides started to extend out, forming shapes like a head, and arms, and a proper body.

Draconicon shook his head, reaching into his pocket. A robe had been folded up in there, and he'd need it in a few minutes. The soul of fire was purging away the shape that the surviving pieces of Asriel had formed for themselves, and it was giving them something new. Something better. Something fuller of substance.

It continued to change, the flower petals falling off as the center started to take on the shape of a proper head. A goat muzzle slowly pushed out again, and little horns started to form on the top of the head. Leaves split, the ends of the green going white with fur, and the little splits turning into digits, into fingers that had soft claws at the tips.

Smiling to himself (not at the pain, but merely at the success of the spell), the dragon leaned his head back, looking up at the top of their small cavern. The soul was not just giving Asriel his body back. It was giving him the chance to grow up, to become what he would be if he hadn't lost so many years. No child, this, but a true adult, a true man.

The high-pitched whimpers, grunts, and shrieks of the flower started to fade, becoming more and more the growls and grunts of an adult male. The dragon kept his eyes on the ceiling, knowing that the transformation would expose Asriel's body completely, and he knew better than to steal someone's dignity by staring at them as they were given something that they didn't expect.

More to the point, he knew that the transforming goat wouldn't want to be seen crying, and that was inevitable. Monsters down here had something other than souls to give them their emotions, to give them their strength and power and their connections to one another. As the flower, Asriel had been giving up more and more of that, sacrificing his connections to others in order to survive, to keep the core of himself from breaking down and being left with nothing. Now, it was all coming back.

The goat's cries and screams echoed in the room, and the dragon's smile faded. Whatever pleasure that he had taken from having made a successful spell had fallen by the wayside at Asriel's torments. He bit his lips, looking up at the ceiling again, forcing himself not to help the goat through it. For all that he wanted to, he knew that he would not be thanked for it. If anything, he might be hated for it.

It took minutes for the screams to stop and for the sobbing to come. He shook his head, shaking out the purple robe that he had brought with him, and then laid it over the goat like a blanket. It was grabbed quickly, pulled around the other guy, and the dragon waited for a second or two to make sure Asriel was properly covered before looking down.

The transformation was complete. The goat had gone from flower to his aged self, a young adult that had slender limbs and vaguely feminine proportions. He was hidden beneath too thick a blanket to see them properly, but he definitely looked like the 'God of Hyper-Death' that he had taken on a few times before.

The dragon sat down by the goat, rubbing his hand between the horns that had grown in. Asriel tilted his head to the side, the darkened fur under his eyes wet with tear-tracks.

"Don't...please..."

"You deserve this."

"I really don't."

"The pain or the comfort? I'm talking about the second."

"So am I..."

"Are you sorry for what you did?"

"I didn't want to be..."

"But you are?"

"Yes..."

He nodded, rubbing between the goat's horns again. This wasn't going to be the end of things for Asriel, he knew that much. There was too much guilt, too much sadness, anger, even hatred in there for the application of a soul to fix it all. It might have thrown everything into stark relief, made the goat realize what he had done, but that was all. There was still a long road to follow.

Annoyingly, as he rubbed the goat's head, he kept looking down his body, from the slight rise of Asriel's ass all the way down to his bare feet. Every time he did, he felt his cock swell slightly, and he glared down at it with a shake of his head.

No. No. That is not what we're doing right now. That comes later.

It didn't help that he'd imagined what the tentacles of the flower might have done, what he would have felt like in their grip if he had been properly 'captured' by them at the start. It would have been interesting to submit for a time, to see what it was like to get fucked by them. At the same time, it would have extended his time here by too long, and he needed to be focused on doing this right.

And that meant not thinking about getting a footjob from his newest supporter.

Shaking his head, he just settled in to keep up the slow petting, ignoring the way that his cock grew across his thigh and hoped that his robe hid what was going on.

"Why?" Asriel asked.

"Why what?"

"Why did you come here for me? What do you really want?"

"I told you. A sorcerer."

"That's not everything."

"No. But it's enough for now."

"Mmmph...I can tell you want more. I can smell it."

"Literally, or metaphorically?"

"Both."

"My apologies for that."

"Do you always...mmmph..."

The goat groaned, grinding his face against the stone floor. The scent was probably oozing out of the robe more than he had expected, and that was something that he'd have to fix in the future. Shaking his head, the dragon tapped his robe along the front, increasing the seals against his musk.

"Better?"

"Better."

"Rest if you can. We'll talk more later."

The End