"What are we, my love?"
"...Monsters."
"That's right. With your physiology, you would only waste your time on wrestling with weaponry. Your body is your greatest weapon, so let us hone it."
In the family training hall, Lillian took a deep breath as she closed her jade green eyes.
Her nerves no more and her body prepared, she clenched her fists as she stared back at her husband with a renewed intensity.
"I am ready, darling. Please teach me well."
Abaddon smiled at her charming determination and swallowed down his own building lust.
When Lillian awoke him this morning, he was not expecting for her to ask him to train him one on one.
Apparently, she hadn't gotten to do all that much in the last war against the dwarves, and she was feeling a bit like deadweight.
Seras and Bekka had tried her best to instruct her in different methods of combat and Lailah had also taught her a fair bit of magic, but... it just wasn't fitting.
When it came to swords and the like, she was not inept, just untalented.
She learned at normal speeds and did not have any particular promise with a specific kind of blade, but she wasn't terrible.
She was just good enough to not die within the first twenty exchanges.
While most would have accepted that, Lillian was not among them.
She spent everyday loving and being loved by her husband and his other wives, who were not only capable warriors but forces of nature.
Lillian wanted to be their equal, and someone that they could always rely on.
She would never tell her husband this, but sometimes in her dreams she had fantasies of saving him from some kind of great and terrible enemy.
It was a silly little dream and she hoped that her husband was never in such a situation to begin with, but still!
Dreams are dreams and she is allowed to have her own!
"My wife, are you paying attention?" Abaddon suddenly asked.
"A-Ah, yes!" (No.)
'Cute..'
The dragon could naturally feel that Lillian was getting herself excited by thinking about something important to her, so he restated his request once again.
"Close your eyes, my dear."
Once Lillian obliged, he started walking towards her and circling her curvaceous body.
"Think of all of the creatures you've eaten till now... Dissect them in your mind. Think about what parts will serve you best, and which ones will give you the deepest comfort."
"...Okay... and then?"
"Combine them into one creature, one version of yourself."
Even though his ask seemed like a tall order, it really wasn't.
He only asked her to assimilate the animals she'd eaten, not the vegetables or inanimate objects.
If he had, the difficulty would have been considerably higher.
Lillian wasn't ready for a task that big right now, but eventually she would be as long as she kept training.
After all, she is adaptation made flesh.
"Husband..." Lillian began worriedly. "What if-"
"I will think you're beautiful no matter what you end up looking like, my dear. You don't need to worry about frightening me."
"H-How can you say that when you haven't even seen-"
"I will prove it to you after we finish if you like."
"...What do you mean by that?" Lillian asked suspiciously.
"Just as I've embraced your sisters in their other forms, I will do the same for you as well."
"...Truly?"
"Truly."
It was a new method of intimacy that started a few months ago when Lisa made it known how much she desired Abaddon in their natural forms.
There was an isolated stretch of land in Samael that went on for several hundred miles, and the two of them would go there and copulate from time to time.
When Seras learned about it, she wanted to try it too.
Audrina was not a dragon, but she was a very large demonic bat that was a little more than half of Abaddon's size and so she was also up for it.
Lying with Bekka in that manner had only happened recently as the size difference between the two was much too big, but Abaddon's new ability to shrink fixed that entirely.
It wasn't something that he ever would have pictured himself doing in either of his previous lives but hey, when you love someone you just love them.
Her worries expunged, Lillian took several deep breaths as her body started to change.
Glistening orange scales with a brown underbelly started to cover her body, both reptilian and aquatic in origin.
She lost her legs, and instead formed only a long tail that connected to her shifting midsection.
On both of her hands, the space between her middle and ring finger split, and traveled all the way up her arms, becoming strong tentacles with barbs that were dripping some kind of necrotic poison.
A webbed surface formed between her new tentacles, giving her the ability to glide through both air and water.
Her beautiful face was the last thing to go, as she formed a long, monstrous muzzle filled with pointed, fish-like teeth and twelve pairs of eyes from various animals.
Currently, she was only around seven meters in size but Abaddon had a feeling that she could get bigger.
A lot bigger.
'Do I... look strange...?'
Lillian must have been concerned about the way her voice would sound in this form, as she went the extra mile to speak to him telepathically.
"My love, I know what you are and I accept everything about you. All of you is beautiful no matter your appearance."
"Ah... thank you, darling."
Lillian's voice was indeed distorted, but it was in no way unpleasant to listen to.
If circumstances allowed, he was still capable of listening to her for hours on end.
Abaddon clasped both hands behind his back, and he became somewhat serious for the first time since they'd entered.
"Alright my love, let your instincts run wild and I will refine you as you go. Don't worry about hurting me."
Lillian knew how good her husband's regeneration was, and that he could not feel any pain so she did not make him ask twice.
With a mighty roar, she lunged at him with impressive speed and swung her tentacle in a massive downwards arc through the air.
BOOOOOOOMMMMM!!
Abaddon raised a single hand to catch her tentacle, but the sheer force of the impact reduced the ground underneath him to splinters.
Luckily, this training hall was Valerie's masterpiece, and even Abaddon could not easily destroy it unless he changed into his demonic or dragon body.
"I see... you're quite strong." Abaddon looked up at his hand that caught her tentacle.
Even though he couldn't feel it, most of his arm had been pierced by her poisonous barbs.
He wasn't too concerned since he had long become immune to any types of poison or venomous substances, but he could still tell how nasty it was.
With the barbs embedded in his arm, Abaddon was essentially stuck and he could do nothing as Lillian pulled him into the air and whirled him around.
BOOOOMMM!!
She flung his body hard into a wall on the opposite side of the training hall, a full seventy yards away.
"I hope she's not enjoying this.." He muttered as he pulled himself out of the rubble.
"I-I'm not! You aren't hurt, are you?" Lillian asked worriedly.
Abaddon chuckled as he waived away her concerns with his hand.
"Think nothing of it. I'll be coming to you now, so get ready."
"Okay!"
Abaddon held out his hand and conjured a blunt greatsword and spear made of ice.
He casually spun them in his hands before he started running at Lillian like he was going to attack her.
"Smaller opponents will be more nimble, so you have to use your mind instead of your body. If you have to, bait them by using only a fraction of your speed until you can deal a fatal blow."
"Got it!"
Lillian raised all four of her tentacles and slammed them hard into the ground, causing a miniature earthquake that sent waves of jagged rock crashing over Abaddon.
'Thank the gods for self repairing runes...'
Abaddon flipped into the air above the wave of earth, and Lillian utilized that moment to throw a punch with her tentacle.
The dragon twisted his body in midair to avoid her attack, and he ran up the surface of her appendage towards her head.
"You shouldn't let an opponent get this close, my dear. You are the monster so you control the flow of battle."
"Got it!"
Lillian's muzzle suddenly changed into a large beak that looked like it was from some kind of bird.
"SKRREEEEEEEEEEEE!!!!"
She opened her beak wide and unleashed a sonic scream that burst his eardrums and cracked his icy weapons.
And in all honesty, Abaddon was more surprised that his weapons were damaged.
His ice typically could not be destroyed even if 1,000 of the world's best fire mages chucked their spells at it, but Lillian had done so rather easily.
'As I thought... Only my wives can do something like this.'
Excited and more than a little motivated, Abaddon leapt up into the air and raised his weapons above his head like he was going to attack.
"I will make you work for your reward, my love! Don't disappoint me!"
"I won't, darling!"
- 2 Hours Later
An extremely handsome demon and a very large monster were lying side by side on the destroyed floor of the training hall.
Lillian's training had gone... splendidly.
She learned more about her self and her powers than she initially ever thought possible, and she had fun doing so as well.
As a matter of fact they had so much 'fun' that the room was having difficulty repairing the damage.
Even if Valerie scolded them later, it would all be worth it in the end.
"You were very impressive, sister."
Suddenly, Lillian's shadow disconnected from her body and Audrina appeared with the rest of the wives standing beside her.
They all leapt on top of Lillian in a massive dogpile, and showered her with praise for all of her efforts and improvements thus far.
"W-When did all of you get here?"
Seras: "About an hour ago."
Eris: "We would have said hi, but we didn't want to interrupt."
Bekka: "You were so amazing! You look so cool!"
Shy, Lillian's body shrank down to a much more familiar appearance, a large snake with three heads and hypnotizing green eyes.
"I-I still have a long way to go, but... I will not just sit on the sidelines in the next war. I am going to prove myself, and I will make our family proud!"
Audrina: "Aww!"
Lailah: "How silly, we're already proud."
Valerie: "This new enthusiasm of yours is really cute."
Lisa: "Seems like Erica is in for quite the surprise, hm?"
Abaddon suddenly sat up from the ground and reminded his wives of a crucial thing.
"Are you girls forgetting something? If you want the honor of battling our enemy then you have to make it to them first."
In that moment, the girls recalled their earlier contest with Abaddon in Apeir where they had been just a moment too slow to battle Darius.
"Don't be like that, husband."Bekka said sweetly. "Can't you let us take this one?"
Her honeyed words very nearly threatened to break his resolve but by some miracle he held firm.
"Sorry, my love. You know we had an agreement."
She puffed out her cheeks cutely in a pouting gesture before an idea suddenly crossed her mind.
She pulled all of her sisters into a huddle, and explained what she was certain would be a foolproof plan.
Sensing a foul plot, Abaddon attempted to listen in but they had already finished giggling and deliberating.
Lillian: "Darling... do you really think that you should fight Erica?"
"...Yes...?"
Lailah: "Even though it would be like domestic violence?"
"Wait...What?"
Seras: "She's a girl."
Eris: "Do you want to hit her even though she's a woman?"
"W-What? I just-"
Audrina: "Do you want to hit her because she is a woman?"
Valerie: "Are you going to hit us next?"
Whether it was done intentionally or unintentionally, all of Abaddon's wives simultaneously made scared faces and put on their best defenseless acts.
In the face of this clever and cruel mental attack, the dragon only had one option in front of him.
"You know what? You girls have fun."
Updated from fr𝒆ewebnov𝒆l.(c)om