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Chapter 1710: Flawless Victory
Primordial Villain with a Slave Harem

Quinlan came across the cell toward her through the wreckage he’d made of the room, and the closer look did nothing kind to the weight already sitting in his chest.

The big bad Black Fang, the woman who’d looked almighty even drenched head to toe in enemy blood, hung cracked open on the wall with her veins gone black beneath unhealthy skin.

He had watched her wade through battlefields and make slaughter look effortless, and for the first time, she looked like she’d lost.

’No.’

Quinlan understood within just a few moments of staring into her deep purple eyes that were gazing directly back at him.

’What am I even saying? This woman...’

Even chained and starving, fighting the most uphill battle of her life...

’She won.’

Everything they’d done to her in here had bought them her body, not one inch of what still burned behind her eyes.

The dungeon had been winning the war for her flesh, perhaps... Even that wasn’t certain, watching the crumbled dwarf corpse behind her.

But one thing was certain: they lost every other war they had picked with her.

’A flawless victory.’

Her eyes had not left him since he walked in. Every serpent tattoo on her body pulsed, stronger and stronger the nearer he came, and she watched him close the last of the distance like she’d stopped letting herself believe he was real.

His hand rose to the collar at her throat, the dwarven band sunk into skin it had spent days trying to claim, and his face went cold with disgust the moment his fingers found the metal.

"Stop!" Myrasyn’s voice cracked across the cell from the wall beside her. "You can’t just yank it off! The fat hairy ones are truly nasty creatures! Spawns of the devil, every last one of them! I bet that if you rip it loose they have some failsafe in place that will take her life!" .

He knew that. His fingers didn’t pull; they followed the band to where it bit into her throat, studying, examining, tracing the seam with a touch that held nothing gentle and all of his fury, and his face darkened with every pulse of black it dragged out of her.

"They dared put this on you..." The words came low, more to himself than to her, and the cell felt colder for them.

He straightened from the collar and lifted two fingers toward the two women on the wall, one toward each, the tips touching their foreheads.

Myrasyn went rigid, her ears clamping flat to her skull.

"W-wait!" she cried out in alarm.

Was she about to get a hole punched clean through her head?!

In her defenseless position, she could not even hope to do anything about it!

Then the water came, welling up warm and soft, pouring over both of them and slipping under their ruined clothes to sheet across skin that hadn’t felt anything kind in days.

It moved wrong for water in the best possible way, pressing into the hollows of them, tracing every line of their bodies, lifting the caked grime and dried blood off in rivulets that ran dark down the wall, every current bent and placed in real time by a master who knew exactly what he was doing.

Myrasyn blinked twice, big-eyed, and somewhere in that second blink her heart stopped screaming about her imminent death.

Her skin came up clean and shining beneath the filth, bright the way it hadn’t been since the chains closed, and her face lit up like she was having the time of her life.

"I know you didn’t betray me," Quinlan said. "Thanks for keeping Black Fang company. I’m sure she appreciated it."

"!!" Myrasyn’s eyes widened.

Then her lips turned into a big, lively grin. "Yeah, we became besties for sure! We spent half of it laughing thanks to the news getting worse and worse and Ragnar losing his mind right along with it. Black Fang kept going on and on about ’tick-tock tick-tock, the villain is coming for you...’ and I thought I might just die before they even killed me."

"She did that...?" Quinlan mused.

Sera didn’t look up from the golden light pouring out of her hands, voice coming with obvious jealousy. "Quin. Are you sure you should be handing foreign queens sensual body washes? She didn’t even ask for it. At least make it cold or something..."

"I am NOT foreign, I’m practically family!" Myrasyn’s ears shot bolt upright.

"You are?" Sera repeated wryly. This shameless woman barely interacted with them at all. They were just using each other for mutual benefit until the last few minutes before it all went to hell.

"Y-yeah!!" The queen nodded profusely.

Sera turned an even flatter look on her, fully aware the queen would say anything at all if it kept the warm water running over her grimy skin, and Myrasyn’s face went hot as her ears swiveled to every corner of the cell that wasn’t Sera.

Then the humor drained out of Myrasyn’s face as her gaze slid to Black Fang, who still hadn’t said a word and whose eyes hadn’t left Quinlan once. "...She’s okay, right?"

"Yes." Quinlan spoke with utmost belief. "There’s nothing in this world that can make her lose it."

"Because she already lost it all?" Sera murmured, not pausing in her healing. "Venomborne Terror before puberty..."

Quinlan chose not to answer that. He raised his hand, and [Warp Gate] tore the air open in the corner of the cell.

Three dwarves stumbled through onto the bloodied stone, and the first of them slipped and went down hard, both palms plunging wrist-deep into a slick that had spread from the bodies.

"What!"

He shoved himself half-upright with his hands running red and a sound strangling in his throat, because some of the dead were his own colleagues.

The other two had locked up where they landed, the color draining from their faces until they were sick and bloodless, one of them muttering fast and broken under his breath.

All three were shaking, and not one could turn back toward the gate, the compulsion in their chests herding them deeper in no matter what their bodies wanted.

Myrasyn’s ears shot straight up. "Those are the royal smiths! Ragnar’s own forge-masters!"

"Aelindra was kind enough to point me to their quarters," Quinlan shrugged. "It was on the way here so I made a pitstop."

On the floor, the ruin that had been a councilwoman had no mouth left to argue how kind she’d been.

Myrasyn’s lips parted. For once in her long, loud existence, nothing came out of them.

"Take it off her cleanly, without causing any harm," Quinlan told the smiths. "If you aren’t sure you can take it off without failure, stop."

Quinlan knew the importance of commands and their phrasing. If the dwarves decided to conduct a final act of revenge by taking it off ’wrongly,’ well, that’d be it.

That’s why he had to make sure the command was clear.

Sera, who’d been pouring golden light into the worst of the wreckage since she reached the wall, drew her hands back to give the dwarves room, her eyes moving between the collar and the look on Quinlan’s face.

The smiths bent to Black Fang’s throat with grim, sick obedience and worked the locking runes under an order they had no power to refuse.

The band came apart with a click and dropped from her throat.

"Quinlan..." she finally spoke, voice rough, as if not fully there.

For days she’d held herself together on willpower and spite alone, and now the man who’d torn the whole dungeon apart to reach her stood close enough to touch, close enough that she could see the blood drying on his chest and the fury he was keeping so carefully leashed for her sake.

Quinlan reached up and brushed the matted hair back from her face, his thumb settling against the cheekbone he’d washed clean, and whatever moved behind his eyes then, he put no wall in front of it.

"Let’s get out of here, shall we?" He smiled, tired and crooked.

"The hunger won’t stop..." she rasped all of a sudden. "Get away from me, quickly..."

"What do you mean-"

Black Fang’s muscles bulged.

"Run!"

The manacles ripped out of the wall in a burst of stone as she came off it straight at him, faster than a body that broken had any right to move.

"Quin!" Sera shouted as Black Fang lunged.

Primordial Villain with a Slave Harem
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  1. Offline
    CreaTorDominion
    + 2 ⋅ 0 -
    Another special thanks to Despawning for this righteous work.
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  2. Offline
    Despawning
    + 3 ⋅ 0 -
    Chapter 1711 Enhanced Champions

    The undead front had become a graveyard in reverse.

    Bodies that should have stayed dead climbed over the ones that had just fallen, rotting fingers dragging themselves across scorched earth toward anything breathing with a mindlessness that made each individual kill meaningless, because the horde behind the corpse was already replacing it before the body finished collapsing.

    Gorthrax the Eternal stood at the center of the advance in featureless black armor pitted by ages, the blue fire in his empty eye sockets sweeping the field with an intelligence that had nothing in common with the shambling things he commanded.

    Archlich Vozen flanked his left, dark energy bleeding from his gauntlets in tendrils that found the nearest allied corpse and hauled it upright with fresh purpose.

    The Drowned King anchored the right atop his rusted mount, a banner of black mist trailing behind him.

    Three remaining pillars of the Covenant of Eternity, and between them, enough undead to bury a kingdom.

    Elisabeth hit the front line at full stride and the golden armor she wore answered the charge.

    Divine radiance erupted from her on contact, a pulse of light so dense it carried weight, and the undead within ten meters of her boots simply ceased to exist.

    Bone disintegrated. Rotting flesh turned to ash that scattered before the wind caught it. The Dawnbreaker's light treated undead the way fire treated kindling, and Elisabeth tore through the horde with the conviction of centuries spent training for exactly this enemy, her mace connecting with anything the radiance didn't reach first, each swing trailing ares of gold that burned long after the weapon had moved on.

    "Blessed be the souls the Goddess could not save," she murmured between kills.

    The undead adapted. They always did.

    Vozen's tendrils wove necrotic shielding across the next wave, dark energy layering over rotting skin in a film that ate the outer edge of Elisabeth's radiance before it could reach the flesh beneath.

    The shielded undead hit her line in a wall of bodies that didn't burn on contact, and the Dawnbreaker had to start swinging for real.
    Orianna's vines answered before the pressure reached Elisabeth's flank.

    Massive constructs of thorn and hardened bark erupted from the earth in a crescent that sealed the gap on Elisabeth's left, each vine as thick as a man's torso and pulsing with the warm crimson glow of the Bloodfather's mark that burned on Orianna's forearm.

    The Flower Queen had been creating constructs since the fighting began, but the ones she produced now were wrong for a mortal mage's output. Too dense. Too fast. Too hungry.

    A vine caught an armored undead mid-lunge and crushed it inside its coils in a single contraction, the blackened plate crumpling inward like parchment, and two more erupted from the corpse's remains to seize the next pair rushing through.

    The Reservoir fed her constructs the way a river fed its tributaries, and the Flower Queen's garden had never bloomed this violently.

    "I could get used to this," she murmured, smiling softly while watching a cluster of undead vanish inside a cage of thorns that tightened until nothing remained but wet fragments between the bark.

    Iris fought five meters ahead of both of them with the sigil between her shoulder blades dim and cold.

    [Torment Cycle] had been stacking since the first blow landed.

    Every wound the undead carved into her skin fed the furnace inside her chest, and every hit she returned landed harder than the last, her sword cleaving through rotting bodies with a force that had no business existing in a frame this small and this battered.

    The Reservoir pulsed through the bond like a second heartbeat she could feel but refused to listen to.

    Every other marked fighter on this battlefield was drawing from it freely, and the difference showed just through Orianna's vines that were now crushing armored undead like insects.

    Iris's sword arm burned and her ribs screamed
    where something dead had caught her with a mace she'd been too slow to parry, and the Child of Reckoning ate it all and gave it back as rage made physical.

    She didn't need his power. She'd been fighting since she could hold a blade, and every ounce of strength she carried had been paid for in her own blood.

    'The Ravenclaws were Ravenshade cousins.' The thought surfaced between kills as her eyes tracked Gorthrax across the freld. 'The Covenant operated out of Ravenshade territory since forever. The gangster that took Damian..'

    "Were you involved with the Ravenclaw family's downfall?" she snarled at the Drowned King as her sword cleaved through two of his summons in a single stroke, blood and rust spraying across her face.

    The Drowned King did not so much as glance at her.

    "Answer me!" The next swing split an undead knight from collarbone to sternum hard enough to crack the flagstone beneath the corpse.

    Nothing. The ancient lord continued directing his cavalry as if the woman screaming at him were furniture.

    Iris's teeth bared behind a mask of blood. "Fine. I'lI get my answers my way."

    As she threw herself at the next snarling minion, Gorthrax finally turned his head toward her.

    "Interesting... I want to study her..." he murmured."She's like a berserker, but her relationship with pain is so much more unique..."

    The ancient undead lord recognized what was happening to her the way a scholar recognized a theorem he'd read about but never seen proven.

    Every wound made her faster. Every broken rib sharpened her edge.

    The girl was turning his army's greatest advantage against itself, because the horde that overwhelmed every other fighter on this field was just fuel to her.

    But she was too low level to matter in the grand scheme of things.

    He raised one gauntleted hand and the advance on her section tripled.

    Vozen's necrotic tendrils shifted to reinforce Gorthrax's push, darkened undead surging toward Iris's position in a concentrated tide, and the Drowned King's mounted cavalry swung wide to flank her from the east.

    Three lords coordinating their forces against a single swordfighter who had attracted the wrong kind of attention by being too stubborn.
    Iris's [Torment Cycle] hit a ceiling she'd never touched before.

    Her class had no ceiling, but the body housing it did, and the muscles that had been converting pain into power were beginning to burn in a way that had nothing to do with [Eternal Hunger's starvation or Ragnar's dark ritual.

    This was simpler. Older. The body saying what the will refused to: she was running out of road at this pace.

    The bond called again.

    She'd been ignoring it. The crimson pull of the Reservoir that sat behind every family member's mark, the shared blood that Quinlan pumped through his women like a second circulatory system, fueling everything they did.

    All she had to do was reach for it.

    Her mind began forming the words through [Master's Link], the request she'd been too proud to make since the bonding ceremony. But for Damian... For revenge...

    'Quinlan, can I-'

    She stopped.

    The words died unspoken because the answer was already there, as vivid as if he were standing in front of her instead of halfway across the continent in an Elvardian dungeon.

    She could see his face with perfect clarity.

    That big, confident, infuriatingly charming smile.
    Those mesmerizing eyes carrying just a little too much smugness for any sane woman such as her to tolerate.

    His mouth would curl at one corner the way it did when he was about to say something that would make her want to punch him, and his voice would come out warm and certain and completely insufferable.

    'Of course you can, Iris. Your revenge is my
    revenge, have you forgotten?'

    ‘...’ Iris understood perfectly. Quinlan had lived through her terrible childhood in some twisted Soul Records simulation. He wanted justice done for Damian and her mom just as she wanted.

    Still, her eyes darkened.

    The arrogance. The absolute, bone-deep, unapologetic arrogance of that man, who would give her everything she asked for.

    Then the darkness cracked, and what broke through it was a grin.

    Wide and crooked and genuine in a way that her face rarely allowed, because Iris had spent most of her life making sure nothing real showed through.

    Because despite all his insufferable attitude, despite the smugness and the possessiveness and the way he looked at every woman around him, her included, like they were already his, Quinlan Elysiar was the man who had given her everything.

    He would say yes. He would always say yes. And he wouldn't even hesitate.

    The mark between her shoulder blades ignited.

    Crimson script blazed to life down her spine in lines that burned through her armor and cast red light across the undead pressing in around her, and the Reservoir that had been pressing uselessly at the edge of her awareness poured through the brand in a flood that hit her class like oil hitting a furnace.

    [Torment Cycle]'s numbers shattered. The pain she'd been stockpiling, every wound, every cracked rib, every gash she'd refused to acknowledge, detonated through her muscles at twice the conversion rate.

    An undead's mace caught her across the ribs on the backswing, and the impact that would've buckled her a minute ago ripped through [Torment Cycle] and came back as a surge that lit every nerve in her body white-hot.

    Her back arched, her lips parted, and the breath that left her was closer to a sigh than a grunt.

    'What the..'

    Iris then licked blood off her lower lip and shrugged.

    Quinlan..." She split an undead in half mid-stride without breaking rhythm. "By the end of the day, I'll make you the only existing Necromancer on the face of Iskaris!"

    The laugh that followed came out low and rough and breathless.

    "Oh, wait."

    Her expression turned crooked as she looked toward the undead lords.

    "He already is, because you Covenant of Eternal Losers are nothing but grave robbing Corpse Animators! Hahaha!"

    And the woman who conducted a full-on imaginary conversation with herself and a man hundreds of miles away, all the while believing herself fully sane, threw herself back into the killing.
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    1. Offline
      Despawning
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      Chapter 1712 My Power

      The duel had worn past the point of counting exchanges, and the gap had not closed.

      Kaede answered both of them at once, the dark blade sweeping from Ayame's katana to Blossom's gauntlets in arcs that treated the two-on-one like a warm-up, and every third swing came from the sword itself rather than Kaede, the weapon dragging her arm sideways to intercept a void-phase Blossom was still halfway through.

      Blossom crackled out of the void at Kaede's flank with lightning arcing between her gauntlets, and the sword met her before Kaede turned.

      The broad side of the blade caught both claws before they reached flesh and electricity sprayed outward in a shower that scorched Kaede's forearm without drawing a flinch, and Ayame came through the opening with a cut aimed at the wrist holding the cursed steel.

      Kaede's sword wrenched free of Blossom's claws while she simultaneously kicked the dogkin and met Ayame's cut in a counter so heavy the collision drove Ayame's boots into the earth to the ankle and sent cracks racing through the stone beneath her.

      "You've become much faster, yes." The smile Kaede showed her sister held nothing warm. "But speed was never the real problem, was it?"

      She shoved, and Ayame skidded backward through scorched dirt.

      "I don't know what nonsense you're spouting." Ayame reset her grip, then she grinned. "But it seems the Scarlet Lilies came to their senses."

      "Mercenaries switch sides." Kaede's tone was flat. "It's what they do."

      "And Ragnar?" The ridge above them had gone quiet minutes ago, the tremors that had been shaking the battlefield since the start gone still. "He's rather silent. I see a big ice construct over there, I wonder what it could possibly mean?"

      Kaede came in hard and Ayame met the first strike with water running her blade thin and bright, redirecting the second into the dirt while Blossom materialized behind Kaede's knee with claws that forced the sword to wrench backward and cover.

      They separated, and the screams of the surrounding war filled the gap.

      "Why are you doing this, Kaede?" The mockery left Ayame's voice. "You should be pursuing Greenvale. The Fujimori holding two whole duchies would immortalize your name in the clan's legends."

      Kaede's gaze found hers through the smoke, and honesty crossed her face for a fraction of a second before the mask settled back. "Greenvale was always just a stepping stone. He forced our hand. We cannot allow someone with his abilities to take Elvardia and add an entire nation to his arsenal."

      "We." Ayame caught it instantly. "The sword says 'we,’ sister?"

      Kaede's grip tightened on the hilt. The dark steel hummed. "I'm talking about the Fujimori leadership."

      "Sure, sure."

      "Your beliefs are none of my concern."

      The overhead came down with everything the cursed blade could channel, splitting the air in a visible line, and Ayame raised her katana because she had nowhere left to go.

      The water along her steel had been thinning with every party, each exchange compressing the infusion until it barely clung to the edge, but under the full weight of Kaede's blade the current surged instead of breaking.

      Water bled from the katana in a sheet that climbed the descending steel and carried the incoming force sideways along its own edge, and the strike slid past the point of contact the way a river carries a stone past a bend.

      Kaede's sword hammered into the earth beside Ayame's hip hard enough to crater it, and Ayame stood uncut with her arms shaking.

      But the water was gone. The deflection had burned through the last of the infusion, and her blade ran dry as the current faded to nothing.

      She needed the Reservoir again, and the unease arrived instantly.

      Through the bond she could feel them.

      Lucille was furthest forward, carving into the dwarven front with a magma-coated axe in one fist and a blacksteel warhammer in the other, elite souls covering her flanks, and every dwarf she cut down sent warmth pulsing back through the Reservoir.

      One of the gentlest women in the family was the engine keeping her sisters fueled, and she was killing without pause.

      Serika's wind-solar eruptions were cratering the Fujimori lines in flashes of gold and howling gale, each punch pulling from the pool and sending back what she took threefold, while Raika fought with such devastating punches that the shockwaves alone scattered those who stood before her.

      Kitsara was... Doing Kitsara things.

      But all of them were killing, all of them refilling what they took.

      Ayame and Blossom were fighting a woman they couldn't kill, draining the Reservoir without returning a single drop.

      "No one will mind, all of Blossom's friends are nice girls!!"

      Blossom's voice came bright and certain from the side, as if she'd fully read her thoughts. "Dealing with Corrupted Bitch Sister is very important! Ayame is allowed to be greedy!"

      “…Right," a soft giggle broke through Ayame s composure.

      Ayame knew that Blossom was right. It didn't sit well with a woman raised to pay her debts in full, but this wasn't the time.

      Ayame reached for the Reservoir, and Quinlan's water answered.

      The current surged back along her blade, running the steel in a pressurized film. She resettled her stance and faced Kaede.

      Kaede's eyes narrowed, visibly studying what this power was about, how it functioned.

      The Bloodfather class was extremely anomalous, perhaps even more so than
      any other class Quinian wielded. The denizens of Iskaris could only guess how it worked.

      Ayame noticed the sharp, observing eyes of her younger sibling and smirked. "Guess we're both getting empowered by external forces that aren't quite our own, hmm, sister?" Water rippled along the edge.

      "Shut your mouth." Kaede rushed in. "My power is mine and mine alone."

      The overhead carried the same crushing force, but the water was at full and the curtent climbed the descending blade before the impact reached Ayame's wrists, redirecting it sideways. Her boots shifted an inch.

      Kaede pulled free and swung again, a lateral sweep aimed at her throat, and the water answered better than ever before.

      The current caught the incoming steel and bent its trajectory into the dirt, and Ayame's counter came through the gap, scoring a thin line across Kaede's forearm.

      Kaede glanced at her arm and found red.

      The next exchange came faster, three strokes, high, low, diagonal, each carrying force that dwarfed Ayame's own output, and the water turned every one of them.

      It received the force and gave it somewhere else to go, flowing around each impact the way a stream flows around stones it can never move, and Ayame was moving with it now, her footwork shifting from the desperate retreating stance she'd held all fight into something fluid and forward.

      Her understanding was accelerating. Each deflection taught the next, the water learning the shape of Kaede's sword the way a river learns its banks, and the girl who had been driven backward through scorched earth for the entire duel took her first step forward.

      "What is this..." Kaede hissed. Her expression hardened.

      Blossom came from behind with lightning trailing from her gauntlets, aimed at the gap between Kaede's shoulders, and the Fujimori leader's response was wild and violent.

      She spun a full rotation with the cursed blade extended, the are of dark steel forcing Blossom to phase backward into the void and Ayame to duck beneath the swing.

      The dogkin landed five meters back with sparks racing between her claws, unhurt.

      Kaede stood at the center of the crater her own swing had carved. breathing harder than she had a minute ago.

      "This rapid improvement..." Her eyes hardened, awfully aware that her sister was getting accustomed to her new powers in real time, against HER!

      The mere thought made her hands tremble in rage.

      Ayame straightened from the crouch with water running bright along her katana, and her gaze drifted past her sister toward the edge of the horizon.

      "Would you look at that?"

      Dust was climbing the sky in a column wide enough to blot the treeline.

      A second column rose from the west, thinner and faster, and the banners became visible at the same moment.

      Silver-bark standards from the east, Isveth's host of shrine maidens and matriarchs marching in formations so tight the column moved like a single organism through the trees.

      The head maiden herself ran at the front, expression full of fury.

      On the other side, Consortium banners were cresting the western ridge with Maelstrom's heavy infantry pouring across the fields, the general's booming voice already carrying orders across the distance.

      Then, if that wasn't enough, beastkin snarls could be heard behind the humans, wolfish howls and the deep battle cries of bearkin.

      Three armies were converging on the same battlefield from opposite ends of the horizon.

      Ayame let the grin crack all the way through.

      "You got the jump on us, but you failed to finish the job in time."

      Then, all of a sudden, the dark blade in Kaede's hand screamed.

      The sound came from the steel itself, a tone so low it bypassed the ears and hit the chest, and Kaede's arm wrenched sideways as the sword pulled toward the approaching armies with anger that had nothing to do with its wielder.

      Dark energy bled from the edge in tendrils that reached past Kaede's guard and her whole body lurched a step before she caught herself with both hands on the hilt, fighting the pull.

      "I know." The words came through her gritted teeth, whispered at the blade in her grip quiet enough that her own soldiers wouldn't hear it. "I'm not going to fail, I promise.."

      "My power is mine and mine alone," Ayame mused. "..Right."

      …

      Black Fang hit Quinlan before his arms could rise.
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