Ranobes » Primordial Villain with a Slave Harem » Chapter 1724: Sentencing!
Options
Bookmark
Chapters list

Chapter 1724: Sentencing!
Primordial Villain with a Slave Harem

On the eastern front, Kaede’s sword arm had stopped mid-swing.

The pressure that rolled off the man in the sky hit her chest like a battering ram and her boots slid backward through the scorched dirt, the cursed blade screaming in her grip as it dragged her arm sideways toward the source with immense hunger. It wanted him dead.

Across from her, Ayame and Blossom had stopped momentarily as well, their eyes turned skyward.

Kaede’s teeth ground together.

"Soldiers!" Her command cut through the ranks before her breathing had steadied. "Aelindra was one councilwoman! Not a queen, not a general, one seat on a council of many, and seats can be filled! The tides are even, the war is not won by circus shows! Maintain formation and fight with honor!"

"..."

"Lady Kaede..."

"Yes, my lady!"

Just like that, her troops steadied. The Fujimori banner snapped forward.

Across from Kaede, Blossom stood perfectly still with her gauntlets at her sides and her ears angled toward the sky, her blonde tail a blur behind her that hadn’t stopped since Quinlan took to the air.

She had watched Myrasyn’s entire performance with wide, shining eyes that belonged at a festival and not a battlefield, and the pure, unfiltered awe on her face made it abundantly clear that the dogkin had fallen completely and irrevocably in love with the queen’s display.

The voice, the authority, the staff coming down in that brilliant arc, the dramatic pause before the sentencing, all of it. Blossom loved it the way only Blossom could love something: wholly, immediately, and with her entire body vibrating to prove it.

Then Ayame’s elbow found her side.

"Blossom. She’s about to charge us."

The whine that left the dogkin could have shattered hearts across the continent, and she tore her gaze from the sky with visible anguish before turning back toward Kaede.

Her tail did not slow down.

She planted her feet, straightened her back in one sharp motion, and raised a gauntleted fist above her head the way Myrasyn had raised her staff.

Her chin lifted, her chest puffed out, and her brow furrowed into what she clearly believed was the same regal severity the queen had worn, an expression that on her face landed somewhere in the vicinity of a kitten trying to look like a lion.

"Kaede Fujimori!" she announced across the melee, and her voice rang with all the authority a bubbly dogkin with a tail wagging at terminal velocity could produce.

Several soldiers on both sides stopped fighting to look at her.

She had clearly decided she was going to perform her own version of the queen’s sentencing whether the battlefield was ready for it or not, and the mimicking motions she made were alarmingly accurate in form, her free hand sweeping out in a near-perfect copy of Myrasyn’s gesture, her posture rigid with ceremonial weight, every movement studied and precise.

"For the crime of making Blossom look away from Master’s incredible moment!!" Her voice carried genuine conviction and her ears were vibrating with excitement.

She held the pause.

It was the exact pause Myrasyn had held before delivering the sentence, timed well and carried with real commitment, and it would have been genuinely impressive if the girl holding it could stop her smile from breaking through.

"The sentence is punishment!!"

Ayame stood beside her with a flat expression.

"You mean death?"

"Death!!!" Blossom gasped, realizing she made a grave mistake.

"Because she made you look away from Quin, not because she betrayed and sold me? Your oldest friend?"

Blossom’s head whipped toward Ayame and the regal posture evaporated in an instant. "That too!!"

The dogkin evaluated her lacking performance without bias. "Blossom needs practice... Natalie and Poppy will help her!"

Then her eyes snapped forward, the warmth drained from her irises, and the adorable girl who had been playing queen vanished into the void between one heartbeat and the next.

...

Across the battlefield, elven soldiers who had dropped their weapons stayed where they’d fallen, kneeling or standing slack with tears drying on faces still burning from the warmth in their blood, and the armies around them let them be.

Dwarves and Fujimori had bigger concerns than allies who had stopped swinging.

The coalition’s councilwomen moved through the paralyzed ranks with ashen faces, grabbing shoulders, barking orders into ears that refused to hear them.

One seized a kneeling archer by the breastplate and hauled her upright. The archer looked through her matriarch with wet eyes, sinking back to her knees the moment she was released.

Another slapped a sobbing mage across the face hard enough to split her lip, and the woman took the blow without blinking, her hand still pressed to her chest where the warmth lived.

They had lost their army.

The undead hadn’t paused.

Gorthrax’s horde ground forward with the same dead inevitability it had carried since the first corpse climbed to its feet, because mindless things don’t feel dread, and the lords commanding them saw no reason to waste time.

"I’ll kill him after I kill you!" The Drowned King’s voice tore from his rusted helm as his mount crashed through the melee toward Iris.

Iris parried the swing and let the impact carry her boots across the dirt, grinning through the blood running down her face. "Didn’t know corpses could dream!"

The Drowned King’s mount reared with a shriek of grinding metal, and the fury that poured off the undead lord doubled the pace of every corpse within fifty meters of his banner. "I’ll tear your mouth off!"

"I don’t need to cast spells to beat you! Aim for my limbs or something more valuable, retard!"

"I meant I’ll shut you up, you braindead cunt! You have no grasp on language itself!"

"Grasp language? What nonsense are you blabbering about? All I need to grasp is your hideous skull to break it apart!"

"ARGH!" The lich screamed in frustration.

"ARGH!" Iris screamed a battle cry, swinging her sword with all her might.

...

Above the battlefield, Black Fang watched the chaos with her violet eyes.

"Are you done?" she asked, not turning toward Quinlan.

He chuckled beside her, golden light still rolling off him in waves. "No. But you can go."

His grin sharpened. "Have fun."

Black Fang stepped off the air without a word.

The Beloved mark on her skin blazed bright purple the instant she dropped, the light burning through her clothing and painting a violet comet trail behind her as she fell toward the battlefield with her hair whipping upward and her serpent tattoos pulsing in rhythm with the mark, every channel in her body flooding with a power that hadn’t existed before today.

It was time to see what a Beloved Mode Black Fang looked like!

Primordial Villain with a Slave Harem
Chapters list

Comments 3

  1. Offline
    CreaTorDominion
    + 0 ⋅ 0 -
    Despawning thank you.
    Read more
  2. Offline
    Despawning
    + 2 ⋅ 0 -
    1733 Upholding Tradition

    Quinlan reached into his pocket ring and pulled out a vial.

    The glass was small and dark, filled with a liquid so deeply violet it was nearly black.

    Quinlan peeled the skin from Ragnar's back again, and while the raw muscle glistened in the winter sun he uncorked the vial and poured.

    The violet liquid hit exposed flesh and Ragnar's body locked rigid.

    "Black Fang gave me this little vial," Quinlan's voice came wrong against the back of his skull as the venom began to seep. "All she said was 'use this."

    The words cut through the first wave of sensation as the venom threaded into his muscle fibers, and Ragnar's eye snapped toward the Fujimori lines.

    He found her.

    Black Fang's katana carved through Tatsumi's guard in & diagonal stroke that split the youngest Fujimori elder from shoulder to hip. The man folded and was dead before his knees hit the ground.

    "BLACK FANG!"

    The roar tore from Ragnar's throat, raw and ragged.

    She paused.

    The katana stopped mid-arc and the violet eyes lifted from the carnage to find the limbless torso dangling in the sky.

    "I WILL-"
    Then the venom reached his nerve endings and the rage in Ragnar's throat became a shriek.

    It hit all at once, every fiber the poison had threaded through igniting with a sensitivity so extreme that the winter air across the open wound became its own blade, the wind itself flaying him, and the sound that replaced his roar had nothing honorable left in it, a high broken scream.

    Below, Black Fang watched the dwarf king with the faintest flicker of life behind her eyes, so muted and so brief that anyone other than Quinlan might've missed it.

    Then it was gone, and the Venomborne Terror turned her back on the limbless king in the sky as if he had ceased to exist, and the massacre resumed.

    "Sera."

    "Mmhm-"

    The glow returned, and the skin sealed shut.
    Ragnar screamed louder than he had during any cut.

    The venom was still inside, threading deeper through rebuilt tissue, and the healing detonated every sensitized nerve at once as new flesh grew around the substance and pressed it tighter against the endings it had already claimed.

    Golden light became its own instrument, warmth and restoration converted into white-hot agony by the poison lacing every fiber, and the dwarf king thrashed so violently that dark fluid sprayed from his shoulder stumps.

    Sera watched the display with her head tilted, studying the dwarf's shattered expression with thorough fascination.

    But she realized that it wasn't enough.

    She no longer wanted to only watch her man do the dirty work.

    After all...

    "Quin."

    Her voice came sweet and warm.

    "So there's this unofficial tradition among us girls." She tucked a strand of hair behind her ear as if she were the most innocent maiden in existence. "Ayame did it to slavers. Vex to the lionkin. Iris to Gilbert and dirty soldiers. Jasmine and her mom to Aurelion..."

    She twirled the strand of hair cutely as she explained, "I want to uphold the tradition. But the councilwomen are, well.. not equipped for this sort of thing."

    Her gaze returned to Ragnar, and the smile that crossed her face was the most beautiful and the most terrifying expression the dwarf king had ever seen.

    "That leaves me with this... thing"

    She looked at Quinlan and blinked many times innocently. "Can I, Quin?"

    He was silent for a long second before sighing.

    "No touching."

    Sera's smile went soft in a way that was entirely about the man who still had it in him to be so jealous and possessive of her despite the situation, and she nodded like a delicate maiden whose beloved had done something far too romantic.

    "Of course, my love."

    A dagger of golden light crystallized in her hand and cut apart the rags covering his groin.

    Then she giggled. "I might need a magnifying glass for this."

    She brought the dagger down between the dwarf king's legs.

    The sound that left Ragnar hit a frequency the throat was never built to produce, high and thin, so raw that soldiers on the ground pressed their palms over their ears and several dropped where they stood.

    The venom that had saturated his flesh caught the new wound instantly, flooding sensitized nerve endings that had never been exposed to open air, and the agony exceeded every threshold the dwarf king's body possessed.

    "Heal," Quinlan called.

    "With a joyous heart."

    Sera's light flooded over him, sealing every wound.

    From that point, two blades worked him.

    Quinlan's ice razor opened him from behind in methodical, furious lines, peeling and slicing through flesh the venom had turned into a landscape of raw agony.

    Sera's light dagger traced across his chest and stomach with a delicacy that made the cruelty worse, and she hummed while she worked, a soft melody that floated above the screaming.

    Between cuts she healed everything back to perfection so the next round landed on fresh, unblemished, venom-soaked nerve endings primed to receive the full measure of what both of them had to offer.

    Ragnar broke on the third dual round.

    "PLEASE! GODDESS ABOVE, STOP!"

    The words poured out of him in a flood that had no pride left in it, no dignity, no trace of the king who had laughed through his own dismemberment on the ridge, just a broken animal screaming at anything that might listen.

    Below, the dwarven army was breaking in a way no weapon could have managed.

    It started at the center, where the dark ooze had been falling longest and the soldiers had been listening to their king for minutes.

    A captain in full plate lowered his axe, looked at the men around him, and stepped backward out of formation without a word. He turned and walked. No one stopped him because the man beside him was doing the same.

    The collapse spread outward in rings.

    On the left flank, three sergeants threw their weapons into the dirt simultaneously and dropped to their knees with their hands behind their heads, and the soldiers behind them followed within seconds, steel clattering to the ground in a cascade.

    On the right, a dwarven company broke into a full sprint toward the rear with shields abandoned and formation gone, and the ones who remembered Quinlan's words from earlier did exactly what he'd told them: they threw their weapons away and knelt, sinking into the mud with faces carved from misery, choosing surrender over one more second of standing beneath that sound.

    At the rear of the center formation, a grey-bearded colonel with nine hundred years under the crown reached up and unclasped his helmet.

    He set it on the ground beside his boots with a finality that said he would never pick it up again, then unfastened the officer's gorget from his throat and placed it on top.

    The rank insignia he had earned across dozens of campaigns caught the winter light one last time before the mud swallowed its shine.

    He knelt.

    The soldiers nearest him watched their most senior surviving officer surrender his commission in the dirt, and the flatness in his voice when he spoke carried more weight than any order he had ever given.

    "It's over, lads and lasses. Throw them down."

    Steel hit the ground around him in a wave that spread outward for fifty meters.

    "Captain! Orders!" A crossbowman cried at the nearest officer, and the officer was sitting in the dirt with his hands over his face, staring at nothing.

    "Prepare for the dark age of the dwarven race, soldier. Or its extinction..."

    "Sir...'" the soldier cried and lost all his will to fight.

    The dwarven army that had marched through Kaede's portal under the banners of the Elvardian Alliance unraveled from the center in minutes, and the wailing from above never stopped.

    Ragnar watched a dwarven spearman from his personal guard throw his weapon into the dirt and kneel with both hands over his face.

    He watched three companies collapse inward like tents whose poles had been cut. He watched the banners fall one after another, the golden hammer-and-mountain of his house trampled by the boots of men running from a sound they could no longer stand.

    His army. His people. The soldiers who had followed him through the portal because their king had asked them to.

    "Kill me." The words came out flat, emptied of everything. "Please just kill me!"

    "Kill you?" Quinlan repeated the words slowly, tasting them on his tongue.

    A breath left him that was almost a laugh but not quite, a single exhale through the visor that shook his shoulders once.

    Then it came again, stronger, a low chuckle building in his chest that vibrated through the hand gripping Ragnar's collar and traveled down through the limbless torso like a second heartbeat.

    "Kill you...?"

    The chuckle climbed, turning fuller and warmer, a laugh that grew and grew until the Primordial Villain threw his head back and released it completely, a boisterous, unrestrained roar of genuine amusement that echoed across the dying battlefield.

    It shook through Ragnar's bones, each wave of laughter reverberating through the limbless ruin until the dwarf king's teeth rattled in his skull.

    Quinlan laughed like a man who had heard the funniest thing in his life, and the sound of it was worse than every cut and every drop of venom combined because there was nothing forced about it.

    The Primordial Villain found the dwarven king's plea for death genuinely, thoroughly funny.

    "Haaah... Thanks, I needed that," he chuckled, laughter finally fading.

    The silence it left behind was heavier than the screaming had been.

    "Sera."

    "Heal."
    Read more
    1. Offline
      Despawning
      + 3 ⋅ 0 -
      1734 Disgrace to the Ancestors

      Chizuru watched Black Fang's katana carve through Tatsumi in a diagonal stroke that split the youngest Fujimori elder from shoulder to hip. A man she'd mentored for centuries folded to the dirt before his blood finished leaving him.

      The terrible, blazing violet eyes left the corpse without lingering, lifting Skyward to where Ragnar's screams rained down from the Primordial Villain's grip, and whatever passed behind Black Fang's gaze lasted less than a heartbeat before she turned back to the Fujimori line as if ticking a name off a list.

      Chizuru's fingers tightened on her blade.

      Tomoe stood to her left with blood running from her temple and her breathing gone short, Hozumi held the right with his guard braced against Alexios, and the morale that had held the Fujimori line together was hemorrhaging faster than any wound on the field.

      Her gaze found Kaede.

      The Sword of the Fujimori burned bright arcs that carried force enough to split formations, and every exchange drove both opponents backward because the raw power behind the blade was simply greater.

      But Ayame slipped beneath a slash that would have taken her head, her spine arching backward until her hair swept the ground.

      Seeing the follow-up come for her neck, she launched into a backflip from the bent position, her body rotating past kade's blade in a single fluid arc, thighs tight and legs cutting the air above her.

      Kaede's next strike came even faster, but Ayame managed to catch it on her katana while inverted, head toward the dirt and feet toward the sky, the parry so clean the ring of steel carried across the field.

      Before Kaede could attack for a fourth time, using Ayame's position to finish the job, claws raked toward the back of her neck.

      The dogkin had struck from behind, and Kaede's blade whipped around to parry, sending her counter at the blonde girl's midsection in the same fluid motion.

      But the assassin in questionable black leather armor had already read it.

      Her acute senses caught the shift in Kaede's muscles before the sword arm finished committing, and she bent away from the edge with a flexibility that no rigid skeleton should have allowed, the blade close enough to stir the fur on her ears before she settled into a low crouch a step back, weight forward, fingers curled.

      She stood and began slowly prowling, blue eyes tracking Kaede with extreme patience and a commitment to kill.

      Ayame managed to land on her feet thanks to the dogkin's intervention, and the two young women, both barely past twenty, framed the Fujimori's chosen from both sides.

      The statistical gap between them and Kaede wielding that blade should have made this fight a slaughter, and instead the Sword of the Fujimori couldn't find a single clean kill.

      ‘These girls are geniuses among geniuses'

      Chizuru saw it with a clarity that tasted like ash.

      The dogkin was a predator whose intuition ran so far above what even beastkin veterans were capable of that watching her fight looked like watching someone who already knew the outcome. She turned every exchange into a hunt where Kaede was forced to defend herself regardless of how much harder she swung.

      And Ayame... what Chizuru was watching was no longer samurai technique. At least, nothing the Fujimori elder knew of.

      The foundation was there in the footwork and the angles of the cuts, but what the girl was doing with it had evolved past anything the Fujimori had ever produced in recorded history.

      The elders had known she was talented when they discarded her.

      They had seen the raw promise ever since she was a little baby taking her first swings with a miniature wooden sword.

      But whatever Ayame had become in the year since went beyond talent and beyond training, and Chizuru could not identify what had done it, because neither the Primordial Villain nor Black Fang could account for mentoring the kind of swordsmanship she was watching.

      The Fujimori had thrown away their own greatest blade, and it had come back to cut them.

      "You better deflect properly or it'll all be over, Hozumi! Oh, to be carefree again!" A joyous roar erupted behind Chizuru, Alexios's voice unmistakable in its boisterous savagery. "Let's see which of us fossils shall live to see the new age!"

      Her neck strained toward the sound but the motion died in her spine, because Black Fang had started walking toward her.

      Every step was unhurried, the blade at her side still burning with the serpentine patterns, and the pressure that poured off the Venomborne Terror closed around Chizuru's world until the battlefeld's roar dimmed to nothing and only the eyes remained, carrying a killing intent so dense and so patient that the composure the old woman had maintained cracked down its center.

      "You.." Her voice came wrong, pitched higher and thinner than she had ever permitted it to be. "You were such an adorable child. I held you in these hands, did you know that? When you were born, I was the first elder to hold you. So small and warm against my chest..."

      "It's not too late!" Desperation climbed through the cracks. "Embrace your heritage, child! The Fujimori are your blood, your history, your home! Come back to us!"

      Black Fang's expression didn't change and her pace didn't slow.

      The eyes that tracked Chizuru carried the same flat, serpentine patience they'd worn since latsumi hit the dirt, and the old woman's pleas washed over them the way rain washed over stone.

      Chizuru's heel caught the earth as her body took a step backward without her permission.

      "How?!" The word ripped from her with a rawness that made the nearest soldiers flinch. "We are the same level! The Heavenly Restriction binds us equally! You should not be capable of growing stronger, yet you carry a pressure that wasn't there when we last crossed blades! How did you take the next step?!"

      She didn't need the answer spoken.

      The mark on Black Fang's belly pulsed violet through her clothing, and Chizuru's gaze snapped skyward to the armored figure conducting his orchestra of suffering above the battlefield.

      "That man..."

      "You refused us!" Every shred of composure vanished as four centuries of frustration erupted.

      "Four hundred years we offered you everything! Home, riches, power, a seat among your own people! You could've become the youngest elder in our history! You could've gone down as the greatest warrior our people have ever known! And you spat on every hand the Fujimori extended, choosing to live as a filthy criminal rather than accept the clan that birthed you!"

      The old woman's entire body trembled, rage climbing as she shrieked, "Yet that man appears and within months you fight at his side?! The woman who rejected every concession we ever made gives her loyalty to a foreign villain?!"

      "And Ayame! He purchased her from a slave house for zero gold! ZERO! Acquired by some nobody through sheer idiotic luck! And now both daughters of the Fujimori stand against their own clan, tearing apart everything their ancestors bled to build!"

      "If that man did not exist, everything would have gone according to plan!" She was shrieking, her face twisted beyond recognition. "His impossible, unfair existence undid our clan's greatest ambition! The sacrifices, the thousands of years of patience, ALL of it! Even the king was..."

      The raving turned into guttural cursing. "Cursed be the Primordial Villain, Quinlan Elysiar! May all his loved ones experience the same despair his unjust actions inflicted on others!"

      Black Fang's eyes blazed an even more violent violet the instant Chizuru spat her words, a single fierce pulse.

      For the first time since the walk began the faintest shift crossed the Venomborne Terror's face, and it belonged entirely to the man in the sky whose name Chizuru had just spat like poison.

      Chizuru saw the pulse. She saw where the mark sat and what it meant, and the last thread holding her to anything resembling dignity snapped.

      She spat at Black Fang's feet. "Whoring yourself to a foreign devil! Branded on the belly like livestock!"

      The words pouring from her bore no resemblance to the elder who had offered grandmotherly mercy moments ago.

      "You are the disgrace of your ancestors! A stain on every generation of Fujimori blood! Your lineage, your name, everything this clan stands for, you defiled the moment you spread yourself for that creature and let him mark you as his property!"

      "Finally." Black Fang's voice cut through the vitriol and Chizuru's mouth snapped shut.

      Her eyes danced, trailing gorgeous iridescence with every step.

      "The mask of hypocrisy came off at long last."

      She smiled, entirely unbothered.

      Then, she decreed:

      "Hanako Fujimori died when you killed her. No amount of screaming will reach her."

      Her blade hung loose at her side and the smile widened into something that looked, impossibly, at peace.

      “But I, Black Fang, Disgrace to my Ancestors, thank you for your words.”
      Read more