Ranobes » Primordial Villain with a Slave Harem » Chapter 1728: Match Made In Heaven
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Chapter 1728: Match Made In Heaven
Primordial Villain with a Slave Harem

Black Fang closed the distance in silence and swung for the back of Lilith’s neck.

The void tore open between them and a wall of compressed nothing caught the purple blade six inches from Lilith’s spine.

"Grh!"

Blood burst from Void’s nose before the barrier even finished forming.

The veins along her temples swelled so hard they cast shadows, both eyes snapping open as Black Fang’s strike carried enough force that Void almost lost consciousness just from trying to stop her.

Lilith felt the terrible killing intent washing over her and whipped around. "Bronnya!"

The tanker moved to take over the fight against the elder while Lilith spun and brought her sword up just as the void barrier shattered.

Black Fang’s katana punched through and Lilith’s blade caught it with a clash that nearly drove her into the dirt.

"You want to die, lunatic?!" Lilith grunted through the strain.

Black Fang’s blade came back around in silence, angling for Lilith’s throat with the same efficiency it had used on every body in the corridor behind her.

Lilith caught it on her sword’s edge.

And the impact nearly buckled her stance on the spot. ’She became even stronger since we last met?!’ she gasped inwardly in disbelief. ’No... She didn’t gain more stats... She just became "better" as a combatant,’ she realized through gritted teeth.

She managed to shove the blade aside and returned a cut that Black Fang slipped without effort, violet eyes tracking the arc the way a cat tracked a moth.

Two more exchanges. Every parry cost Lilith more than the attack it stopped. "What did you do to yourself?!"

Black Fang didn’t respond.

"Please stop attacking! We switched sides, Black Fang!" Jallen’s voice tore across the melee.

The spearwoman was twenty meters right with her weapon braced against Tatsumi’s overhead strike, boots sliding in the dirt.

Black Fang’s blade stopped mid-swing and her violet eyes settled on Lilith.

"I killed Scar."

Although she only spoke three words, the meaning behind them was clear to all: ’despite that, you want to become my allies?’

Lilith’s knuckles went white.

Scar was out there right now, blue-skinned and spine-straight, commanding soul armies for the man who owned her soul, and the woman who’d helped put her there was standing close enough to touch.

Seeing the hesitation, Black Fang got her answer.

She lowered her katana and began walking by Lilith.

"Go kill the undead, you’re in my way."

The Spellblade bumped into her shoulder. "You think I’ll just do whatever you tell me to?"

Black Fang’s eyes settled on her, and the violet that stared back was so deep and so empty that Lilith felt she was staring death itself in the face.

"Yes."

But the Adamantite Adventurer held it.

"You better think again, then!"

"Orc boss." Void’s voice came, and for once it was ragged, breathless. "Use your head, please."

Lilith’s eye twitched.

"Let her have the elders!" Jallen shouted, catching the elder’s next thrust on her spear shaft with a crack that split the wood. "She’s got a vendetta while we’re here just because."

The follow-up nearly took her head off. "Let’s go kill undead! We’re professional monster slayers, not destroyers of the elderly."

She was more than happy to get away from the ferocious elders who were pushing her to the brink of death with every attack.

Lilith and Black Fang held each other’s eyes.

The battle raged around their stillness, Bronnya’s shield ringing, Alexios doing the heavy lifting as he fought multiple elders at once.

Lilith broke the staredown first, eyes full of dissatisfaction. "I join Quinlan Elysiar and the first thing I get is this lunatic trying to cut my head off from behind..." she growled. "What a phenomenal start."

Black Fang was already looking at Chizuru, ignoring the dissatisfied rambling.

As she disengaged from the fight, Lilith couldn’t help but look up, eyes landing on Quinlan.

’Did that fucker not tell her about our situation, or did she just ignore it?’

Her eyes narrowed. ’I can’t even decide, they’re both crazy.’

’The two killers of Scar, one more unhinged than the other.’

She scoffed.

’What a match made in heaven.’

...

The Fujimori front was collapsing.

Black Fang’s army had hit the line, and the combined force ground through samurai formations with the efficiency of a machine that multiplied with every kill.

Alexios was at the center of the storm, swinging his longsword wildly at the elders until he sensed the surge of wrongness from behind. "Now what?"

’He has a new power? Again?’ He almost laughed at himself for the thought, but not because such a thought was impossible.

No, at this point the old king half-expected Quinlan to turn up with a new power every other minute.

What surprised him instead was...

That bastard would happily watch Alexios die before sparing a single soldier from his women’s side.

He would be more than happy letting Alexios make a final stand even if it became a 1v5 against all the elders. So why were these creatures rushing to his aid?

Then Black Fang materialized from the press of bodies at his right flank, katana dripping.

’Ah.’ He glanced at the katana. ’It all makes sense now.’

The forces that came to back him up weren’t Quinlan’s.

"Leave," she ordered coldly.

In fact, the forces weren’t even here to back him up, Alexios realized wryly.

He parried a samurai’s desperate thrust without looking and kicked the man into the puppet behind him. The scream was short.

"Leave? I was here first."

"I don’t care. The elders are mine."

"That’s where you’re wrong, young lass. They’re mine." He deflected a strike and decapitated the follow-up in the same motion.

His gaze dropped to the Beloved mark glowing through her clothing, violet light pulsing with her heartbeat.

"Bastard got even you, huh...? Is he really such a charmer? To be honest, I just don’t see it."

The katana was at his throat before the last word settled.

He didn’t flinch, instead standing with an unnatural, ominous blade against his jugular and an expression that suggested mild curiosity.

Finally, he grinned.

"Noted. No staring."

The blade pressed harder. A bead of blood welled.

"Go help your daughter."

"Felicity?" His grin widened. "She’s having fun with her friends. What kind of father shows up and ruins the party?" He tilted his head. "A deeply uncool one."

Black Fang’s expression didn’t change.

His hand rose and closed around the flat of the blade between two fingers, guiding it from his throat the way he’d move a branch from his path.

The grin went away.

"These fossils conspired with foreign powers against my kingdom and my people. Whatever vendetta you carry, I believe I deserve at least a piece of the pie."

The old king did not navigate the political landscape of his rotten court for such a long time without having anything to show for it.

Black Fang studied the king with her blade still in his grip.

She pulled the blade free.

"One."

"One, huh? Hozumi is mine, then. But if you’re slow, I’m killing them all."

They split. Black Fang moved left toward Chizuru with her puppet army in tow, and the old woman’s face went the color of curdled milk as the violet streak she’d been watching from a distance was heading straight for her.

Alexios moved right, longsword low, and Hozumi’s aged expression curdled.

...

While the elders were facing down two deadly executioners intent on seeing their heads roll...

High in the skies, Quinlan was making his next move!

Primordial Villain with a Slave Harem
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  1. Offline
    Despawning
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    Sorry for the delay everyone, I was quite busy today
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    1. Offline
      CreaTorDominion
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      No need to apologize bro. We really appriciate your dedication.
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  2. Offline
    Despawning
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    1737 Sacrilege

    "It's none of your concern, disciple."

    The words left Black Fang quietly.

    "Ohoho~ A nameless disciple now, am I?" Vex closed the distance again, pressing herself against Black Fang's side with her tail curling around her thigh, chin tilted up, voice dropping to a conspiratorial murmur. "I can't wait to hear what really happened during your 'rescue."

    Black Fang stood like a woman being climbed by a cat she couldn't bring herself to throw away.

    "But first..."

    Vex's eyes shifted toward the remaining pockets of resistance, and the playfulness in her expression hardened into the same killing focus she'd worn when she took Ryonosuke's head.

    "We have work to do."

    …

    Scar felt the battlefield tilt.

    The Fujimori lines were collapsing to the west and dwarven surrender was spreading through the northern ranks like a plague, and the undead front that had been grinding since the ambush started suddenly had arithmetic that favored the living.

    She redirected the bulk of her Elites toward Vozen's flank without a word, and five hundred blue-skinned soldiers pivoted as one.

    The Scarlet Lilies hit the same flank at roughly the same time, professional violence that Black Fang had dismissed from her warpath and pointed toward the nearest worthy target.

    Bronnya went through Vozen's shielded line like a siege weapon, Lilith's sword sheared through necrotic constructs behind her, and Orianna's vines closed around the Archlich from three sides while Scar's dagger found the binding gem at his collar.

    "Sacrilege upon sacrilege!" Vozen screeched, gems flaring. "You think raw numbers can-"

    The dagger punched through the gem mid-sentence, and the blue fire in his sockets guttered, scattered, and went out.

    The Pale Tyrant of Karth, who had spent millennia perfecting an army in his crypt, was defeated with the same philosophy he'd mocked all his life: raw, immediate, overwhelming force applied without ceremony.

    Scar pulled her blade free and walked toward the center.

    Blisabeth's mace connected with Gorthrax's barrier and the necrotic wall cracked but held, divine light bleeding through the fissures.

    The Eternal was weakening with his horde thinning, but he yielded ground without yielding composure, each retreat measured and controlled.

    Scar stepped into the gap on Elisabeth's left with both daggers drawn and the pale flame burning at her back.

    The radiance pouring off the Arch Priestess flickered the moment she registered what had arrived to help her.

    "I don't fight alongside the dead."

    Scar studied her, head tilted, then shrugged.

    "Leave, then."

    The dismissal hit Elisabeth harder than anything Gorthrax had managed all day.

    "You dare tell me to leave when I'm about to expel the oldest recorded monster?! This is my divine mission!"

    Scar had already turned her back and was pressing Gorthrax, blades flickering into the ancient lord's defenses in strikes so precise they left no room for recovery, and the Elite Souls flooding in on every side cared even less about Elisabeth's fury than their general did.

    The Lilies hit Gorthrax's right flank before Elisabeth finished sputtering.

    Bronnya's shield caught the Eternal across the pauldron, Lilith opened a seam in his guard, and Scar drove both blades through the gap in his breastplate.

    His barrier shattered, the light in his sockets dimmed to embers, and the oldest lord of the Covenant of Eternity went to his knees in the dirt.

    The dry rattling that escaped his ribeage was almost a laugh.

    "The Goddess's inquisitors hadn't managed to touch me for millions of years, then I get defeated by a brat who was a non-factor less than a year ago..." Blue fire flickered in his sockets as he looked at the blue-skinned soldiers pinning him from every side. "What a joke this fate of mine is..."

    His skull turned toward Scar, and the ancient intelligence behind the fading fire studied her the way it had once studied Iris on the field.

    "Your master is an interesting creature. I hope he'll bring the art of Necromancy to levels I never would've managed."

    "He already has" Scar spoke flatly, eliciting rasping chuckles from the undead.

    "True, true..."

    "Return to your grave, filth." Elisabeth stepped forward with divine light concentrating at the head of her mace. "By the Goddess's mercy, I grant you the peace of-“

    A dagger caught the mace shaft six inches from Gorthrax's skull.

    "No," Scar announced flatly.

    "What?!"

    "My Master desires this one captured."

    "Oh?" Gorthrax's amusement increased.

    "This abomination must be returned to the earth!" Elisabeth's golden light swelled as her weapon strained against Scar's blade. "They are a blemish on all that the Goddess stands for, I won't let you-"

    She stopped.

    A hundred pale flames had appeared around her in a ring that hadn't existed when she started the sentence, each one burning behind an Elite Soul whose weapon was drawn and level.

    They'd moved into position so quietly that the Arch Priestess hadn't heard a single footstep.
    Scar withdrew her blade from the mace and walked around Elisabeth, both daggers twirling in loose circles at her sides.

    The eyes above the mask promised violence, and she closed the distance without hurrying, because the soldiers at her back had already decided how this conversation would end.

    “With the defeat of the Elvardian Alliance, the Primordial Villain, Quinlan Elysiar, became the greatest force on the continent of Iskaris."

    Her voice carried across the field without rising above conversational volume, because an army standing behind her words made volume unnecessary. "The nations of mortals and their religious beliefs will find a way to integrate into the new age, or they will perish. That includes you and your Goddess's church."

    A hundred boots hit frozen earth in a single unified step as the Blites closed inward, and Elisabeth's face drained of color so fast the golden radiance around her flickered.

    "You.. How dare you speak such blasphemy?! The Goddess is everything! Creator-"

    "I'm not asking," Scar cut her off, and the daggers stopped twirling.

    The Arch Priestess's gaze snapped toward the Scarlet Lilies.

    Lilith watched the standoff with total indifference toward theological disputes.

    "I don't have strong feelings about religious matters" She glanced at the ring of Elites, then back at Elisabeth. "If the Goddess objects, I'm sure she'll let you people know."

    Elisabeth's divine light pressed outward against the closing ring, straining against soldiers who did not blink and did not care, and for three long seconds the Arch Priestess stood with every intention of fighting her way out through a hundred of them and the soul general who commanded them.

    Then she lowered the mace.

    "This is sacrilege."

    "Yes," Scar agreed, and gestured. The Elites parted to let her through.

    "I'll discuss matters about your master and his unacceptable actions with the church." Elisabeth decreed. "But don't think I'll trust you with Gorthrax! I'm not going anywhere until the Covenant of Eternity is fully dealt with."

    "Okay," Scar shrugged. It never hurt to have the strongest anti-undead warrior close to you when you were dealing with a gang of ancient and powerful undead monsters.

    The sound of bones scraping across the bloodied ground preceded the woman who walked out of the eastern carnage.

    Iris emerged from what was left of the Drowned King's cavalry with his ribcage dangling from one fist and his skull swinging from the other, split clean from crown to jaw.

    Her armor had lost its war of attrition long before the lord himself fell, and what remained covered approximately nothing: torn leather strips, a single pauldron hanging by a strap, and the fading crimson script still pulsing down her bare spine.

    The woman underneath looked thoroughly pleased with herself.

    Blood and rust painted her from the collarbone down, black hair clung to her face in wet strands, and the grin she wore was so wide and so savage it had no business on a human face.

    "Anybody have a potion?"

    "Catch." Jallen tossed one and Iris caught it, bit the cork out, and poured the red liquid into the Drowned King's split skull.

    It pooled in the bone cavity, and the Child of Reckoning raised the ancient cranium to her lips and drank.

    She lowered the skull, exhaled through her nose, and wiped her mouth with the back of a hand that was more blood than skin. Then she looked around at the silence she'd caused and blinked.

    "Aurora's potions taste better."

    “…Seriously?"

    "Yeah."

    "...Have you considered that you normally drink potions from a clean vial, but you drank ours from a filthy skull?"

    ".." Iris paused. Then shrugged and drank again.

    "..." Jallen was speechless.

    …

    And just like that, it was time to conclude the Great War of Iskaris!

    1738 Introductions

    The Great War of Iskaris was winding down everywhere except the east.

    Dwarven soldiers knelt in long rows with their hands behind their heads while blue-skinned Elites walked the lines collecting steel.

    The last of the councilwomen's guards were being pried out of their shield circles by the same elves their mistresses had marched here.
    The Covenant's horde had it worst.

    With Vozen's binding gem shattered and the Drowned King's skull split from crown to chin, every construct the two dead lords had raised lost the will steering it, and hundreds of thousands of corpses went feral in the same breath, stripped of orders and turned loose as wild monsters that lunged at anything living, kneeling dwarf and surrendered samurai alike.

    The response was less a battle than pest control.

    Myrasyn's now obedient subjects and Isveth's fanatics swept the field in long radiant lines, golden spells punching through the rotten ranks while the Consortium and the beastkin closed the gaps, and the feral dead were mowed down faster than they could shamble into range of the prisoners they hungered for.

    "Leave no abomination standing!" Isveth's voice rang over the cleanup, the Head Shrine Maiden cleaving a shrieking husk in half mid-order. "None of them get to defile the Holy Son's battlefield a minute longer!"

    But one sound refused to die with the war.

    From the eastern field came the ringing of two blades, sharp and rhythmic and unbroken, and every soldier on the continent's bloodiest battlefield kept turning toward it like a compass needle finding north.

    The armies began to drift east. The victors walked because the final duel of the Great War deserved witnesses, and the defeated marched because the soldiers herding their disarmed columns left them exactly one direction to walk in.

    Alexios Valorian strode at the head of one such stream, towing Hozumi by the ankle.

    The unconscious elder slid along behind him face-down, plowing a neat furrow through the half-frozen mud that thousands of boots had churned out of the morning's frost, and every few meters his forehead clipped a discarded helmet or a shield boss. The King of Vraven adjusted his stride for none of it.

    Black Fang kept pace not far from him with Chizuru's hair bunched in one fist, dragging her own prize through the same ruts.

    Chizuru hung without resisting. eves open and registering none of it.

    The two apexes had fallen into step without meaning to, king and wanted criminal matching strides while their prisoners carved twin furrows behind them.

    Serika and a loose scatter of Quinlan's women moved through the same stream around them, which meant the conversation that followed had an audience.

    "FATHER!"

    Felicity came sprinting through the drifting columns with her purple hair bouncing, towing Feng by the wrist the entire way.

    Alexios passed Hozumi's ankle to his off hand just in time for his daughter to crash into his chest, her arms locking around as much royal plate as they could reach, and he caught her against him with his free arm.

    "Thank you." She said it into his breastplate first, then tipped her head back and looked up at her father with big eyes, and the chirp that lived in her voice cracked open around the words. "For trusting my word."

    After all, Alexios had rushed through the portal because Quinlan asked him to, and because Felicity swore it wasn't a trap, all for a criminal whose head he had wanted on a spike for almost a full year.

    Gratitude poured off his youngest daughter so plainly that the Warrior King let the day's brutality drain from his face, and his gauntlet settled on top of her head.

    "I'm glad you're safe, Felicity. Did you have fun?"

    The old man received quite a few questioning looks, as he had just asked his teenage daughter if she had a great time massacring people on one of the most brutal battlefields that had ever been recorded.

    "Yeah! I got a lot of levels too!" Felicity decreed happily, then her hand clamped around Feng's wrist again and hauled the teen front and center before her father. "This is Feng Jiai! My bestest and most annoying friend in one comprehensive package of insecurity, brattiness, and awesomeness!"

    "What did you just say?" Feng's eye twitched at the princess, but she let it go in favor of looking up at the king with a wry tilt to her mouth. "We've already met, actually."

    "You did?!" Felicity's head whipped between the two of them.

    "Yeah. He saved me."

    Felicity went still, and then she turned to her father with a gratitude that ran deeper than the hug had.

    He had been asked to protect her friends, and somewhere in that slaughter, the King of Vraven had personally kept the most important one alive.

    "While it is true we have met." Alexios inclined his head toward Feng, "the introductions were brief. It is good to properly meet the famous Feng of the stories."

    Feng's neck snapped toward Felicity. "What stories?!"

    Felicity smiled at her and blinked, full of girly innocence, with no clue what anyone could possibly be talking about.

    "What. Stories."

    The princess kept smiling, so the Tidebreaker filed the betrayal away for later and turned back to Alexios, the smugness she wore around everyone settling over her like a uniform. "I owe you a proper thanks."

    "Think nothing of it, child." Alexios's voice rolled into the cadence he reserved for thrones and judgments. "You may keep the company of a certain overly arrogant bastard, a criminal whose neck I have been measuring for the gallows for the better part of a year..."

    The air around the group changed as nearly every woman within earshot turned her eyes on the King of Vraven at once.

    Vex stopped pretending to watch the surroundings entirely, and her pentagram eyes fixed on the back of the royal head with the violence she normally saved for nasty sluts who eyed her hubby too long.

    “..but you are a human child and a citizen of my kingdom all the same," Alexios carried on, unbothered, "and I do not abandon my citizens to undead filth. Not while I draw breath."

    Felicity edged closer to her father's flank, jittering. "Father... Stop badmouthing Quinlan! You keep calling him ugly names in the presence of his wives!"

    "I don't like lying."

    Felicity stomped on the ground, yelping. "Father!"

    The female bloodlust gathering around this conversation was thick enough that her [Nullmage] instincts were begging her to cast a suppression field directly over his mouth.

    Feng grinned up at him. "Thanks, old man. But, uh..." Her eyes flicked sideways.

    "Speak freely, child. Today of all days, the crown is fresh out of ceremony." Feng opened her mouth.

    "She's not a citizen!" Felicity beat her to it, rocking up onto her toes. "Of the Vraven Kingdom! Never was!"

    "Hm." Alexios considered that. "What about before the bastard turned outlaw fit for the gallows?"

    Felicity giggled into her hands. "Nope! Feng came after that!"

    For the first time since the conversation began, Alexios frowned.

    The girl in front of him was visibly a teenager, and the bastard's entire criminal career was not yet a year old.

    The numbers didn't add up.

    Before Quinlan Elysiar turned outlaw, this child had been growing up under someone's crown and inside someone's census, for every child born on Iskaris belonged to one of the three nations.

    "Then where, exactly..."

    Felicity wound up and slapped Feng across ne backside, loud enough that a passing Elite Soul glanced over.

    "What the fu- are you doing?! 'll beat you up!"

    "This foul-mouthed brat comes from a different world!" Felicity declared, glowing with pride. "Just like Miss Serika!"

    Alexios's gaze lifted past the girls to the tanned redhead some twenty paces to the left. Serika, without slowing or changing expression, raised one fist and gave the King of Vraven a thumbs up. "Yo."

    "A different world...?" he repeated.

    "Yeah! Like Thalorind! Just another one, not governed by the Goddess! There are millions of worlds out there."

    "Oh, Goddess."

    Hozum's ankle slid out of the royal grip and dropped into the slush with a splat.

    ‘Strange armies of the dead rising in blue skin. Elves, always a thorn in my side, suddenly start singing the praise of an outsider man. A king flayed in the open sky, screaming for mercy. My daughter's best friend, imported from a different world. And so much more...'

    He closed his eyes. 'Why must every road lead back to the same shameless bastard?'

    At his feet, face-down in the mud, Hozumi released a long wet gurgle that might have been agreement.

    …

    Minute by minute, the eastern field filled.

    Streams of soldiers fed into a widening ring around the duel ground, victors at the front and prisoner columns herded in behind them under Elite watch, until the last fight of the Great War had an audience the size of a city.
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    1. Offline
      Despawning
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      1738 Introductions

      The Great War of Iskaris was winding down everywhere except the east.

      Dwarven soldiers knelt in long rows with their hands behind their heads while blue-skinned Elites walked the lines collecting steel.

      The last of the councilwomen's guards were being pried out of their shield circles by the same elves their mistresses had marched here.
      The Covenant's horde had it worst.

      With Vozen's binding gem shattered and the Drowned King's skull split from crown to chin, every construct the two dead lords had raised lost the will steering it, and hundreds of thousands of corpses went feral in the same breath, stripped of orders and turned loose as wild monsters that lunged at anything living, kneeling dwarf and surrendered samurai alike.

      The response was less a battle than pest control.

      Myrasyn's now obedient subjects and Isveth's fanatics swept the field in long radiant lines, golden spells punching through the rotten ranks while the Consortium and the beastkin closed the gaps, and the feral dead were mowed down faster than they could shamble into range of the prisoners they hungered for.

      "Leave no abomination standing!" Isveth's voice rang over the cleanup, the Head Shrine Maiden cleaving a shrieking husk in half mid-order. "None of them get to defile the Holy Son's battlefield a minute longer!"

      But one sound refused to die with the war.

      From the eastern field came the ringing of two blades, sharp and rhythmic and unbroken, and every soldier on the continent's bloodiest battlefield kept turning toward it like a compass needle finding north.

      The armies began to drift east. The victors walked because the final duel of the Great War deserved witnesses, and the defeated marched because the soldiers herding their disarmed columns left them exactly one direction to walk in.

      Alexios Valorian strode at the head of one such stream, towing Hozumi by the ankle.

      The unconscious elder slid along behind him face-down, plowing a neat furrow through the half-frozen mud that thousands of boots had churned out of the morning's frost, and every few meters his forehead clipped a discarded helmet or a shield boss. The King of Vraven adjusted his stride for none of it.

      Black Fang kept pace not far from him with Chizuru's hair bunched in one fist, dragging her own prize through the same ruts.

      Chizuru hung without resisting. eves open and registering none of it.

      The two apexes had fallen into step without meaning to, king and wanted criminal matching strides while their prisoners carved twin furrows behind them.

      Serika and a loose scatter of Quinlan's women moved through the same stream around them, which meant the conversation that followed had an audience.

      "FATHER!"

      Felicity came sprinting through the drifting columns with her purple hair bouncing, towing Feng by the wrist the entire way.

      Alexios passed Hozumi's ankle to his off hand just in time for his daughter to crash into his chest, her arms locking around as much royal plate as they could reach, and he caught her against him with his free arm.

      "Thank you." She said it into his breastplate first, then tipped her head back and looked up at her father with big eyes, and the chirp that lived in her voice cracked open around the words. "For trusting my word."

      After all, Alexios had rushed through the portal because Quinlan asked him to, and because Felicity swore it wasn't a trap, all for a criminal whose head he had wanted on a spike for almost a full year.

      Gratitude poured off his youngest daughter so plainly that the Warrior King let the day's brutality drain from his face, and his gauntlet settled on top of her head.

      "I'm glad you're safe, Felicity. Did you have fun?"

      The old man received quite a few questioning looks, as he had just asked his teenage daughter if she had a great time massacring people on one of the most brutal battlefields that had ever been recorded.

      "Yeah! I got a lot of levels too!" Felicity decreed happily, then her hand clamped around Feng's wrist again and hauled the teen front and center before her father. "This is Feng Jiai! My bestest and most annoying friend in one comprehensive package of insecurity, brattiness, and awesomeness!"

      "What did you just say?" Feng's eye twitched at the princess, but she let it go in favor of looking up at the king with a wry tilt to her mouth. "We've already met, actually."

      "You did?!" Felicity's head whipped between the two of them.

      "Yeah. He saved me."

      Felicity went still, and then she turned to her father with a gratitude that ran deeper than the hug had.

      He had been asked to protect her friends, and somewhere in that slaughter, the King of Vraven had personally kept the most important one alive.

      "While it is true we have met." Alexios inclined his head toward Feng, "the introductions were brief. It is good to properly meet the famous Feng of the stories."

      Feng's neck snapped toward Felicity. "What stories?!"

      Felicity smiled at her and blinked, full of girly innocence, with no clue what anyone could possibly be talking about.

      "What. Stories."

      The princess kept smiling, so the Tidebreaker filed the betrayal away for later and turned back to Alexios, the smugness she wore around everyone settling over her like a uniform. "I owe you a proper thanks."

      "Think nothing of it, child." Alexios's voice rolled into the cadence he reserved for thrones and judgments. "You may keep the company of a certain overly arrogant bastard, a criminal whose neck I have been measuring for the gallows for the better part of a year..."

      The air around the group changed as nearly every woman within earshot turned her eyes on the King of Vraven at once.

      Vex stopped pretending to watch the surroundings entirely, and her pentagram eyes fixed on the back of the royal head with the violence she normally saved for nasty sluts who eyed her hubby too long.

      “..but you are a human child and a citizen of my kingdom all the same," Alexios carried on, unbothered, "and I do not abandon my citizens to undead filth. Not while I draw breath."

      Felicity edged closer to her father's flank, jittering. "Father... Stop badmouthing Quinlan! You keep calling him ugly names in the presence of his wives!"

      "I don't like lying."

      Felicity stomped on the ground, yelping. "Father!"

      The female bloodlust gathering around this conversation was thick enough that her [Nullmage] instincts were begging her to cast a suppression field directly over his mouth.

      Feng grinned up at him. "Thanks, old man. But, uh..." Her eyes flicked sideways.

      "Speak freely, child. Today of all days, the crown is fresh out of ceremony." Feng opened her mouth.

      "She's not a citizen!" Felicity beat her to it, rocking up onto her toes. "Of the Vraven Kingdom! Never was!"

      "Hm." Alexios considered that. "What about before the bastard turned outlaw fit for the gallows?"

      Felicity giggled into her hands. "Nope! Feng came after that!"

      For the first time since the conversation began, Alexios frowned.

      The girl in front of him was visibly a teenager, and the bastard's entire criminal career was not yet a year old.

      The numbers didn't add up.

      Before Quinlan Elysiar turned outlaw, this child had been growing up under someone's crown and inside someone's census, for every child born on Iskaris belonged to one of the three nations.

      "Then where, exactly..."

      Felicity wound up and slapped Feng across ne backside, loud enough that a passing Elite Soul glanced over.

      "What the fu- are you doing?! 'll beat you up!"

      "This foul-mouthed brat comes from a different world!" Felicity declared, glowing with pride. "Just like Miss Serika!"

      Alexios's gaze lifted past the girls to the tanned redhead some twenty paces to the left. Serika, without slowing or changing expression, raised one fist and gave the King of Vraven a thumbs up. "Yo."

      "A different world...?" he repeated.

      "Yeah! Like Thalorind! Just another one, not governed by the Goddess! There are millions of worlds out there."

      "Oh, Goddess."

      Hozum's ankle slid out of the royal grip and dropped into the slush with a splat.

      ‘Strange armies of the dead rising in blue skin. Elves, always a thorn in my side, suddenly start singing the praise of an outsider man. A king flayed in the open sky, screaming for mercy. My daughter's best friend, imported from a different world. And so much more...'

      He closed his eyes. 'Why must every road lead back to the same shameless bastard?'

      At his feet, face-down in the mud, Hozumi released a long wet gurgle that might have been agreement.

      …

      Minute by minute, the eastern field filled.

      Streams of soldiers fed into a widening ring around the duel ground, victors at the front and prisoner columns herded in behind them under Elite watch, until the last fight of the Great War had an audience the size of a city.
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        MyEminence
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        Despawning has been delivering us good eats like doordash! We appreciate you buddy!
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