Chapter 1757: Aware |
The dwarven war chief was on his feet before the roar reached the upper tiers, laughing so hard the braids in his beard shook, and the smiths in the row behind him were already arguing about the relic’s craftsmanship while the rest of the colosseum was still processing what they’d seen.
"That saber!" He slapped his second on the shoulder hard enough to stagger the man. "The damn thing came out and showed off like a jealous wife!"
His second straightened and shook his head. "Can’t blame it. To do such a disloyal thing to your weapon..."
A small smirk sat underneath despite all they went through, the dwarven blood in them amused beyond belief that the blade would do such a thing.
For a moment, he even forgot he was a prisoner of war captured by a man who didn’t have the most noble of reputations.
In the elven sections, Myrasyn sat down.
"Phew..." She pressed a hand to her chest, exhaled once through her nose, and started fanning herself with the other hand.
Her heart was going haywire.
She had screamed, wept, clutched at Isveth, and shaken the poor woman, and somewhere between the Fujimori drama and the jealous saber she had apparently decided she was finished for today.
Her fingers fanned in quick waves against her flushed cheeks.
"Your Majesty?" Isveth’s eyes hadn’t left the duel ground.
"I’m fine, Isveth," she smiled.
Isveth said nothing, partly because there was nothing to say, and partly because her fingers were clasped so tightly in her lap that her knuckles had gone white three miracles ago.
But in the section where the beastkin lords sat, the laughter and worship found no echo.
Rajah leaned back.
His amber eyes tracked the Primordial Villain on the duel ground, and the easy humor that usually sat behind that predatory gaze was gone.
Skarn hadn’t moved at all, his arms folded across his chest and his grey eyes fixed forward, perfectly still, watching the man below with the focus of someone measuring a threat.
A man whose existence they could not comprehend despite their best efforts had just conquered a cursed relic they couldn’t fathom.
Worse still, he did it the way someone tastes a wine and sets it down.
Gorruk snorted.
The large bearkin scratched his jaw, looked at his fellow lords, and said what all three of them were thinking.
"We should have asked for more concessions."
Many months ago, back when Quinlan received a mission from the Vesper Consortium, entrusted with establishing relations, he was still a masked stranger calling himself ’Devil.’
Barely level thirty, he’d been forced into a thousand-year non-aggression pact sworn in blood by the beast lords, because every predatory instinct they possessed had screamed about what the boy would become.
How right they were...
On the duel ground, Kaede’s body shuddered.
The color that had held in her skin through the duel drained between one heartbeat and the next, her cheeks going grey as the last thread of the relic’s power snapped.
Whatever remnant of its will had still been feeding strength into a body that was getting farther and farther away died the moment he conquered it.
Kaede’s power was already fading. Now it was instant.
Her remaining hand uncurled against the stone, her eyelids fluttered, and the Duchess of Silverwind collapsed into the frost without a sound.
"She’s crashing." Seraphiel’s voice cut through the noise, all playfulness gone, her palms already blazing gold over the stump.
"Don’t worry, Ayame..." Liora spoke gently and dropped beside the elven healer. "It’s normal, considering her injuries and her drop of stats. We will save her."
"..." Ayame didn’t respond.
Quinlan watched the healers work for a moment, then looked up at the colosseum still roaring around him.
"The spectacle is over." His voice carried across the tiers without effort, and the noise died the way it always did when the Primordial Villain spoke, filling the space where the roar used to be.
He paused because from where he stood, he could see all of them.
The raised fists and the lowered heads, the soldiers shouting beside soldiers who hadn’t moved since the fighting stopped.
It was time to stop messing around and do what was right.
"Before we take the next step, I want to say one thing to the people who lost someone today."
The noise that remained died completely.
"I am aware."
The words landed in the silent sections like stones in still water, and the ripple was visible across the tiers, a flinch here, a tightening of hands there, a held breath released.
"We were ambushed by Elvardia and their allies, and I called upon help. You showed up and, together, we overcame terrible odds to call ourselves victorious."
In this moment, Quinlan felt a great deal of conflicting emotions.
People knew him as the greedy, shameless primordial, but while he could be absolutely ruthless, he wasn’t completely devoid of empathy.
After all, even if it was what felt like multiple lifetimes ago, he was once upon a time a dejected office worker forced to do his bosses’ bidding.
"Some of you came because you chose to while others because you were told to." His gaze moved across the tiers, slow and measured. "A lot of you aren’t going home, and no words I say from down here are going to change that."
He had coerced some of their leaders, called in favors with others, and some had followed him here out of genuine loyalty.
None of that changed the result.
People died today because his actions put them on this field.
Whether they marched out of devotion or orders, they paid a terrible price today.
In the beastkin ranks, a young dogkin pressed her hand over her mouth.
"I won’t insult the dead by calling them heroes, because they deserve better than to be called the villain’s heroes." That landed like Quinlan, blunt and real, and a few wet laughs broke through the silence in the nearest rows. "But every person who bled on this field today bought a debt, and every family that lost someone is owed the payment."
His voice hardened.
"Although I don’t have the means to do it right away, I proclaim it with all of you as my witnesses: I’m going to pay it. Your loved ones died to buy you a better tomorrow, and I refuse to spit on their sacrifice."
Quiet.
Then a sob cracked through the dogkin’s fingers, raw and sudden, and it spread through the silent sections the way fire catches in dry brush.
Soldiers who had held it together through the entire spectacle pressed their faces into their hands.
An elven archer gripped the arm of the woman beside her and wept into her shoulder.
In the prisoner block, a grizzled officer bowed his head and his chest shook once, then again. He wasn’t the recipient of the villain’s promise, as he came here to kill Quinlan, not to save him. But hearing the man who had killed his comrades honor them in the same breath hollowed him out in a way the battle itself hadn’t.
Quinlan watched it spread.
’I’ll have to ensure their leaders conduct a proper tally of their dead as soon as possible.’
He filed it beside everything else he owed the people who ensured all his girls remained alive and breathing.
"All right."
< Chapter 1757: Aware
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