Chapter 1761: Blood Oath |
"The bloodshed stops here."
The crimson gaze behind the visor found Rajah first, then Skarn, and held.
Every predatory instinct in Rajah’s body screamed at him to lunge, to close the distance and tear through the armored throat before whatever stood behind it could grow any further.
Beside him Skarn stood coiled and rigid with his grey eyes locked on the helmet’s burning glow.
But neither struck.
"You swore a blood oath!" Skarn’s voice came low and guttural, a growl aimed at the face in front of him. "Have you forgotten?!"
"A blood oath, huh..."
Quinlan remembered perfectly. An ominous chamber. Five apex lords staring him down. And the words he spoke that day.
I swear on the blood I have shed, the lives I have taken, and the throne I will one day claim. For the next thousand years, I shall not make a move against the Beastman Confederation, nor shall I orchestrate its fall through hidden hands. So long as your people do not raise their claws and fangs against me or mine... my warpath shall not cross yours. This, I vow, by my blood. By my soul. May all that I hold dear be evaporated into dust should I fail to uphold my oath.
He remembered all of it, and he also remembered Skarn’s grey eyes fixed on his across that chamber with all senses straining to find a lie and finding none.
"It was a mistake to let a human-" Rajah started.
A chuckle rolled through the helmet, low and unhurried, resonating through the living metal, and it silenced Rajah mid-word.
"A human..."
Quinlan repeated the word with dark, savoring amusement, the glow behind his visor brightening as his helmeted head tilted in a slow arc across the tigerkin lord.
He didn’t bother correcting the misconception.
But the sound of that chuckle sat in the chest of every beastkin within earshot, because the predator in each of them had registered what Rajah had just gotten wrong.
This... thing before them was no human at all.
"You can think whatever you want of me, tigerkin, but I suggest you take one fact to heart."
Rajah’s scowl deepened at the casual way he was addressed, a low vibration building in his chest.
The amusement died in Quinlan’s tone as if it had never existed, gone from one moment to the next as he decreed:
"Luminara, the First Elf, is my cherished mother."
In the elven ranks, every ear went rigid.
"I’m the Primordial Villain. I’m called as such because that is who I am."
His voice shifted, and genuine feeling bled through.
"Yet my mother’s heart is so gentle that she is known as the Primordial Nurturer."
The elven ranks broke in a synchronized gasp.
"Primordial Nurturer?!"
"That’s Lady Luminara’s title?!"
"How beautiful..."
Thousands of voices crashed into each other as soldiers who had spent their entire lives worshipping the First Elf heard her son describe her nature for the first time.
Officers who had held perfect composure through the entire spectacle pressed their hands to their chests, and Isveth’s knees buckled behind Quinlan.
The Holy Son, the man whose very existence was sacred to them, had just spoken about his mother with a tenderness that made the wrath surrounding him feel like a shield built to protect something precious.
"To her, family is everything," Quinlan continued, his voice carrying across the stunned silence that followed the elven eruption. "She lives and dies for her children."
His tone hardened.
"The children whose children stood before me, kneeled, and proclaimed their undying loyalty."
Overbearing hostility began pouring off his armor, aimed at the two lords before him.
"And you dare threaten them with slavery? You dare think I’ll stand idly by and do nothing about it?"
Myrasyn’s eyes were wider than ever before, unable to believe the words she was hearing. "Quinlan..."
Skarn managed to collect his composure just enough to respond, but before he could snarl again, Quinlan’s twin infernal eyes locked onto the wolfkin.
"As for the pact..." A beat of silence. "What about it, wolfkin?"
Skarn’s eyes went wide.
He had built the oath’s framework with his own hands, had rejected binding artifacts and demanded blood and eye contact instead, trusting his senses to detect deception.
The boy who stood before him that day had spoken those words without a flicker of falsehood, and Skarn was sure of it.
But the man who swore that oath was looking at him now like the cage he’d built was made of paper.
"A member of the Beastman Confederation ambushed me and my forces." It felt as if the man was looking straight into his soul as he added, "On multiple occasions."
"What?!" Skarn and Rajah’s heads snapped toward the foxkin at the same time.
The foxkin sat on the ground in clusters, disarmed and surrounded, prisoners without a lord.
Silver’s banner had been torn down after Kitsara took his head, and what remained of his forces were soldiers without a cause, huddled among the people their dead leader had betrayed.
Quinlan’s tone deepened, turning entirely unnatural, inhuman in its extreme violence.
"And that’s not all."
The words boomed across the flat ground and up through the ranks, and the malice behind them hit the foxkin prisoners before the echo finished carrying.
"After all..."
Soldiers who had fought under Silver’s command slammed their faces into the frost.
A foxkin officer who had led hundreds pressed his forehead to the ground with his arms locked over his skull, and the keen that tore from his throat died as suddenly as it started.
Three rows deep, bladders released without their owners’ permission, dark stains spreading beneath them on the frost.
"A member of the Beastman Confederation’s leadership tried to kidnap and rape my wife."
The words left Quinlan’s helmet in a voice that barely qualified as spoken language and felt more like a primal force asserting itself over those who dared question him.
The frost beneath his feet cracked outward in thin, branching lines as the red eyes behind the visor swam with fire bright enough to paint Skarn and Rajah’s faces in light.
Wife.
Skarn and Rajah’s gazes cut to the dogkin ranks, where Kitsara stood beside her brother. She gave them a small wave.
"That’d be me, and yes... Silver, leader of the foxkin tribe, member of the Confederation’s leadership at the time the pact was sworn, tried to take me from my chosen mate by force..."
She spoke those words with such feminine fragility that it made the contrast with their content all the more devastating.
Her words only made it worse. Quinlan’s wrath spiked at the reminder, rolling off his armor so raw and so personal that the ground beneath him groaned.
Many of the beastkin looked at him with incredulity.
Silver was dead.
The debt was settled and the corpse was cold, yet Quinlan’s fury hadn’t dimmed by a single degree because the mere thought of what that man had tried sent it spiking fresh.
The menace bleeding from Quinlan was rising with every passing moment, and the beastkin lords felt it loudest, apex senses screaming a warning that dwarfed everything they had registered when the boy was level thirty.
This was something that had outgrown the cage they’d built for it, radiating a pressure that didn’t belong to any race or class or level on this continent.
But Skarn didn’t kneel.
"You..." A growl tore from his chest, low and continuous, building until his grey fur bristled along his forearms and his lips peeled back from teeth that could shear through plate.
< Chapter 1761: Blood Oath
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