Primordial Villain with a Slave Harem

Chapter 1293  Found

"'The Primordial Villain is to be classified as a force equivalent to an entire hostile nation, a singular force capable of bringing ruin to the Vraven Kingdom on his own,' King Alexios decreed."

The group fell silent.

Ria's last words hung between them with a weight none of them could brush aside. Even the breeze seemed to hesitate.

It was Iris who broke the stillness.

"The fun is over."

That was all she said.

The girls understood. Their faces shifted at the same pace. First the shared look, then the quiet nod.

'It's time to go back to Quinlan. He needs us. Our journey ends here.'

No one argued.

Ria lowered the imaginary newspaper. Her grin faded. She looked ahead, squinting at the path. A second passed. Then another.

Her posture stiffened.

"Hold on…" she whispered. "Something's ahead."

The rest straightened instantly. "Stay close."

They fell into formation without thinking. "What do you sense?" Iris asked, squinting but sensing nothing.

Ria didn't answer at first. She narrowed her eyes while her pupils tightened.

"There's something wrong…" she murmured under her breath. "They're not on the road but in the woods."

"A beast?"

"No," Ria said immediately.

She kept staring straight ahead into the trees.

"This presence is odd. It's… complicated. Not like anything I've felt before."

Iris glanced at Ria.

"Should we turn around?"

"That would be smart," Ria nodded.

But just then, the blonde flinched. Her shoulders jerked once, and she sucked in a sharp breath, as if trying to brace against something.

"They noticed us! They're coming."

"Direction?"

Ria's voice thinned.

"… On the road."

Feng frowned. "You said they were in the woods."

"They were," Ria whispered. "But now… they're on the road. And they're not rushing us."

The carriage kept rolling at a steady pace, wheels crunching over gravel and old leaves. None of them spoke. None of them shifted. They stayed loose, careful, acting like merchants on their way who saw nothing and sensed nothing.

Ahead, a figure stood alone in the center of the path.

A man. Armor of Ravenshade design. Regulation cloak. Hand resting on the pommel of his sword. Only his posture was off, too steady, too patient.

When the carriage drew close, he raised a hand.

"Papers."

Ria leaned forward with a polite smile and passed him a folded set of merchant documents. The names on them belonged to no one in this carriage. Her allies had insisted on aliases; she hadn't argued and used her contacts to get them what they wanted.

The man unfolded the papers. His eyes dragged across the lines with slow precision. He looked at the group. Back to the paper. Then at the group again. His stare lingered long enough that Ria's pulse tightened in her throat.

Did he know they sensed him earlier?

Did she slip up?

The man's gaze drifted to Iris and Lyra.

"You hired good guards," he said. "Must've paid a heavy sum."

Ria shrugged lightly. "You can never be safe enough. Better to cut profits than end up robbed or dead."

The man mulled over her words. He looked at the paper. Then, at the carriage.

He hadn't decided.

But Iris had.

Her arm shot out in a blur. The blade arced toward his neck. Metal rang sharply; the sword didn't go through. It lodged halfway, stuck against something beneath the armor.

Ria kicked Iris's weapon with her heel, forcing it deeper.

The man spasmed.

The cut should have dropped him instantly, but he let out a guttural growl, deep and wrong. His hand grabbed the blade lodged in his throat, fingers tightening around it as if his tendons were made of steel cables.

Iris and Ria pushed. He pushed back.

Feng lunged out of the carriage, blade drawn. Lyra swung her shield, slamming the base into the man's side.

None of their hits killed him.

He opened his mouth. Instead of reaching for the blade at his side, he started casting a spell, making it clear he was not a fighter but a mage. A spark snapped to the right.

Felicity appeared from the side of the carriage, one hand raised, and cast her nullification.

A pulse of silence snapped outward. The man's chant cut off mid-syllable. Felicity gritted her teeth, veins showing along her neck. "He's… very high level…! I can't silence him for more than a second!"

Iris let go of the stuck sword and reached under her cloak. Her fingers closed around a dagger she bought for the undead specifically, and drove it straight into his neck next to the sword.

The sound that left him was nothing human.

His body jerked once. Twice. The strength drained from his limbs. He collapsed onto the dirt, armor scraping against stone.

The forest went still.

Iris straightened, breathing hard. "Level sixty."

Ria's face lost its color. Sweat beaded down her temples. "Level sixty?! If we didn't hit him first, we'd be corpses. Why did we even jump him in the first place?"

Iris crouched beside the corpse.

The veil faded from the man's flesh. His skin withered in seconds, peeling back to reveal hollowed features and bone reinforced with runic burn marks. His armor shifted shape, turning brittle and ancient. The stench of old rot seeped out.

A rotting undead, hidden under a polished illusion.

Iris's eyes locked onto the strange sigils burned across its face. They gleamed then dimmed with final death.

A vicious smile crept across her face. Something sharp flashed behind her eyes.

"I finally found you," she whispered, voice trembling with a thrill none of them had heard from her before.

"The Covenant of Eternity."

The words Covenant of Eternity weren't nearly as well-known as the Vesper Consortium, despite being their rival syndicate in the Ravenshade duchy.

The Consortium left traces everywhere.

Rumors in taverns.

Shady caravans.

Strange shipments.

You could sniff out their movement by simply walking through a town for an afternoon.

But the Covenant?

They didn't leave trails.

They didn't leave whispers.

They didn't even leave patterns.

You never stumbled on them.

You only heard of them if you were already in too deep.

They were buried deeper than cults, deeper than black-market cabals, almost mythological. A lich or whatever this thing was, here, of all places, on a random woodland road, made no sense.

Lyra stared at the shriveled corpse. "Why are they here? In the middle of nowhere?"

Iris didn't answer.

Her silence said she had no idea.

She grabbed the corpse by the collar and hauled it up with stiff, controlled effort. "Ria. Show me where you first sensed him."

Ria swallowed, nodded quickly, and led them off the road and into the trees. The ground sloped slightly downward. The air thickened, as if something unseen stirred beneath the soil.

They reached a small clearing.

That was when Iris dropped the dead thing to the ground.

Right at the center of the clearing lay a formation.

A set of metallic plates half-buried in the dirt.

Runes carved with surgical precision.

Stone anchors arranged in a perfect circle.

Ria stepped closer, crouching beside it. Her face drained of color the moment her eyes focused on the structure.

"This is suppression," she whispered. "Not the cheap kind. This is… extremely rare. Whoever set this up used resources even nobles can't get their hands on."

Lyra knelt across from her, leaning in. Her fingers grazed a metal plate. "This isn't human work. Look at the forging lines. Look at the etching. This was made by dwarves."

The pink-haired tanker had received a few lessons from Kaelira when the two discussed tactics as the gang's two primary tankers. The conversation sometimes drifted to the art of crafting, and Kaelira gave her examples of the 'insecure midgets' and their marks, so that Lyra could let the elf know if she noticed their signs anywhere.

They all exchanged a single, heavy stare.

If the Covenant was using dwarven suppression artifacts out here, in an unmarked woodland, then something was happening.

A metallic chirp broke the silence.

Another artifact on the corpse had activated on its own, light blinking through a slit in its surface. A woman's voice echoed from within.

"Are you done?"

The recording clicked again.

"Report back."

The message looped once more.

Then the artifact fell silent.

Iris's head snapped toward the blinking artifact.

Her expression darkened.

"We have to leave. Right now," she said as she picked up the suppression artifact, not wanting to leave it behind. It might be their best way to find the Covenant, and even if it led to nowhere, the woman knew that Quinlan would give her his trademark greedy grin when he saw what she got for him.

This will be the perfect return gift, the woman smiled beneath her helmet.

Then something shifted in the woods, not far.

…

A few hours earlier…

Quinlan opened his eyes.