Primordial Villain with a Slave Harem

Chapter 1479  Foxkin Tent

The tent smelled of ink and candle wax.

Maps covered the table in overlapping layers. Terrain reports. Troop movements. Supply lines drawn in charcoal that smudged at the edges where fingers had traced and retraced routes through the night. A foxkin war tent was never loud. No banners hung from the posts. No trophies lined the walls. Information was the only decoration that mattered.

Silver sat at the center of it, legs crossed, tail still. His silver fur caught the candlelight in a way that made him look carved from marble. Sharp features, even sharper eyes, and a face built for patience and long silences.

He was the foxkin tribal leader, the same whose son Quinlan had killed when he visited beastkin lands.

Three scouts knelt before him.

"Thornwall fell at dawn," the first reported. "Dwarven siege engines breached the eastern gate. Covenant forces emerged from the tunnels beneath the merchant quarter simultaneously. Garrison was overrun within ninety minutes."

Silver's ear flicked. "Casualties?"

"Elvardian losses were light. Covenant absorbed the bulk of the resistance at the tunnel exits. Approximately four thousand undead minions were destroyed during the breach."

"And ours?"

"Zero, my lord. Our scouts withdrew to observation positions before the assault began, as instructed."

Silver nodded once.

"Whisperfield and Ashenmoor are next on the schedule," the second scout continued. "Dwarven artillery is already in transit. Covenant tunnel networks extend beneath both cities. Estimated fall: tomorrow and the day after, respectively."

"That puts the count at fourteen settlements," the third added.

Fourteen.

The invasion was barely a day old, and the Ravenshade Duchy had already lost fourteen settlements of note. Border towns fell first, as expected. Then the mid-tier cities. Now the front lines pressed inward toward the heartland, and with each city that crumbled, the next one fell faster due to the war machine picking up steam. Getting into the groove, if you will.

The strategy was elegant, Silver had to admit. Even if the architects were creatures he despised.

Elvardia brought the hammer. Dwarven siege engines were devastating against human fortifications, purpose-built to crack barriers and walls that had stood for centuries. Their engineers understood stone the way foxkin understood terrain, with an intimacy born from living inside it. When a dwarven crew targeted a wall, they didn't just break it. They found the fault lines, the stress fractures, the joints where mortar met stone at imperfect angles. One volley to test. Two to weaken. Three to collapse.

Behind the walls, while defenders scrambled to plug the breach, the ground beneath their feet would open.

The Covenant of Eternity had been preparing for this invasion - or rather, for their rise from the shrouded caves to the surface - for millions of years. Tunnels. Thousands of them. Carved through bedrock and soil by tireless undead hands that never needed rest, never complained, and never told anyone what they were doing. The network was so vast that when the order came, Covenant forces could surface inside nearly any major settlement in the eastern half of Ravenshade simultaneously.

Dwarves cracked the shell from outside. Undead poured in from below. The chaos made organized defense impossible.

Then the elves.

Elvardian rangers held the perimeter. Their archers denied retreat, cutting down runners and messengers with a precision that bordered on cruel. More importantly, the elves filled a gap the alliance desperately needed. The Covenant's magic was dark by nature, necromantic, corruptive, effective, but limited in application. Dwarven mages were few and focused on earth manipulation for siege purposes. The elves brought elemental diversity. Barriers. Wards. Healing for the living forces. Counterspells against human mages. Without them, the alliance would have cracked under any concentrated magical resistance.

Together, the three factions created a synergy that Ravenshade's defenses struggled to answer.

But they had lacked one thing.

Eyes.

Dwarves were miners, not trackers. The undead saw the world through dark magic and corruption, excellent underground, useless for reading a living battlefield above the surface. Elven rangers were superb scouts in forests and woodlands, but the moment the terrain shifted to plains, hills, or urban sprawl, their effectiveness dropped.

Foxkin thrived everywhere.

Silver's scouts moved through the grasslands like the wind. Through cities like shadows. Through forests as well as any elf and through rocky terrain better than most dwarves. They read tracks, identified troop compositions from a distance, mapped patrol routes, and reported back without ever being detected.

They were, in a word, invaluable. And Silver made very certain that the alliance knew it.

He leaned forward. "Regarding the Ashenmoor approach. Who holds the northern ridge?"

"Covenant shock troops are positioned there currently. Blind Grave Oracle assigned them to secure the high ground before the siege begins. But we're expected to take part in the fighting, and it'll be very chaotic, my lord. I expect heavy foxkin casualties."

"No. We can't have that. I refuse to lose so many soldiers."

"But… My lord, we agreed to help our Elvardian allies in exchange for letting us settle in their lands."

After the foxkin tribe betrayed the Beastman Confederation, they were naturally no longer welcome. Silver and his people found their new home inside Elvardia.

"We're helping, of course. Just not bleeding for the cause."

Seeing his subordinate's confusion, Silver tapped the map twice. "Recommend to the Elvardian command that the ridge position be reinforced. Suggest dwarven heavy infantry. Frame it as a concern about the ridge's structural stability under concentrated counterattack."

The scout paused. "The ridge is solid granite, my lord."

"The dwarves don't know that yet. They'll send engineers to verify. By the time they confirm it, they'll already be entrenched and unwilling to leave a fortified position." Silver's tail swayed once. "The undead currently holding the ridge will be redeployed to the front assault, where casualties are highest."

"What if they question our report?"

"Just say we are foxkin. We don't know much about metals," Silver shrugged.

The scout's expression didn't change. He simply nodded.

That was how Silver operated. He never issued orders that could be called outright treacherous. He made suggestions. Recommendations. Observations that happened to redirect risk away from foxkin forces and toward allies who could afford the losses. If the foxkin lost a few hundred less men and women because their ridge position was conveniently filled by dwarves, well, that was simply smart tactical reallocation.

The dwarves got a strong defensive position. The undead were utilized where their expendability was most efficient. And foxkin casualties remained at zero.

Everyone benefited.

Some just benefited more than others.

"Dismissed," Silver said. "Rotate the southern observation teams. Double coverage on the supply routes between Thornwall and Ashenmoor. I want to know if Ravenshade attempts a counter-offensive before they've finished deciding to attempt it."

The scouts rose, bowed, and vanished through the tent flap without a sound.

Silver sat alone.

His gaze drifted from the map to a folded piece of parchment tucked beneath a paperweight at the corner of the table. He stared at it for a long moment, expression unreadable. Then he pulled it out and unfolded it.

A face stared back at him.

Young. Human. Dark hair. That easy, arrogant look in the eyes was captured well, even in a rough sketch.

Quinlan Elysiar. Devil. The Primordial Villain. Dead or Alive.