Primordial Villain with a Slave Harem

Chapter 1481  The Deal

Three words. Delivered flat, without elaboration, as if each one cost him something to say. Tharion was not a man who admitted fault easily. The fact that he opened with this told Alexios everything he needed to know about how badly the East had fallen.

"Elvardia is conducting a full-scale invasion," Tharion continued. "Their forces coordinated with the Covenant of Eternity. Undead tunnels beneath our settlements, siege engines from the surface. They deployed suppression artifacts across the region to delay information from reaching us in time."

He paused. His jaw worked.

"By the time we understood the scope, more than a dozen settlements had already fallen. The eastern territories are compromised. Several more will fall within days."

Alexios said nothing.

"The suppression artifacts were the key," Tharion said, and the anger crept through despite his composure. "They jammed long-range communication across the entire eastern front. Garrison commanders couldn't report. Messengers were intercepted by foxkin scouts or elven rangers before they cleared the first checkpoint. We were blind for the most critical hours." His hand closed into a fist at his side. "By the time the first warning reached my command center, three cities had already been overrun."

Alexios listened. His expression did not change.

Tharion's gaze hardened. "My king. I am calling back my army from the Greenvale campaign to defend my lands. The eastern front requires every soldier I can muster."

The silence stretched.

"I did not break our deal," Tharion decreed carefully. "I committed forces to Greenvale as agreed. I held the line and was willing to make the needed sacrifice. But my duchy is being invaded by a foreign power while my army sits in another man's territory, cleaning his dirty house because he was far too incompetent to do it himself." His voice steadied. "Do you think otherwise?"

Alexios studied the projection.

The duke was angry. Rightly so. His lands burned while his soldiers fought someone else's war in the south. Any lord in his position would do the same. Pull back. Defend. Survive. The question was whether the crown would allow it.

More importantly, Tharion was being smart about this. He wasn't demanding. He wasn't threatening. He was asking, with the implicit understanding that the answer mattered far beyond military logistics.

The king let the silence hold for another moment.

"No," Alexios said. "The deal is in effect. Recall your forces. Defend your lands."

Tharion's shoulders dropped a fraction. Relief, quickly buried.

"However."

The duke stiffened.

"Your family must remain standing, Tharion. Your duchy must survive. So long as House Ravenshade endures and the eastern front holds, our arrangement proceeds as planned." Alexios folded his hands. "My forces will need time to arrive."

Tharion stared at him for a long beat. Then he nodded once.

"Understood, my king."

The projection dimmed and vanished.

Alexios leaned back.

The throne room was quiet again. The cold tea. The empty chair. The crown sitting on the armrest like a thing that had been set down and not yet picked back up.

Greenvale in the south, fracturing under inner conflict. Members of the Consortium, the target of the competition for the right to rule over Greenvale, had rooted themselves deep inside the forests, holding every inch of their territory with all they have. Not even Alexios expected them to be this resistant. Not a single one of the seven ruling heads has been captured or killed yet. They were all hiding like rats…

Save for one of them.

Black Fang.

But she was more problematic than the rest combined, for…

She was now working together with the bane of Alexios' existence.

Using Quinlan's means of appearing and disappearing rapidly and randomly, she became a much bigger thorn in the Greenvale forces' side.

Then, of course, there was Elvardia in the north, rolling through the eastern territories with a war machine centuries in the making. The Covenant's undead pouring out of tunnels that had been there since before his grandfather's grandfather drew breath.

The kingdom was being squeezed from both ends, and the rot ran deeper than any foreign army.

His lands were corrupted. Not by magic, though there was plenty of that. By ambition. By scheming dukes who spent more energy undermining each other than defending the realm. By noble houses that treated the kingdom as a carcass to pick clean rather than a body to keep alive. By fractures so old and so deep that the word "unity" had become a political tool rather than a principle.

Alexios stroked his beard with a weary hand.

He reached into the breast pocket of his coat and pulled out a small portrait. The painting inside was bright.

Felicity looked up at him with kind eyes and a gentle smile. His youngest daughter. His most compassionate child. His thumb traced the edge of the frame.

"The deal..." he murmured, looking at her face. The word sat heavy on his tongue. "Daughter. How did you become the centerpiece of it all?"

She had not been meant for this. But history did not care about intentions. It cared about positioning, and Felicity's position had shifted from sheltered princess to critical variable without her father's permission.

Alexios set the portrait down gently.

His gaze moved to the wall beside his desk, where a second piece of parchment hung pinned with a simple nail. The same wanted poster that hung in every tavern, barracks, and guardhouse in the kingdom. That same face. That same infuriating confidence, captured in charcoal.

Quinlan Elysiar. Devil. The Primordial Villain.

The royal boon written beneath the crossed-out bounty was Alexios's own decree. He'd signed it himself.

He looked at the poster.

Then he looked at the statue of the Goddess in the corner of the room. The carved figure stood in her eternal pose, hands open, eyes cast downward in mercy or judgment, depending on the hour.

"Is it fate?" Alexios asked the stone quietly. "My daughter and the anomaly. Bound together despite every law of nature and every rule of this kingdom that should make such a bond impossible."

He stared at the Goddess for a long time.

She did not answer. She never did.

"The princess and the villain…"

"Maybe…"

He fell silent. Then shook his head.

"No."

The communication artifact rang.

Alexios blinked. The ring was sharp, insistent, coming from a different artifact than the one Tharion had used. This one was smaller. Personal. Keyed to a single sigil.

Felicity's sigil.

The king's heart skipped.

He pressed the sigil.

It was not Felicity's voice that welcomed him.

"Old friend!" Quinlan Elysiar said pleasantly. "Miss me?"

Alexios Valorian stared.

His terrible day had just become worse.