Primordial Villain with a Slave Harem

Chapter 1499  My Soldiers, [Awaken]

"So be it."

Three words, flat and final. The calm hadn't changed. The tone hadn't shifted. And somehow that was worse than any threat.

A sound cut through the frozen air.

Steel clearing a sheath. Distant, above them, but amplified by the dome's acoustics until it rang through every street. A clean, high note that lingered and then deepened into a hum. A vibration. A frequency that had no business coming from a blade, resonating in the bones of every person who heard it.

Then the scream.

The sword screamed.

Ghostly pale blue light erupted from above the city, visible even through the ice-filtered haze. "My soldiers, [Awaken]."

The Primordial Villain's voice echoed through the dome.

"Those who resist my will are to be annihilated."

A sound erupted from every direction at once, a unified roar that came from throats that were being formed in this very moment, a chorus of voices layered on top of each other, hundreds deep, reverberating off the ice walls until the entire dome vibrated with it.

"YES, MASTER!"

The words hit like a physical force. Soldiers staggered. Civilians clapped their hands over their ears. A battlemage's concentration shattered and her half-formed spell detonated in her own hands, throwing her backward.

Then they materialized.

On the eastern battlement, a figure appeared three paces from an archer. It stepped out of the air itself, translucent and faintly glowing, a humanoid shape made of pale light and shadow that solidified in the time it took the archer to flinch. Its eyes burned cold blue.

Then a hundred more appeared.

On the western wall, a hundred more appeared. On the southern gate, another hundred. In the streets below, between the houses, on the rooftops, in the alleys, in the market square where an hour ago a hundred thousand people had cheered for their count. Hundreds of souls materialized in every quarter of the city, an army conjured from nothing, standing among the defenders like ghosts given purpose.

A mage on the wall broke first. She stared at the translucent soldiers surrounding her position and lowered her staff.

"This isn't possible…" she whispered. "It can't be possible!"

The mage was not alone. The sentiment was shared among everyone. "He broke the barrier! He made a barrier of his own! And now he's summoning an army?!"

No one answered. There was no answer to give.

This was not the power system they understood.

A man who could shatter a county capital's barrier did not also create barriers of his own. A mage who manipulated elements did not also command hundreds of summons. These were separate disciplines. Separate classes. Separate lifetimes of study.

The Primordial Villain treated them like items on a list.

Then it got worse.

A ripple of light split the air above the main gate. A vertical tear, edges crackling with energy, widening into an oval large enough for a person to step through. A woman stepped through.

She was lean, dressed in dark robes with a purple hue that caught the blue light of the dome and turned it violet. A katana hung at her hip. Her eyes were purple and burning bright, matching the blade she drew as she cleared the gate.

Every soldier on the wall who could see her went rigid.

They knew that face. Even in the outskirts of the Ravenshade duchy, far from the duchy of Greenvale, they knew. The wanted posters were everywhere. Black Fang.

The most wanted woman in the Vraven Kingdom.

She landed on the wall without a sound.

She did not speak. She did not announce herself. She did not offer terms or mercy or explanation.

Her eyes found the highest-level defender on the battlement. A veteran captain, level seventy, who had served under Tharion Ravenshade for eight hundred years. The man saw her coming, raised his sword, and activated his defensive skill.

Black Fang's katana blazed purple.

One cut.

His head flew.

She was already moving to the next.

Behind her, the gate stayed open. More figures stepped through. Warriors in mismatched armor. Mages with staffs crackling. A woman with twin daggers who dropped from the gate's edge to the street below and vanished into the alleys. Quinlan Elysiar's allies. His will made manifest, pouring into the city through a door he'd torn open.

On the battlement, the veteran soldiers tried to form ranks.

True chaos began.

...

Outside the dome, the dwarven army had gone quiet.

The roaring celebration that had erupted when the barrier fell, the chest-pounding and boot-stomping and guttural hymns of triumph, all of it had died the moment a wall of ice grew from nothing and sealed the city shut.

Now tens of thousands of dwarven soldiers stood in formation, staring at a dome of blue-white ice that hadn't existed thirty seconds ago.

General Thorga stood beside Regiment Commander Borek Ironvault at the forward command position, two hundred meters from the dome's base. Borek was a broad, grizzled dwarf with a beard braided into three iron-capped ropes and a face that looked like it had been carved from the same granite he'd spent four decades mining before enlisting. He commanded the entire ground assault force, while Thorga was his lieutenant. Together, they were supposed to be cracking this city open right now.

Instead, they were staring at ice.

Borek squinted at the dome. Then at Thorga. Then back at the dome.

"That's new," he said.

"That's new," Thorga agreed.

A long pause.

"He just..." Borek gestured at the dome with one meaty hand. "He broke their barrier. And then he made one. His own. Over the whole city."

"He did."

"A barrier of ice."

"Yes."

"Over the whole city."

"I was standing here too, Borek."

The regiment commander crossed his arms. His gauntlets creaked. He watched the dome for another few seconds, as if expecting it to do something else ridiculous.

It didn't. It just sat there, enormous and impossible, glowing faintly blue in the afternoon light.

"Well," Borek said. "What do you propose we do about it?"

Thorga had been asking herself the same question. Their artillery crews were still at their stations, loaded and aimed at walls they could no longer see. The bombardment timeline her aide had been recording was meaningless. The entire siege plan, supply chain logistics, troop rotations, ammunition calculations, all of it assumed they'd be grinding down a magical barrier for days.

The barrier was gone. There was a new one. And this one belonged to their ally.

Borek didn't wait for an answer to his question. "I say we shoot our way in and join the fight. This dome will be much easier to shoot through than the original barrier reinforced by hundreds of mages. A few volleys is all we need, I'd wager."

"I think," Thorga said carefully, "he didn't just lock them in."

Borek glanced at her.

"I think he's keeping us out."

The regiment commander's brow furrowed. The braids in his beard swayed as he shook his head.

"Nonsense. He's an ally fighting in the Elvardian army. He's been breaking barriers for us across the whole campaign. Why would he lock us out of the prize now?"

"I don't know," Thorga said. "But that dome doesn't seem very inviting to me…"

Borek opened his mouth to argue.

A sound cut him off as a sudden doorway materialized right before the ice dome, facing them. Thorga's hand went to her axe.

Borek raised a fist. Behind him, the nearest dwarven squad locked shields with a speed that spoke of centuries of warfare. Crossbows leveled at the opening.

A figure stepped through.

An elf. Young by elven standards. Rather short-haired, only reaching her shoulders, which was unusual for their kind. She wore heavy plate armor over a compact frame, the kind of armor designed for close combat, and she moved with the easy confidence of someone who was very comfortable being stared at by thousands of mighty Elvardian warriors.

She stopped three paces from the archway and planted her feet.

She inclined her head to each. "Team Captain Kaelira, Elvardian Third Ranger Corps." The faintest smile adorned her lips. "Though I imagine my file says 'missing in action' by now. I've been with Quinlan Elysiar for some time. I'm also his lover, for the sake of full transparency. I represent him in this matter."

Borek's eyebrows climbed into his helmet.

"If you survived without capture, why didn't you report back to your regiment?"

"I was stranded deep in enemy territory, Commander. I had no access to communication lines, extraction routes, or allies for hundreds of kilometers." Kaelira shrugged. "Quinlan Elysiar found me, saved my life, and gave me a home."

"That's a touching story, but you're still an Elvardian soldier. You had a duty to report back."

"Duty." Kaelira tasted the word like something foul. "To Elvardia."

"To your nation. To your oath."

Kaelira raised an eyebrow. "Oath? I made no oath to your cause, Commander. My nation made me a criminal because I wanted to forge artifacts."

The words landed flat and hard. Kaelira's smile hadn't changed, but her eyes had.

"They sentenced me to a lifetime of military service. No trial. No appeal. An elf with a hammer, condemned to die in armor." She held up a gauntleted hand. "I climbed the ranks over the years. Earned my captaincy. And my reward for all that service was a suicide assignment to probe Ravenshade's border defenses."

"That's an internal Elvardian matter," Borek said stiffly. "Bring your concerns to the courts."

"No. I will not return to that filthy, backwards nation unless it's for the sake of my Quinlan." Kaelira's gaze swept the dwarven officers behind Borek.

The tomboy elf, always so selfless and shy, was in full sass mode right now.