Primordial Villain with a Slave Harem

Chapter 1561  Do It

The royal guards had locked around Morgana before the dust finished settling.

Twelve men and women in enchanted plate formed a wall of overlapping shields and layered barriers, their formation closing with the practiced speed of soldiers who had trained for this scenario a thousand times. Inside the wall, two guards knelt beside their queen and cracked healing potions against her lips, tilting the vials until the liquid ran down her throat and into lungs that were barely pulling air.

The healer began her work.

She was a tall woman with close-cropped grey hair and the kind of expression that had seen more dying soldiers than living ones. She dropped to her knees beside Morgana and her staff was already glowing, a chant rolling off her tongue in a low, rapid cadence that pulled the ambient mana in the air toward the queen.

"Hold Her Majesty's head back. I need the airway clear." Her voice was flat and clipped and left no room for argument.

Morgana's breathing was a wet, shallow rasp. Her eyes were open but the irises had gone still, the cycling elements that had defined her for the entire battle faded to a dull, unfocused glow. Blood ran from her mouth and pooled in the hollow of her collarbone.

The healer's hands moved across her chest and the chant intensified. Bone fragments shifted beneath the skin as the spell began pulling them back into alignment, and Morgana convulsed once before the healer pinned her flat with a palm on her sternum.

"Hold her still. If those rib fragments migrate into her heart she's dead in seconds."

The guards obeyed.

Across the field, Alexios watched the formation around his wife and the muscle along his jaw worked once before he turned back to Quinlan and Myrasyn. The killing stroke he'd been denied still burned in his grip, and the armless man standing across from him had just said two words that meant nothing.

"Do it."

Do what?

His eyes swept the field. Quinlan's companions were still fighting. The soul army was still holding the line. Myrasyn stood between them with her staff angled forward and her green eyes tracking his every shift in weight. The elven warriors, her elites who arrived right after she had, became visible behind her as they fanned out to cover the flanks.

Nothing had changed.

'What are you playing at, boy?'

Then he heard it.

A sound that cut through the roar of the battlefield, the clash of steel, the screaming of dying men. A sound so wrong and so out of place that every guard in the formation froze at the same time.

Morgana screamed.

The sound that came out of her was guttural and raw, torn from a chest that had no business producing anything louder than a whisper. It was the scream of a woman being killed, and the wet tearing sound that accompanied it was flesh parting around steel.

A dagger punched through Morgana's chest.

The blonde woman kneeling at the queen's side had drawn the blade from her hip and driven it downward into the shattered ribcage with both hands, burying steel into the ruin that Quinlan's seven-element punch had already torn open. The dagger sank to the hilt and Morgana's back arched off the ground as the blade found organs that the healer had been fighting to keep alive.

Cassandra's hands were shaking on the hilt.

She had been Quinlan's long before this moment.

Months ago, when Blossom infiltrated the capital to extract Jasmine's mother, Cassandra had been the royal guard who caught the dogkin's ankle mid-escape. She should have let go. Instead she held on while Blossom's [Veil of the Hollow] swallowed them both in void smoke, and by the time Quinlan's [Warp Gate] opened beneath them there was no ground to push from and nowhere to dodge. The portal took them both, dumping Cassandra thousands of miles from Valorian soil where Quinlan and every one of his women were waiting.

They broke her. He [Subjugated] her. And then he sent her back with a cover story and orders carved so deep into her soul that she felt every one of them like hooks in her chest, and could do nothing about any of them.

[Subjugation] left no collar, no brand. It operated beneath the skin, in the channels where mana met soul, invisible to every detection spell the royal court possessed. She had been a compromised agent, sending him information from Morgana's side for months.

Yet no one had ever looked at her twice.

Now the knife was in her hands, and the queen was beneath her, and Cassandra's body obeyed the only authority it recognized.

"I'm sorry, my lady," she whispered. "I'm so sorry…"

She twisted the blade.

Morgana seized. The guttural scream choked off into a wet gurgle and the queen's hands clawed at the earth beneath her, fingers dragging trenches through the dirt in a spasm that had nothing to do with will and everything to do with a nervous system shorting out.

The healer threw herself backward. "WHAT ARE YOU DOING?!"

The guard captain reacted first.

His greatsword came down on Cassandra's neck from behind, a stroke so fast and so heavy that the blonde woman's head separated from her shoulders before the sound of the impact reached the ears of the guards beside her.

Cassandra's head hit the ground and rolled.

She stayed upright.

The hands on the dagger hilt didn't let go. The arm that had been driving the blade deeper was still driving, the muscles locked in a contraction that continued after the brain that controlled them was gone. Cassandra's headless corpse ground the dagger another inch deeper before the guard captain kicked her sideways and she finally collapsed, fingers still curled around a hilt that was no longer there.

"HER MAJESTY!" The captain's voice broke across the formation. "HEALER! NOW!"

The healer was already scrambling back. Her staff flared bright and the chant that left her mouth was faster and louder than any spell she'd cast in her long and illustrious career, tinged with the kind of desperation that training was supposed to prevent. Blood sprayed between her fingers as she pulled the dagger free and pressed both palms against the torn flesh, pouring everything she had into tissue that was falling apart faster than she could mend it.

"Form on her! Shields up, weapons out! Nobody gets within ten meters of the queen!"

The formation tightened, and the wall of shields closed until there wasn't a gap wider than a fist between any two bodies.

The healer pressed her lips into a line. She worked.

"Her Majesty is still breathing," she said after a long, terrible silence filled with nothing but the wet sound of regeneration magic fighting a losing battle. "The blade went through the chest cavity where the ribcage was already shattered. It missed the heart by a margin I wouldn't bet my life on. She was conscious until the strike hit, but she's gone under now. Unconscious, barely stable, and if I stop casting for even a second she will bleed out."

She looked up at the captain with blood on her face and fury in her eyes. "I need a perimeter and I need silence and I need every potion you have left because this woman is dying and I am the only thing standing between her and -"

Laughter.

Low and dark and unhurried.

"How sturdy. And they call you a glass cannon? I simply can't seem to kill you, Rabid Dog."

Quinlan Elysiar stood on the field with no arms, ice sealing both stumps, [Soul Reaper] hovering at his shoulder in ghostly flames and [Synchra] locked around his torso in full crimson plating, and he was chuckling.

"Oh well. I'm sorry, old friend." He looked at Alexios with red eyes that held no apology.

"But I'm afraid your wife is my property now."

Alexios's face went white.

"[Subjugation]."

The spell left Quinlan the way all his magic did: silently, invisibly, with no gesture. His mana simply moved. It left him through channels that answered thought faster than speech, crossed the distance in the time it took a heart to beat, and entered Morgana through the wounds Cassandra had opened.

On this continent, slavery required iron collars forged with binding runes, physical chains locked around the throat to enforce obedience through pain and compulsion. Crude external hardware, breakable with enough strength or the right spell, limited to commands the slave could hear and consciously process.

[Subjugation] was a different creature entirely.