Primordial Villain with a Slave Harem

Chapter 1587  Chatty Elf

The Endless Hunger had nothing left to eat, so it ate her.

"Hey!"

"Black Fang!"

"Wake up, or it'll be over!"

Black Fang came back to consciousness the way a drowning woman surfaces. Lungs burning, body convulsing, every nerve screaming a single message that overrode thought, memory, and identity.

The venom in her channels had turned fully inward.

She'd known this would happen. [Ouroboros: Endless Hunger] existed for a single purpose: the kind of fight where you stood alone against an army and killed until there was nothing left standing. It demanded a constant stream of death to sustain itself, because it ate its wielder alive the moment the killing stopped.

Now the killing had stopped, and the Hunger was still here.

A vein in her left forearm split. She felt it go, the hot wet pop beneath the skin, and blood ran down to her wrist and pooled against iron.

Chains.

Her back was against stone. Her legs were stretched out in front of her, numb from the knees down, and her arms were pulled above her head where iron cuffs held her wrists to the wall. A basement. Damp rock, low ceiling, no windows.

And a slave collar humming against her throat.

She felt it immediately. Foreign magic pulsing into her channels in steady waves, trying to write itself into the architecture of her mana pathways. A binding spell. A high-tier artifact, a new development of dwarven technology. The kind of artifact that cost a kingdom's treasury and turned the wearer into property.

There was a reason she hadn't turned the Hunger off despite the fight ending and it actively hurting her now: it was eating the slave spell embedded into the collar.

Every pulse the collar sent inward, the venom met and dissolved. The binding magic was fuel, and the Hunger consumed it the same way [Ouroboros: Shedding] had consumed Gorthrax's [Deathmark] on the battlefield. Foreign magic entering her channels was just another meal.

But not a big enough one.

The collar fed the Hunger a trickle. The Hunger wanted a river. The difference came out of her flesh, her vessels, her mana pathways. It was eating the collar's magic and her.

"Black Fang."

The voice came from her left. Soft, musical, and entirely too composed for the circumstances.

"Black Fang, can you hear me?"

She turned her head. Her neck muscles spasmed from the venom damage and her purple eyes found the woman chained to the wall beside her.

Myrasyn sat against the wall in an identical position. Arms chained above her head, slave collar humming against her throat. Her golden hair was matted with dried blood on one side and her ceremonial robes were torn at the shoulder, exposing bruised skin beneath. She looked like a queen who'd been dragged through hell and back.

Her green eyes were bright.

"You're awake." A smile touched her lips, warm and genuine, as if they'd met at a dinner party. "I was getting lonely."

Black Fang said nothing, turned her head forward, and assessed.

A dungeon. Low ceiling, heavy door, no windows. Two sets of chains, two prisoners, two collars. The air tasted like underground, deep enough that sound wouldn't carry. The faint tremor of movement above them suggested heavy foot traffic.

"You've been unconscious for roughly six hours," Myrasyn offered. "I counted by the guard rotations. They check every forty minutes. The last one was... oh, twenty minutes ago, I'd estimate. So we have a little time just to ourselves."

Black Fang tested the chains. The iron held. Her muscles screamed and the effort produced nothing but fresh agony in her shoulders.

She reached for her mana. The moment the spell formula began to take shape in her channels, the runes on her cuffs blazed white-hot against her wrists. The iron seared into her skin, the pain so immediate and so total that her arms locked rigid and her spine arched off the wall. The spell was ripped apart. The runes tore through the forming structure, shredding the mana construct at the root.

Not one to be easily deterred, she tried again. The runes responded faster, the searing hit before the spell formula was half-formed, and this time the backlash split her lip from the inside when her teeth clamped together.

The Endless Hunger spell was cast before the chains were placed on her wrists, thus it remained.

"I wouldn't bother with those. They're runed." Myrasyn chirped. "I already tried. All it earned me was bruised wrists and a headache."

Silence.

"You were magnificent, by the way."

Black Fang's eyelids trembled for a single moment. This elven queen seemed to be in a really chatty mood for some odd reason.

"I was on my back, bleeding out, perfectly useless," Myrasyn continued. "But I had an excellent view. You fought the weird Fujimori girl, the undead lords, and..." Her eyes sparkled. "You attacked the Arch Priestess of the Goddess. A herald of the divine." Her ears twitched. "You really are a heretic, aren't you?"

A low growl came from Black Fang's throat.

It was ignored. "And then that big serpent!" Myrasyn's gaze grew distant, replaying the memory. "The way it drove into you and you just... kept killing. The little stocky ones couldn't touch you. You carved through them while the poison ate you alive, and you didn't stop until every last one of your people was through that portal." She paused. "It was genuinely the most impressive thing I have ever witnessed, you're like a hero!"

"Stop talking."

Myrasyn pouted. The expression had no business on the face of a four-thousand-plus-year-old queen, and yet there it was, lower lip and all.

"The beyond adorable nature spirit tried to reach me, you know," she continued, undeterred by the overly rude attitude of the woman sitting next to her. "Those roots of hers were spreading everywhere during the battle. A tendril latched onto my ankles and waist and tried to pull me underground but then my dear sister's loyalists hacked it apart."

Her ears flattened as a second pout came. "Though I feel she could have tried a bit harder. She gave up rather quickly…"

Just as fast as it formed, the pout receded, replaced by sparkly eyes and twitching ears. "What is she? I've never seen anything like her!"

"..."

Myrasyn sighed. "You are an extraordinarily difficult conversationalist, Black Fang."

Black Fang was experiencing agonizing pain.

This was not new.

She was just a little kid when she found herself in the belly of a python and felt its digestive acids eat through the skin of her arms and legs. She clawed her way back out through the thing's flesh from the inside. That was when she awakened, when the Venomborn Terror was birthed.

The venom baths came later, submerging herself in vats of concentrated venom in the basement of her Consortium compound, the liquid eating through the outer layers of her skin while she sat still and breathed.

Days at a time. The flesh would slough. The nerves would scream. And she would sit, because the woman who could endure the most venom could wield the most venom, and the woman who wielded the most venom lived longer.

She had done this for centuries, until the baths became more pleasant than painful, a skincare routine more than anything.

That was until Kaede and Lilith burned her home to the ground and drove her out, which was when she moved to Quinlan's stronghold. But centuries of boiling in her own venom had given her a relationship with pain that most people could not comprehend.

Pain was information. It told her where the damage was, how fast it was spreading, and what she could afford to lose.

Right now, the Hunger was telling her everything.

She closed her eyes.

The venom was moving through her body in anarchic currents, eating whatever it touched. Mana pathways in her left arm had eroded to threads. The muscle tissue in her thighs was being digested from the inside, fibers dissolving and feeding the Hunger nothing because her own flesh was not what it wanted. Her liver was processing toxins so concentrated that the organ itself was swelling against her ribs. She could feel it, the pressure, the heat of tissue being broken down and rebuilt and broken down again in a cycle that her body was losing by degrees.

The collar pulsed.

Another wave of binding magic pushed into her channels and the Hunger lunged for it. The foreign mana tasted different from her own tissue. Richer. The venom devoured it in an instant and for a fraction of a second the gnawing eased, the Hunger satisfied by the meal, and the pain in her body receded just enough for her to breathe.

Then the collar's magic was gone and the Hunger turned back to her.

There. The gap between pulses was where the damage lived.

Black Fang reached into herself and grabbed the venom with her will.

Four centuries of venom baths had given her a control over her own body that no alchemist could replicate. She could feel every flow in her system. She seized the largest one now, the one chewing through her thigh, and wrenched it.

The pain spiked. White and absolute, a bar of heat driven through her femur.

Throughout it all, her expression did not change.

"You know," Myrasyn mused from beside her, "the artificers who designed these collars are quite proud of their work. Nasty little people. My scouts reported that they drank themselves unconscious after Ragnar accepted the prototype."

Myrasyn's eyes narrowed. "To think the artifact they had been developing in secret deep in their caves would be clasped around my throat…"