Primordial Villain with a Slave Harem

Chapter 1588  Gluttonous Resistance

Black Fang didn't join the chatting. She was redirecting the flow upward through her core, through her chest, and into the channels surrounding her throat where the collar's binding magic was thickest. The venom hit the foreign mana and fed. The gnawing in her thigh stopped. The Hunger had something to eat.

One stream wasn't enough. The Hunger had a thousand mouths.

She found the next. The one dissolving the pathways in her left forearm. She grabbed it, wrenched it toward the collar, and the pain that shot through her arm was a razor drawn from wrist to shoulder, peeling nerve from bone. Her teeth pressed together until the enamel creaked.

Flow by flow, she gathered the venom. Each redirection was its own private agony, a white-hot flare that spiked and faded as the stream found its new path. Her liver. Her calves. The cluster of eroded pathways behind her sternum where the Hunger had been nesting deepest. She pulled them all, one at a time, toward the collar, compressing the venom into a dense ring of consumption that circled her throat and waited for the binding magic to pulse.

The collar obliged.

"!!" To Black Fang's surprise, the binding spell didn't come from her throat. It shot downward through her left hip, a lance of foreign mana that bypassed the concentrated ring of venom entirely and drove into the channels along her pelvis.

A nasty dwarven craft. The collar wasn't a blunt instrument that hammered at one point until resistance broke. It was a hunter. It probed, found the weakest section, and struck where the venom wasn't.

"You can do this, Black Fang." Myrasyn's voice had shifted. "Fight it. The Terror of Humanity cannot let herself be enslaved."

"…" Black Fang wrenched a stream of venom from her throat down through her core and into her hip. The pain of the redirection was a white line drawn from collarbone to pelvis, every nerve along the path screaming as the venom tore through tissue to reach the binding before it could take root. She caught it. The venom dissolved the foreign mana half a second before it finished writing into her channels.

A hiss escaped through Black Fang's teeth as the collar pulsed again. Right shoulder. She dragged the venom across her chest and caught the binding in the joint, dissolving it with a half-second to spare.

"Are you dealing with this too?" The words came out between her teeth.

"In my own way." Myrasyn settled against the wall, eyes half-closed, breathing measured. "I cast [Sanctified Radiance] in the moment before my dear sister clasped this lovely gift around my neck. The light fills my channels and purifies the binding magic as it enters."

A pause. Two long ears flicked forward. "It requires constant concentration. Every breath, every heartbeat, I must maintain the flow of light through my body. One lapse in focus, one moment where my mind wanders, and the artifact will write itself into my channels before I can stop it."

Ten seconds passed. Left knee. Black Fang wrenched the venom down and caught it.

"So yes," Myrasyn continued, her voice carrying the lightness of a woman discussing her morning routine, "I am fighting. I have been fighting for six hours while you slept. It was very boring and I kept pouting because it seemed the poison was doing the work for you by itself."

She grinned and chirped, "I'm glad you're awake. Now we get to fight against this cruel fate together."

Black Fang knew the weirdo next to her was correct. It was the poison, the Hunger that ate away at the binding effect while she was momentarily knocked out.

But she also knew that such a method was unsustainable. Without directing the Hunger, she'd be consumed from the inside within a day at best.

Again. The base of her spine. Black Fang caught it, the venom ripping through her lower back and dissolving the binding a fraction of a second before it took root.

Each pulse came at a cruel ten-second interval, each one targeting a different section of her body, and each one required her to drag the venom through her own flesh to meet it. The collar was learning. Testing her response time, mapping where her venom was thickest, and striking where it was thinnest.

She matched it. Pulse for pulse, redirection for redirection, agony for agony. Her body was the battlefield and the venom was the only army she had.

Black Fang knew within seconds: this was not a battle she could win, but a battle she could survive, one pulse at a time, until something changed.

Myrasyn raised her hands to clap. The chains caught her wrists one inch into the motion. She looked up at them, frowned, and let her hands fall back.

"Clap," she said. "Clap, clap, clap."

Black Fang opened one eye.

"You did it." Myrasyn beamed. "You found the rhythm. Very impressive." Her ears perked straight up. "Now you simply have to keep that up for every moment of every day until we get to shed our collars." The smile didn't waver. "If you stop, you become a slave. So try not to lose concentration."

The cheerfulness with which she delivered this was deeply wrong.

Black Fang closed her eye.

...

The dungeon settled into silence.

Not true silence. There was the hum of two collars working in tandem, a low droning vibration that lived in the walls and the floor and the teeth. Beneath that, two women breathing. And beneath that, the wars being fought inside their bodies where no one could see.

Myrasyn sat with her back straight against the stone, her chin level, her arms drawn up by the chains in a posture that somehow suggested a throne rather than a cell.

Her eyes were closed. A faint luminescence traced the veins beneath the skin of her throat and chest, pale gold, barely visible in the dim light. The radiance moved in slow, steady circuits through her body, sweeping her channels in rhythmic waves that matched her breathing. Inhale, the light advanced. Exhale, the binding magic retreated. She made it look effortless, the way four thousand years of elven discipline could make anything look effortless. Her face was composed, her breathing even, her ears still.

Beside her, Black Fang was bleeding from the nose.

The venom in her channels moved in violent surges, lurching from one part of her body to another every ten seconds as the collar struck. There was no grace to it. Each redirection tore through her tissue and left damaged pathways in its wake, and the cost showed on her skin in burst capillaries and bruising that spread like ink beneath the surface. Blood seeped from her gums. A vein in her neck had swollen visibly, purple-black against the pale skin, and the flesh directly beneath the collar was already raw.

One used light. The other used self-destruction. An elven queen purifying herself from within, a human assassin poisoning herself to stay free. The method could not have been more different, but the result was the same.

Two slave collars humming against two throats, and neither one taking hold.

For now.

But then, to Myrasyn's surprise, it was Black Fang's lips that parted first.

"Did he escape?"