Primordial Villain with a Slave Harem

Chapter 1599  One Week

Thordak's hands went numb on the warhammer.

The man hadn't moved. He hung in the sky above the fortress like a painting, arms at his sides, dark armor drinking morning light until the silhouette was more absence than shape.

Seventeen thousand dwarves lived in this mountain. Six hundred years of rock, steel, and runic engineering stood between them and whatever the world decided to throw at them.

He looked down at all of it the way a man looks at an anthill.

"One week," Thordak breathed. "The dispatch said one week."

The soldier beside him was shaking. A veteran, four hundred years on the eastern border, hands that had held the line against brutal beastkin invasions one after the other. Those hands were trembling now.

"Lord Warden. That's... that's the eastern border. We face the Confederation. The human lands are south. How did he get here without-"

"The sentries." Thordak's voice came out hoarse. "Where are the elven sentries on the border passes?"

Nobody answered. The elven observation posts dotted the forests that stood between the wild beastkin and the mountain range, sharp-eyed archers whose detection range made infiltration a practical impossibility. Nothing moved through the border without an elf seeing it.

Nothing should have reached Kharn Moldur unannounced.

"It doesn't matter." Thordak shoved the paralysis aside with the only tool he had left. Duty. "Battle stations! Every cannon to the observation ports! Runic batteries to the outer wall! I want barrier teams on every level and I want them there before I finish this sentence!"

The room broke.

Dwarves scattered. The paralysis that had held them at the windows shattered under direct orders, and training took over where courage couldn't. Boots hammered stone in every direction. Officers barked commands down stairwells. The deep horn system, designed to relay orders through three hundred meters of rock, bellowed sequences that hadn't been sounded in years.

Kharn Moldur woke up.

Cannon crews hauled the siege-grade ballistae into position at the upper observation ports, the iron frames grinding against their tracks as teams of four wrestled them into firing arcs. The weapons were old but maintained. Each bolt was tipped with a runic payload capable of punching through enchanted plate at four hundred meters.

Earth mages positioned themselves at structural chokepoints, palms pressed flat against the walls, ready to collapse corridors and seal passages if the outer defenses failed. Mana-forged portcullises slammed down across the main stairwells. Kill-zones activated in the entry corridors, their ceiling-mounted rune arrays warming to a dull orange glow.

Thordak watched through the narrow windows cut into the mountain. Three cannon emplacements flanked him, getting ready to shoot. His officers were already there, their faces hard, grips steady on their weapons.

The figure hadn't moved.

Arms at his sides, saber hovering behind, red eyes burning down through the mountain's shadow.

Then the armor began to change.

It started at the chest. Thin lines of crimson light split through the dark plating, branching outward like veins, spreading across the torso and down both arms. The lines pulsed. Slowly at first, then faster, then in a rhythm that reminded Thordak of a heartbeat, and with each pulse the light grew brighter and the air grew heavier.

Mana pressure hit him like a physical wall.

Thordak had felt enemy mana before. Every dwarf who'd served on the border knew the feeling, the prickling heat of a powerful mage preparing a spell.

But those were weather changes.

This was annihilation.

Hostility made tangible. Anger so dense it had weight, pressing down on the mountain, on the balcony, on Thordak's shoulders and chest until his lungs had to fight for every breath. The soldiers around him staggered. A cannon operator dropped to one knee, clamping his palms over his ears as if the pressure had a sound.

The crimson veins blazed brighter. The pulse quickened. Those red eyes hadn't blinked once, fixed on the fortress beneath them. The arms hadn't moved. The fingers hung loose at his sides, relaxed, and that was the detail that crawled into Thordak's gut and nested there.

A mage channeled through gestures.

This man was charging an attack that made the mountain tremble and he was standing in the sky like he was waiting for rain.

"Cannon teams!" Thordak roared. "Target the figure! FIRE!"

"Lord Warden... the cannons need a few more seconds…" His adjutant's voice was barely audible. The boy's face had gone gray. "Lord Warden, please. We should-"

"Hold your ground!" Thordak gripped the railing. "We are Kharn Moldur! We have held this mountain against-"

The words died in his throat.

The truth of what he was looking at had finally settled through dwarven pride and landed on the bedrock of his survival instincts.

He understood without being told. The spell would be cast before the cannons released the first volley.

Thordak cupped his fists around his mouth and bellowed upward with every ounce of air his lungs could hold.

"I am Thordak Ironfold, Lord Warden of Kharn Moldur! I demand parlay! Whatever grievance you hold against the Alliance, name your terms! What do you want?!"

His voice echoed off the cliffs. The mountain carried it upward, amplified by the natural acoustics of the Greymount basin.

"Death."

One word. It reached Thordak's ears with perfect clarity despite the distance, carried on mana-laced air that made the syllable land like a hammer strike against his eardrums.

His instincts screamed.

"ALL UNITS, BRACE FOR-"

The sky split open.

A column of molten rock erupted from the man's chest in a roaring stream that struck the observation hall.

It ceased to exist.

The dwarves pressed against those windows, the soldiers who'd been staring in horror, the cannon crews who'd been almost ready to fire, all of them vanished in an instant. The magma hit them and they became part of it. Stone, iron, flesh, bone, all reduced to the same glowing orange river that hammered through the windows and flooded the hall in a violently explosive wave of liquid fire.

The screaming started.

A dwarf stumbled backward from the wall of heat, his beard on fire, his palms raised in front of his face. The magma caught his boots first. It didn't splash. It enveloped. His feet sank. The leather dissolved, the flesh beneath it bubbled and split, and he screamed, a sound too high and too raw for a man that robust. His knees went. His thighs. His armor glowed white at the joints and peeled apart like foil.

Beside him, another dwarf turned to run. The heat got him before the molten rock did. His eyes burst in their sockets and the fluid that ran down his cheeks sizzled against his skin. He fell forward and the orange pool accepted him face-first and closed over his head without a ripple.

A barrier team tried to hold. Three dwarves with palms pressed to the floor, circles blazing, pouring every ounce of mana into a force wall that shimmered blue-white against the advancing orange. The barrier held for four seconds before molten rock poured through, and the three dwarves didn't have time to pull free before the ground beneath their fingers liquefied and swallowed them to the wrists.

The stream didn't stop.