Primordial Villain with a Slave Harem

Chapter 1600  Rats in a Hole

From the sky, the man poured magma in a continuous, unbroken flow that hammered into the mountainside and filled every opening it found. The observation windows, the ventilation shafts, the cannon ports, the blast doors. Every hole that six centuries of engineering had carved into solid granite became an entry point. The liquid fire found them all.

Thordak threw himself backward from the balcony as the wall of heat struck. A wave of magma still caught his left arm. His gauntlet superheated. The metal fused to his skin and the pain that followed was unlike anything he'd experienced.

He didn't scream. His Vitality was too high, his armor too thick, his body too durable. The heat that killed his soldiers in seconds gave him the gift of surviving long enough to watch.

The balcony melted behind him as he staggered into the stairwell. Soldiers were running. Officers, veterans, old dwarves who'd held the line through everything, running like children fleeing a wildfire. Their discipline had been burned out of them. There was no formation that addressed this. No protocol for a man in the sky melting your mountain from the top down with his arms resting at his sides.

"DEEPER!" Thordak bellowed. His voice cracked and he didn't care. "Everyone deeper! Abandon the upper levels! Move to the mid-fortress! Activate the inner barriers!"

They ran.

The stairwells became rivers of bodies. Soldiers and civilians mixed together, miners carrying children, engineers dragging wounded, everyone pouring downward because downward was the only direction away from the surface.

Thordak pushed through them, his injured arm hanging at his side, his warhammer in his good fist, shouting orders that mattered less with every passing second.

The inner defenses activated. Mana-forged gates, three meters thick, slammed across the main corridors. Secondary ward layers flared to life. Runic dampening fields tried to slow the advance. Structural supports reinforced themselves through automated enchantments triggered by the temperature change.

These defenses had been designed to outlast a siege. A Level 74 lavamancer pouring everything they had into the mountain would drain themselves dry before the first gate buckled. Even the most powerful elemental caster alive operated on a budget. Mana was finite. Spells had duration. You cast, you spent, you waited on cooldowns, on your mana regenerating.

The man in the sky was not operating on the same rules.

Thordak had watched the entire assault from the command balcony. No incantation, no gesture, no medium of any kind. His arms hung at his sides and the magma poured from his chest like it was bleeding out of him, and it hadn't stopped. It hadn't even fluctuated. The volume was constant, the heat was constant, and the flow showed no sign of tapering.

How long could something like that last?

The magma reached the first inner gate in under a minute.

Thordak watched from behind it. The gate glowed orange at its center. Then white. Then it sagged, the bottom edge liquefying, and a thin stream of molten rock wormed through the gap and pooled on the floor. The pool spread. The gate weakened. More found the seam, the stream became a flow, the flow became a flood, and the three-meter barrier that was supposed to hold for hours folded inward like wet parchment.

"WHAT?!" he screamed as his people cried and wailed in sheer terror all around him.

Behind, the homes. The residential quarters where families had lived for generations. Small rooms carved with care, furnished with dwarven craft, decorated with the accumulated history of lives well-lived. Cradles, shelves, chairs sized for children.

The magma didn't distinguish.

"The ventilation shafts!" someone screamed from below. "It's coming through the ventilation shafts!"

It was. The network of air passages that kept seventeen thousand dwarves breathing had become a circulatory system for liquid fire. Molten rock poured from ceiling vents in thin streams that widened as the walls around them softened. It dripped onto people who'd thought they were safe two levels below the fighting.

A woman pressed against the far wall with two children behind her. The stream from the vent above her widened and a glob struck her shoulder. Her scream bounced off every wall in the corridor. She fell. The children grabbed at her. One of them touched the glowing rock on her back and his hands-

Thordak looked away.

"MOVE! EVERYONE TO THE DEEP MINES! ABANDON EVERYTHING! MOVE!"

They moved. The entire surviving population of Kharn Moldur flowed downward, deeper and deeper into the Greymount, through corridors that grew narrower and rougher as the architecture shifted from polished fortress to raw mine shaft. The air was thick with heat and the stench of cooked rock and burned flesh Thordak refused to think about.

Above them, the mountain groaned.

Thordak felt it in his bones. Every dwarf could feel the mountain, and what the mountain was telling them now was simple. It was dying.

The upper levels were collapsing as structural supports melted. The Greymount itself was settling differently, shifting, redistributing as the mountain that had existed for millions of years was being evaporated, folding inward, like a body curling around a wound.

And through it all, from the surface, the pressure hadn't changed.

The hostile mana held constant. The man above was still pouring magma into the mountain the way a man pours water from a jug. It had been going for minutes. It hadn't slowed, and there was no indication, none whatsoever, that it was going to stop.

How long?

The question gutted him. How long could one man sustain this? This man was producing a continuous flow of magma, enough to fill an entire mountain fortress, and the mana pressure from the surface hadn't decreased.

What kind of reserves did you need to melt a mountain?

The deep mines leveled out at three hundred meters. Ore processing chambers, rough-hewn and functional, never meant for habitation. Thordak organized what was left. Perhaps five thousand of the original seventeen. Maybe less. He couldn't count.

"We hold here." His voice was raw. "Mages, collapse the access tunnels above us. Bury us in if you have to. Cut off every path from the upper levels."

The mages pressed their palms to the walls. The tunnels above them groaned and collapsed, tons of granite slamming down into the passages, sealing the survivors in the deepest pocket of the mountain.

Silence.

The rock around them was warm. Getting warmer. The magma was still up there, still flowing, still filling every space it could find, and gravity was pulling it down. Always down. Toward them.

A thin line of orange appeared at the ceiling seam where the collapsed tunnel met the chamber's roof.

"No..." Thordak whispered.

The line widened. A bead of molten rock dripped from the ceiling and struck the ground. Then another. Then a stream, thin as a finger, that sizzled against the ground and began to pool.

Thordak looked at the dwarves around him. Soldiers with melted armor. Civilians with burns covering their bodies. Engineers cradling broken fists. Children who'd stopped crying because the heat had dried their tears before they could fall.

Through the ceiling, more streams. Another. Another. The collapsed rock above them was saturated. The magma was seeping through the rubble like water through gravel, finding every crack, every gap, every imperfection in the barrier they'd made.

The wailing started again.

Thordak watched his soldiers die. Dwarves who'd sworn oaths to him, who'd trained under him, who'd trusted that the Lord Warden of Kharn Moldur would keep them safe. Their Vitality kept them alive longer than it should have.

That was the cruelty. A Level 60 soldier didn't die instantly when magma touched his skin. He lived for seconds. Long, shrieking seconds, the furious flames climbing his legs, his stats fighting the damage, his body refusing to quit, the pain stretching out and out and out.

A veteran beside him fell to his knees in the rising pool. The magma reached his waist. His mouth opened but the sound that left him was more fundamental than a scream. A noise from a place below language.

Thordak pushed deeper.

He was the Lord Warden. This was his mountain. These were his people and they were dying around him and he could not help a single one of them so he did the only thing left.

He survived. He pushed through corridors he'd never walked, through maintenance shafts carved by miners decades ago, deeper and deeper, his injured arm dragging behind him.

Behind him, the magma followed. Always followed. Gravity and hatred working in perfect alignment.

He was the last one standing.