Primordial Villain with a Slave Harem

Chapter 1601  Mercy

He was the last one standing.

The final chamber was small. A dead-end storage alcove at the absolute bottom of Kharn Moldur's mine system, a pocket of air and rock that the magma hadn't reached yet. Thordak pressed his back against the wall. His armor had partially fused to his body. His left arm was a ruin of melted metal and charred tissue. His beard was gone, burned away, and the skin beneath it was raw and blistered.

The magma crept through the doorway. Slow now, gentle, a thin sheet of molten rock that spread across the stone with patience.

"No! Damn it!"

It touched his boots.

Thordak jumped. A desperate, animal lunge straight upward, his good hand clawing at the ceiling, his fingers scraping rough stone. He caught a lip in the rock and hung there for half a second before his weight - combined with his bad grip - ripped him free and he crashed back down.

His boots hit the floor and the soles melted on contact. The heat punched through to the skin beneath and Thordak howled and threw himself at the wall. His gauntlet scraped stone, his fingers found a crack, and he hauled himself up six inches, eight inches, his legs kicking against the surface, his injured left arm shrieking as he tried to use it and the fused metal ground against the charred muscle beneath.

The magma rose behind him. Ankle-deep now. The heat crawled up his greaves and the metal glowed.

He climbed. Fingers tearing, boots slipping, armor dragging him down. The plate that had protected him for centuries was an anchor now, superheated steel pulling him back toward the floor while cooking him alive. His good hand found another crack. His left couldn't grip. The fingers were fused inside the gauntlet, the joints locked, the tendons cooked solid.

He bit the rock.

His teeth closed on a jutting edge of granite and he pulled, hauling himself up inch by inch with his jaw and one working hand, his legs scrabbling against the wall, his boots trailing orange smears where the molten soles streaked the stone. His teeth cracked. He didn't let go. A guttural cry escaped through his clenched jaw, the sound of a creature that had abandoned every dignity in the pursuit of ten more seconds of life.

The magma reached his calves.

His grip failed. His teeth tore free from the rock, taking fragments of enamel with them, and he slid down the wall and his legs sank into the rising pool and the pain hit so hard his vision split in half.

He tried again. Clawed at the wall with bloody fingers. Pulled. Slipped. Fell back.

The magma didn't care.

Thordak howled.

He howled the way a man howls when he understands that this is the worst thing he will ever feel and it is not going to end quickly. The magma reached his thighs. His armor glowed and split, the heat met his skin, and his muscles contracted so violently that his own bones cracked under the force.

He fell to his knees.

His fists pressed together. His mouth formed words he hadn't spoken since before the military.

"Goddess... forgive me. I have sinned in word and deed. I have taken more than my share and given less than my duty. I have threatened men's daughters and drunk when I should have worked and laughed at warnings I should have heeded..."

The magma reached his chest. His voice dissolved into wet, breaking sounds.

"Please... please, I don't want to die here. Not like this. Not-"

It stopped.

The magma stopped rising. The heat remained, the agony remained, but the orange tide that had been climbing his body froze in place.

Then it receded.

Slowly. Pulling back from his chest. His waist. His thighs. The magma withdrew, sliding away from him, draining from the chamber, leaving behind blackened rock and the stench of a mountain's death.

Thordak stared.

The molten rock in the doorway leading to the final chamber parted. The sea of magma that filled the corridor beyond split down its center, the two halves pulling apart like curtains.

A man walked through.

His boots touched nothing. He walked on air the way other men walked on stone, each step landing on empty space as if the world had built him an invisible floor because the real one wasn't worthy of contact. The magma churned beneath his feet. The heat that had melted three-meter gates and cooked seventeen thousand dwarves alive parted around him the way a river parts around a stone it cannot move.

The dark armor pulsed with crimson veins, each one beating in time with a heart that Thordak could feel in his ruined chest. The red eyes burned in the shadow of the corridor.

He walked the way he'd walk across a courtyard. Unhurried. Hands at his sides. Not a single element of his bearing acknowledging the hellscape he'd created, as if the mountain of melted rock and the thousand-degree air and the corridor of parted magma were as unremarkable as a morning breeze.

On a deep, instinctual level, Thordak felt it… Fury lived beneath the stillness. Fury so constant and so compressed that it had stopped resembling emotion and become structure. The man walking toward him was built from anger, sustained by it, defined by it, and none of it was meant for Thordak specifically.

That was worse. Thordak and his seventeen thousand dwarves were not the target. They were the first sentence.

He stopped three paces away and looked down.

Thordak tried to stand. His body obeyed, barely. His Vitality stat had kept him breathing through the unsurvivable. He planted one foot. Then the other. His legs shook but they held.

Ice erupted from the ground beneath him.

Shards of frozen blue punched upward through the scorched rock, through the melted remnants of his armor, through the cooked flesh beneath. A dozen points of entry, each one a spike of cold so absolute it burned as badly as the magma had. Thordak's body - already stripped of its protection, already charred and split and barely holding together - offered nothing.

The shards pierced his calves. His thighs. His sides. One through his shoulder, another through his hip.

The scream that left him was soundless. His throat had already given everything it had. His mouth opened, his body seized around the impalement, and the contrast - fire damage layered with ice damage, cooked skin meeting frozen steel - was so far beyond pain that his mind defaulted to white.

He hung there. Pinned upright by a dozen ice shards, his body a ruin of burns and punctures.

The red eyes looked down at him and held nothing he could negotiate with.

Thordak's mouth moved.

"Kill me."

His voice was barely a rasp. A breath shaped into syllables by a tongue that had stopped working properly.

"Please... just kill me. Mercy!"

The red eyes didn't change.

"No."

"What..." Thordak's vision was fading. The edges of the world were going dark and soft. "Why...? Please..."

"You'll become my sacrifice."

The words were the last thing he understood. His consciousness was already collapsing, the pain and the damage and the sheer totality of what had happened pulling him down into a darkness that felt, after everything, like mercy.

But before the dark took him, light flared across his vision. Bright and foreign. Letters that burned themselves into his awareness with the authority of a system that did not ask permission.

[Ding!]

[You've been Subjugated by the Primordial Subjugator!]

The Lord Warden of Kharn Moldur, last survivor of a city of seventeen thousand, read the notification once.

Then the darkness swallowed him.