Primordial Villain with a Slave Harem

Chapter 1602  Volcanic Eruption

Thordak hung from the ice shards like a trophy on a wall.

His breathing was shallow and wet. The charred remnants of his armor had fused to his torso in patches, and the skin between the patches was burns and puncture wounds that would have killed a lesser dwarf six times over. His Vitality kept him alive. That was the point.

[Overlord's Sacrifice] required a living vessel.

The spell was simple in concept. When a killing blow landed on the Primordial Subjugator, the damage transferred to a designated slave instead. Instantaneous, passive, the difference between dying and walking away from a fight that should have ended you.

The problem was the vessel. For the spell to work properly, for the damage to transmit, the sacrifice had to be able to take the hit. Dying on the spot would make the spell moot.

Ragnar's warhammer had caved the sacrifice's skull in.

He should have acquired a roster of high-Vitality slaves built for nothing except surviving punishment that would destroy anyone else. The tools existed. The class gave him every mechanism he needed.

Instead, he'd spent all the best candidates on building his soul army.

Killing was easier than Subjugating, yes. But that was a terrible excuse.

Quinlan had simply not prepared properly. He had Synchra, he had his Vitality, all his powers. On a deep, instinctual level, he felt that was enough. Best grind to unlock the next rank of Necromancy than 'waste' potential Elite Souls on this.

No more.

That thinking would never fly again.

A Lord Warden of the dwarven border, veteran of centuries, Vitality stat high enough to survive being cooked alive in the belly of his own fortress. That was the kind of vessel [Overlord's Sacrifice] deserved.

Of course, a man with Thordak Ironfold's experience and connections would prove useful for far more than absorbing a hammer blow.

But that was for later.

Quinlan raised one hand.

Wind gathered beneath the dwarf's ruined form and lifted him off the ice shards with a wet sound that echoed in the small chamber. Thordak rose, limp, arms dangling, head lolling forward. The wind held him two meters off the ground and drifted him behind Quinlan the way a river carries debris.

Quinlan looked up.

Three hundred meters of collapsed tunnel, saturated stone, and cooling magma sat between him and the sky. The route he'd come through was still open somewhere above, the original breach in the Greymount's face where he'd poured magma into the observation hall.

He wasn't going back that way.

His red eyes brightened. The glow intensified until the dark chamber turned red. Heat rolled off him in waves that made the air above his head shimmer and distort. The temperature climbed past what the scorched walls could absorb, and the stone around him began to glow.

Magma erupted from his crimson eyes, turning into a column of molten fire that slammed into the ceiling and punched through it. Rubble exploded upward. The column bored through three hundred meters of the Greymount in a continuous roar, vaporizing collapsed debris, re-melting cooled stone, annihilating every layer between the deepest mine shaft and open sky.

The morning light opened above him and the eruption punched through the mountaintop like a volcanic detonation, spraying molten debris and superheated stone hundreds of meters into the air. A plume of black smoke and ash billowed outward, blotting out the sun across half the Greymount basin.

Quinlan rose through the hole.

Wind carried him upward through the shaft's wake, the walls still glowing white-hot around him, Thordak's unconscious form trailing behind in the updraft. Molten rock dripped from the edges and fell past them. Heat that would have cremated a normal man barely registered against [Synchra]'s plating.

He cleared the peak.

From below, it would look exactly like what it was.

A volcano born in seconds from a peak that had stood for millions of years.

Why waste mana instead of flying back the path he came?

The elven sentries who manned the passes had either heard an entire fortress screaming or received a desperate dispatch from the dwarves before the communication lines melted. Either way, he suspected that they would be at the breach by now, possibly setting up a trap for him.

There was no reason to entertain them.

…

The elven patrol had arrived at the breach two minutes ago.

A scouting detachment of twelve archers from the nearest outpost, rushing here the moment the tremors began. They'd found the observation hall gone. The windows that had looked out over the basin were a river of cooling orange. The stench hit them forty meters out, hot stone and something else beneath it that none of them wanted to name.

Their captain, a willowy woman with pale green hair braided tight against her scalp, had been composing a field report in her head when the Greymount exploded.

The detonation threw three of her archers off their feet. A geyser of magma punched through the peak above them, and for a long, terrible second, the entire mountainside shuddered as if the ground itself was trying to shake them loose. Debris rained down. Chunks of superheated rock the size of wagons tumbled past the tree line and crashed into the underbrush, setting fires that caught instantly in the dry canopy.

Then the smoke parted.

A figure rose from the new crater, dark armor pulsing with crimson veins, ascending through the heat and ash with his arms at his sides.

Behind him, something else floated. A body. Blackened, ruined, hanging in the air like a sack of charred meat. The remnants of dwarven armor clung to it in patches. One arm was fused to the torso. The other dangled at an angle that meant the shoulder was gone.

The captain's hands went still on her bowstring.

"That's..." One of her archers trailed off. The girl's voice had gone thin. "Captain, that's a dwarf. That's a person."

She said nothing. Her eyes tracked the figure as it cleared the smoke and hung in the sky above them, red eyes burning down through the haze.

"Bows up!" she ordered. Her voice cracked on the second word. "Formation! Nock and hold!"

Twelve bows rose. Twelve arrows found their strings. The formation was correct, textbook, the product of decades of woodland drilling.

Every hand was shaking.

These were sentries. They tracked beastkin raiding parties, counted migration patterns, maintained the observation network that kept the Alliance's eastern border secure. They lived in the canopy. They loved the quiet. The most violent thing most of them had done in the last year was put down a wounded elk.

The man floating above them had just turned the Greymount into a volcano.

"Captain..." The archer beside her swallowed audibly. "Captain, what do we do?"

"…"

The figure hadn't looked at them, his attention directed downward at the crater he'd made and the grave of seventeen thousand beneath it.

Then the saber moved.

It had been hovering behind his back since he emerged. Now it swung forward, positioning itself in front of him, and the blade ignited.

Ghostly pale flames erupted along the edge, cold and bright, casting the smoke around him in colorless light that made the orange glow of the burning peaks look warm by comparison.

"[Eternal Damnation]."

The Greymount screamed.

Seventeen thousand voices rose from the stone at once. The sound hit the elven patrol like a physical force, a wall of anguish that bypassed their ears and went straight to the marrow. Raw, shredded, utterly inhuman. The souls of an entire dwarven city, ripped from their resting place, tore free of the rock and streamed upward in a howling river of colorless light.

They rushed toward the saber.

The blade drank them. Thousands upon thousands, pouring into the ghostly flames in a torrent that turned the spectral fire blinding, each soul compressed, consumed, sealed inside the weapon without pause or mercy. The stream lasted seconds and felt like hours. The screaming filled the basin, echoed off the cliffs, bounced between the peaks, and carried into the woods where every bird and animal within a mile had already gone silent.

The flames dimmed.

The saber returned to its lazy orbit behind his back. The screaming stopped.

An archer behind her dropped her bow. Another was on her knees, hands pressed to her ears, eyes wide and streaming.

"Run. The best we can do is report to the Council! Fighting is meaningless…"

Her voice came out as barely a whisper.

"RUN!"