Primordial Villain with a Slave Harem

Chapter 1651 Detested word

That no amount of grinding, no number of levels, no tonnage of blood on her gauntlets would close what she had just felt open beneath her. She had spent a hundred and fifty years building herself into a weapon for exactly this kind of fight, and the man pinning her to the moss had learned hand-to-hand combat as an afterthought.

Her wrists strained once against his grip, then stopped.

"You're a truly amazing fighter-" Quinlan began after lifting his hand from her throat, seeing the fight leave her.

"Don't." It came out of her hoarse and final. "Don't give me that bullshit."

Quinlan looked down at her for a beat. Then he nodded to her once, released her wrists, and stood. "I understand."

The dome fell in a single exhale, thinning to mist and then to nothing. The courtyard opened around them, and the afternoon light settled back in warm and gold.

Quinlan returned to his previous spot and moved his focus back toward the line.

Orianna was still on one knee where she had been before the dome went up, her head bowed toward him. Lyra crossed the wet moss and sank to one knee in front of Quinlan beside the Flower Queen, steady and formal. Ria followed a half-step behind with her head dipped toward him, and Liora and Shallan knelt together in the same breath.

Raika struggled with both the physical strain and the emotional dread as she managed to get up with shaky limbs, then she crossed the distance and began lowering herself.

Sylvaris was doing the same, but the matron's knee touched the ground...

Before the pair could kneel, wind hit all seven of them.

It rose from below, warm and enormous, and it scooped all seven of them off the greenery in a single gust that left their boots hanging a meter above the courtyard. Seven women floated with their hair whipping upward and their eyes wide on the man standing beneath them, looking up.

It rose from below, warm and enormous, and it scooped all seven of them off the greenery in a single gust that left their boots hanging a meter above the courtyard. Seven women floated with their hair whipping upward and their eyes wide on the man standing beneath them, looking up.

And suddenly, all seven of them felt strange, as if something was seriously wrong.

Quinlan Elysiar looked down on the world. His height put him above most people he met, and his wind manipulation put him above every battlefield he fought on, hovering over his enemies and looking down on them like they were insignificant ants. That was how the Primordial Villain operated, always above, always looking down.

He was looking up at them now.

His chin was tilted back, bloodied face turned toward the seven women floating above him, and his eyes were shining with warmth so open that every woman in the air felt it in her chest. His mouth had softened. The Bloodfather was standing on the ground beneath seven women he had lifted there himself, and the expression on his beaten face was genuine appreciation. Every bruise and split on his skin only made it land harder.

"I don't want retainers."

His voice was easy and blunt.

"I want allies I trust and badass fighters who awe me on the field of battle. 'Retainer' is..."

His face turned into a hateful grimace as he spat, "I detest it. It's ugly and disrespectful for what you are."

Lyra's hand left her hilt, and the shieldmaiden's pink eyes had gone bright in a way she could not hide. Orianna's composure cracked for the second time in minutes. Raika's bloodied mouth pressed together, and her gaze dropped to the moss she had just been beaten into before it lifted back to him carrying something she was not ready to name.

None of them quite knew what to say. The man beneath them had refused their offer of loyal servitude and offered them a proper place by his side.

Lyra's voice came first.

"...Yes, my Lord."

It cracked on the second word, bright and warm.

The others followed. The word passed through the seven in a breath, each woman's voice giving it a different shape.

Then, their ribbons of blood, previously inert, moved.

Seven threads of dark crimson that had been hovering inert since the rite began struck in the same heartbeat, and the wind landed them gently.

Lyra hit the moss first and the shieldmaiden lost her composure with a strangled sound that had no business coming from her. Raika went down without a noise, teeth locked, taking the restructuring the way she took everything. Orianna's knees buckled and the Flower Queen's face crumpled into a grimace she would have been mortified by any other day. Sylvaris landed with her grace intact for exactly one second before the rite found whatever was underneath it, and the sound the matriarch made through her teeth reached her daughter before her body did, mother and daughter making a pile of pain.

"Mom!! I'm dying over here and you're sandwiching me!!"

"...Impossible... Mommy can't move..." the moon elf breathed weakly.

Ria, Liora, and Shallan hit the ground together, adding their voices to the eleven women who had been suffering for the last several minutes and who, despite their own agony, found the energy to welcome them.

"Welcome to the party!!" Feng hissed through her teeth from somewhere nearby.

"THIS IS HORRIBLE!!" Ria shrieked.

"We know!" Sera groaned.

"Actually..." Lucille wiped a strand of caramel hair from her sweating face and exhaled. "This is... not that bad anymore."

Three meters away Shallan had her forehead pressed into the moss with both fists white against the green. "...not that bad?!" she breathed.

Just then, Quinlan's weight left the moss. His legs folded back into the meditative cross, the crimson script at his throat rekindling at half its former intensity, and [Soul Reaper] resumed its orbit. The Bloodfather closed his eyes.

"Break time is over, ladies~"

"WHAT?!" Iris's head came off the ground. "Oh no no no-" from Aurora. "He's joking," Kitsara whispered, her fox ears flat against her skull. He was not joking.

The crimson script at his throat blazed to full brightness as he refocused on the ritual in full. The banked fire in eighteen chests roared back to furnace heat in a single breath.

"I dared... delude myself..." Ayame whispered from the green with her cheek pressed flat, "...that I was getting used to it..."

Quinlan sank into the work. The Bloodfather class fed him understanding the way hunger fed urgency, showing him where each bond needed pressure and where each connection required his will to guide rather than his presence to fuel, and behind his awareness Nyxara steadied the flow from the soul realm without a word. A nudge where a thread pulled tight, a widening where a connection threatened to tear.

Hours passed.