Primordial Villain with a Slave Harem

Chapter 1704 Awaken

Aelindra's mandible lay six feet from her body in a pool of blood that was still spreading across the stone, and the teeth that had scattered on impact sat in white fragments between the cracks like shrapnel from a porcelain bomb. What remained of her face below the nose was a curtain of torn flesh and exposed muscle hanging over her throat, twitching with each shallow breath her unconscious body still drew.

The Primordial Villain stood over her with blood drying on his bare chest and the dead shard of [Synchra] fused to the base of his neck, and the war that raged across the slopes below them sounded distant from the ridge's peak. His forearm was still open where he'd cut himself to coat [Soul Reaper], crimson running freely down his wrist and dripping from his fingertips in a steady rhythm that matched nothing in his pulse.

"Quin..."

Ten meters behind him, the dark-light in Sera's blades guttered once and died.

The screaming edge that had burned divine and demonic in the same breath went quiet, the compressed radiance unraveling from both weapons in threads that dissolved before they hit the air. The blades themselves followed, [Divine Arsenal] losing cohesion as the hunger that had held them together drained out of her hands and left nothing behind.

The brand on her womb dimmed. The blazing mark that had burned since the moment Nyxara's wrath found her flickered, pulsed faintly, and settled into the faint warm glow it had carried before the transformation. What remained was Sera.

The healer. The girl who had an irresistible urge to restore when her friends bled, who channeled golden light with firm hands and utmost urgency.

She stepped up to Quinlan, and every thought of the fight left her head.

Her hands found his chest first, golden light already blooming from her palms as her eyes swept all the terrible damage he'd sustained, and the sound that left her was quiet yet furious. "Quin... I'll-" She was already channeling when he interjected.

"Heal her first." He tilted his head toward Aelindra's body without looking at it. "We need her alive. I'm not sure if her death would also set things off..."

Then he gripped her hand on his skin, holding softly, in what was meant to be a reassuring manner. "I'm fine."

Quinlan pressed his left palm flat over the wound on his right forearm and let frost crawl across it. Ice sealed the cut in a thin crystalline shell that stopped the bleeding without ceremony, and the brief hiss of cold against raw flesh didn't make it to his face.

"That's... Just some measly ice won't..." Sera was ready to mount a full blown defense case as to why his little band aid solution wouldn't suffice, but she swallowed it all.

Instead, her fingers curled against his grip, and for one full heartbeat the healer in her fought the woman in her for control of her hands. The woman lost. She stepped beside Aelindra's ruined face and golden light poured into the tissue, stabilizing what was left and closing the arteries that were emptying the elf's life onto the ridge.

"You can probably wake her now. It's gonna be messy, but..." Sera murmured, and Quinlan wasted no time.

"Awaken."

The command went through [Subjugation] like a blade through silk, reaching past the darkness Aelindra's mind had retreated into and dragging her back by the roots of her consciousness. There was no gentleness in the pull. The spell found her where she'd fled and hauled her into the light whether her body was ready for it or not.

Aelindra's eyes snapped open and a sound left her chest that belonged to an animal caught in a trap, a wet gurgling howl that couldn't form consonants because there was nothing left to form them with. Her hands clawed at the stone beneath her and her body tried to curl inward around the agony that hit her from every nerve in her face simultaneously, and the terror that followed was worse than the pain because she could feel him inside her mind.

She could feel the bond.

It sat where her autonomy used to be, heavy and absolute, a collar that didn't need metal. Everything she was, every millennium of power and pride and the seat on the Elvardian Council she'd bled for, belonged to the man standing above her with her blood on his knuckles.

"Stop."

The guttural keening died in her throat as the command reached her vocal cords and shut them down, and Aelindra's body went rigid with the effort of obeying an order that fought every instinct screaming at her to express the pain she was drowning in. Her eyes rolled toward Quinlan with a hatred so concentrated it could have cut steel, and the tears that ran from it had nothing to do with grief.

Sera's healing poured deeper. Muscle reconnected across the gap beneath her nose, tissue bridging the wound in layers of golden light that rebuilt enough structure for the lower face to hold shape without restoring the bone itself. The pain didn't lessen, the nerves knitting back together made sure of that, but the bleeding stopped.

The rebuilt lower face was smooth and wrong, a healer's patch job visible beneath skin too thin to hide the absence underneath, and the face that looked up at Quinlan from the ground was a ruin wearing a mask.

"Your mouth is under construction, so you will be using [Master's Link]." His voice carried the same flat tone he used when cycling elements mid-combat, mechanical efficiency with nothing behind it. "Think of the answer in my direction as you tell me where Black Fang is being held."

The resistance came immediately, a wall of refusal that slammed against the inside of the bond so hard Aelindra's hands shook with the force of it. Her eyes burned with defiance and her mind screamed no with every fiber she had left.

The bond didn't care.