Primordial Villain with a Slave Harem

Chapter 1785: Proud Girls

Ayame crossed the courtyard to Quinlan’s side with the winter dusk settling gold and violet over the compound, and behind her the [Warp Gate] widened, its shimmer stretching until the doorway stood wide enough for multiple people to pass through at once.

Then the family came home.

"Master!"

Blossom cleared the gate at a dead sprint, ears pinned flat with speed, and crossed thirty meters of courtyard in the time it took Quinlan to open his arms.

She hit his chest hard enough to spin him half a step, burrowed in, and looked up with her tail whipping the air behind her.

"Blossom organized the whole cleanup and counted all the supply crates and didn’t bite a single prisoner even when one of them called Master ugly names!"

"Good girl."

The tail became a blur just as Quinlan mused, "You made quite the scene back there."

The blur stalled, and her ears folded back as she pressed her face harder into his chest.

Screaming a whole wolf lord halfway into the ground, in front of everyone, was not the sort of thing the bubbly dogkin was known for.

"...Blossom was very loud," she mumbled into his tunic.

One hand crept up from the fist it had made in his shirt and found the collar at her throat, closing around it with extreme tenderness.

Blossom didn’t care about a lot of things.

"But the collar..."

Suggesting she gave it up?

That was entirely off limits.

Her thumb moved over the worn leather with far too soft of a touch, and her blue eyes went wet at the edges.

She tipped her head back to look up at him, chin still against his chest, and not a trace of the fury that had made Skarn flinch remained in her face.

"Is Master angry?" Her voice had gone tiny. "Blossom shouted, said mean things about the wolf’s insecurities, cracked the ground, and made a scene at Master’s important meeting in front of everyone."

Her ears sank lower. "Did Blossom make a mistake?"

Quinlan chuckled low in his chest and dipped his head until the tip of his nose brushed hers. "Angry? That was perhaps the most badass thing I’ve ever seen you do."

Then he paused, thinking. There were a lot of moments his electric, void-wielding, far too gorgeous dogkin lover achieved, so it was hard to claim a single moment as clearly above the rest.

He shrugged, settling for: "It’s certainly up there."

The worry left her ears one degree at a time, and then all at once the tail burst back into a blur, fast enough to stir the hem of her clothes.

She surged onto her toes and kissed him, quick and reverent, dropping little presses to his cheek, his chin, the corner of his mouth, each one its own small thank-you and love-you.

He caught her waist to keep them both upright and grinned through it. "A short dogkin girl walked up to the alpha of the entire wolfkin tribe and made him look like a scared little puppy, in front of every soldier he commands."

His grin widened. "The dogkin are going to sing about that for generations. Pups who aren’t even born yet are going to hear about the girl who out-howled the wolf lord."

Blossom, finally done delivering her barrage of needy kisses, hummed and burrowed into the side of his neck, her arms winding around him, her whole weight going trusting and boneless against his front.

"Blossom doesn’t care about such things," she whispered into his skin, her tail still going behind her. Her arms tightened. "But if Master is proud of Blossom, then Blossom is the happiest girl in the whole wide world."

"Hubby~"

Vex arrived at his back rather than his front, and for once she didn’t wrestle anyone for access to his front.

She wound both arms around his waist from behind, pressed her cheek flat between his shoulder blades, and settled in like she meant to be removed surgically or not at all, content to let the dog girl keep the embrace she’d earned.

"Did you see, hubby?" The words came muffled against his spine, thick with pride. "I didn’t demand a single kiss the second I laid eyes on you. I let Blossom have you for as long as she needs. Because I know she deserved it."

She even went as far as to admit: "That was amazing, Blossom."

Quinlan shook his head, amused.

Unlike most of his other girls, Vex had not taken to the harem life quite as gracefully.

The early days had been a war she waged mostly against herself, and she’d lost more of those battles than she’d won, in ways that landed somewhere between pitiful and endearing.

There had been the night she sat down outside his bedroom door and cried her heart out while he was inside with someone else.

Quinlan hadn’t minded her extreme jealousy.

He had never once minded.

He loved yanderes with a burning, uncomplicated passion. The only line he cared about was harem dynamics, and for all the times Vex had teetered right at the edge of causing real emotional problems for her fellow sister-wives with her possessive behavior, she had never once put a foot over the limit.

But clearing his bar for what was ’acceptable yandere behavior’ had never been Vex’s goal.

She’d set her own, and set it far higher.

She wanted to be his perfect wife, the woman who could stand by his side with extreme pride, and such wives did not wail on the doorstep while their husband saw to someone else.

So she’d been working at it, quiet and stubborn, filing down a jealousy that ran bone-deep.

Holding still at his back while he cradled another woman was one of those filings.

It mattered to her. And because it mattered to her, it mattered to him.

He loosened one arm from around Blossom, reached back, and drew Vex around to his side, gathering both girls in against him at once. Then he tipped her chin up and kissed her forehead. "I saw everything. My yandere witch is amazing as well."

Vex was already rising onto her toes to meet it before it landed, chasing the kiss up like she’d been waiting all her life.

"The queen of jealousy behaved like she was a member of a harem made of friends and not enemies to destroy," Aurora observed in passing, then began clapping.

*Clap. Clap. Clap.*

"Is this how mothers feel when their child finally stops pooping their pants?"

"..." Vex’s eyes instantly narrowed into dangerous slits, aimed at a certain platinum haired, grinning girl.

Aurora only offered her a peace sign with her fingers in response.

Kitsara sauntered out next, five tails swaying in lazy arcs. "Stop badmouthing Vexie... I’m really proud of her!"

One tail detached only to form a second Quinlan, who began patting Vex’s white hair.

But a kick to the stomach dispelled the illusion, as Vex scoffed, "Only the real version can touch me. I promised Hubby I’d never let another man lay his hands on me."

"..." The foxkin was speechless for a moment, which spoke volumes about the absurdity of what just left the Hexwitch’s lips.

"That was-"

"Not my Hubby," Vex interjected.

"... No matter how you look at it, no other man was involved. It’s either him or me, a woman..."

"No. How do I know you replicated him down to the very last atom? If a single detail, a single strand of hair is misplaced, then that’s no longer an illusion of my Hubby but a replica of another man."

"What the fuck is wrong with you?" Kitsara asked, then burst into laughter, clutching her stomach. "Never change, you insane bitch," she decreed between breaths.

The rest poured through in a wave, Serika hauling a supply crate on one shoulder and laughing together with Kitsara, Seraphiel and Kaelira deep in conversation, Feng trailing at the rear with her hands shoved in her sleeves.

The courtyard filled with the noise of a family arriving somewhere it belonged.

Then they all stopped to take in the scene at the base of the giant tree, where the Queen of All Elves knelt in the dirt with tears running freely down her face while a small green girl inspected the royal ears held out for her approval.

Beside her queen, the Head Shrine Maiden of the elven faith sat with a dryad’s foot in her lap.

She was massaging it.

"Rosie’s new friends are very talented!" Rosie declared from her throne of elven laps, both arms spread in imperial welcome as the girls approached. "The pretty ladies have earned the right to keep serving!"

"Serving?" Jasmine inquired with far too big of a grin on her lips.

"!!" Rosie was caught. "Rosie meant pampering!"

"Mhm..." Jasmine nodded along.

Myrasyn mouthed the word "friends" to herself like a blessing and Isveth kept massaging while her tears increased in their intensity.

Lucille came through the gate last of the girls, stopped on the cobblestones, and simply breathed for a moment, taking in the pine, the woodsmoke, and the copper vent of the bathhouse trailing steam into the evening air.

"Our home keeps getting louder and louder," she said, but her tone held zero complaint, only firm approval.

The gate rippled again, and a different kind of arrival stepped through.

Scar walked out first, both blades at her back and her pace even, and behind her came the Scarlet Lilies, four women stepping onto foreign ground with careful, unaccustomed footing, mercenaries who had spent their careers arriving everywhere uninvited.

Bronnya made it three steps before her head tilted back, and kept tilting, and kept tilting, until her mouth hung open at the crown of golden light spreading against the first stars.

"That’s... a tree," she managed.

"Are you sure it’s not a bush...?" Void yawned.