Primordial Villain with a Slave Harem

Chapter 1787: Serenity Under The Moonlight

Black Fang had chosen the room herself.

Third floor, at the top of the last staircase.

The wide hall with the tall windows that nobody in the household had ever found a use for, meant for events never thrown as they were far too busy, furnished with chairs that collected dust until tonight.

She had cleared it down to bare floor, and the two blocks of ice stood alone in the center with the frozen faces of the last Fujimori elders staring out of them.

Quinlan reached the top of the stairs first and stopped.

’Damn...’

Moonlight fell through the tall windows and pooled silver across the floorboards and the ice. Rosie’s otherworldly, fairy tale-like tree’s crown pulsed its slow gold beyond the glass, and the frozen elders stood at the center of it all as if the room had been built around them.

’This woman... Why is she always so mesmerizing?’

On the sill of the farthest window, one boot drawn up and the other hanging into the dark, Black Fang sat watching the sky. Winter stars burned sharp and close above the treeline, and the light traced the line of her profile, the violet eyes at rest, the serpent tattoos asleep along her arms.

"Why drag them all the way up here? There’s room next to the other lovely guests we house..." Quinlan mused. "Could’ve just put them in there."

Black Fang kept her gaze on the beautiful moonlight for a long second, silent. Then her eyes left the sky for the first time and found his. They carried a strange, muted light.

"So that I can wait in the basement for hours while you show off?"

Quinlan smirked instantly at that.

Her gaze held his amused eyes a beat longer, and then the edge left as she returned to watching the stars. "No."

One by one, the rest filed in behind him and went quiet without being asked. Even Elisabeth, arriving mid-complaint about seating an abomination indoors, lost the sentence somewhere on the threshold.

Isveth stopped dead beside her queen. "..." Her hand found Myrasyn’s sleeve, and the two elves stared at the woman in the window with an expression usually reserved for shrines.

Kaede sat small in the far corner between her two escorts, her hands slack in her lap, watching the floor.

Quinlan looked at the mesmerizing assassin a moment longer, at the extreme serenity she wore without effort, and then he turned to the two monuments in the moonlight and flicked two fingers.

The frost sheeted off Chizuru’s block and shattered across the floorboards.

"..." Chizuru blinked ice water out of her eyes.

She took in the moonlight, the ring of watching faces, the window full of stars, the villain standing before her with his hands calmly at his sides, and the last echo of her own defiance hanging in a room that had no audience to perform it for.

"Welcome back," Lucille greeted pleasantly.

"..." The fire went out of the elder’s face the way it had in the arena, all at once and from the center, and what remained was a grey, flat emptiness.

Quinlan flicked his fingers again, and the second block cracked open.

The eldest of the Fujimori elders drew one long breath through his nose and straightened his spine as the ice fell away from him, with a slow dignity that his soaked robes did their best to undermine. His gaze passed over the villain and the king as if they were furniture, caught on the broken heir in the corner, and his lip curled a fraction.

Then his eyes settled on Chizuru, and they held less mercy than the ice he’d just left.

"You gave them everything?!"

"We lost..." Chizuru said to the floor.

"Silence is always an option!"

"Silence." Chizuru laughed once, a dry, terrible little sound with no humor in it. "You think they will let me remain silent?"

Hozumi turned to the wall instead of answering, and the two last elders of the Fujimori stood in a puddle of their own melting prison while the space between them did the talking.

"For what it’s worth, she did not give us everything," Quinlan told the elder as he pulled a chair from the wall with a current of wind, turned it backward, and sat down astride it with his arms folded across the backrest, comfortable as a man settling in for a card game.

"So let us resume," he said, his gaze on Chizuru. "The arena heard what your clan did. Tonight I want the why. Elvardia’s war first. Why did you join them?"

"The clan does not answer to its captors!" Hozumi hissed. "Chizuru, don’t you dare say another word."

"I see." Quinlan raised one finger, and ice began climbing back up Hozumi’s body, slow and measured, crystalline sheets sealing around his shins, his waist, his chest. Then the casing swelled outward, thickening, the walls expanding until a gap opened between frost and skin.

"Thankfully, I only need one of you."

Veins of magma bled through the ice from the outside, glowing orange threads that burrowed through the frozen walls and met the water pooling within, and the temperature inside the casing climbed past scalding in seconds.

Despite being a level 74 powerhouse with a Vitality high enough to shrug off what would desecrate a normal human body...

"W-what is this?! STOP!" Hozumi’s composure shattered as steam erupted against the inner walls and his robes fused to blistering skin.

Where a vein of magma ran too close to the surface, the flesh peeled back in thin wet strips that curled away into clouded water, and his hands clawed uselessly at ice that rebuilt from the outside faster than the heat could eat it from within.

Quinlan’s ability to wreak havoc went far beyond what a ’normal human body’ could take.

Now, he was powerful enough to cause agonizing pain even for the continent’s apex beings.

"CHIZURU!" Hozumi’s voice cracked, half drowned. "Fujimori honor is EVERYTHING! You will NOT speak willingly to these-"

The ice sealed over his mouth.

His muffled screaming carried on behind the frost, thin and wretched, and the casing shuddered with every thrash while the orange glow of the magma pulsed through the ice in slow, steady rhythms, turning the elder’s prison into a furnace with a window.

Quinlan hadn’t moved from his chair for a single moment throughout this brutal display of cruelty. His chin rested on his folded arms, and nothing in his expression had changed since he spoke his question to Chizuru, his eyes remaining on the female elder.

Elisabeth stared at the man she had apologized to, and the expression on her face was far too difficult to read.

She turned away.

In the seconds that followed, accompanied by thrashing inside a magma-filled ice casing lacking in oxygen, everyone in the room understood why the children had been sent away.

Quinlan, despite his calm exterior, was carrying immense anger toward these human garbage. He had no intention of playing nice.

As for why they were still not [Subjugated]?

Simply because Hozumi was Alexios’s prey while Chizuru was Black Fang’s.

There was a creed among sadistic torturers such as them...

Though he had no reservations about enslaving either elder should they refuse to comply.