Primordial Villain with a Slave Harem

Chapter 1846: Sacred Duel Under the Moonlight

"Ah, I’m forgetting myself," Ayame realized with a gasp, then sent Quinlan a devastating little glare over her shoulder, as if it was his fault she forgot the procedure.

"First..." she opened the sacred duel with a bow to her opponent, and the brat vanished into it.

It was the single most serious gesture Quinlan had ever received from her.

She bowed low and complete, naked in the brazier light, honoring him the way the rite demanded an opponent be honored. Then she straightened, turned to the open hall around them, and bowed again, to the ancestors whose floor they stood on.

"Fujimori Ayame petitions her ancestors to witness." Parade-even, every syllable in dress uniform. "A sacred duel, under terms sworn almost a year ago. The loser submits to the winner. The verdict of this floor is truth."

She settled into her stance, and the ceremony burned off her like morning mist.

"And in case mister primordial has forgotten," she added, leveling the ironwood at him, "we agreed on pure swordsmanship, meaning we will cast no magic, use no items, or employ any other tricks. Just us and the blade."

"I know," Quinlan nodded with a confident smile.

"Good~"

He answered the bow with one of his own, his eyes never leaving her, and brought his blade up in the guard she had drilled into him a lifetime of levels ago.

"I’m ready."

For three full heartbeats, nobody moved. Snow ticked against the veranda. The brazier popped once.

Then Ayame vanished out of her stance, and the dawn dojo learned what its floor had been saving itself for.

*CRACK!*

Ironwood met ironwood at the height of his throat, and the impact rang through the racks along the walls. He caught the second cut coming off the first, barely, and the third arrived from a direction the second had sworn was empty. He gave ground, once, twice, wood cracking against wood in bursts, and she flowed after him across the floor like water poured downhill.

"Hoh." The corner of his mouth went up behind his guard. "You’ve become truly fast."

"Flattery won’t help you now~"

She was everywhere. She fought the way calligraphy looked, every line finished, every stroke already the start of the next one, and her bare feet made no sound at all on her ancestors’ floor. She spun inside his reach, cracked the ironwood across his ribs, and was gone before his counter finished forming, hair combs flashing in the firelight.

The spin also showed him the whole line of her back, the tuck of her waist, and the flex of her bare ass as it drove the pivot, and his next block arrived a hair late for reasons that had nothing whatsoever to do with her footwork.

"Focus, my hopeless student~"

"I am. Extremely."

"On the duel, or my body?"

"Yes."

"Hehe~"

*Clack.* *Clack.* *CRACK!*

He blocked what he could see. The problem was the rest of it.

’She’s gotten better again,’ he noted, tracking her through a feint that split into two real cuts. He had watched her fight since the days her sword was the only thing standing between a level-one primordial and the labyrinth’s trashiest mobs, and he had believed, more than once, that he knew what to expect from her.

But the woman carving arcs around him refused to be understood. Every level of her grind, every stance her father’s dojo had planted in her, every hour of quiet training with her blade, all of it had been distilled into instinct that no longer resembled effort.

This was a prodigy at full bloom, and she was toying with the most feared being on the continent, on her own sacred floor, wearing nothing but moonlight.

"My first companion," he grinned behind his guard, straining. "You somehow kept pace with a primordial’s growth from level 1. I’m amazed."

The pride that came up under the words was enormous, warm, and completely useless as a defense.

"!!" Ayame’s eyes went wide. Her lips pressed together and went wavy at the corners, and the happiness that broke through had no business on a dueling floor.

She buried it under the next swing before it could settle.

"That’s only natural!"

*Thwack!*

Her perky tits bounced with the follow-through, and the waver in her lip had been stamped out by pride before it finished forming. "I’m going to become the greatest wielder of the blade in the whole damned universe!"

She circled him, cutting, each stroke throwing the firelight across her body in ways the ancestors had never been consulted about.

"Have you forgotten the ambition I told you about when we met?"

*Clack!* He caught it. *Clack!* He caught that one too, barely, and the grin on his face had gone past entertainment into something feral. He was bruised across half his body by now, his arms burned from holding a guard no one else on this continent could have held, and he was having the time of his life.

"I have forgotten nothing. But your ambitions have shifted, my beloved samurai. ’I want to become the greatest swordmaster in the world, not a housewife hiding behind her husband’s back,’ was what you told me back then. The ’whole damned universe’ is new. What happened?"

"You made me realize my ambitions were lacking!"

"Good," Quinlan smiled, and decreed in far too confident a tone while staring right into her gorgeous crystal blue eyes, "Together, we shall become supreme."

Ayame’s grin went incandescent, and what came next was not something a man forgets.

*CRACK!*

The flat of her blade caught him across the shoulder and hurt, a hot, deep, professional welt that a lesser man’s bones would have filed a complaint under. Quinlan considered the red stripe coming up on his skin with genuine interest.

"Stings."

"It’s supposed to do more than that, actually." Ayame landed out of her spin, delighted, chest heaving with the first honest flush of exertion. "Those blades train warriors who crack boulders. Many serious injuries were caused by them. You’ve just become too sturdy."

"That’s what having a harem of a dozen needy babes does to a man."

"I knew you’d say that!" she laughed and came at him again, and now the hall filled with the sound of it, wood cracking in flurries, her sharp exhales riding each cut, his grunts when one got through.

*THWACK!* Forearm. *SMACK!* Thigh.

"Hn."

"Two," Ayame reported, delighted with herself.

The third she aimed at his hip, and it never landed, because the ironwood was already in the way, crude and exactly on time. He decided where the blade needed to be and put it there half a heartbeat before she needed it not to be, and the impact walked her arms back into her shoulders.

Her eyes widened a fraction.

"Hmm~?"

She reset, circled, and ran the same opening from the mirrored side. He answered it the same way. She tried it a third time with a feint buried in the middle, and he ate the feint and answered the real cut anyway.

"Tch." Her lower lip pushed out.

By then he was catching one in four, then one in three, adapting the way he adapted to everything, in the middle of it, without commentary. The guard she had once drilled into a level-one boy in a tunnel was holding together on her ancestors’ floor far past the point where any other guard on this continent would have collapsed into kindling.

And that, Ayame discovered, was doing something to her.