Primordial Villain with a Slave Harem

Chapter 1847: Cowardly Man

Her student. Her first student, the panicky boy who had needed her help just to keep a steel spear pointed in the correct direction, currently reading her fastest work on nothing but the base she had given him and whatever monstrous thing he had grown on top of it.

Heirs and retainers and prodigies had been drilled on this floor for time immemorial. Not one of their teachers had ever handed a primordial his first guard. The pride sat in her chest wide, hot, and thoroughly inconvenient, and she had no intention of letting him see a single gram of it.

She swallowed the whole thing behind a circling step and a lowered blade.

"Your base is still honest," she noted. "Who taught you that, I wonder?"

"Some cocky brat who needs a good spanking."

"Wrong answer. It was a peerless visionary. A saintess~"

Quinlan wanted to respond, but his brain was overwhelmed. She said his body was unfair, but Quinlan felt hers was a much greater weapon. At least against him.

She was plain breathtaking.

Sweat had come up on her by now, and the crimson mark rode low on her belly through every rotation. He watched it a beat too long.

"That mark is far too perfect. I should become an artist."

Sweat ran the line of her spine and disappeared, her thighs flexed through every cut she committed to, and the firelight made thorough use of all of it. He watched openly, the way he’d promised himself he would the day she first told him her terms.

"Perish the mere thought before you get even more cocky. The physique made it, not you. You were merely the ink, not the artist, and the ink does not get to sign the piece. Second... Eyes up, pervert~" She read the audit mid-exchange and punished it, cracking the outside of his knee.

"No."

"So be it. Watch all you want while I claim victory~"

She wasn’t wrong. On any scorecard the duel belonged to her, and it was not close. His body wore her penmanship across ribs, shoulder, forearm, thigh, while she had taken exactly one hit in return, a flat parry-slap against her hip that she had allowed just to feel its weight.

The problem, she was discovering, was what the scorecard refused to measure.

*THWACK!*

A cut that should have folded a level seventy at the knee landed flush across his back, and he simply walked through it, into the pain, the way other people walked into rain, and her follow-up had to abort into a backflip because his free hand had come within a finger’s width of closing around her wrist.

The backflip was the most beautiful thing that hall had witnessed in its entire existence, and it was also thoroughly obscene.

She went up and over with her legs opening through the arc, and for one long moment the dawn dojo held everything a duel had no business involving upside down in its air. All of it turned past him at a range he could have licked.

Quinlan did not look away. Neither did his hand, which had come half a finger from her wrist and appeared to have developed an agenda of its own.

She landed three body-lengths away and stared at him, breath coming ragged.

"...You were not watching my blade."

"The terms of this duel seriously impede my ability to focus."

"You are in the middle of a sacred battle!"

"Yes," he said. "And you’re flashing your pussy."

"Shameless!" She pointed the ironwood at him like an indictment, ears burning, and then had to use it immediately, because he had closed another step while she was busy being scandalized. "What," she demanded, "is your body even made of?"

"The overwhelming desire to teach a cocky brat a lesson."

"..." Competitive fire blazed up across her face. She flowed forward again, and this time the cuts came in from three angles that had no right to be available from a standing start.

*THWACK! CRACK!*

Both landed, painting bruises a hand could cover across his ribs and his upper arm, and neither of them stopped his foot from coming down half a step nearer than it had been. Ayame’s next breath went in wrong.

The gap between their swordsmanship stretched wide as a canyon. It was not enough. The first cold thread of understanding began winding its way up through her spine, chased immediately by a heat she refused to look at directly.

The warmth made her curious.

She gave him an opening. An engineered one: she let a spin carry her a quarter-turn too far and left her bare ass facing him at perfect striking distance, the kind of target she was sure he’d jump at.

She waited.

His ironwood came up, read the target, and went somewhere else entirely. He parried her next cut instead, clean and professional, as if the most inviting target on the continent had not just been offered to him gift-wrapped.

Ayame pulled up short, blade lowering an inch, genuinely offended.

"That was a clean opening." Her chin came up, blue and mutinous. "Strike my butt, coward. It’s a legal target."

"No."

"No?!"

"The only thing hurting your butt tonight will be my palm. This blade doesn’t deserve the privilege."

The words crossed the space between them, calm as a signed decree, and Ayame’s entire body forgot, for one warm and catastrophic second, that it was in a duel.

She recovered behind a scowl. "Indecisive pervert. You’ll lose because of that, you arrogant, overgrown..."

Her mouth kept issuing complaints. Deep underneath them, in a place she would have died before showing him mid-duel, something purred.

"The nerve. The nerve!"

"You’re grinning," he observed.

"I am baring my teeth. It’s a war expression." She spun her blade once, and the humor dropped off her stance like the robe had dropped off her shoulders. "Fine. Since you insist on being taught the hard way."

She stopped holding back.

What came next, no scroll in the clan’s archive had a name for. She used the whole hall, the pillars, the racks, the veranda’s edge, one lacquered beam that had done nothing to deserve it.

She fought in three dimensions the way only a woman with her stat sheet and innate talent could, cuts raining out of angles that required her body to be somewhere no body should be, her feet touching wood for half-heartbeats before the next launch.

Moonlight from the windows struck her, lost her, and found her again, and delivered the full report every time.

*SMACK!*

"Hah!"

Off the second pillar with both feet, ass tight, thighs snapping her through a rotation the human hip had not been zoned for, and down onto him from above.

*CRACK! CRACK! CRACK!*

Three hits in one pass, marks stacking over marks, and the pillar she had kicked off wore the print of her heel pressed a knuckle deep into the lacquer. Quinlan’s counters closed on empty air a full breath behind her.

But he was still advancing.

Every cut she paid out, he bought position with, eating a strike that would hospitalize a champion in exchange for one half-step of closed distance, spending pain like a currency nobody had ever thought to ration him.

"Gh." The sound came out of him low, almost appreciative, and his foot came down half a step closer.

It was ugly to watch.