Primordial Villain with a Slave Harem

Chapter 1869: Catching Up to the March

The commission’s column had been on the border road since the previous night, and Iris ran at the head of it with the third holding’s books roped between her shoulder blades.

Nobody behind her had eaten anything warm since the dark, and nobody said so out loud, because the young woman leading them hadn’t slowed once and complaining took energy.

The commission’s clerks made it worse by surviving. Three archivists swayed in the middle of the column with crate-files strapped where saddlebags should be, sleeping in shifts. One of them was drafting a second hazard-pay request in his head.

Ahead of them, out past the river flats, mysterious fires had been burning since midnight.

Iris had known that since dawn.

She had been moving at this pace ever since.

Stormlord rode the ranks up and down, and backs straightened wherever he passed. "Water at the next rise," he told the sergeants. "We stop for nothing else."

Near the front, Princess Felicity Valorian sat her horse with her visor up and her chin refusing to admit anything. Her stomach growled with the volume of a modest siege engine. She pretended it was the horse.

Then the air split open in the middle of the column, and a [Warp Gate] bloomed between the supply wagons, breathing warmth into the winter road.

"GATE!"

The column turned into a hedgehog in under three seconds. Spears and swords came down in a bristling ring, horses shied, and two riders threw themselves bodily in front of the princess.

Every soldier on the continent knew what came out of gates like that. Necromancer was the polite version.

Quinlan Elysiar strolled out with Ayame on his arm and surveyed the leveled steel with warm approval, as though the crown had turned out an honor guard for him.

Black Fang came through behind them and was even less bothered by the sharp blades aimed at her.

Then Quinlan looked past the spearpoints at the column behind them, and the approval dropped off his face.

Grey faces looked back at him. The horses had been ridden well past the point where a horse argues about it, and behind them the clerks slept sitting up, with the kingdom’s evidence roped to their backs.

"Quinlan!"

Felicity burst out from between her own bodyguards, shoved a spear aside with a gauntlet, and arrived at a sprint.

"You’re late!"

"Sorry."

"Did you have fun?" she asked, sending a look toward Ayame, having a great many suspicions about what they’d been up to for the past day.

"It was nice seeing Silverwind. Beautiful land."

"Hehe! I bet you did a lot of sightseeing..." She had both gauntlets on his sleeve already. "We left in such a hurry there was no time to stock anything meaningful. Supply lines are trying to catch up."

The look she sent down the column landed on exactly one person.

Iris came back down the line at a run and stopped hard in front of him.

"You’re stalling the march."

"They look like they could use a breather." Quinlan hadn’t stopped looking at her soldiers. "How long have they been up?"

"Since we left."

"How far to the next destination?"

"They’ll make it. They’re professionals."

Many flinched at that.

"Hmm." Quinlan grinned, liking how this unhinged baddie was making career soldiers weep silently. "Then let me make it faster."

Quinlan rolled his wrist once, and the road went to work.

Wagons full of files went first.

Then the road itself. Frozen ruts a hand deep sank flat ahead of the wheels, stone knitting where the ice had chewed it open. This let the horses and infantry boots stop fighting the ground.

A wrongness folded open beside the supply train, and Void arrived out of it with her eyes shut, in exactly the posture she had been sleeping in a moment earlier.

"Welcome back..." she murmured, smiling softly.

She lifted one hand at the rearmost wagon without opening her eyes. The wagon left the road, arrived a hundred paces up it, and kept rolling as though nothing at all had happened to it.

And just like that, the Void Mage and the Primordial Villain began hauling the heavy vehicles, drastically increasing march speed.

Iris watched the road unbuild itself in front of her army as she ran, and the thing she had been carrying since the dawn report came loose by a fraction.

"...Thank you..." she whispered under her breath.

Quinlan refused to accept the gratitude, merely grinning back at her, making Iris avert her gaze.

Felicity beamed at the pair of them from Quinlan’s elbow, delighted beyond all reason, both gauntlets still on his sleeve.

Stormlord took one look at a road with nothing wrong with it and gave the only order it left him.

"Column! Double time!"

The groan that went up ran the entire length of the formation.

"He fixed the road," a corporal said, and heard his own funeral in it. "Why did he fix the road?"

"So we can run on it faster," said the man beside him.

"He’s truly a villain!"

"The Villain!!"

Down the ranks the verdict assembled itself out of forty separate complaints, and it was unanimous.

They had been warned about this man for nearly a year now. And the first thing he had done on meeting them was take away every excuse they had to walk.

"That’s how he does it." A sergeant wheezed it between strides. "He improves your conditions... until you die of them."

Quinlan flew at the head of a column that was now openly calling him a slaver, and looked entirely at peace with the assessment.

"Your soldiers are slow," he told Felicity.

’Die, Villain!!’ many screamed inwardly.

"They’re trying their best!" Felicity chirped.

’We are, princess!!’

"Is that so...? Then let me help them. [Awaken]."

He said it without ceremony.

The winter road opened along both flanks, and the dead climbed out of it.

They rose in the colors they had died in, ring mail scoured and surcoats whole, wearing faces the living had last seen going into the ground. Then they fell in beside the column at a dead run and started picking people up.

A soldier in the third rank was scooped off his own feet by an arm around his ribs, and made a sound no grown man wants recorded.

"PUT ME DOWN YOU FOUL-!"

"No. You’re too slow."

"Marlen?!"

"Aye."

Petyr hung over a dead man’s shoulder at a full run, staring at the back of a head he had helped burn a kit for. "You were on the wall! I helped burn your kit!"

"Good kit, too." Marlen didn’t break stride. "You still owe me four silver."

"You’re DEAD and you’re still on about the four silver?!"

"Money is money."

It happened the whole length of the column at once. Men who had been two miles from falling over were being carried by men and women they had buried, and the shouting that went up had very little to do with fear.

"Does it hurt?" It came quiet off a dead man’s back, with no mockery anywhere in it. "Being... what you are now?"

The soul carrying him considered the question at a run.

"I hated the cold," he said. "Haven’t been cold since."

"He killed you," the living man said, careful.

"Aye." The dead man shifted his grip so the living one wouldn’t slide. "I’ve had worse commanders."

Behind them, the sergeant who had explained the improvement of conditions was riding up a rise on the back of a lancer he had drunk with for six hundred years, and had revised his position.

’He’s an angel!’

Iris ran at Quinlan’s shoulder with the ledgers thumping against her back and told him what was in them.

"Every road in this county pays twice," she said. "Once to the crown, on a schedule that’s written down. Once to the count, on a schedule that isn’t."

"How far back?"

"Oldest book I’ve got is thirty years, and it’s on every page of it." She jabbed a thumb back at the books strapped between her shoulders. "Three holdings, three sets of books, same second toll. The books don’t say whose it is. The keepers do, once you sit them down properly."

"He’s got an entire machine running."

"Yes."

Silence returned, the two of them looking at each other for a long moment. Then...

"Look at you~"