Primordial Villain with a Slave Harem

Chapter 1893: Pile Rights

Somewhere above the world, in patient ink, her class had already written it: the Villain and his justicar.

A road that did not end at the top of any ladder, because it did not end at all.

The emptiness was still there. But it had stopped being a wall and become room.

Room for the work, for the creed, and, apparently, for this pack of lunatics currently pretending they weren’t all watching her cry.

Iris scoffed, wet and unconvincing, and looked away from all of them. "Take your hand off. I’m not a pet."

The hand stayed.

She did not move to remove it.

Her eyes were streaming freely now, and the smile had gotten past every guard she owned. She stood there scowling through both, a demon of vengeance leaking in front of the entire peerage of Vraven, radiantly, furiously happy.

"Iris!"

Armored weight hit her from the side.

Queen Felicity Valorian, crown clutched in one arm, had abandoned every shred of royal dignity and closed the distance at a sprint. Her hug arrived with the full sincerity of fourteen years and half a suit of plate.

"I’m so happy for you!" she wailed into Iris’s shoulder, crying instantly, completely, without any negotiation at all. "You did it, you finally did it!"

"Gh... I just fought a level 74 enemy. All of you should take a step back and give me some damned room-"

"Pile rights!" Kitsara announced.

"Wait!" said Iris.

They did not wait.

Blossom hit her first, then Feng, and then the rest of the family arrived as one warm landslide, and the Demon of Vengeance, Keeper of Eternal Suffering, Scourge of the Vile, vanished under a shrieking pile of the most powerful women on the continent in front of six hundred members of the peerage.

"Get off- you’re all fat as fuck- what do you bitches eat?!"

They didn’t listen.

"Ah. I dropped the crown!" the queen of Vraven said, from inside the pile.

"Wait, let me try it on~" Kitsara purred.

"Nooo... You shouldn’t...!"

"It looks good on you~" Seraphiel giggled.

"You try it too!"

"Sure!"

"Me next!" Aurora laughed.

While the girls passed the royal crown around, Iris hissed, yelped, and swore in language that made three heralds write formal complaints, and the pile only squeezed tighter. Her tears would not stop.

But she started to smile as well.

Her domain’s thirty-nine coals went on burning in her chest, under the only thing that had ever been waiting on the other side of vengeance.

Family. It had been down here the whole time.

Off to the side of the pile, precisely one step too far away to be included and one step too close to be uninvolved, stood Black Fang.

She exchanged a dry look with Quinlan, who winked at her.

"Feel free to jump in."

The Venomborne Terror pointedly decided that he no longer existed.

...

It took a while for the pile to release its prisoner.

When it finally came apart, laughing and disheveled, one armored figure extracted herself from the middle of it, stood, and spent a solemn moment straightening a crown that she managed to get back after valiant, royal effort.

Then Queen Felicity Valorian looked across the hall at her father.

Alexios Valorian, former king of Vraven, had drifted back up the dais during the commotion and settled onto the high throne out of pure habit, the sword of state gathered back across his knees, watching his daughter’s happiness from the most comfortable seat in the room.

Felicity marched to the foot of the dais.

She put her fists on her armored hips, tilted her head back to aim her entire fourteen years up at him, and addressed the most feared warrior-king in human history in the voice of a girl finding her brother in her room.

"Um. Excuse me? That’s my chair."

Alexios looked down at her.

"...So it is," he said.

"If you’re abdicating, then abdicate! Up, up!" She actually shooed him, with both gauntlets.

The old king rose from the throne of Vraven with the gravity of mountains, stepped aside, and gestured her past. The corner of his mouth had surrendered.

The hall watched their new queen climb the dais.

She turned. She arranged herself. She sat, very straight, in a throne that could have seated three of her, her sabatons swinging clear of the floor.

Then she gripped the armrests and lifted her chin high, with all the majesty available to somebody holding her crown out of her eyes through willpower alone.

Theater ran in that family, whatever else did. The hall went acutely, perfectly silent.

"Hear the crown," said Queen Felicity Valorian.

Six hundred nobles held their breath. The first decree of a reign was history, always. Chroniclers three kingdoms away would copy this sentence for centuries.

The queen of Vraven raised one gauntleted finger and pointed it at the old man standing beside the throne.

"Alexios Valorian." Her voice rang clear off the far doors. "For three whole years you schemed, and lied, and cheated, and tricked basically everybody, all so that you would never, ever have to leave me alone."

Her voice wobbled, and she stomped it flat, and kept going.

"So. By royal decree, the first of my reign: you are forbidden, from this day until the end of time, from calling yourself a terrible father. It is now illegal. I’ll toss you in jail if you ever dare to utter that word ever again on yourself."

She sniffed, regally.

"As your queen, I demand it. As your daughter... I command it."

The great hall of Vraven stood in profound, scandalized, melting silence.

Somewhere in the middle rows, a hardened old countess pressed a handkerchief to her eyes with both hands. The Mediator, tucked discreetly near a pillar while sweating his balls off, wondered how he found himself inside the royal throne room. He beamed into his beard.

Alexios Valorian stood beside the throne he had held for long centuries and looked up at the young queen occupying it. For a moment the whole hall could see every one of those years on him, and none of them weighed anything at all.

Then the old king bowed his head to his daughter.

"...Yes, Your Majesty."

"Hmph." The queen crossed her arms, scarlet-eared. "Good."

The hall did not know whether to cheer or weep, and audibly attempted both.

And then, while the sound was still finding its shape, the queen of Vraven turned her head, and her gaze went across the great hall, past the peers, past the banners, to the man standing beside a red-eyed woman at the center of the floor.

The noise died on its own.

Felicity smirked.

Then the queen of Vraven rose from her throne, and walked.

One step.

Two steps.

Down the dais she came, holding her crown steady with one hand, every trace of the flustered girl folded away, and the hall parted in front of her. Nobles dropped as she passed, rank after rank, velvet going down like wheat.

"Quinlan." Her voice was clear and young, and it reached every corner of the seat of the nation. "My first decree had to be spent on disciplining my unruly father."

She crossed the last of the floor and stopped in front of the Primordial Villain, looking up.

Queen Felicity Valorian, sovereign of Vraven, lifted the great crown from her head, held it out before her in both gauntlets, and knelt.

"But my first act as queen of Vraven... is to ask for vassalage."