Read Novel Full Chapter 1901: Screaming Mountain
Chapter 1901: Screaming Mountain
"I know. I’ll just massacre a couple million dissidents at most. I consider the dwarven people mine already, so I won’t destroy them."
"...Good."
Quinlan moved to the window, thoroughly pleased with the new mission, and collected his second-in-command on the way, one arm scooping Ayame off the window seat and folding her under it like a sack of very expensive potatoes.
"Wha... Quin!" The samurai’s legs kicked once at the indignity. "I can walk!"
"I’m excited."
"And?!"
"I felt like picking you up."
"..." Ayame went still under his arm, chin propped on one hand, ears faintly pink.
She sighed. "Carry on, then."
The window swung shut behind the Primordial Villain, his dangling samurai, and the sound of a governor pretending very hard that her hands weren’t still shaking over the tax rolls.
...
Serika was pouring the last of the moonwine into Kitsara’s cupped hands, the foxkin having lost cup privileges an hour earlier, when Quinlan came up the royal roofline with a samurai folded under one arm.
His boot never finished landing.
A streak of blonde and lightning crossed the entire rooftop between two heartbeats, and Blossom hit his chest with her arms already locked around him, tail going like a war banner.
"Master!"
The rooftop laughed, started composing its usual greetings, and then actually looked at him.
The words died where they stood.
His eyes had gone bright and ominous, lit from somewhere far beneath the warmth he’d carried when it was time to laze around.
Every woman on that roofline had seen those eyes before.
It was time to fight.
The change swept the rooftop in a single breath. Serika set the bottle down, and when she straightened, her eyes were burning emerald and her ponytail had begun its slow molten pulse.
Kitsara’s five tails lifted and sharpened, the drink gone from her face between one blink and the next. Vex spun her pentagrams up bright, and her crimson tattoos woke with them.
Friends who had spent the evening rating nobles now stood the roofline as warrioresses, and the night turned colder around them.
Blossom dropped off his chest to his heel, and Ayame put herself back on her own feet with what dignity remained.
Quinlan tore space open along the roofline, a dimensional seam widening into a gate.
He walked through first, and his family followed him in, one by one, each delicate face wearing the look of a trained killer on the prowl.
The sound arrived before the mountain did.
It came up through their boots the moment they stepped through, tens of thousands of dwarven voices dragging one melody through solid stone until the floor itself sang along.
The royal smithy of the dwarven capital was filled past overflowing, every tier packed, dwarves on the stairs, dwarves on the rails, dwarves standing on cold quench-troughs for the view.
And every last one of them was geared. Mail over work-leathers, axes across backs, war-braids bound in iron rings, hammers resting on shoulders that had swung them since childhood. They sang like drunks and stood like an army.
On a bench in the middle tiers, an elven royal guard in full armor screamed the chorus, sword raised high, having the time of her life.
At the heart of it all, on the great anvil, a helmet was being born.
Brokk struck it with Everwright to the song’s own beat, and the hall sang to her hammer. Every fall of the water-grained head threw sparks the color of a fresh pour.
*CLANG!*
"That’s thirty!" a smith bellowed from the second tier, and the whole tier roared the number back at him.
The rune-script down the haft burned steady, an elf’s hammer drinking a dwarf’s mana and giving it back in the strike.
The gate’s light touched the far wall, and the song stumbled.
For one held breath, the royal smithy stared at the Primordial Villain and the women arrayed behind him.
Then the mountain went berserk.
"THE VILLAIN!"
"Don’t call him that! He’s a master smith!"
"HE CAME! HE ACTUALLY CAME!"
"LORD ELYSIAR STANDS WITH THE MOUNTAIN!"
The name three hundred smiths had refused to speak in this hall now came off every wall of it at once. Hafts hammered shield-rims and boots hammered the tiers. The war song came back twice the size it had died at, rolling over the newcomers in a wall of heat and voices.
On her bench in the middle tiers, the elven royal guard’s sword came down very slowly.
"...Oh," Elowen said. "Oh, no. No, no, I was... I was singing. That was a cultural exchange. That was diplomacy."
Brokk never broke her rhythm.
She struck Everwright down one final time, and the helmet on the anvil went quiet, finished. She lifted it in both hands, pushed her braid back, and set it on her head.
Then the First Hammer of the Royal Smithy looked across her overflowing hall, found Quinlan, and nodded to him, once.
Quinlan nodded back to her.
Everwright went up over her head, and the hall’s thunder cut itself off to hear her.
"SONS AND DAUGHTERS OF THE MOUNTAIN!"
Her voice came off the tiers like a hammer off hot steel.
"Kings wrote our lives in their books! Councilors wrote our deaths! We wrote nothing!" The haft’s runes flared with her grip.
"Tonight, that ends! Tonight we go up, drag every corrupt son of a bitch off his council seat, and murder our way to the mountain’s heart! And when the last of them falls, we build the golden era of the dwarven race with our own hands!"
"AYE!!"
The answer came from tens of thousands of chests at once.
Brokk brought Everwright down on the bare anvil with everything her arm and her titles were worth.
Quinlan’s mana was waiting for it.
It slid beneath the strike, obedient to nothing but his intent, and the gong that should have filled a hall filled the mountain instead.
The note went through the mountain’s bones as though they were air, down into the roots and up through every tier, rattling lamps in their brackets and shivering dust off ceilings a mile away.
In the farthest galleries, dwarves who had never seen the royal smithy felt the First Hammer’s anvil arrive in their chests, and understood.
And just like that, the dwarven rebellion began.
The hall emptied upward, roaring, a river of mail and axes pouring through every gallery mouth toward the lords’ tiers. The first screams came back down the shafts within seconds, and the smell of blood followed them.
Quinlan watched the rushing dwarves from beside the great anvil, and the light coming off his eyes had nothing to do with the forges.
"Oh, how I’ve missed this," Serika said beside him, watching the axes pour past.
Then, in the heart of a war being born, the Primordial Villain called upon a window he hadn’t opened in a long time.
[Name: Quinlan Elysiar]
[Race: Primordial]
[Level: 52 ➣ 58. XP: 138,206,417 / 312,443,203]
[Health Points: 3300 ➣ 3469]
[Mana Points: 3919 ➣ 4200]
[Vitality: 220 ➣ 231]
[Strength: 164 ➣ 183]
[Agility: 174 ➣ 193]
[Magic: 262 ➣ 280]
"It’s time to resume the grind," he said to no one in particular.
"Finally," his girls spoke in perfect sync, drawing their weapons.