Primordial Villain with a Slave Harem

Chapter 1903: Anchor Stones

"LORD ELYSIAR IS WITH THE DWARVEN REBELLION!"

The Primordial Villain climbed the processional stair of the dwarven capital one step at a time, and the mountain rearranged itself around his mood.

A hundred crossbow bolts dove at him from the balconies. A crosswind swatted the entire volley sideways into the shaft. Then the balconies themselves leaned outward, politely, like servants pouring wine, and emptied their crossbow lines off into the dark after it.

The screaming on the terrace changed register.

"The stone threw them off! The stone itself!"

"The mountain’s helping him! The mountain wants us dead!"

"Hold the line! HOLD, DAMN YOU!"

A sergeant with a two-handed maul broke ranks and charged down the stair, bellowing his clan at the thing in dark armor. "KORVASH! CLAN KORVASH FIGHTS TO THE END!"

Frost took him mid-swing. The Primordial Villain walked past without turning his head, and the statue stayed exactly where its courage had carried it, maul raised forever.

The soldiers nearest the new statue stopped fighting to stare at it. One of them, a veteran with twenty border clashes in his beard, put down his axe and sat on the steps, done with the entire fight already.

Along the terrace’s flank, the garrison’s sally-doors glowed orange at the hinges and slumped shut, welding the reserve companies into their own barracks. Fists hammered the cooling metal from inside, and the hammering turned to howling.

Lightning entered the front rank of the eastern shield-wall through their tower shields and left through the back rank’s boots. Two hundred soldiers dropped where they stood with smoke crawling off their pauldrons, and the smell of cooked meat rolled across the terrace.

"That’s no man!" someone wailed from the collapsing line. "RUN! RUN!"

"Trials. Coronations. Signatures." The man in dark armor rolled his neck as he climbed, red eyes shining. "I almost forgot what pure joy feels like."

This was war again, honest war, with nobody in front of him worth sparing.

He was humming.

"Monster!" dwarves screamed and wailed as he approached them at his own pace.

The Villain’s family spread across the terrace behind him, each woman picking her hunting ground on sight.

"Everyone!" Kitsara’s voice sang over the battlefield from a balcony rail, twin daggers already dark with poison. "This noble lady proposes a game! We’ll count our kills until the mountain runs out of idiots! Loser draws the winner’s bath for a week~!"

"Deal!" answered the deadliest women alive, from every corner of the terrace at once.

The household soldiers who heard the exchange needed a heartbeat to understand that these delicate-looking, tall women were dividing up their deaths like party favors.

Serika helped them understand.

She landed on the western shield-wall fist-first, and the wall stopped being one. Solar force erupted from the impact and folded the formation against the terrace wall in a single wave of heat. "[Solar Eruption]!" arrived a heartbeat late, announced mostly for fun.

"Nine!" Kitsara sang from her rail, while a second Kitsara waved cheerfully from the opposite one. The crossbowmen caught between the two smiles swung their weapons from one to the other with shaking hands, unable to tell which of them was death.

"Eight," Vex corrected from inside a crumbling crossbow line. Her pentagram eyes tracked a soldier crawling for the stairwell, and her hex closed around his heart like a fist. "The one by the brazier was mine. My hex reached his heart before your blade did."

"Finders keepers~"

"Split him," Aurora offered. She was walking the stair’s edge below, staff in hand and untouched, [Dreamveil] running like a second skin over the rebel wounded being dragged clear. Every bolt aimed at the wounded sparked off thin air and quit.

"Split?!" both women scoffed together, equally offended.

"Since when do you make the rules?!" Kitsara demanded.

"...Behave, foxy."

"Or?"

"Or I’ll add frog slime to your potions."

"On second thought, splitting sounds good!"

Blossom flickered out of a collapsing doorway, claw gauntlets crackling, blonde tail wagging over the wreckage of an entire squad. "Blossom has eleven! Blossom is winning!"

"Good girl," Quinlan called without looking.

The tail nearly achieved flight.

On the west edge, Lucille strolled through the wreckage of Serika’s shield-wall with her axe resting on one shoulder, magma dripping off its edge, glowing footholds hardening under her boots with every step. The survivors scrambled backward from her on their elbows.

"Sweethearts," she offered them kindly, "drop the crossbows and kneel. You don’t have to die today. A wonderful tomorrow awaits you."

The mom-voice rolled across a terrace of dwarves, warmer than any hearth, and it frightened the survivors worse than the lightning had. Veterans of the household companies knelt in the gore with shaking shoulders, and one of them wept outright.

The crossbows hit the floor before she finished the sentence.

"Wonderful~ Do surrenders score?"

"Yes," said Aurora.

"Yay!" The terrible Bloodmonger beamed like a schoolgirl.

"She’s smiling," a kneeling veteran whispered, unable to look away from her. "Stone save us, why is she smiling...?"

Ayame stayed a pace off Quinlan’s shoulder, unhurried, and a water crescent followed her cutting line through three spearmen who had made the mistake of grouping up. She flicked her blade clean and glanced at her man.

"Not counting, Quin?"

"I’ll let you girls have the fun." The grin came through in his voice. "Wouldn’t want to ruin the competition."

"Tch."

Serika vaulted a barricade, spun a heel-kick through a helmet, and let herself watch her student for the length of one breath.

Across the terrace, Quinlan was strolling uphill through an army. The magma tide had grown as wide as the stair itself, and entire formations dissolved at the sight of his approach. Stone moved before his eyes did. Fire answered his bare intent.

He could still fight with every scrap of the economy she’d drilled into him back in Vulkaris, and he was sharper at it now than he had ever been under her. He just saw no reason to. Tonight, he was letting all of it loose.

He was pure terror itself.

Pride filled the Solar Fist’s chest, fierce and simple, the teacher’s kind.

"Hey, Lucille!" Serika put a straggler down with a lazy backhand and called across the wreckage. "Remember what I said on the roof? That my student got greedy?"

"I remember the bottle in your hand~" Lucille called back, herding her kneeling prisoners into a neater row.

"I’m taking it back." Serika watched the far sally-doors sag into slag, grinning wide and bright. "Greedy doesn’t cover that anymore. I taught a martial artist. That over there is a walking natural calamity no soul on Iskaris can hope to contain any longer."

"Mm." Ayame’s voice arrived from their man’s flank, deeply fond. "Our terrible calamity~"

"Damn right!" Serika laughed and waded back in.

...

The processional stair ended at the lords’ tiers, and Quinlan Elysiar climbed its last stretch alone.

Behind him, the terrace wound down into mop-up and arbitration.

"The chute ones count double!"

"Denied."

Tens of thousands of household soldiers had stopped existing as an army in under half an hour, and his girls’ voices chased each other across the wreckage like it was a festival ground.

Ahead of him, rune-light burned steady along the lintel of the first warded arch.

Quinlan felt it one step before the threshold.

The mountain’s attention thinned under his intent, and the tide of molten rock that had climbed a mile of stair beside him reached the arch and died against it. A thousand tons of magma simply stopped being anywhere.

He stopped walking.

Past the archway, the corridor beyond stood open and inviting, clear all the way to the next landing. The old anchor-stones glowed in the lintel above a threshold that had just eaten a magma flow the size of a river.

He flicked two fingers. An ice spear formed off his knuckles and went through the arch.

The spear crossed the threshold without slowing, and then it was gone, unmade mid-flight in total silence. The mana holding it together had been drunk out of the air, and the floor beneath stayed clean.

"Neat." Quinlan considered the empty stretch of corridor where the spear should have landed.

Wind next. The gale forgot itself at the lintel. A whip of lightning made it one hand’s width past the line and unraveled.

’Hoh?’

A coil of wind lifted the nearest corpse off the stair and hurled it at the archway. The wind died at the line, but the body kept flying on its own momentum, cleared the threshold, and rolled twice down the corridor beyond, entirely unbothered.

Flesh and steel passed where mana could not.

"Interesting," Quinlan hummed, thoroughly entertained now. "[Awaken]."

Pale flame stood up out of the stones beside him and cooled into a dwarf commander he’d just slain.

"Master." The voice came from somewhere deeper than the dead chest, gravel over old coals.

"Explain this barrier to me."

"That is a null-lattice of the lords’ tiers. The anchor-stones drink all mana within their bounds."

The dead commander’s gaze rested on the rune-light, and reverence entered the gravel.

"Within their threshold, no spell survives. What lives in flesh and forged steel keeps its nature. A mage becomes a man in there."

"Any way to disable them from the outside?"

"Not that I know of. Only from the inside."

Quinlan nodded. "Understood."

Boots came up the last of the stair behind him. His girls had left the scorekeeping to itself the moment the arch brought their man to a halt.

A wry glint appeared in his crimson eyes. "They thought I’m just a mage, huh?"

"A one-trick pony!" Kitsara giggled.

"Well, you’ve not given them much of a reason to doubt~" Lucille purred.

"Ego checked. Quin must show off now." Serika grinned, already knowing her lover more than well enough to see where this was going.

Quinlan flexed his fingers, and the Soul Reaper began brimming in his fist.

"Time to show them the error of their ways."

Quinlan stepped over the ward line and kept walking, followed by a handful of deadly women grinning from ear to ear, watching their man pave the way into the heart of dwarven power.