Primordial Villain with a Slave Harem

Chapter 1905: Into the Null-Magic Barrier

"You summoned me," said the Witch Queen of Vraven, the strongest elemental mage on Iskaris, five hundred years of mastery across seven elements, "to a place where magic does not exist."

"I did."

"Why."

"Why not. Aren’t you my strongest slave?" Quinlan shrugged, quoting her earlier claim.

Morgana’s left eye twitched.

"You gate-hopping, primordial son of a-"

"Silence," Vex demanded with a tone of pure menace.

The eruption strangled itself at the halfway point, and the rest of the sentence stayed in Morgana’s eyes, at length.

Then her gaze snagged on the lintel. On the anchor-stones, quietly drinking a discipline she had spent five centuries perfecting, as if it were spilled water. The fury stayed exactly where it was. Underneath it, against her will, a research problem began unpacking its instruments.

"Move." The strongest elemental mage alive shouldered her staff and marched toward the one hall in the world where she was a woman with a stick, because the alternative was letting him watch the curiosity arrive.

The Primordial Villain surveyed the army he had just pulled out of thin air, and gravity entered his bearing.

"Avengers," he declared, from the floor, "assembled."

"Now is not the time for silly Earth references, baby~" Lucille chided him with a tender smile.

"I was worried when you flew," Aurora admitted. "But if you’re saying things like that, you’re fine."

And just like that they went, his girls and his old guard together, through the arch and into the mountain, leaving him sitting in the crater they had all declined to mention.

"Dibs on the ballista crews!" Kitsara was already through.

"Avengers," Quinlan noted to the empty landing, "dispersed."

... Not quite. A tower shield planted itself beside his crater, and a gauntleted hand came down into his field of view.

His valiant pink-haired tanker hauled him to his feet with one pull.

"Thank you, Lyra. Always so reliable."

She smiled at him, bright and brief, then shouldered her shield and jogged after the girls.

Despite Quinlan’s complaints, he was grinning from ear to ear because of what his girls had just done. Namely, not waiting for him.

Nobody had asked him where to stand or what to hit. They were not his soldiers, and they had never for one day been his minions: they were his partners, monsters with their own scores to settle and their own styles of settling them.

Just like how he preferred his perfect warrior wives.

Quinlan pulled a healing potion off his belt and drank it in one long pull. The creak in his chest faded. The dent in Synchra’s plates did not.

"Sorry, partner," he murmured, laying two fingers flat on the wounded plate. "That one was on me."

Synchra rippled under his fingers and flared, once, in unmistakable disapproval.

"Fair," he agreed. "I won’t take you for granted."

Then the Primordial Villain rolled his neck, and his eyes gained a terrible glint.

’Might as well do that, then.’

One more warp gate spun open beside him.

...

The gallery filled with everything a war is supposed to sound like.

The honor guard of the high clans were three thousand of the finest heavy infantry the mountain had ever produced, in interlocked formation deep enough to swallow a charge whole, on ground built for them, with the two best ballista crews alive working the platforms. They had no sorcery, and on this floor, neither did anyone else.

"For the high clans!"

"Bury them!"

The under-tier’s first charge broke against the shield-wall in front of everyone. So did the second. Tunnel-wardens died on blacksteel with their picks still raised, the wall gave back not one inch of floor, and the ballistae worked the packed stair-mouth in turns, every bolt going through three people before it stopped.

Serika hit the wall next, and the wall held.

Her opening blow, the kind that folded siege doors, landed square on the interlock, and the interlock drank it: runes flared down the linked shields, the force ran away along the whole formation and bled into the stone, and thirty dwarves grunted, took one collective half-step, and closed up again.

The Solar Fist stood in front of an unbroken shield-wall for the first time in years, and her grin came up slow and wide.

"Oh," she said. "You lovely little bastards."

She went to work, and it was tough work. The wall rotated fresh shields into every breach she made. A war maul she never saw came around a shield rim and caught her across the ribs, and the sound of it echoed off the colonnade. She put its owner into the third rank, spat a worrying amount of blood, and kept swinging.

Kaelira’s opening detonation should have taken six of them. Her hammer met a tower shield, the rune-channel behind the blow fired, and the shield drank that too: grounding-lattices, worked into the blacksteel by smiths who had spent generations learning to break other people’s runework, pulled her detonation apart and fed it into the floor.

The sulk on the Runeweaver Titan’s face turned, slowly, into something with far more respect and far more violence in it. "I’m starting to understand the mechanism."

She began recutting her channels between swings, testing, adjusting, her craft against the mountain’s, and every blow landed a little deeper than the last.

"Uh oh~" Kitsara giggled, ducking a halberd.

Kitsara herself had lasted eight seconds on the ballista platform before its guard detail arrived, and her tails were just tails in here. A slit-bolt tore through the space she had just vacated, close enough to trim fox fur.

"Grr!! Mountains are bad news for graceful ladies such as I! Cavemen girls, I’ll leave this to you."

"Watch out!"

Lyra planted her tower shield over the foxgirl and took the follow-up bolt full-on, and even braced, the tanker went three steps sideways with her boots carving grooves in the stone.

"Uhh, thanks!!"

Black Fang walked, and soldiers died where her walk had been. This time, the dead did not get to rise.

"Your best...?" she spoke calmly, looking straight at the dead.

Her expression did not change. "Lacking."

"Shut it, serpent bitch!" A dwarf woman screamed. "My husband died in your invasion. Don’t presume this is the full dwarven glory!"

Indeed. What remained of the dwarven nobility and their retainers was a crippled force of the once glorious military their race sported.

But...

"And?"

It wasn’t Black Fang’s problem.

Her katana’s blade flashed and came down again.

"Big siiis~" Ayame called from the west colonnade, where a gray-bearded captain with a lifetime of blade-drill was somehow still alive in front of her, giving ground one perfect parry at a time. "Were you lonely? Did you two rehearse the sulking together?"

Black Fang treated the gallery as empty of little sisters.

"You’re really powerful, by the way," Ayame told the captain sincerely, and their blades met four more times before either of them breathed.

Raika’s punches came off the flank with shockwaves that scattered helmets three ranks deep, and the wall bent around her and did not break. Blackjack waded into the press grinning, came back out bleeding from four places, and went back in grinning wider.

"Zehahaha! More, more! Come at me!"

Cedric and Selene worked as one blade in two hands along the colonnade, Abudha’s open palms turned halberds aside with a monk’s economy, and Ria ghosted the murder-line where the platforms couldn’t crank down far enough to track her. Blossom was a rumor in the dark between the pillars that both ballista crews had already learned to fear.

Orianna, robbed of every trick that made her Orianna, had taken over the rebel wedge at the stair-mouth instead, and under her flat, unhurried orders, the under-tier’s charges stopped being suicide and started being a siege.

Ignis punched someone very hard. It helped less than advertised.

"Hold!" the commander called down the line, hoarse and exact. "The stones hold and so do you! Nothing is coming that you weren’t forged for! Hold and bleed them!"

And they did. The wall reformed over its own dead, rank stepping into rank, and the gallery floor grew crowded with bodies from both sides.

Then the fighting nearest the arch stuttered, because the Primordial Villain had come back through it at a stroll, carrying something upright in his left hand.

"VILLAIN! YOU DARE?!"

Quinlan’s eyes flashed a brilliant crimson. Beneath his helmet, a terrible expression sat on his face.

"Yes."