Primordial Villain with a Slave Harem

Chapter 1906: Royal Shield

"VILLAIN! YOU DARE?!"

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

"Yes."

A limbless torso in crumbling fused plate. One socket empty, one eye burning with a hatred the ice had not cooled by a single degree.

"It’s the king." The whisper ran the shield-wall end to end, and the fighting died where it passed. "Stone have mercy, it’s the king."

An axe hit the tiles somewhere in the second rank, and nobody bent to pick it up.

"He’s alive," a guardsman said, hushed. "Stone above, what did he do to him?"

"Eyes front!" an officer barked down the line, and his own eyes never moved from the king.

Ragnar. The last king of the dwarves.

The king who had fed his own body to a forbidden ritual to become his people’s unkillable shield, aimed the result at the wrong man, and lost his limbs, his war, and his mountain for it.

Quinlan had frozen what remained, and kept it.

He was gray where the frost had burned him, grayer where it hadn’t, and sinking inside his own fused plate.

The ice had died at the gallery arch, drunk out of the air by the old stones the moment the Villain carried him across. Only the ritual held the last king of the dwarves together now, and the ritual had never once let him go.

Ragnar’s eye had found Black Fang before the whisper finished traveling, and it never left her.

She passed within arm’s reach of the king who had tormented her with his own royal hands, hour after hour, and then handed her to dozens of renowned torturers with orders to do their worst.

"You." Ragnar’s rasp climbed out of the ruin of his chest on royal habit alone, a king summoning his prisoner. "You will look at-"

Her eyes never once arrived on him. To the Venomborne Terror, the last king of the dwarves was an empty stretch of gallery.

"Gh..."

The far platform loosed.

"HOLD! THE KING-!" The scream went up from half the gallery at once, a heartbeat too late.

The Primordial Villain brought the royal torso up to meet the bolt without breaking stride.

"What a great shot," he chuckled ominously, the sound reverberating across the hall.

"Ng!" Ragnar made a wet sound.

The king took it below the collarbone, the shaft burying to half its length. The ritual’s black threads came crawling for the wound, sluggish as cold tar, hauling it closed around the shaft while the honor guard watched their king pay for it out of what little king was left.

Stinking ooze welled up around the shaft as the threads worked, ran off the fused plate, and spattered the tiles.

"HRRAAGH!"

"YOU SHOT THE KING!" A guardsman’s voice cracked somewhere along the shield-wall.

On the far platform, the loader backed away from his own weapon with both hands raised, as if it had fired itself.

The Villain drew [Soul Reaper], and the black saber drank the gallery’s light along its edge.

Then the hush ran out.

"WALL EAST!" an officer screamed. "THE WALL, EAST!"

Serika had not spent the hush mourning anybody, and the interlock in front of her was one rune-flare from failure.

*Clang!*

The gallery came back to killing all at once. Kaelira’s hammer took up its rhythm against the grounding-lattices again, each strike biting deeper than the mountain wanted to admit. Blackjack’s laughter rolled up from the southern press. At the stair-mouth, Orianna’s level voice was still turning charges into a siege.

Chaos owned the floor from colonnade to colonnade.

The commander had asked for a man with a saber.

What came up the center now had a saber in one hand and the last king of the dwarves in the other, moving at a working pace.

The first guardsman to reach him took two cuts to put down. The black edge skated off his breastplate, runes flaring where it scraped, and found him on the return instead, through the seam under his sword arm, where rune-plate had to end so a dwarf could swing.

"You people truly have amazing armor," he noted, hunting the next seam. "Can’t wait to fit my armies in your best gear."

"Shut your foul mouth, monster!"

*GONG!*

A war maul came down at his spine, full swing, honest force, and rang off the last king of the dwarves instead.

Quinlan had brought the royal torso around behind his shoulder without turning his head, and the maul’s owner stood frozen over the finest swing of his life, spent on his own king’s plate.

"Even now, you’re so sturdy. Truly admirable," Quinlan mused.

"Damn... you, Villain." The rasp shook its way out of the king in pieces, and each word cost a wet wheeze and a string of dark filth off the royal chin.

Synchra was still knitting herself together from the ballista, and he gave her nothing new to pay for.

The next axe met empty air as he slid inside its arc, a spear got turned wide on the flat of the black saber, and everything heavier found the king waiting for it.

The wall was dying at both ends while its center spent itself on him.

Serika had a shield rim in each hand and was folding a tower shield in half, fighting next to Vex, who, without her Hexes, was working overtime to keep up with her more brutish fellow harem elder.

On the west colonnade, Ayame’s masterful cuts were exploiting the smallest of gaps in dwarven craftsmanship, cutting her enemies down with frightening accuracy.

Then the commander spent his masterpiece.

"PRESS!" His arm dropped. "CHAIN!"

The first wall of shields came in low and fast, lives spent to buy half-beats, and Quinlan met it with the last king of the dwarves.

The lead shield-bearer had his thrust lined up for Quinlan’s visor, and the king’s face swung into its path. The thrust died half-launched, checked by a reverence no parry could have bought, and the black saber came over the royal shoulder and took him through the throat.

It was cruelty with nothing wasted in it. Every man in that press had sworn his line to the body on the Villain’s arm, and the Villain wore their king like a buckler, and turned their love into gaps in their guard.

"He’s using the king as a shield!" a guardsman screamed from the second rank, his axe frozen at the top of its arc. "I can’t swing! Stone forgive us, I can’t swing!"

"He is dead!" the commander bellowed. "That thing is a shield! Cut through it!"

The cuts pulled anyway.

Almost every arc that met the king’s glare bent soft at the last inch, and every softened arc fed the saber another opening.

Quinlan worked through them at a butcher’s pace, two fingers rolling the saber’s hilt through its angles, presenting the king’s ruined glare to one dwarf while the black edge finished another.

"Not... my men." Ragnar’s rasp shook against his own plate, air whistling through some new hole the ritual had not bothered to close. "Villain! Not with me! DON’T DO THIS TO ME!"

"Shh. Only Anima-grade shields talk, and you’re nothing but deteriorating Junk." Quinlan angled him into a descending hammer. The hammer swerved wide, and the saber repaid its owner for the kindness.

"Curse your wretched..." The wail broke into a wet, hacking cough that sprayed the royal plate black. "...existence!"