Primordial Villain with a Slave Harem

Chapter 1926: Princess Defense

Four weeks after the dwarven mountain fell, winter still owned the old Vraven-Elvardia border, and the fortress Quinlan Elysiar had pulled out of the frozen plain in a single day had stopped being a wonder and become a schedule.

Today’s entry on that schedule was an escort.

A dwarven marshal read the rules out at dawn in a voice like a rockslide. The armies would move one person from the east gate to the western ridge by dusk, against the hunters already waiting on the field: the retired king, Morgana Ravenshade, and the Scarlet Lilies, hired for the afternoon.

If any hunter touched the person being escorted, every general on the escort had to analyze and submit a report on what went wrong and how they proposed to improve the current setup.

The person being escorted was Rosie Elysiar, sole living Princess of the budding empire, who was having the best day of her winter.

"Rosie thinks everyone looks very cool today! Almost one percent as cool as Rosie’s Papa!" she told the human vanguard from the middle of a moving fortress of tower shields, waving at soldiers as though the formation were a parade organized slightly in her honor.

"...Princess, please keep your head down," a general begged.

"Okay! Rosie’s head is down!"

It was not down.

The hunters started at noon.

Alexios Valorian came up out of a drainage ditch inside the escort’s left flank and did not slow down.

"CONTACT LEFT!! IT’S THE KING!!"

A dwarven anchor squad locked a shield ring across his path. He walked through it without changing stride, and the ring came apart into dwarves.

"HE’S THROUGH!! SECOND WALL!! SECOND WALL!!"

It was too late.

Forty paces on, the ground opened under him. The dwarves had dug a pit across the lane that morning and roofed it over with dirt. They knocked the props out as he crossed.

Alexios landed on a falling rubble midair and used it to jump out before properly landing in the trap.

"A nice attempt," he told them.

Then he killed all of them.

"Why is everyone lying down?!" Rosie asked her general, up on tiptoe to see behind the column.

"They got killed."

"Oh, no!!" Rosie yelped.

"...In game."

Obviously, the war games didn’t go until death. Those who were ’killed’ were to stop resisting and wait for the turn to be over.

"Phew!" Rosie wiped her brow.

Morgana came over from the far side, and the far side had been waiting for her. The Elemental Sovereign shouted a name and opened the first shield wall like a curtain.

The elven counter-volley arrived before she could shout a second, hundreds of light-arrows on a flat arc, and her staff came up to answer them instead of the road ahead.

While she burned the sky clean, a human flex company rotated a fresh wall into the gap she had just made, and dwarven crews re-staked the lane behind it.

She made three walls into kindling and got no closer to the princess than the length of a market street.

"You cannot win," Morgana informed the fourth wall.

"We know, my lady!" a voice called back from inside it, muffled and cheerful. "But we only have to slow you down!"

The Scarlet Lilies attacked as a unit, on the theory that four centuries of teamwork beat any doctrine a committee had invented.

They were nearly right. Bronnya went through the first wall laughing and wore half of the second as a collar. "BAHAHA! Boss! They’ve stopped breaking!!"

"I noticed!!" Lilith was carving through her third shield rotation with what sounded suspiciously like joy. "Void! VOID! Do your thing!"

Void, asleep on Bronnya’s back through the entire charge, opened her eyes. She took in the four fresh walls standing between the squad and the princess, the two ballista crews tracking her specifically, and the sliver of sun left on the ridge.

"No," Void murmured, and went back to sleep where she hung.

"What do you mean no?!"

"I don’t want to be against Scar ever again... I don’t like this game..."

"..."

The horns called it at dusk.

Rosie crossed the western ridge untouched, then went back down the line and thanked her escort personally, which took until full dark, because she meant it literally.

The generals’ argument started before the horn echoes died.

"The dwarven line held them longest! Write that down!"

"Your line held because our volleys kept closing your gaps!"

"And who filled every hole they tore? Humans! With their bodies!"

Alexios worked a dent out of his vambrace in the falling dark, grinning. He might’ve found his new overlord infuriating on a personal level, but being given the task of acting as a high-level hostile against the armies was a role he played with a joyous heart.

Both he and Quinlan wanted an army that could do more than just face the enemy’s fodder.

The portals opened at full dark, one to a province, and the armies went home through them in the order they had marched out.

The dead went last, because the living kept stopping them to say things.

"Same wall tomorrow, yeah?"

"Same wall."

They stepped through to New Whisperfield.

The lamps were coming on and the streets were warm underfoot, because Jasmine Argentis had her towns piped full of the earth’s own deep heat and considered frozen cobblestones a personal insult.

Marlen walked home through the lamplight with the exercise’s dust still on his boots.

He was a human spearman of middling height and unremarkable face, and he had died on Whisperfield’s wall, killed by the man who now held his soul.

These days a faint blue-white light came off him at the edges, like breath in the cold. The neighbors had stopped noticing it.

"Marlen!" Petyr leaned out of the tavern doorway across the lane and flipped a coin at him. "Here’s a silver."

Marlen caught it. "Three silver left."

"...You really could’ve forgiven my debts after your rebirth. Shouldn’t they have died with you?"

"Nope," Marlen grinned and received an onslaught of grumbling.

The door of the third house on the lane banged open before he touched the latch, and his daughter hit him at the knees.

"Daddy!"

"Father! You’re back!"

His son arrived a breath later at a full sprint and got an arm around his neck, and Marlen carried them both inside at once, wearing children instead of armor.

"You’re late," Wenna said from the stove, in the tone that meant the opposite.

"The retired king walked through our entire shield line like weather," Marlen said, setting the little one on a chair. "Twice. We drilled the counter-form after. I’ll show you, Tam, hand me the broom."

Dinner was loud. The broom became a spear, the spear became a lesson, the lesson collapsed when the little one commandeered the broom and declared herself the retired king.

Wenna laughed until she had to sit down, and the stew nearly burned. Nobody in that kitchen would have traded the noise for a quiet house in paradise.

Marlen sat back and watched them, and the light at his edges dimmed to nothing.

He had died at the wall in the rain, and most men who die get one ending and keep it.

What he had instead was the stew and the shrieking, a friend paying down four silver one coin a year out of pure stubbornness, a wife who had buried him and then answered a knock one evening to find the burial canceled.

His boy was taller than the last mark on the doorframe. He would be there to cut the next mark too.

"You’re staring again," Wenna said softly.

"I’m counting what I get to keep," Marlen said. "The count keeps going up."

She kissed the top of his head on her way past. Her eyes were wet.

Neither of them mentioned it.

When the children were asleep he stood at their door a while, then kissed his wife at the threshold.

All along the lane, in the hour after the lamps went out, the dead of New Whisperfield left their houses quietly and walked toward the muster square together, where the Necromancer would arrive and portal them to the labyrinths.

That was, in every way that mattered, exactly what it was: a night shift.

...

Six weeks after the mountain fell, the snow on the Confederation’s watch-ridges had gone rotten underfoot, and the war-lodge fire had a problem it could not burn.