Primordial Villain with a Slave Harem

Chapter 1535  The Dawn Breaker

”The Dawn Breaker, Elisabeth Valorian…” he whispered. ”Your elder sister.”

”Yes!” Felicityʼs voice shook, eyes wide and amazed. ”And look, I told you! Unlike normal Arch Priests, she can move with her power! Sheʼs so badass!”

Quinlan looked back at the figure carving through undead. She wasnʼt weakening. If anything, the radiance was intensifying.

ʼItʼs really the armor,ʼ he realized. He could tell firsthand from his interactions with Velara. Arch Priests were devastating within their churches and diminished without them. But there were exceptions. The Dawn Breaker, to be exact. Her armor, said to be forged by the Goddess herself, acted as a mobile church. A walking holy ground.

As such, Elisabeth was treated as the Goddessʼs holy warrior, her chosen enforcer.

ʼThe church hates the undead,ʼ Quinlan thought, watching Elisabethʼs holy light scatter another wave of corpses into ash. Velara had barely tolerated his necromancy. Purity and Corruption were natural enemies.

The Church and the Covenant of Eternity were natural enemies. Of course the church would lend their strongest weapon to humanity when the dead marched in force.

ʼThey sent their attack dog to the front line. Thatʼs how seriously they take this.ʼ

On the battlefield below, the Drowned Kingʼs screech carried even to their altitude.

”THAT BITCH!” His form wheeled toward the source of the holy light, fury radiating off him in waves of black mist. ”That piece of shit Goddess sent her fucking hound after us!”

Archlich Vozenʼs skull turned slowly toward Dawn Breaker. The gems along his chain flared once. ”I see her,” he said, and the dry scrape of his voice carried a hatred so old it had calcified into something beyond emotion. ”The Goddess insults us yet again.”

”Iʼll drown her! Iʼll drown her whole bloodline! Iʼll flood every cathedral on this continent in the blood of its priests!”

Dawn Breaker didnʼt even acknowledge them. She pressed forward through the undead tide, her priests healing every wound before it could slow her, her blade leaving trails of white fire that burned through necrotic flesh like acid through paper. She was a one-woman extinction event for anything dead, and the undead ranks split around her the way water split around a heated blade.

But there were so many of them. For every hundred she destroyed, a thousand more pressed in from the flanks. Her priests were burning through their mana to keep her healed. She was holding ground, carving a safe zone into the undead advance, but she wasnʼt pushing them back. She was a dam, and the river was rising.

Gorthrax the Eternal hadnʼt spoken. Hadnʼt reacted. Hadnʼt changed his pace.

He simply walked forward.

Dawn Breakerʼs holy radiance washed over him as the distance closed, white-gold light flooding across his featureless black armor, pouring into the hollow sockets of his skull. The light found nothing there. No gems, no magical flare, no pale imitation of life. Just empty space, old and deep.

And yet the light reflected back.

His sockets caught the glow and held it, two points of stolen radiance burning in a dead manʼs skull, and for the first time, Gorthrax the Eternal spoke.

His voice was the sound of a coffin lid dragged across stone. Dry. Disused. A thing that had been sitting still in the dark for so long that the air itself seemed surprised to carry it.

”So bright...”

The Drowned King stopped screaming.

Vozen went still.

”It burns.”

He kept walking.

”I will extinguish this flame.”

His head snapped toward Gorthrax, toward Vozen, and a current of intent passed between the two of them. Their lord had spoken. Their lord had declared.

”Finally! Letʼs go all out!” the Drowned King shrieked, and his voice tore across the battlefield. He slammed his fist against his breastplate and the sound that erupted from his throat wasnʼt a word. It was a battle cry, ancient and guttural, a rasping howl that rolled across the undead ranks like a signal fire.

”Itʼs time for death to rule the world!” Vozen answered it. Both lords raised their hands in unison and spoke the same incantation at together, their voices merging into a single dissonant chord that vibrated across the field. ”[Edict of the Eternal: War Without End]!”

The spell hit the undead horde like a current through water. Hundreds of thousands of corpses stiffened, straightened, and surged forward as their bindings tightened and their rotting muscles burned with borrowed strength.

The dead that Dawn Breaker had been scattering like ash suddenly started pushing back. Both lords fell into step behind Gorthrax, and the three of them advanced on Dawn Breaker together.

Elisabeth saw them coming.

She stopped mid-stride, planted her feet, and raised her blade above her head. Light gathered along the edge, so bright it left afterimages across the battlefield.

”[Divine Wrath: Purifying Dawn]!”

She swung in a wide arc and holy fire exploded outward from the edge in a ring that expanded for a hundred meters in every direction. Every undead caught in the radius disintegrated instantly. The unholy life, driven further by the [Edict of the Eternal: War Without End], meant nothing when the bodies carrying it turned to ash before the buff could be used. Bone fragments rained down across the scorched ground, leaving a perfect circle of empty earth around her.

She straightened in the center of it, her divine armor pulsing with light.

Then she turned toward the trio of undead monstrosities, their forms visible through the smoke and ruin of the battlefield, Gorthrax in the center, Vozen and the Drowned King flanking him, the full weight of the Covenantʼs leadership bearing down on a single point.

Her eyes narrowed.

She growled.

A sharp gesture at her priests. Stay back. They obeyed without question, pulling their formation to a halt behind the edge of her cleansed circle.

Dawn Breaker rolled her shoulders, adjusted her grip on her blade, and began walking forward to meet them. ”The Goddess gave me this power to purify Thalorind of its filth. Iʼll see her vision through, or Iʼll die swinging.”

The conviction in her voice could have filled a cathedral. The smile that followed it belonged nowhere near one.

”Leaving your burrows and joining together, so I donʼt have to flush you out one by one. How generous of you.” She spun her sword at her wrist, leaving a circular, bright holy light afterimage. ”Only the Oracle is missing. Why donʼt you call on her so I can finish you four in one go?”

The Drowned King snarled. Vozenʼs jaw creaked open to spit a retort.

Gorthrax spoke first.

”Little priestess. Iʼm far too old for this. Letʼs just kill each other.”

The words scraped out of him like the last breath of a sealed tomb. He said it the way the living said goodnight. A formality. A small courtesy before the inevitable.

Dawn Breakerʼs radiance flared brighter. Gorthraxʼs empty sockets drank the light and gave nothing back.

The four of them closed the distance.

...

Quinlan watched from above as the Covenantʼs three lords and the Goddessʼs champion collided in a storm of holy fire and necrotic devastation that carved a crater into the battlefield. Shockwaves rippled outward through both armies, staggering soldiers hundreds of meters from the epicenter.

ʼFour monsters,ʼ he thought. ʼAnd thatʼs just one corner of this field.ʼ

His gaze swept across the war. Ravenshade pushing from the south. Elvardia entrenched and bleeding. The Covenantʼs undead flooding the flanks. Dawn Breaker holding but outnumbered. Foxkin raiders in the backlines.

He needed to move. Every minute he spent watching was a minute Elvardiaʼs lines eroded further, and if those lines broke, the whole board flipped. But charging in blind against a field with threats like Gorthrax on it was suicide.

ʼSo whatʼs the play?ʼ

The grin came back. ...