Primordial Villain with a Slave Harem

Chapter 1541  Right Hand of the Primordial Villain

… Twenty meters.

Reina stopped herding.

Sheʼd been pacing him along the left flank for the entire flight, flickering in and out of visibility, and in the space between one heartbeat and the next she committed. Her camouflage cloak shimmered and dropped as she poured every stat she had into raw speed, twin short swords drawn, closing the gap with the efficiency of a woman whoʼd been killing mages for longer than most nations had existed.

Fifteen meters.

Isaraʼs voice tore across the sky behind her, raw and ragged with a premonition she couldnʼt put into words. ”Heʼs not panicking! Why isnʼt he panicking?!”

Ten meters.

Quinlan felt Reinaʼs killing intent lock onto the gap between his shoulder plates where the armor was thinnest. She was faster than him. She knew it. The swords were already angled for the insertion.

Five meters.

He smiled.

Then he ignited.

Fire erupted from both feet in a concentrated blast that turned his body into a horizontal rocket, and the first thing the jet of flame hit was Reina Ashworthʼs face.

She was fast enough to react. Her camouflage cloak flared with stored mana as she crossed both swords in front of her and channeled a barrier through the blades, the defensive technique of a woman who had survived ambushes from mages of the highest caliber. She truly was equipped for the job.

The fire split around her guard and scorched her flanks, but the core of the blast washed over her barrier and she kicked off the air sideways, singed and furious but alive.

But the jet wasnʼt the point.

Quinlan poured mana into the blast with everything he had left in reserve, the fire swelling from a focused stream into a roaring cone of superheated flame and pressurized air that expanded outward in every direction behind him. The explosion swallowed the sky.

The two nearest generals caught it full in the face and their barriers shattered. One went spinning into the ground trailing smoke. The other managed to angle his shield spell and deflect the worst of it, but the concussive wave sent him tumbling end over end, blind and disoriented. Drekken planted his tower shield and tanked the blast, but even he slid backward through the air, boots scraping against nothing as the force shoved him fifty meters off course. Isara screamed and threw up her chains in a defensive lattice that caught the fire, the golden links glowing white-hot as they absorbed heat they were never designed for.

The rest of the pursuit scattered.

And below, the earth tore open.

The fire blast ripped the thin layer of packed soil and grass off the basin like a scab, and through the smoke and debris and falling dirt, Auroraʼs barriers shimmered into existence, translucent domes of layered arcane energy that had been waiting beneath the surface, untouched by the inferno raging above because Quinlan had sealed the girls inside them the moment theyʼd taken their positions.

Inside the barriers, figures moved.

Quinlan flipped in the air, killed his forward momentum, and turned around.

They were already launching.

Ayame came out of the basin first.

She punched through the barrier membrane with her katana drawn, the blade humming with compressed Skysplitter magic. Her expression was ice cold concentration.

Her eyes were locked on Reina Ashworth with the cold, absolute focus of a woman who had spent the last month dying.

Hanae, the Primordial Sadist, had killed her so many times in their first day of training that Ayame had stopped counting by noon. The ancient swordswoman moved with a speed that made the world look frozen, and sheʼd taken Ayameʼs head off her shoulders with the same casual ease that a gardener plucked weeds. Over and over. Faster than Ayame could see, faster than she could think, until the fear of death burned itself out and left behind only the question: where is the blade going next?

But Hanae had also trained Black Fang. And Ayame had watched.

Sheʼd watched a Level 74 assassin, arguably the deadliest woman on the continent of Iskaris, get taken apart by a swordswoman who was using fewer stats than Black Fang had to her name. Hanae limited herself on purpose, stripped her advantages down to nothing but technique, and still dissected Black Fangʼs offense stroke by stroke.

That was the lesson. A samurai who could read the bladeʼs path before it moved could punch far above their weight.

Reina Ashworth was ten meters away, but despite being blasted in the face, she was already moving, twin short swords rising into guard with the speed of a woman whose reflexes didnʼt care about pain.

Ayame closed the distance before the guard finished forming.

The world had gone quiet inside her head, emptied. Every stray thought, every emotion, every flicker of self that might have slowed the signal between her eyes and her hands had been carved away.

Reinaʼs left shoulder dipped a fraction before the sword came around.

Ayame was already past it. Her katana caught Reinaʼs right blade in a bind that drove the taller womanʼs arm wide and exposed the gap between guard and body. Reinaʼs eyes widened at the angle. That parry had been too precise, too clean for this womanʼs level.

The assassin disengaged with a kick off the air and reset, both swords coming up in a scissoring cross aimed at Ayameʼs throat. The speed was vicious. Level 73 speed, the kind that had killed warriors with a far higher Agility stat than Ayame.

ʼThose blades... I can see them...ʼ

Ayame read Reinaʼs weight shift to her right foot and dropped below the scissor before the blades reached the apex of their arc. Her counter came from below, a rising diagonal that opened a gash across Reinaʼs forearm deep enough to sever tendons. The right sword tumbled from nerveless fingers and blood sprayed between them.

She couldnʼt stay here.

One exchange. Two at most. That was all the window the fire blast had bought her. Reina was faster, and the moment the assassin recovered her footing and adjusted for the injury, that speed would bury Ayame regardless of how well she could read it.

ʼI kill her now or Iʼm dead.ʼ

Ayame planted her back foot and drove forward into the gap, katana rising, but she wasnʼt aiming for the cut.

The katana swept up in a wide arc that forced Reina to lean back, buying a half-second of separation, and in that half-second Ayame reversed her grip on the hilt and raised the blade above her head with both hands. Skysplitter magic poured into the edge.

The blade screamed.

Compressed magic condensed along the edge until the air itself split, a razor-thin line of distorted atmosphere extending from the tip of her katana upward into the sky. ”[Heavenʼs Descent].”

She brought the blade down.

The swing bisected the space between them in a vertical plane of invisible force that stretched thirty meters high and carved a trench into the earth below. Everything in its path ceased to exist. Air, dirt, magic, flesh.

Reina Ashworth tried to dodge.

She was fast enough to have dodged it, but sheʼd been leaning backward from the feint when the real attack came.

The Skysplitter passed through her from crown to hip.

For a frozen instant the assassin stood there, split down the center, her remaining sword still raised in a guard that no longer had a body behind it. ”What is this class...” Those were the last words of a Level 73 assassin, eight hundred and twenty years old, killed by a girl of twenty at Level 50. Then the two halves separated and fell.

”One day, Iʼll defeat you in a fair duel.”

Ayame flicked the blood from the edge with a snap of her wrist and turned to the battlefield behind with the same emptied focus sheʼd carried since the moment she left the basin.

Below Quinlan, the kill box came alive.