Primordial Villain with a Slave Harem

Chapter 1568  The Grand Convergence

The mage beside him had been mid-chant when the water reached her, and her own mana became a conductor that pulled the lightning into her channels and burned them out from the inside. She crumpled without a sound.

Three dead from a single broken barrier.

The rightmost tanker held, but the two mages who had been chanting protective wards behind the formation were not so lucky. The first mage went rigid, her staff falling from fingers that locked open. The second mageʼs ward caught part of the discharge, but the water had already soaked through the gaps in his plate and found the path of least resistance through his legs and into his chest. He dropped.

Five dead.

The healer screamed.

Kill notifications flooded through Quinlanʼs mind. He exhaled.

The white glow bled out of him slowly.

The lightning that had turned his body into a conduit leaked in residual bursts, crackling across [Synchra]ʼs surface in diminishing arcs that left scorch marks on the crimson plating. The stone-and-ice hands that had channeled his full lightning output smoked where the electricity had superheated the mineral. Sparks jumped between his fingers for three full seconds after the last of the charge left his channels, each one bright enough to leave afterimages, and the air around him smelled like a forge and a thunderstorm had occupied the same room.

He stood in the dying light of his own attack with smoke curling off his armor, the ozone haze still thick around him. He looked across the killing field at the one man still standing in it.

Alexios Valorian had not moved.

The moment the water exploded forward, the Warrior King had driven his longsword ahead of him point-first and placed both hands on the grip.

”[Divide].”

The severing force projected from the blade in a wedge. It split the flood ahead of him in a V that carved the water apart the way a shipʼs prow carved the sea, and the lightning that traveled through the medium met the line of severance and died on contact. The current couldnʼt cross the cut. Water flowed past him on both sides in twin streams that boiled and arced with electricity, and the killing field raged around him in every direction, but the ground where Alexios stood was dry.

[Soul Reaper] pulsed.

”[Eternal Damnation],” Quinlan cast, and watched the souls get dragged into the blade, all of them.

Six, to be exact.

The five slain Royal Guards, and…

Across the field, twenty meters behind the shattered Royal Guard formation, a headless body lay face-down in the dirt where it had been kicked. Blonde hair fanned out around the stump of her neck, darkened with blood. Her fingers were still curled in the shape of the dagger hilt sheʼd held when she died.

Cassandra.

Quinlan reached through [Eternal Damnation] and found her.

She was still his.

[Subjugation] didnʼt end at death. The bond he had burned into her channels, the authority he had written into her soul, persisted beyond the boundary that separated the living from the dead. Cassandra had belonged to her Primordial Subjugator from the moment of her subjugation and would continue to belong to him until he relinquished his claim on her existence.

He had not relinquished anything.

The guard captainʼs greatsword had separated her head from her shoulders, but the soul that had lived in that flesh still bore his mark. It didnʼt matter that someone else had struck the killing blow. What mattered was that her entire existence, soul itself included, was his property.

[Soul Reaper] drank her in, alongside the five others. The flames flared once, and the soul that had been Cassandra disappeared into the pitch-black saber.

Then Quinlan spoke.

”[Awaken].”

Ghostly fire erupted from [Soul Reaper]ʼs blade, pooled on the scorched earth, and condensed into six kneeling forms. Quinlan pulled lesser souls from [Soul Reaper]ʼs reserves, the nameless dead heʼd been stockpiling since the battle began, and fed them into the six through [Soul Fusion]. The spectral light flared as each Elite devoured the lesser souls poured into it and solidified.

Blonde hair. Armor that shimmered between solid and ethereal. Eyes that burned with blue-white fire.

Cassandra rose to her feet and looked up at Quinlan.

”Master.”

The word came out steady. She had died with his name burned into her soul and she had come back with it still there.

Quinlan regarded his six newest Elite soul soldiers, with a special focus on Cassandra.

”Welcome back. Youʼve done well.”

The guard captain stared at the spectral woman wearing the face of the traitor heʼd beheaded minutes ago. His greatsword shook in his grip.

The ground shook.

The tremor came from the east, from the direction of the distant city of Whisperfield, and it hit with the force of a body striking the earth at terminal velocity. A crater punched into the field four hundred meters away, the impact throwing a plume of dirt and debris skyward, and the thing that had made it was already climbing out.

A skeletal frame dragged itself from the crater. Bone and rusted iron held together by the black glow of necromantic energy, one arm hanging limp where the joints had been shattered. Archlich Vozen, thrown from a battle miles away with enough force to cross the distance in seconds.

A second impact hit before the first finished settling. Closer. Louder. Golden light exploded from the point of contact and the shockwave flattened the grass in a fifty-meter ring. A woman in golden armor rose from the smoking hole with blood running from her hairline and divine radiance still flickering across her cracked pauldrons.

Elisabeth, The Dawn Breaker.

She planted her weapon in the earth and hauled herself upright, and her eyes found Alexios across the field in the same instant the Undead Lordʼs empty sockets locked on Quinlan.

”Father?!” Elisabeth shouted.

”You?!” Vozen growled.

Then two more shapes descended from the eastern sky. A lich wreathed in pale fire and a towering figure clad in barnacle-crusted armor that dripped seawater with every step. Gorthrax the Eternal and the Drowned King touched down on either side of the first lich and the necromantic pressure rolling off the three of them bent the air.

The undead horde trailing in their wake darkened the eastern horizon.

Every head on the field turned.

The battle of Whisperfield had come to them.

But the great convergence of Iskaris was only getting started.

*Thoom! Thoom! Thoom! Thoom!*