Primordial Villain with a Slave Harem

Chapter 1578  Cooked

The collar artifact was a new development in dwarven runic engineering, centuries in the making, designed to replicate the effects of slave-binding magic without requiring the Slave Master-class to power it. The runes did the work that a class normally handled, writing obedience into the targetʼs soul through brute-force mana inscription.

The binding magic pushed deeper into Quinlanʼs channels, seeking, trying to find the place in Quinlanʼs soul where it could carve the word ”obey.”

It found the Primordial Subjugator waiting for it.

”PATHETIC!”

The Primordial Villainʼs mana detonated.

The Primordial Subjugator was not a mere class: it was Quinlan Elysiar himself.

Subjugating the Subjugator…?

Quinlanʼs entire existence answered the attempt with a rejection so fundamental that the collarʼs runes were outright expelled. The foreign mana that had been crawling through his system was seized by his own reserves and driven back through every pathway it had infiltrated, and the force of that expulsion hit the collar from the inside like a battering ram hitting a gate that opened inward.

The collar cracked and then shattered into smithereens.

The shockwave of rejected magic that followed hit Ragnar in the chest hard enough to make the dwarven king slide backward through the dirt. The two largest pieces of the artifact embedded themselves in the shields of the nearest dwarves, still smoking, the runes along their surface dark and dead.

Ragnar felt the backlash before he understood it. His mana pathways spasmed as the energy heʼd fed into the collar reversed course and flooded back through his system, and a notification seared across his vision in text that burned brighter than anything the system had ever shown him.

[The Primordial Subjugator has rejected the concept of enslavement.]

[His dominion over subjugation is absolute. The one who holds the chain will not wear it.]

The dwarf king stared at the notification. His free hand, the one not holding Blossomʼs throat, trembled.

”Rejected the concept…?!”

Rejected, as if enslavement itself had no authority to touch him. As if the collar, the centuries of engineering, the pride of dwarven runic craft, had tried to impose a reality that did not apply to what Quinlan Elysiar was, and reality had said no.

”Durnok!” Ragnarʼs voice broke toward the rear of the shattered formation. ”What just-”

Lightning.

It came from two directions at the same time.

Quinlanʼs body was broken. His skull was fractured. His reserves had been nearly emptied.

But those scraps were enough.

The bolt erupted from his eyes and arced upward. Morganaʼs hands came up at the same instant, the puppet queenʼs fingers sparking with voltage, and the two bolts merged into a single concentrated lance aimed at the dwarf king.

Quinlan didnʼt aim in the traditional sense.

His vision was still three images refusing to become one. Blood ran into his eyes and the ringing in his skull ate the edges of every sound on the field.

But he could sense the marks.

The lightning found the three lines Blossom had carved below Ragnarʼs pauldron and poured inside.

The gap was barely wider than a finger. But lightning didnʼt need width. It needed entry, and the dogkin had given it multiple, each one a channel carved through ancient blacksteel that led directly to the flesh beneath. The current hit Ragnarʼs lower spine first, arcing through the muscle along the path Blossomʼs claws had opened, and the dwarven kingʼs legs buckled as the nerves connecting his brain to his lower body received a voltage they were never built to carry.

Then Morganaʼs half of the lance found the gash behind his knee.

The combined current met inside Ragnarʼs body. Two streams of lightning from two casters converging in the space between his armor and his skin, and the dwarven kingʼs torso locked rigid as every muscle in his core fired at once. The smell of burning flesh filled the inside of his plate. His organs cooked. His blood boiled in the veins closest to the entry points, and the scream that tore out of him was cut short when his diaphragm seized and refused to let air pass.

Ragnar hit both knees.

”Get my armor off…” he rasped.

A royal guard threw himself across his kingʼs body to do just that. His gauntleted fingers found the clasps along Ragnarʼs side and started tearing, but the plate was hot enough to scorch, and the dwarf hissed through his teeth as he worked. A second guard joined him from the other side, and between them they wrenched the breastplate free.

Steam rose from Ragnarʼs body. The padded underlayer had fused to his skin in patches where the heat had been worst, and pulling the plate away tore chunks of cooked flesh with it. Ragnar made no sound. His teeth were locked together so hard the muscles in his neck stood out like cables, and his one good hand gripped the dirt with enough force to crush stone.

When they pulled the helmet off, his left eye came with it.

The socket had been cooking inside the superheated metal since the lightning entered through Blossomʼs gap beneath the rim. The fluid inside the eye had boiled first, swelling the tissue against the inside of the helmet until the pressure had nowhere to go. When the guards wrenched the armor free, the burst remains of the eye clung to the metalʼs interior in a smear of vitreous fluid and charred tissue, and what was left in Ragnarʼs skull was a hollow that wept clear liquid down the side of a face burned beyond recognition from cheekbone to ear.

Lower on his body, the padded underlayer had fused to his skin in patches where the heat had been worst, and pulling the plate away tore chunks of cooked flesh with it. What remained of the padding crumbled apart in charred strips, and the guards kept stripping because there was nothing beneath the padding that wasnʼt burned through, and within seconds the most powerful dwarf on the continent was standing before his formation buck naked.

His body hair was gone. Every last strand singed down to the follicle, leaving his barrel chest and stocky legs smooth and pink and blistered. Without hair, without armor, without the steel and the gold runes and the imposing silhouette that a centuries of kingship had built around him, Ragnar looked like an oversized newborn with too much meat on its frame. An ugly, deformed newborn.

His beard was the worst of it. The pride of dwarven manhood, the symbol of status and lineage that every dwarf carried as a declaration of who he was and how long he had endured. Gone. The cheeks theyʼd hidden for centuries were on full display for the first time since Ragnar was a boy. They were not impressive. The dwarven kingʼs hand went to his face. His fingers found the empty socket and stopped. For one second, just one, the most powerful dwarf on the continent stood naked and hairless with his fingers touching the place where his eye had been and his expression was that of a man who could not reconcile what his hand was telling him with what he knew to be true about himself.

Then the second passed and Ragnar was Ragnar again.

”Get me my spare armor!”

Through a display of sheer vitality, he stood before the healers descended on him.

The claim that he had the greatest durability on the continent was not a baseless rumor.

Blossom was dropped as soon as the lightning seized Ragnarʼs nerves, hitting the ground coughing and gasping, and she didnʼt waste the opening on breathing. She phased.

Blossom materialized at Quinlanʼs side. She placed herself between her master and the dwarven line, gauntlets raised, every breath a rasp through her damaged windpipe.

”Blossom is here, Master.”

Ragnar looked at Quinlan.

The Primordial Villain was still on all fours. Blood ran from his fractured skull. His arms were stone prosthetics that shook under his own weight. His reserves were visibly running low. His body was broken in ways that should have made him a corpse, and he had just shattered an artifact that centuries of dwarven engineering said could not be shattered and cooked a king inside his own armor.

Ragnar looked at the man bleeding in the dirt and something inside him recoiled. Something older than thought, older than language, older than the first ancestor of his recorded bloodline ever picked up a hammer and called himself a smith.

It wasnʼt fear. Fear was an emotion. Emotions could be mastered.

What passed through the dwarven kingʼs remaining eye was deeper than that, buried in a place that a thousand years of war and kingship had never reached because it had never needed to. It lived in the marrow. In the blood. In the ancient, pre-civilized part of a dwarven soul that remembered a time before kingdoms and forges and crowns, when his predecessors huddled in caves beneath the mountains and prayed to the Goddess that the things walking above them would pass without looking down.

Primordials.