Primordial Villain with a Slave Harem

Chapter 1579  Who Dares?

Primordials.

Ragnar didnʼt know the word applied to the man on all fours. He didnʼt know what Quinlan Elysiar was. But his cells knew. His blood knew. Every strand of dwarven ancestry coiled inside his body knew, because the terror of primordials was not something the mortal races had learned. It was something they were born with, written into the species the way a rabbit was born knowing the shadow of a hawk, and the dwarves had buried it deeper than anyone because the dwarves had been the ones hiding the longest.

The ancient legends spoke of beings that shattered armies and reshaped continents. Most scholars dismissed them as mythology because no living creature could do what the old texts described.

He had just rejected the concept of enslavement from a fractured skull on empty reserves and cooked a king alive in his own plate, and the legends suddenly felt like understatements.

But then, just as quickly as it came, Ragnar buried the feeling.

”Kill him. Now!”

The Kingʼs guards charged.

The war reached Ragnar first.

Alexios hit the fractured Elvardian line like a battering ram. The Warrior King had watched Ragnarʼs betrayal tear the alliance apart, and recognized the opening for what it was. His golden longsword carved through the dwarven flank with Lilith at his right and Stormlord at his left, and the blacksteel formation that had been an unbreakable wall ten minutes ago was now a broken thing trying to fight on three fronts.

Kaede and the Fujimori swordswomen drove through the gap from the east. The Aegis Vanguard reformed and pushed from the south, and every advantage Ragnar had calculated when he swung his warhammer at Quinlanʼs skull was evaporating in real time.

The dwarven wyverns overhead banked hard, their riders screaming orders that couldnʼt be heard over the carnage below.

The foxkin elite who had been tearing apart the rear found themselves squeezed between the Fujimori and a fresh wave of human soldiers who had arrived from the southern road. The undead horde from Whisperfield pressed in from the east, thousands of corpses grinding against Alexiosʼs flank, and behind them marched Duke Tharion Ravenshadeʼs regiment.

From the south, another column. Seventy-five thousand Ravenshade men and women who had been chasing Morgana across the countryside and arrived too late for the original battle but right on time for this one. They hit the field at a march and the ground shook beneath them.

And behind them, a second Valorian army. Fresh, and rested. Banners sharp and armor gleaming.

The field was no longer a battlefield but a continent collapsing inward on a single point, and at its center, a man bled into the dirt.

Ragnarʼs plan had been precise: kill the man, and if that didnʼt work, collar the Primordial Villain and turn him into a weapon. Every piece of it had failed, and the armies pouring onto the field were burying what remained.

Then, just as his royal guards were converging on Quinlan to finish the job -

”Who dares hurt my father?”

A squeaky voice, girly and innocent, yet charged with a primal fury, erupted from beneath the earth. The ground split open.

A thousand roots exploded from the battlefield at once.

They came from everywhere. From beneath the dwarven line, the human line, the elven line, the undead horde.

Massive gnarled things as thick as siege towers and smaller tendrils by the tens of thousands, punching through scorched earth and cratered stone and the bodies of the dead with equal indifference. They wrapped around ankles and shields and the legs of wyverns. They impaled corpses and dragged soldiers underground, shattering formations.

The dwarves who had been advancing on Quinlan disappeared. The roots swallowed them whole, dragging them beneath the earth so fast that the screams cut off before they started, and the ground where theyʼd stood sealed shut behind them as if theyʼd never existed.

Quinlan stood up.

He shouldnʼt have been able to. But the roots were beneath his feet now, holding him, supporting his weight where his own legs couldnʼt, and the Primordial Villain rose from all fours to his full height with the ground itself propping him up.

A small hand gripped his pauldron before Rosie settled onto his shoulder with her little legs dangling against his cracked chestplate and leaves woven through her hair catching the smoke-filtered light.

Green skin. Large amber eyes. A tiny dryad girl perched on the shoulder of a bleeding, broken man while a thousand roots tore the continent apart beneath them.

”Iʼm sorry, Father…” Her voice was small but still carrying the edge of the fury that had split the ground open. ”The roots werenʼt ready for what I needed them to do. I had to supercharge them.”

Aelindraʼs sword stopped mid-swing.

The black-haired elf had been cutting through the charging enemies when the roots erupted, and sheʼd handled them with the efficiency of a woman who had fought for millennia. But her purple eyes had found the source, the tiny figure sitting on the Primordial Villainʼs shoulder, and her blade hung in the air for a full heartbeat.

”What manner of forest spirit is that?!”

She didnʼt have an answer. The thing sitting on Quinlanʼs shoulder didnʼt exist in any bestiary or scholarly record that the Alliance of Elvardia maintained, and the roots that were shredding formations across the entire field were operating on a scale that no nature creature in recorded history had ever demonstrated.

On the ground ten meters away, Myrasyn heard her sisterʼs question and began to laugh hysterically, the sound of a woman with a blade wound in her back and a slave collar grinding against her will.

”A forest spirit?” Myrasyn managed between fits.

Sheʼd seen the creature once before. A tiny dryad with green skin and leafy hair during the alliance negotiations, where Rosie acted extra cute and called him Daddy with a voice that melted every elven woman in the projection room.

The little girl tearing the battlefield apart was not cute.

”But this...” Myrasynʼs laughter turned unhinged.

Her green eyes found Aelindra, then Ragnar.

The laughter turned into words that carried across the watching elves.

”You imbeciles.” Her voice found its edge. The queenʼs edge, the one whoʼd been making hard decisions for thousands of years, all in the pursuit of prosperity for the people who called her their queen. ”You irredeemable imbeciles. You had an alliance with this man! You had him fighting for our cause, winning our wars, conquering our cities!” She looked at Aelindra. Then at Ragnarʼs charred figure across the field. ”And you threw it away.”

She began to clap. Slowly. Her hands could barely move, but she got enough distance between her palms to produce a sound, and each clap was a verdict.

”Congratulations. Youʼve doomed both our races.”

Clap.

Clap.

Clap.

Aelindra crossed the distance in one stride and kicked her sister in the mouth.

Myrasynʼs head snapped sideways. Blood sprayed from her split lip and her laughter cut off into a grunt of pain, but the smile that stayed on her face when she turned back was worse than anything sheʼd said.

”Strike me all you like. It wonʼt change the arithmetic.”

”Shut your mouth.”

”Your golden age,” Myrasyn laughed, ”begins today. Isnʼt that right, sister?”

Aelindra kicked her again. This time Myrasyn didnʼt speak.

...

At the center of the field, Quinlan stood with Blossomʼs arm braced beneath his, holding him upright where the roots couldnʼt fully compensate. His Void Stalker on one side, his daughter on his shoulder, amber eyes scanning the chaos as she orchestrated the destruction of her fatherʼs enemies.

His red eyes swept the field.

Every fighter within line of sight felt it. The stare of a man who had been backstabbed, collared, fractured, and who was now standing with a thousand roots at his command and an expression that contained nothing but sheer, unadulterated fury.