Primordial Villain with a Slave Harem

Chapter 1801: Arrogance

Quinlan held the old king’s stare across the frozen basement, Iris still gathered against his side, and neither man had moved since the words ’my duty as king’ left Alexios’s mouth.

The frost held with them. It sat over the casks and the stone in a pale crust, the two lantern flames stayed drowned at their blue points, and beneath it all the sealed pillar kept its silence, forgotten by the very audience it had tried courting.

”You know,” Quinlan said at last, ”we’ve spent most of a year trying to kill each other. And in all that time, I felt respect toward you.”

Quinlan’s voice stayed level and conversational, which, against the pressure in the room, only made it heavier. ”You hunted me with badly lacking information, yet you, proud king of humanity, still played every board to win.”

Alexios’s eyes narrowed.

”But that was when you didn’t know what you were looking at. Now we’re not talking about a primordial you have little information on, but one of your numerous corrupt vassals. Today, instead of a proud king, all I see is an arrogant man desperately clinging to power.”

”...” Alexios remained silent for a long moment, then he laughed.

It came out dry and low and entirely unafraid, rolling around the freezing cellar.

”Arrogance.” He turned the word over and shook his head slowly. ”Far be it from me. I’m just a dying old man who wants to leave this world knowing his people are in a better place than where I found them.”

He said it without a drop of self-pity, in the same tone he might use to report troop numbers, a man stating his deadline.

The winter eased.

Warmth crept back across the stone, the lantern flames climbed up out of their blue and filled the cellar with moving yellow light, and the mass went out of the dark.

Quinlan tilted his head. ”Then talk.”

”Think past the blood for one moment.” Alexios flexed his sword hand open and closed, working feeling back into the fingers. ”Say I stand aside. Say I let the Primordial Villain roam my kingdom meting out personal justice on whichever noble house he judges filthy. Whatever control the crown still holds dies alongside them, and every house with the means starts preparing for the day you decide it’s time to ’judge them.’ And you...”

He looked Quinlan right in the eyes.

”You become the wrathful tyrant. Oh, the commoners will adore you. A monster who butchers nobles, justified or not, is a folk hero by dinnertime. But powerful men will fear you, and what powerful men fear, they scheme against, and they won’t scheme with armies. Not against you who just eats them all up.”

His voice dropped lower. ”You heard the same testimony I did tonight. Somebody seems to have rented the Covenant’s name for one night of cruelty, because nobody audits the Covenant and nobody avenges its victims. Make yourself the continent’s dreaded executioner, and your name will be rented a hundred times over. Every lord who wants a rival’s house burned will burn it himself and whisper ’the villain’s justice’ over the ashes.”

Against Quinlan’s side, Iris went very still, her stare dropping to the chain doubled around her fist, split knuckles whitening over the iron.

A rented name...

In another world, where things played out differently, she could’ve been hunting him instead of the Covenant.

”Let them hate me, or falsely accuse me.” Quinlan waved it off. ”They’ll fall in line soon enough, or the world will leave them behind.”

”Leave them behind...” Alexios repeated the words the way he examined captured maps, from several angles, hunting the trap. ”Tell me, Quinlan. When you imagine the world that comes after all of this, what does it look like?”

”I’m not giving you a political speech in a basement at night.”

”Indulge a dying man.”

”Hah...” Quinlan exhaled through his nose, and a corner of his mouth admitted defeat. ”Fine. One thing. The one thing this continent keeps teaching me no matter which corner of it I dig up. Power that gets handed down long enough stops being earned, and anything that stops being earned rots. When a man receives everything from birth, land, title, armies, without ever having to achieve a single thing in his life...”

He glanced at the frozen undead.

”...you get the kind of sick men who buy a child and let terrible things be done to them without blinking.”

Silence answered him for a while.

Alexios stood with the lantern light moving on his face, and the pause ran one beat too long, then several more.

Quinlan had aimed those words at nobles in general, but watching the old king’s expression, he realized they’d struck his house perfectly as well.

Alexios Valorian was a dying man with a crown that would pass the way crowns always passed, to children born holding one. Both princes were seen as pushovers, lacking the old king’s charisma, intellect, strength - everything. They would not be able to fill the shoes he left behind, not one bit.

The Princesses weren’t much better either. One was wed to Duskmere Dukedom for political leverage, one belonged to the Goddess’s church far more than to her father. The other had jumped through a portal and chosen the villain’s family over her own palace.

His own children were the one battlefield the old king was clearly going to lose.

Quinlan could have pressed the wound. Instead, he let him have the silence. Kings were entitled to a few seconds of their own.

”You’re right,” Alexios said at last. ”You are more right than you know. I’ve sat above that rot for almost a thousand years. I’ve watched houses I knighted myself thicken into things their founders would have put to the sword.”

His chin lifted. ”You’ve diagnosed the disease correctly, but it’s your medicine that kills the patient. Tear the pillars down with nothing built to replace them, and it won’t be dukes starving in the rubble, it will be the millions of small people who plant and haul and pay taxes to whoever owns the road they walk on. Order is a poor, ugly, corrupt thing, and it is still gentler than its absence.”

He exhaled tiredly. ”I don’t have the years left to rebuild what you would raze in a weekend.”

”So what do you propose?” Quinlan asked coldly.

Alexios squared himself. ”A royal warrant. The crown opens the Ravenclaw investigation formally. My archives, their ledgers, every record they believe is buried, all of it under law and in the open. And if the trail truly ends where you believe it ends...”

However, Quinlan wasn’t in agreement. ”I’m sorry, old friend, but I can’t trust your men to investigate properly. These are the kind of people who’d call the nation just and prosperous when the lands fester with criminal syndicates powerful enough to rival ducal houses.”

”Are you two done?”

Iris’s voice cut through the cellar, scraped raw by screaming at a skull for a long time.

She had pulled out of Quinlan’s hold, and neither man had caught the moment she did it.

”Kingdoms, tyrants, the future of the continent.” Her hands tightened into trembling fists. ”You’ve been posturing in a freezer carving up my revenge like it’s loot. My family. My brother. My revenge. Neither of you gets to decide what happens to the scum who did this. Warrant or massacre, I don’t give a shit what paper it’s wrapped in.”

She looked them both in the eye, one after the other, for a long passing second.

”They’re mine and mine alone.”

Nobody spoke for a moment, then Quinlan’s tension depleted from one second to the next, replaced by a big grin.

”This old fucker certainly knows how to rile me up. My apologies. I didn’t mean to belittle you, Iris.”

”You’re one to talk...” Alexios grumbled, but Iris didn’t hear it.

Her gaze remained on Quinlan, their eyes latched onto each other’s, until Iris spoke again. ”Quinlan... You’ve done so much for me I can’t even put it into words-”

She wasn’t allowed to finish, for Quinlan interrupted, his amusement gone. ”You’re not about to apologize to me, are you? It’s your revenge, your justice, no matter how emotionally invested I might be. I merely hope to be there to see the end of it.”

”...” It was Iris’s turn to turn silent for a long second, mulling over his words. Then, a brilliantly unhinged, bewitchingly gorgeous, murderous smile greeted his words. ”That... is my hope as well. Together...”

”Together,” Quinlan nodded, feeling an irresistible urge to hug this amazing woman. But Iris was already a step ahead, stepping into his embrace and looking up. ”Thank you... for everything. Without you... I’d...”

This time, Quinlan didn’t chitchat, merely returning the hug with full force.

Iris allowed herself a few seconds of it, fierce and wordless, her forehead pressed into his chest. Then she reached her limit and moved to pull back.

She didn’t move an inch.

”...Let go.”

”No.” Quinlan’s chin settled on top of her head. ”The moment isn’t over.”

”It’s over. It’s been over.” Her palms pushed against his chest, the same palms that had cracked a frost monolith tonight. ”You clingy bastard... Go hug the slit-eyed slut.”

”Khm...” Alexios coughed into his palm, and Quinlan’s head turned toward the king, unimpressed.

”Do you need a cough medicine, old man?”

”What I need is for you to release her before she reaches for that chain.”

Quinlan’s arms loosened with zero remorse, and Iris tore herself free, planted a full step of distance between them, and glared at Quinlan with dangerous eyes.

But she couldn’t hold it any longer than a few seconds, and looked away.

Alexios then turned to face Iris fully.