Primordial Villain with a Slave Harem

Chapter 1908: Final Resistance

From behind the great doors at the far end came the muffled fury of the council’s last lords.

”WHAT ARE YOU WAITING FOR?!” That was Mogrun, pitched high with terror. ”THAT THING IS ALREADY DEAD! THE COUNCIL COMMANDS YOU! LOOSE! LOOSE!”

And then their king used what the ritual had left of his lungs.

”SHOOT!” The roar came out ruined and enormous, dead air forced through a broken instrument, and every soldier in the corridor flinched as it hit them. ”FORGET WHAT I AM NOW! SHOOT HIM THROUGH ME! THAT IS YOUR KING’S LAST COMMAND!”

Something tore in what remained of his chest. His last word frayed at its edges, and black ran freely from the corner of the royal mouth.

On the right, the ballista crew obeyed their king.

The great bolt crossed the corridor, and the Villain met it with their king.

Ragnar took it a hand’s width from the first shaft, burying to half its length. The black threads came for the wound slower this time, slow enough that the whole corridor watched them labor.

The ooze crawling down the shaft ran thin and dark. The smell of it reached both barricades, old rot and older iron. The stones were still drinking. The king was still paying.

The scream that left him had gone threadbare. The approval underneath it had not.

Quinlan’s voice rolled down the corridor, not sounding one bit pleased. ”Okay. Bloodbath it is then.”

Every dwarven spine at once felt a terrible shudder rush through it.

Their king’s own order closed over the killing ground, and every dwarf in it now owned an impossible choice. Shoot, and the bolt landed in the body of the king they had sworn their lines to. Hesitate, and they were still armed soldiers holding weapons on the Villain’s path, in a dark his family had already dissolved into.

The choices came due one at a time.

A sergeant on the left barricade leveled his crossbow, hunting a clean angle past the king that did not exist, and his prayer got as far as ”Stone keep-”. Blossom was through him and elsewhere before the trigger finished its travel.

On the right wall, a slit-crew got their second weapon cranked halfway back to tension. Ayame’s blade came in through the slit itself, and the cranking stopped.

A barricade tried to rally around its standard. Serika’s fist arrived, and the standard went down with everyone still holding it.

Twice, a slit-crew caught Black Fang’s outline and tracked her instead of him, then died before they could react.

”Mercy!! I don’t want to die! I have children-”

Then a crying guardsman threw his crossbow over the barricade and sat down with his hands on his helmet.

”Huh?”

Nobody touched him, and no one was more shocked than the man himself.

”Huh???”

Two more shots came from the right, brave and quick. Both landed in their king, and the men who had fired lowered their weapons afterward and could not look at what they had done.

”Mercy...”

Steel began hitting the floor.

It went down the barricades in both directions, axes, crossbows, ancestral blades, ringing off the flagstones one after another, and the lords’ finest knelt where they stood. Captain Torvek laid his axe down last, unbuckled his helm, and knelt to his king.

”STAND UP!” Ragnar screamed at them, thrashing in the Villain’s grip, all four stumps jerking against nothing, black spraying off his lips with every word. ”COWARDS! TRAITORS! PICK THEM UP! SHOOT! SHOOOOT!”

They knelt, and kept kneeling, and the last command of the last dwarf king landed on soldiers who loved him too much to obey it.

The roar cracked, then failed altogether. The ruin of Ragnar hung in the silence he had ordered them to break, a bolt still working its way out of his mending chest.

”See that?” The murmur arrived warm against the side of the royal skull. ”They love you.”

A beat passed.

”You must’ve done something well.”

”Damn you...” Black, filthy tears began welling up in Ragnar’s eyes. ”Damn you... Just kill me already... Stop this torture...”

...

The great doors of the council hall stood at the corridor’s end, blacksteel from sill to crown, built to drink force, sorcery, and time. The oldest null-lattice under the peak burned across them in unbroken lines.

Quinlan set the king down against a pillar beside the doors, upright, facing back down the corridor, where the eye could miss nothing.

Kaelira came up the killing ground between the kneeling soldiers, hammer over her shoulder, the sulk still officially in force. Then her eyes found what burned across the great doors, and the sulk fell off her between one breath and the next. What burned there was the finest ward-lattice she had ever touched.

”This is a null-lattice.” Her gauntleted finger traced the lintel, feather-light, and her voice had gone fluent and sure, the forge register, the one that had never once stammered.

”Six anchors, cross-braced, and they share their load with every ward on this tier. The whole ring hangs off this door. Whoever laid it was a genius.”

Along both walls, the kneeling soldiers listened to an elf read the mountain’s oldest secret off the stone like a shopping list.

The royal smiths had maintained that lattice for generations by copying it, because no living dwarf could read the original work.

”She can see the anchor points,” Torvek heard himself say. ”She just... looked at it.”

The hammer came up. Six taps followed, unhurried, each one landing on a point nobody else in the corridor could see, and on the sixth, the rune-light across the great doors guttered and went out.

Down every approach and around the council hall itself, the old anchors died with it. The absolute promise every lord in the city had gone to sleep behind died of six hammer taps.

”It’s open,” Kaelira informed the corridor at large, still not looking at him, and stepped aside. Her long ears had turned red anyway.

”A true prodigy to the end,” Quinlan grinned.

The not-looking became ferocious.

”I’m still mad at you. Praise will get you nowhere. Hmph...”

Behind them, the war hymn arrived at the lords’ tiers. It came up out of every gallery mouth at once, tens of thousands strong, the rebellion cresting the last stairs of a city it had climbed one tier at a time. Brokk walked at the head of it, new helmet on her brow, Everwright in her fist.

Quinlan collected the king from his pillar, pushed the great doors of the council hall open with one hand, and let the mountain in.

The last lords of the high clans stood at the far end of their hall, and there was nowhere above them left to go. Their eyes went to the lintel first, where the oldest ward under the peak had died without a sound.

Then their eyes found what the Villain was carrying, and the room’s courage went out.

Quinlan set their king down on the council table, upright among the maps of a mountain he no longer owned, facing his lords.

”Greetings,” the Villain told the room.

Lord Mogrun looked at what remained of his king and sat down on the floor without deciding to.

”Elysiar!” Harrek’s voice went to syrup on the first syllable. ”My lord! The Copper Vaults recognized your quality from the very first-”

”They’re yours,” Quinlan said, to the First Hammer, and stepped aside.

Nobody recorded the order in which the lords died, though Lord Mogrun went down still bellowing about quotas, and Lord Harrek died mid-offer.

The perfumed cousin made it four steps toward the servants’ stair before the tunnel-wardens took him back down the galleries he had bled dry. His screaming lasted three full tiers.

Through it all, Brokk walked to the council table and laid Everwright down on its surface, beside her king’s ruin. Her hand stayed on the haft a moment longer than setting a thing down requires, and then she made it let go.

The smiths nearest the table saw where she had put it, and stopped moving.

”There’s never been a hammer at that council table,” one of them whispered, the oldest grievance of the smithy arriving at its own funeral.

One rested on it now.

Then it was done, and the hall filled, and kept filling: dwarves on the stairs, dwarves on the rails, dwarves packed shoulder to shoulder between the pillars.