Primordial Villain with a Slave Harem

Chapter 1051: Answer Me, Alastair!

The silence that followed was no ordinary silence. It pressed down like a great weight, thick enough to choke on. No one in the chamber dared shift or breathe too loudly.

The king’s eyes lowered to the dark pool of blood seeping slowly across the floor at the duke’s feet. It trailed from the still forms of the Phantom League’s dead.

Everyone understood the unspoken truth.

Kaede had done everything Alastair had failed to do: crushing an enemy syndicate’s leadership in barely a year of ruling while he, given entire centuries, could not claim a single true victory.

The king did not need to voice the comparison. It was written clearly enough in his expression.

”What have you been doing all this time, Duke Alastair Thalion Greenvale?”

Alastair was many things, but a dumb brute wasn’t one of them. He knew what he had to do. Paint his rule in a bright light. So he swallowed hard as he grasped for something—anything—that could cast his rule in a favorable light.

”Your Majesty!” he began, forcing steel into his voice, ”The Beastkin Territory has not dared invade our lands in years. They know they would face the mighty armies of Greenvale! Unlike the Ravenshades, whose pitiful forces crumbled before Elvardia’s invasion, Greenvale stands strong-”

The king’s raised hand cut through his words like a blade through silk.

”I did not know I had such a slick-mouthed politician for a frontier duke,” Alexios said, his tone being deceptively even. ”Greenvale is not invaded?”

He rose from his throne in one fluid motion. The air around him thickened, becoming heavy and oppressive, and when his voice came again, it was no longer calm. For the first time in his life, the king of the Vraven Kingdom raised his voice against one of his dukes.

”It has been invaded for over a year straight!”

The words cracked like a thunderclap across the hall.

Then came the sound of his boots striking the dais. *CLAMP. CLAMP. CLAMP.*

Each step was a blow in its own right, echoing through the vaulted chamber.

Alastair’s eyes went wide. ”Y-you... you don’t mean the greenskins, my king?”

Alexios stopped mid-step, his gaze burning with an entirely inhuman fury. ”I don’t mean the greenskins?! I do mean the greenskins!” His voice rose into a roar that made even the most battle-hardened soldiers in the hall tremble. ”Those brute monsters are tearing through MY lands every single minute, and you, its entrusted protector, sit here eating lavish meals and parading the wife of a RANDOM criminal as some grand catch?”

The force in his voice was straight up physical, a shockwave that moved tableware even in the far ends of the hall.

”The greenskins were sent by the Beastkin Confederation to destroy the Vraven Kingdom! So tell me, Alastair, how exactly are we not being invaded?! Or are you suggesting that just because they’re monsters, they don’t count?!”

Alastair stumbled over his own tongue, a stammering mess of half-formed excuses as the king closed the distance with unrelenting steps.

”You knew exactly what was happening!” Alexios pressed on, his words now heavy enough to crush human lives by themselves. ”And you turned a blind eye to the suffering of my people! Whole villages, whole towns, overrun, desecrated by the filth!”

His words lost their edge for a moment, but no one even dared to think it meant the king got the rage out of his system. ”But why should Greenvale care?”

He began pacing around Alastair like a predator.

”The Sustaining Arm—the three non-frontier duchies—will bail you out, won’t they? Food losses? They’ll send shipments. Ruined peasant lives? They’ll send replacements. Collapsed infrastructure? They’ll rebuild it for you. So why bother fighting? Why not sit safe behind your city walls and boast about your ’strongest army ever’ while the people burn?” 𝐫𝖆₦Ộ𝖇ËŜ

The booming voice returned when the king outright screamed, ”ANSWER ME ALREADY, ALASTAIR!”

”M-my king, I-I-”

Hearing his nonsensical stammer, the king’s gaze turned dark, darker than ever before. Suddenly, his hand moved. And in that moment, the world seemed to slow. The sword he had left aside after Kaede’s display stirred alive, ripping itself from its resting place. It shot through the air with the deadly precision of a hawk diving on prey, turning in flight to meet his grip exactly as his arm came up in a swing.

The blade’s gleam flashed and came down on the duke’s neck.

”W-wait! Y-you can’t d-”

Alastair begged with trembling knees due to the crippling amount of wrath he saw in the king’s monstrous eyes.

The blade stopped a breath from Alastair’s neck, yet the force of the strike was such that the very air cut him. A wide spray of blood erupted, pouring down the perfect edge of the sword.

The duke’s knees buckled, making him fall to the floor. His breath came ragged as the blade hovered above him, its edge gleaming in the pool of his own blood. The hall was utterly silent but for the slow, wet drip of crimson down steel.

The king’s grip tightened on the hilt of his trusty sword, his gaze never leaving the duke’s pale, sweat-drenched face.

When he finally spoke, his voice carried not the roar of moments ago, but the kind of cold authority that made every soul in the hall freeze. Alexios Valorian was ready to deliver his royal decree.

”By my right as king of Vraven...”

Every noble, knight, and servant leaned forward to hear the words rolling off their king’s tongue unconsciously.

”I hereby question your ability to uphold your duties.”

The words rolled out heavy, with each syllable becoming a hammer on the anvil of fate.

A creak echoed in the silence as someone’s chair groaned under the weight of the king’s presence.

This was an unprecedented development. If one asked the dukes, the king didn’t have the right to even question whether they were fit for their stations. It was their family’s birthright; the king had no say in the matter.

As the final word formed on Alexios’ tongue, the hall was swallowed by the silence that always came before the storm.