Primordial Villain with a Slave Harem

Chapter 1504  Arch Priestess

”Is this how you do it?”

He released.

The bolt screamed across the battlement in a branching web that struck the first archer and forked through every body on the platform. Twelve soldiers seized, convulsed, and dropped in a cascade of sparking armor and limp limbs.

[Youʼve slain...]

The notifications stacked. Quinlan dismissed them.

On the ground behind him, the rogue watched.

He had seen a man who was being shot at by a dozen professional archers pause to experiment with a new element. The arrows hadnʼt concerned him. The archers hadnʼt concerned him. Heʼd treated the volley as a minor interruption and the killing bolt as a curiosity.

”Monster...” the rogue breathed.

The word sat in the cold air for a moment.

Then he filled his lungs and screamed.

”Surrender! Everyone, surrender! Save your lives!”

His voice cracked off the ice dome and echoed down the battlement.

”This is not a fight! This is a massacre! Drop your weapons! Drop them now and kneel!”

Down the wall, a young soldier heard the screaming. He looked at the bodies on the archer platform. He looked at the black figure walking away from them without a backward glance. He looked at his own sword.

He dropped it.

But most others fought on. Veterans with too much pride, loyalty, training, or too much fear of what surrender meant kept going. Only spineless rookies quit that easily. And the defenders of Whisperfield werenʼt spineless, nor were they rookies.

The wall stretched ahead. Steel rang. Men screamed. Soul soldiers pressed forward in tireless waves while the living defenders held their ground with the grim resolve of people who had decided that dying on their feet was preferable to living on their knees.

Quinlan respected that.

He accepted the surrenders when they came. A kneeling soldier received ice chains and mercy. A fighting soldier received the saber. There was no cruelty in it and no pleasure. Just the clean arithmetic of conquest.

The ones who knelt were bound and left alive.

The ones who didnʼt were added to the bladeʼs count.

...

Time blurred, until the portion of the wall he landed on was picked clean. However, he did not do so alone. Quinlan pushed from one side, while a certain murder machine of the highest order did her part from the other side.

Black Fang walked toward him through a corridor of the dead. Bodies lay in heaps on either side of the battlement, draped over barricades, slumped against crenellations, folded in the positions where her katana had found them.

Black Fang was drenched in the blood of her slain enemies. It ran in streaks down her dark robes, pooling in the creases of her armor where the fabric met steel. Her katana hung at her side, the purple sheen of the blade barely visible beneath the red.

She stopped three paces from him. Those purple eyes swept his body once, cataloging wounds with the efficiency of a woman who had spent centuries evaluating how close to death someone was.

”Whereʼd you leave the others?” Quinlan asked.

”I fight best when Iʼm alone.”

Cold and flat, yet utterly serious.

Quinlan grinned behind the helmet. ”I know the feeling. What do you say we team up, just the two of us?”

Quinlan, a mage of mass destruction, had to start fighting away from his girls a long time ago, lest they get in the range of his spells, making him have to hold back.

Black Fang was dealing with the same issue.

She was simply too powerful.

”…”

”If I get in your way, Iʼll leave,” he chuckled. They looked over the edge of the wall together.

The streets below were chaos. Soul soldiers pushed through intersections. Pockets of defenders held barricades at chokepoints. Civilians huddled in doorways. Fires burned in the eastern quarter where a battlemage had gotten desperate.

Quinlan stepped off the wall.

Black Fang did the same.

The Primordial Villain and the Venomborne Terror plunged to the depths below together.

They hit the streets and the city learned what it meant to face both of them at once.

Quinlan was force. The Flame Stance roared through his limbs as he carved through formations with the saber in one hand and elemental bursts in the other, switching between them seamlessly based on whatever the next second demanded. He broke shield walls with earth. He closed gaps with lightning. He cut down everything in reach.

Black Fang was silence.

Where Quinlan announced his presence with fire and thunder, she simply appeared and left bodies behind. Her katana moved in arcs that Quinlan recognized. Hanaeʼs influence was unmistakable. The same economy, the same ruthless efficiency, the same philosophy of zero wasted motion.

Sheʼd absorbed more of the samuraiʼs teachings than he had. Or, to be more accurate, she just started from a much higher point before the teachings ever began.

Black Fang had been an efficient killer for a very long time, after all.

Quinlan watched her bisect a veteran knight through his raised shield.

ʼSheʼs still much cleaner and devastating with a blade. I have a long way to go.ʼ

He filed the observation away.

Together, they swept through the eastern quarter, then the market district, then the garrison row. Defenders knelt and surrendered or stood and died. Surrenders multiplied as word spread through the city that the Primordial Villain and Black Fang were fighting side by side, and that no formation, no barricade, no desperate last stand had slowed them for more than a few heartbeats.

A few members of the soul army followed in their wake, binding the kneeling and finishing the stubborn.

Then they reached the cathedral.

It rose from the center of the city like a monument to a gentler age. Tall stained-glass windows lined its facade, depicting scenes of divine mercy in colors that the ice domeʼs blue light turned cold and strange. The doors were open. Light poured from within, golden. It spilled across the stone steps and down into the street like a challenge.

A woman stood at the top of the steps.

She wore robes of white and gold, layered and flowing, with a high collar that framed a face carved from decades of devotion and discipline. A staff rested in her right hand, its head crowned with a gemstone that pulsed in rhythm with the light behind her. Her expression was grim.

An Arch Priestess. Standing before the seat of her Goddessʼs earthly power.

Her eyes moved from Quinlan to Black Fang and back. Her gaze lingered on the blood. On the katana that dripped with it. On the black armor that wore it like decoration.

Her lips curled.

”You two reek of death worse than the undead. At least the Covenantʼs monsters have the excuse of being hollow. Youʼre alive. You chose this. You treat the living like toys to be broken and discarded.”

Her staff struck the stone.

”This is sacred ground. The Goddess shelters all who seek her mercy, and I will not let the likes of you defile it.”

The cathedral answered her.

Golden light surged from every window, every doorway, every crack in the ancient stone. It flooded the Arch Priestess and she drank it in, her robes billowing, her staff blazing, the gemstone at its crown burning so bright it left afterimages. Her domain. Her Goddessʼs seat of power. And she stood at its heart, fed by centuries of accumulated faith and devotion.

The light pressed outward.

Quinlan felt it against his skin.

Beside him, Black Fang drew her katana. The purple steel caught the golden light and turned it violet.

”Iʼve always wanted to kill one of you pretentious choir singers,” she decreed.

Quinlan glanced at her. The flat delivery. The casual grip on the blade. The complete absence of hesitation.

He grinned behind the helmet.

Then he addressed the Arch Priestess.

”I have no intention of harming the people sheltering in your cathedral, just as I have no intention of harming anyone else in this city who complies with my terms.”

The Arch Priestessʼs eyes narrowed.

”But I do not recognize the sovereignty of your Goddess over the citizens of the Vraven Kingdom.” He took a step forward. ”They are denizens of Thalorind, and I lay my claim to them.”

Another step.

”I demand their surrender, just as I demand yours.”

The Arch Priestess stared at him.

The golden light around her flickered. Her grip on the staff shifted, knuckles whitening around the shaft as the words settled over her like a physical weight.

Blasphemy.

Pure, brazen, unapologetic blasphemy.

Wars had been fought across this continent for millennia. Kingdoms rose and fell. Armies burned cities to ash and salted the earth behind them. But in all of that history, across every conflict and every conquest, one rule had remained unbroken.

You did not attack the clergy. You did not threaten a cathedral. You did not challenge the authority of the Goddess herself, because even the most ruthless conqueror understood that some doors, once opened, could never be closed.

These two lunatics were kicking it down.

”Come and take it then, heretics!” she snarled, and the cathedral roared to life behind her.