Primordial Villain with a Slave Harem

Chapter 1554  Strategizing Around The Campfire

Every time Kaede tried to disengage and push toward Quinlan, the assassin cut off the angle. When Kaede created a gap with a combination meant to force Black Fang into a defensive reset, the older woman flowed through it and returned the pressure from a new vector. The frustration building behind Kaedeʼs cold expression was visible in the way her strikes grew heavier, channeling more of the bladeʼs power into each swing, trying to simply overpower the obstacle between her and her real target.

Black Fang absorbed the escalation without changing her expression. She had no interest in letting Kaede Fujimori reach anyone.

Morgana watched the field for a long moment. Her lip curled as she spotted Black Fang carving into Kaedeʼs guard with a sequence that forced the duchess onto her back foot.

The half-healed scar across her chest ached beneath her robes.

She remembered the campfire.

Three weeks into the march toward the Vesper Consortium holdings, the three of them had sat around a fire while the army slept behind them. Kaede sat with her blade across her knees, Lilith with her spellblade planted in the dirt beside her, and Morgana nursed a cup of wine she hadnʼt touched.

”The biggest hurdle is the people around him,” Lilith had said, staring into the flames. ”He raises his dead back up and his companions are dangerous, but Black Fang is the real threat. If sheʼs with him when we engage, sheʼs the one who dictates how the fight goes.”

Morganaʼs fingers had pressed against the scar. ”Iʼll kill her from range. If I engage from a distance, she canʼt do what she did last time. Sheʼs a close-quarters fighter. She needs to be near me to cut me open.”

Kaede had studied the fire for a moment. ”Then leave Lilith to handle the soul army and his other allies. If you keep Black Fang at bay, Iʼll push through to him and finish it.”

”I can hold the army,” Lilith agreed. ”But remember, killing his soldiers is pointless if heʼs able to cast [Awaken] again. I can cut them down a hundred times and it wonʼt matter. You need to make it so that he is never in a position where he can cast that spell. You need to constantly push and push and push and then kill him.”

”Iʼll handle it,” Morgana had said.

Kaedeʼs cold eyes shifted to her. Lilithʼs jaw tightened.

”You just said you wanted to fight Black Fang from range,” Lilith said flatly.

”I will capture the boy and then kill the snake bitch.”

They both remembered Greenvale. The queen abandoning formation to chase Quinlan, abandoning her wind spell and nearly killing her own allies, burning through a Legendary-grade artifact because she couldnʼt control herself long enough to follow the plan sheʼd agreed to thirty seconds earlier.

Theyʼd argued. Kaede had pointed out that the last time Morgana ”handled” the Primordial Villain, he escaped with his assassin while Morgana screamed at empty sky. Lilith had been blunter. The memory ended with voices raised and the fire burning low and nothing resolved, because you couldnʼt resolve a queen who believed she could do everything at once.

Morgana blinked.

The campfire faded. The battlefield returned.

Below her, Kaedeʼs blade locked against Black Fangʼs katana in a grinding contest of strength that neither woman was willing to lose, and the Fujimori duchess was going nowhere.

ʼYou wanted to deal with the boy,ʼ Morgana murmured, watching Kaede struggle against the assassin who wouldnʼt let her pass. ʼBut I suppose youʼre preoccupied.ʼ

Her eyes shifted back to Quinlan.

ʼIʼll take over, then.ʼ

”Three months ago, you could barely survive one spell. You relied on your armor, your assassin, and your portals.” Her chin lifted. ”You couldnʼt even fight me. You just ran and had that woman do the bleeding for you. Yet youʼre saying that you no longer plan to run?”

Quinlan tilted his head.

”You measure time in centuries, Morgana. Decades blur together for someone like you. But three months is a very long time when youʼre me.”

The reaction Morgana gave was the wrong one.

Her pupils dilated.

”Yes,” she breathed. ”Yes, thatʼs exactly it. Three months. You went from a man who needed his armor to survive a single spell to someone who can raise an earth dome thick enough to outlast [Infernal Gale] on raw mana output alone.”

Her head tilted, mirroring his, and the cycling elements in her irises spun faster.

”How? What changed in your mana channels? What did you do to your body?” She stepped forward on the wind, closing distance, and her eyes roamed across his frame the way a surgeon studied a patient on the table. ”Your elemental output has grown considerably, but thatʼs not what stands out to me. Itʼs your body. Your channels have restructured themselves around your mana in a way Iʼve never seen. As if your entire physiology reshaped itself to let your potential through.”

Any other woman on this continent would have bristled at being more or less called old. Morgana Ravenshade did not care.

She was the strongest elemental mage on Iskaris. Her power was a settled fact, not a point of insecurity, and the boy standing in front of her had just confirmed what sheʼd suspected since the first time she laid eyes on him: he was the single most anomalous mana phenomenon she had encountered in five hundred years of studying the craft.

Queen and mother - if only in the biological sense - Morgana Ravenshade had been a researcher long before sheʼd been either of those things. A woman who had clawed her way to Level 74 by understanding magic at a depth that her peers couldnʼt fathom, who had unlocked the Elemental Sovereign class because she refused to accept that the elements were separate disciplines when her own mana channels told her they were branches of the same tree.

And here was a man whose mana was doing things that shouldnʼt be possible.

”When Iʼm done with you, Iʼm going to peel your mana channels open layer by layer and find out exactly what made you into this.” Her fingers curled and fire licked between them. ”You are a walking contradiction to centuries of elemental theory, and I will understand why. Every pathway, every anomaly, every mutation your body has undergone.”

Her smile belonged in a laboratory.

”You are the closest thing to a breakthrough in the fundamental nature of magic that I have seen in my entire life. I will not let that go to waste.”

Quinlan looked at the woman hovering above him with seven elements cycling through her irises and the genuine academic excitement of a researcher who had just found the most interesting specimen of her career, and he exhaled wryly, ”Yep. Still batshit insane.”

He raised both hands.

The air answered before his fingers finished spreading. Wind coiled around his left palm in a tight spiral while fire gathered at his right, and between them the earth beneath his feet cracked as stone pulled itself free and orbited his wrists in jagged fragments. Three elements, cycling in tandem, feeding off each other in the same way Morganaʼs [Infernal Gale] had combined wind and fire into a single devastating lance.

The ground trembled.

Morganaʼs smile widened.

”Come, then,” Quinlan called. ”Letʼs end this farce.”

The elements surged as the Elemental Sovereign and the Primordial Villain collided.