Primordial Villain with a Slave Harem

Chapter 1700 Contaminated

His fists, clenched since the ritual began, opened slack at his sides, and for a single full second the most dangerous thing on this battlefield stood perfectly still with his mouth hanging open and nothing behind his face, looking like a braindead man.

Then the regeneration caught. He heaved massive breaths that shook the fused plate across his chest, air dragging through lungs the ritual shouldnʼt have needed but the body remembered wanting.

”Youʼre better than I gave you credit for, Villain.” The words came between heaving breaths, and for the first time since the ritual they werenʼt coated with pure hatred. ”If I wasnʼt this furious at you, I mightʼve enjoyed this fight.”

Fused plate crawled across the skull, the socket filled, and a new eye opened wet and furious where [Soul Reaper] had carved through. The vacancy vanished behind a rage that had no business existing in something that had just regrown half its brain.

Quinlan wasnʼt about to start chatting now. He used the single second he got to lunge forward.

He closed the distance and drove the coated blade through the healing seam at Ragnarʼs shoulder, the same gap heʼd scored fifty times today. This time primordial blood rode the edge in.

The wound sealed, and Ragnarʼs regeneration locked Quinlanʼs blood inside its own flesh without knowing what it had just swallowed.

For two heartbeats, nothing happened. The primordial blood sat inert beneath the fused plate, dormant, doing nothing that a splash of any other manʼs blood wouldnʼt do. Against a normal enemy, it would have stayed that way, because Quinlanʼs blood wasnʼt poison by nature. It was just blood, strange and primordial and luminescent, but ultimately passive without something to react against.

The dark ritual provided that something.

Necrotic energy swept through Ragnarʼs body in a constant current, maintaining the fusion, powering the regeneration, keeping the armored flesh alive. When it reached the contamination site and encountered cells it didnʼt recognize, it did what it was designed to do: it attacked. Black energy surged toward the primordial blood in a wave meant to break it down and expel the foreign substance the way it expelled everything else that didnʼt belong.

The Abyssal Genesis responded to aggression the way any living system would. It fought back.

”What!”

Quinlanʼs cells lit up under the necrotic assault, and what had been dormant blood became active, a hostile intruder that multiplied in direct proportion to the force sent to destroy it. The dark ritual poured energy into the site to purge the invader, and the invader fed on every drop of that energy and grew. A vein of dark crimson traced beneath the fused plate where only black had run before, brightening with each pulse of necrotic force the ritual sent to kill it.

The ritual was creating its own enemy by fighting it. The harder it attacked, the stronger the contamination became, because primordial biology didnʼt recognize necrotic energy as a threat. It recognized it as food.

Ragnarʼs shoulder twitched. His arm jerked once, involuntary, and confusion cracked through his face for the first time since the battle began. ”What did you...”

”HRARGH!” Ragnarʼs muscles bulged, his head going red, as he forced his cells to expel the invader.

The contamination was only one wound deep, and the ritual still had plenty of reserves to burn. The necrotic current concentrated everything it had on the single site, overwhelmed the crimson vein through sheer volume, and forced it dormant. The twitch in Ragnarʼs arm smoothed back to nothing as the shoulder sealed clean.

He paid for it. The regeneration that purged the contamination had to come from somewhere, and the fused plate across his right side thinned by a visible degree where energy had been cannibalized to fuel the purge.

It wasnʼt enough to cripple him, and Ragnar knew it. His charge came harder than the last ten, fist aimed at the bare chest where [Synchra] had been, and Quinlan wove clear on wind with margins that belonged in nightmares. Without his armor, one solid connection would end this.

The dwarf pressed the attack.

”Die already!”

Three exchanges came fast, each one testing a different angle, and Quinlan answered them all with elemental spacing and saber technique, but the blood on [Soul Reaper]ʼs edge was drying between strikes that Ragnar was carefully deflecting now.

The single contamination had cost Ragnar reserves to purge. A good trade. But it wouldnʼt kill him, and the blood from Quinlanʼs mouth had stopped flowing.

ʼI need more.ʼ

The math was brutal and clean. To kill the roided-up dwarf king through contamination, Quinlan needed to put enough primordial blood inside that body that the ritual couldnʼt purge it fast enough. He needed volume. He needed to coat every strike from here until the end.

ʼThereʼs no time to waste.ʼ

Quinlan caught [Soul Reaper] in his left hand and drew the edge across his own right forearm in a single controlled stroke.

The cut was deep. He cut into the muscle with the same precision he used on enemies, and the Abyssal Genesis answered the invitation with a surge of luminescent crimson that flooded down his arm and dripped from his fingertips in threads of red-black light.

Ragnar stopped mid-charge.

The dwarf king stood three meters away with his fist still cocked and his new eye fixed on the man who had just opened his own arm to the bone as calmly as a butcher sectioning meat. The confusion that crossed his face was different from the contaminationʼs surprise. This was the look of a fighter who had seen thousands of battles and never once encountered an opponent who cut himself open on purpose with that expression.

Because Quinlanʼs expression hadnʼt changed. The same cold focus heʼd worn since he stopped letting Ragnarʼs words steer him sat on his face without a crack, and the blood pouring down his forearm didnʼt register in his eyes as pain, but as ammunition.

The saber burned red-black from guard to tip, dripping, alive.

”Youʼve gone mad.” Ragnarʼs voice came quiet for the first time since the ritual, the perpetual scream of hatred dimming into something that hadnʼt been there before. ”Suicidal dog!”

Quinlan closed the distance, and Ragnarʼs guard came up too slow.

The dwarfʼs eye was still locked on the wound in Quinlanʼs forearm, on the sheer volume of crimson pouring from the muscle, onto [Soul Reaper]ʼs edge where the pale flames opened to accept the blood and coat themselves in it willingly before going away again. The sight of it held him for a fraction too long, because nothing in his thousand years of fighting had ever looked like a manʼs own blade drinking from his masterʼs veins.

The guard he mounted was weak, a half-formed block that [Soul Reaper] carved through on the way to the ribs beneath. The blood that rode the edge went deep, and this time it went in hot, the luminescence brighter than the first application because the source was fresh and flowing.

”YOU FUCKING FREAK!” Ragnar screamed, higher pitched than ever before. His counter came fast and hard, his fist aimed at the open wound on Quinlanʼs forearm to punish the madness heʼd just witnessed, and wind pulled Quinlan clear with a margin so thin the displaced air ruffled the hair on the dwarfʼs knuckles.

The fight resumed, and it was nothing like the exchanges before.