Novel Full Chapter 1533 They're Here
Chapter 1533 They’re Here
At the rear of the procession, walking slightly apart from the group with her arms folded and her expression suggesting she had opinions about the last several hours, came Iris.
“The former slaves are settled in Miri Town, Quin,” Seraphiel reported, brushing snow from her shoulder. “As always, I handled the elves, Felicity took the humans, Kitsara managed the beastkin.”
“And Iris talked to the dwarves! You made the right choice, she saw eye-to-eye with them instantly!” Felicity chirped, overjoyed.
Quinlan glanced at Iris.
Iris’s eyes narrowed.
He’d sent her to handle the dwarven slaves specifically because her blunt, abrasive personality seemed like it would land well with a people who considered politeness a waste of perfectly good syllables. Dwarves respected directness. Iris couldn’t be anything else if she tried.
The glance they exchanged said everything. His expression said, ‘I was right, wasn’t I?’ Her narrowed eyes said, ‘Yes and I hate it.’
“They invited her to drink with them afterward,” Kitsara giggled, tails swishing with amusement. “She declined. Aggressively.”
“Good,” Quinlan nodded. “Thank you, Iris.”
“… No problem,” she managed.
The decision to house the freed slaves separately hadn’t been a difficult one. Miri Town already worked as a settlement where multiple races coexisted without trying to murder each other, which was rarer than it should have been. The people of Whisperfield were different. They’d grown up on the Elvardian border, where slavery was common and interracial politics ran ugly. Many of them had owned slaves personally.
Dumping the freed alongside their former owners in a brand-new city where tensions were already high and resources were still being organized was a recipe for violence. Better to settle them in Miri Town, where inclusion was already the norm, and work on changing the culture here over time.
Why he freed the slaves to begin with?
Pragmatism. People who were given incentives and treated like human beings produced better results than people who were beaten into compliance. His capitalist overlords from Earth had figured that one out centuries ago, and they hadn’t even needed to be decent people to reach the conclusion.
‘Fix the culture. Make it work.’
That was a problem for Jasmine’s desk, not his. Right now, he had a promise to keep.
“Whisperfield,” Quinlan said. “Time to hand it over.”
The girls who had been smiling softly through the exchange with Vex and then the newcomers shifted. A ripple of amusement passed through the group, the kind of shared look that women who had spent months together in absurd situations developed without needing to speak.
Kitsara’s tails swished once. “An empty city…”
“I’d be happy to pay gold to see the dwarven commander’s face,” Ayame said.
“You’ll get to see it for free, though~?” Seraphiel smiled playfully.
The chuckle that rolled through his lovers had a distinctly ominous quality to it, the sound of women who knew exactly how the Elvardian Alliance was going to react and found the prospect deeply entertaining.
Quinlan grinned and his helmet rematerialized.
“Let’s go find out.”
…
Whisperfield was a ghost town.
The ice dome held the city in a frozen snapshot of the evacuation, streets empty, doors left open, belongings that hadn’t made the cut scattered on porches and in alleyways. A child’s wooden horse lay on its side near a well. A merchant’s ledger sat open on a counter, its pages ruffling in a draft that came from nowhere.
Their footsteps echoed off cobblestone in a way they never would have this morning, when a hundred thousand people had packed these roads shoulder to shoulder.
Quinlan didn’t linger on it. The city had served its purpose, and the people who mattered were warm and fed in a settlement with heated floors and frosted quartz windows. Whisperfield was a shell now, extracted of its most valuable part, and shells were meant to be handed off.
They climbed the ramparts on the eastern wall, facing where the Elvardian Alliance had camped before Quinlan sealed the dome. The walkway was wide enough for six abreast, and the girls spread out along the battlements as Quinlan reached the edge.
He’d expected to come face to face with some grumbling elves and even more grumbling dwarves. It seemed both of those races were exceptionally talented at grumbling, and he’d assumed the seven hours of staring at an impenetrable ice wall had only sharpened that talent.
Quinlan raised his hand and the ice parted.
The dome split along the eastern face in a clean vertical line, the two halves pulling apart like curtains, cold air rushing in from the plains beyond. Frost crackled and fell in sheets from the opening edges as daylight flooded the rampart.
The field outside was empty.
Quinlan’s hand stayed raised.
The trampled grass where tens of thousands of soldiers had camped was littered with the debris of a force that had left in a hurry. Overturned crates and tankards dropped in the mud. A tent pole still standing with its canvas half-ripped away, flapping in the wind, campfires burned down to white ash.
The entire Elvardian Alliance was gone.
‘What?’
Quinlan’s eyes swept the field. Thousands upon thousands of boot prints, wagon ruts, and hoofmarks in the mud told the story, all pointing southwest. They’d packed up and marched fast enough to leave their ale behind.
Dwarves didn’t leave ale behind.
“Master!” Blossom’s voice cut through the silence, sharp and urgent. Her ears were standing straight up, angled toward the horizon. “Blossom hears something! Far away! It sounds like…”
Quinlan closed his eyes and activated [Overlord’s Eyes], linking his senses to Blossom’s.
Her hearing flooded into him. The world sharpened. Sounds he couldn’t have picked up on his own snapped into focus through her ears, layered and precise, and beneath the wind and the creak of the empty city, he heard it.
A low, continuous roar. Distant, but massive. The kind of sound that only came from tens of thousands of voices and tens of thousands of steel edges meeting at the same time. A sound that every battlefield produced and nothing else on the planet could replicate.
His eyes opened.
“They’re here.”
Wind manipulation surged beneath their feet and launched them skyward. The rampart shrank below as Quinlan climbed, pulling his girls through the cold air in a tight cluster, rising above the walls, above the dome, above the treeline, until the horizon opened up in every direction.
To the southwest, the world was on fire.
Two armies filled the plains, stretching so far in both directions that the flanks disappeared into the haze of distance. Hundreds of thousands of soldiers on each side, smashing into each other across a front that spanned miles. Smoke rose in thick columns across the battlefield, magic flashed in irregular bursts of color, and the roar of it, the sheer volume of hundreds of thousands of people trying to kill each other at the same time, hit them even from this distance.
The Elvardian Alliance and the Vraven Kingdom.
The war had come while Quinlan was building a city.
They’d known this was coming. The two powers had been on a collision course since long before Quinlan set foot on Thalorind’s soil, and every move he’d made since had only accelerated the timeline.
But knowing a war was coming and seeing it spread across the horizon like a wound torn into the earth were two very different things.
None of them had ever witnessed anything on this scale. None of them had even imagined it.
Quinlan stared at the distant carnage, and the grin that had carried him through the afternoon was gone.
‘I can sense it… Soon, the Continent of Iskaris will look vastly different.’
…