Primordial Villain with a Slave Harem

Chapter 1550  Kill the Enemy, Protect the Master

“Please stop this! All of you!” Her voice carried across the scorched earth with desperation. “It’s not too late! We can still talk! We can still be one giant family! I know that you and Quinlan have not seen eye to eye, but in all my time living and fighting and traveling with him, I realize that he is a much more reasonable man than the kingdom makes him out to be!”

Lilith’s voice came out harder than she intended.

“Return Scar.”

Felicity blinked. The wind pulled at her hair and the earnestness in her face wavered as the white-haired Spellblade stared at her from across the field.

“That’s the only condition, Felicity. He gives her back, and I’ll sit at whatever table you want.” Lilith’s sword arm stayed rigid. “Until then, there is nothing to discuss.”

“Auntie, the human Scar is dead.” Felicity’s voice softened, careful. “She died in battle. That’s a truth no one can undo. But she lives on. She lives on in a new form, with her memories intact, with everything that made her who she was still inside her. If you would just stop and talk to her, you’d see it. She’s still Scar.”

Lilith’s jaw set. “She’s a minion bound to a master. She serves him because she has no choice.”

“That’s… She-”

“Enough.” Lilith cut her off, and the killing intent rolling off her shoulders thickened until the air between them felt heavy. “I love you, Felicity. You are my niece and I have watched you grow. But you are a child standing between armies, and the man behind you is the reason my friend is worse than dead.”

Felicity flinched. Her hands, still raised in that open-palmed gesture of peace, trembled at her sides.

Quinlan’s voice carried across the field.

“She’s right, Felicity.”

The girl spun toward him. “Quin-”

“This was never going to work. Your mother is a rabid dog, and your aunt sees nothing but red. This isn’t a place for negotiation.”

Her chin dipped toward her chest and for a moment she looked exactly like what she was, a girl who had believed she could fix something that was broken beyond words.

Then her hand went to the storage ring on her finger.

Light flashed and a short sword appeared in her grip, a blade forged for a frame that hadn’t finished growing, compact and well-balanced. Her other hand reached up and pulled the visor of her helmet down over her face with a sharp click.

She turned to face Lilith and Morgana’s forces.

“Then I stand with Quinlan Elysiar, the Primordial Villain.”

Lilith’s eyes widened.

A gust of wind wrapped around Felicity’s body before anyone could respond. The air current lifted her off her feet with a gentleness that had no business existing on a battlefield and carried her backward across the open ground, depositing her behind Quinlan’s front line with the care of a man returning something precious to where it belonged.

Quinlan watched her land, steadied by Feng’s hands on her shoulders. Then he turned back to the enemy.

“Scar.”

The soul general didn’t turn around. Her eyes stayed on the enemy formations ahead, on Lilith and Kaede and the forces arraying themselves across the field, but her posture shifted in a way that said she’d heard. A slight straightening of the spine. An acknowledgment without words.

“Begin.”

Scar didn’t need to be told twice.

“We’ve discussed this.” Her voice rang across the ranks, clipped and commanding, carrying the tone of a woman addressing soldiers she’d already briefed. “You will move as planned. Regiment One: Kill the Enemy. Regiment Two: Protect the Master. You know your assignments. You know your roles.”

The army split.

Five hundred soldiers peeled left into offensive formation, tankers at the front with fighters stacked behind them, assassin cells already breaking off toward the flanks, mages and archers settling into support positions with their fire lines calculated and their targets marked. They moved with the coordination of soldiers who had spoken to each other, who had argued over positioning inside the Soul Reaper and settled it before the blade ever released them.

The rest, more than two hundred strong now, mirrored the composition and closed ranks around Quinlan in a defensive perimeter, shields locking together, mages weaving barriers, archers nocking arrows with their eyes sweeping every angle of approach.

Scar walked to the head of the offensive regiment.

“Kill the Enemy moves on my mark.” She rolled her shoulders once and the daggers caught the light.

The regiment settled into the silence of soldiers ready to move.

Kaede Fujimori drew her ancestral blade.

The ring of steel cut through the noise of shuffling formations and stamping boots, and the Fujimori clan elites fell into position behind their leader with the synchronization of women who had trained together for longer than most nations had existed.

Elder Chizuru took the left flank without being told, her own blade drawn, and the clan warriors spread across the line in a formation designed to punch through defensive positions with overwhelming concentrated force.

“His minions regenerate within seconds of being slain. Cut them down and they will rise again so long as the caster breathes. Every kill that is not him or the other living beings on his side is temporary,” Chizuru called across the formation.

Kaede didn’t look back at her clan.

“Open a path for me and I will kill him.”

The Fujimori elites roared.

Lilith’s Scarlet Lilies moved at the same time. Jallen shifted to Lilith’s right with her spear angled forward, long legs already set in a sprinter’s stance. Bronnya planted herself at the center with her tower shield raised, and Void slid off the tanker’s back and landed on her feet.

“Finally,” Bronnya growled, rolling her shoulders.

“You’re making me conscious about my weight…” Void complained flatly, already gathering energy between her palms.

The two forces met.

Kaede hit the undead front line like a siege weapon. Her ancestral blade carved through the first tanker’s shield in a single stroke and the Fujimori elites poured through the gap behind her, each swordswoman engaging a different section of the shield wall.

Scar’s tankers held. The fighters surged to fill gaps, trading bodies for time, and the mage volleys exchanged overhead cancelled each other out. But it was the front line where the real shock landed.

Kaede’s elites carved into the shield wall and found familiar faces staring back at them.

Fujimori swordswomen. Former clan warriors, their skin now blue-tinged and their eyes glowing with spectral light, wearing armor that still bore the Fujimori crest beneath the frost of necromantic energy. They fought with the same techniques, the same stances, the same coordinated footwork that the living Fujimori had trained alongside them for centuries.

A young swordswoman in the Fujimori front line faltered mid-swing as her blade locked against a soul soldier’s guard and she recognized the face behind it.

“Mitsuki?!”

The soul soldier parried her aside without a word and countered with a thrust aimed at her throat.

“Mitsuki, it’s me! It’s Ren!” The swordswoman deflected the thrust and stumbled back, her form breaking as emotion overrode training. “Stop fighting! We’ll free you! Just hold on!”

Across the line, more voices rose from the Fujimori ranks. Warriors calling out names they recognized, shouting promises across the clash of steel. “Hold on!” “We’ll break the cruel spell!” “Just bear with it a little longer, we’re coming for you!”

The soul soldiers didn’t answer.

They pressed their attacks with mechanical efficiency. The Fujimori dead served their general, and their general served the Primordial Villain, and whatever those living women across the line believed about freeing them was a fantasy that had no bearing on the blade currently aimed at their hearts.

Elder Chizuru’s voice cracked across the Fujimori formation like a whip. “Eyes forward! We have been over this already! They are not your brothers and sisters anymore! Mourn later, fight now!”

The hesitation cost them. Scar’s fighters exploited every flinch, every half-second where a living Fujimori pulled a strike because the face behind the shield was someone she’d once shared rice wine with, and the soul army’s front line stabilized.

Then Lilith hit the center.

Her sword burned white and she carved through two soul soldiers in a single arc, the blade trailing light as she punched through the shield wall and into the space behind it. Jallen’s spear took a fighter through the chest beside her, and Bronnya’s tower shield caught a mage volley meant for Void, the impact driving the tanker back three steps while Void’s return fire erased half a dozen soldiers in a pulse of dark energy.

“Separate the Scarlet Lilies,” Scar’s voice carried from somewhere behind the line. “They have hundreds of years of experience fighting as a unit. Pull them apart.”

Assassin cells materialized from the flanks, four-man squads hitting Jallen and Bronnya from angles designed to force them away from Lilith, and the Scarlet Lilies’ formation stretched as each member was pulled into their own fight.

Lilith kept pushing forward.

She cut through a tanker’s guard and drove her blade through his chest, stepped over the dissolving body, and found Scar waiting for her.