Primordial Villain with a Slave Harem

Every garrison in the country had heard the reports by noon. Kharn Moldur was ash, Brakkenvein was a crater, and the third fort down the line had gone silent before its own signal tower had finished climbing.

The demigod was walking the length of the nation, and every stone wall between the coast and the capital had been bracing for him.

The barrier came online first, a dome of pale-gold runes flickering up from the foundation stones and climbing the mountain on both sides of the fortress until it met over the crown in a single locked apex. It was siege-grade dwarven rune-forge built to hold against armies. A heartbeat behind it, twenty rune-bound cannons flared to life along the rampart in a coordinated volley, and rounds the size of barrels came screaming down the slope toward the Primordial Villain along the steepest line the angled mounts could manage.

The mounts could not manage enough, because Quinlan was floating. He looked up at the descending rounds without moving, the air at his heels gathered into a fist, and his women went skyward as one. The wind folded under each of them in a single instant and launched the line clean off the slope, clean past the cannon arc, clean past the highest angle the dwarven mounts had ever been asked to train for. The barrels ripped through empty air where his formation had been standing one breath earlier. Stone exploded against stone behind them, and the mountain shook.

His gale chased the women past the cannon elevation, past the fortress ramparts, past the garrison towers, and did not stop at the crown of the dome. It carried them hundreds of feet higher into the thin sky, until they hovered in a loose ring safely clear of whatever the barrier would do when it failed, ponytails whipping and cloaks snapping, weapons ready.

Quinlan stopped above the dome’s apex and set a gauntlet against the barrier’s skin.

A sting ran up his arm. The feel of it was clean and cold, the kind of rejection engineered by minds that had studied his footprints on their country and built specifically to shed them.

This one was new.

Quinlan narrowed his gaze, pulled his hand back, and called Magma. A column of molten rock rose from his palm in one steady feed and drove into the apex rune with enough heat to glass stone, but the rune drank it without flickering. The magma lost cohesion before it ever reached the surface proper, streaming outward along the runic skin in thin harmless rivers that cooled into nothing before they hit the mountain.

The barrier did not even flash.

‘They are truly great engineers, huh…’

Down around the fortress gates, dwarves were beginning to come out of their hidey-holes. Stumpy figures in heavy armor spilled out onto the courtyard stones by the dozens, then the hundreds, craning their necks up to peer through the rune-glass at the man above their crown.

Their rune-masters had told them what to expect from him and they had been right. Someone in the front of the crowd laughed, and the laugh spread.

On the rampart walk, the old rune-master at the lead anchor-stone had his chest out and was projecting to his apprentices in the carrying rumble of a man who had just been proven right in front of witnesses.

“That is what centuries of rune study looks like, ladies and gentlemen. The Council wanted us to cheap out on the bracket-tuning, and we buried them in citations from the Third Age, and now look at him.” He thumped his breastplate. “The enemy thinks he is the first to try magma on dwarven rune-forge. He is an ignorant child.”

A young dwarven smith in a forge apron pressed her palm to her chest beside him.

“Grandmaster…” she breathed. “I would carry every forge-son you asked of me. Just say the word.”

Quinlan let the magma die and called Lightning.

Every bolt he had in him at once, threaded through the fist he lifted, came down on the same span of rune-braid in a single blinding crack. Blue-white light forked across the entire dome and the apex rune lit up like a brazier, but the runic skin drank it exactly the same way, leaving neither a spider-crack nor a flicker behind. The current bled along the mesh and grounded into the mountain on the fortress’s far side.

The laughter below got louder.

‘Hmm…’

Quinlan let the pieces snap together.

Anti-elemental concentration was the tweak. The dwarven rune-forge had studied the reports of his exploits, read the shape of his attacks, and rebuilt the rune-braid specifically to shed concentrated elemental assaults. Any one of his signatures was likely going to disperse against this thing.

He lowered his hand and let every element he had come up at once.

‘I’m being underestimated, aren’t I?’ It was as if they thought he was a one-trick pony.

The Abyssal Genesis Physique flared through him in a quiet, enormous surge, the primordial biology underneath his class stack waking all the way up and stabilizing every channel the Harbinger fed. Earth gathered at his heels, Water pooled at his left palm, Fire and Magma churned together at his right, Ice crawled up [Synchra]’s seams while lightning ran white across the plate, and Wind compressed into a column under his boots. All seven at once, no concentration, no discipline, just the full primordial inventory coming off its shelves at the same second, and he drove his fist into the apex.

The rune shrieked, the rune-braid lit up in seven colors at once, and none of them bled off into the mountain. Golden light spider-cracked in a web three meters wide that did not heal. A second blow widened it, and a third doubled it. The dome was ringing like a struck bell.

On the rampart, the young smith had turned her face a fraction.

“Grandmaster. What is that?”

The old dwarf had lifted a callused hand to his temple. He was rubbing a slow circle into it and had not spoken since.

Down in the courtyard, the laughter had stopped. Dwarves were stumbling back from the gates, shouting at their rune-masters, shouting at each other. Up the mountain, crews at the half-finished gun-pits were hammering and shouting at barrels that were not going to be ready in time for what was already happening above their heads.

Quinlan paused his strikes long enough to reach upward.

The gale that had been holding his women hundreds of feet above the crown bent at his call, and they came down in formation through the cold mountain air. He saw each of them clear the drop with the same expression on her face.

They were grinning.

Their demigod lover had just asked for their help breaking a dwarven siege dome. No one was going to pass up the moment.

The fighters came down on the cracked star at the same second. Quinlan’s primordial brute-force landed with elements braided through it, Ayame’s Skysplitter cleave carving behind it, Sera’s Dawnbringer judgment dropping beside it, Blossom’s void-claws raking on the right, Vex’s Hexwitch blade biting on the left, Kaelira’s Runeweaver hammer anchoring the center. Around them, the rest of his line came down in the same heartbeat, every woman he had brought spending her strongest opener on the broken apex shoulder to shoulder. Every blow landed in the same hand-span of rune-braid, and the dome rang, cracked, rang louder, cracked deeper.

The apex burst.

Golden light blew outward in a radial wave and shards of barrier-glass scattered across the mountain face, and all of them were through the opening before the shards had finished falling.

On the rampart, the young smith had gone through love, confusion, and raw incandescent rage in the space of thirty seconds.

“YOU!” she screamed at the old rune-master, both fists balled at her sides. “You centuries-of-rune-study FRAUD! I was going to carry your sons! ME! And you could not hold your own bracket against a man who picked up every element he had and shoved all of them down your throat at the same time! Your seed will never see the inside of this womb of mine! Your father’s beard would be ASHAMED of you! GENERATIONAL FAILURE!”

Below them, the dwarven courtyard had broken into panic: civilians running for the inner gates, rune-masters screaming at their collapsing anchors, soldiers scrambling to form a line the seven falling figures were about to land through. Someone was ringing the retreat bell.

It was far too late for that, however.

On his finger, the [Crimson Reservoir of the Sangomar Line] demanded to be filled with a thousand liters of slain-enemy blood, and Quinlan intended to provide it with a proper feast to welcome his newest class reward into his arsenal before the final clash with his enemies occurred.

Dealing with burnout right now, apologies if quality is dropping. Trying my best, the words just aren’t flowing as they used to…