Novel Full Chapter 1634 Massacring with the Girls
Quinlan and his allies came through the broken apex like a thrown spear, and the courtyard met them.
A dwarven heavy-line had formed across the inner gates inside two breaths of the dome’s failure, shieldwall packed two ranks deep with halberds angled to catch a falling figure clean through the boot. Behind it, a rune-cannon crew was spinning up something improvised on a barrel still warm from the volley that had not landed.
Quinlan slowed his fall and the rest of them slowed with his gale. He hung above the courtyard with [Soul Reaper] in a slow black orbit at his shoulder while the rune-glass shards settled into the dirt around the dwarven line, and pulsed [Master’s Link] open.
<Ladies…>
That was all Quinlan said.
The pulse landed in the girls at once, and Ayame took it from there. The strategy had been walked through already. Soldiers and officers only while civilians disarmed and leadership captured where it could be captured. The Skysplitter’s voice came through [Master’s Link] now only to seal the shape of it.
The girls’ expressions had gone tight in the descent. The tightness was urgency, all of it pointed at the woman they were trying to find. Underneath the urgency, in the same set of faces, sat hunger. The dwarven garrison below was a great deal of XP, and every woman in the line above the breached apex was already running the math on how many of them she was about to clear before this fortress was done.
‘Let’s see what you got, Vampire Gramps,’ Quinlan thought, and the [Crimson Reservoir of the Sangomar Line] sat warm against his finger under [Synchra]’s glove.
The ring answered like a held breath.
He dropped.
…
Quinlan landed in the gap between the shieldwall and the cannon and the stones cracked outward in a six-foot ring under his boots. His first cut was Stone, broad, low, and shaped to scoop, and a wedge of the courtyard floor lifted under the dwarves’ shields and dumped two-thirds of the front rank onto their backs without killing any of them. The cannon’s crew went down a half-second later under an open palm of compressed Wind that flattened them and snapped the barrel sideways off its carriage.
His women came down behind him.
What followed was massacre. Sera carved a tall officer apart in six brightening exchanges of [Divine Arsenal] light against rune-iron, every cut hotter than the last until the captain’s halberd parted in her hand and his pauldron seam followed it.
“What bullshit class…” the man rasped at the dirt as he settled, blood foaming where his armor used to close.
Sera tilted her head and giggled, light and pleased. Ayame answered a four-man wedge with a flurry. The lead halberdier got out “How is this even real…” before [Sundering Cleave] tore through rune-bound steel a dwarven garrison’s budget couldn’t have armored against.
Vex’s [Hex of Decay] crawled the officer pips inside a forty-foot half-circle and chewed through their channels while her sword walked the line and found the seams the curse had loosened. “HOLD THE…” was as much of the order as the lieutenant got out before Serika put him through the inner gate with a [Blazing Fist]. She folded two halberd-flankers with bare fists and a [Solar Drive] cross next.
Blossom worked the rampart in [Umbral Step] flickers, removing combat mages one at a time before any of them finished a casting gesture. Kaelira’s hammer broke the right flank in close, and behind her Aurora’s [Dreamveil] flexed and snapped against every shard of return-fire that tried to reach the line.
The girls were stronger than they had been even just a day ago. Months of grinding on triple-XP [Blessed Seed] feed had compounded into every one of them, but this fight was still far from effortless. The fort lacked defenders at the peak of personal might, but even so the girls only carried it through teamwork, numbers, the element of surprise from getting the literal drop on the enemy, and the leverage of their unique classes.
All that is to say, they still couldn’t tip the scales in a clash between the continent’s peak fighters. This only made them even hungrier and more desperate to get stronger quickly so that they could properly stand by their anomalous lover’s side in the imminent clash against Elvardia.
Inside a few minutes, the courtyard had been cleared of anyone in plate.
It was also still full of dwarves.
Apron-smiths who had dropped their tools when the apex burst. Old forge-runners with grandchildren clinging to their leg-leathers. Conscripts with their weapons on the ground in front of them and palms up. A healer in white with one hand on a wounded soldier’s belly. None of them had been touched. One of the old forge-runners spat into the courtyard dirt and rasped, to no one in particular. “Aye. We’re doomed.”
…
Quinlan drew [Soul Reaper].
The pitch-black saber slid up out of its orbit and lit the courtyard a shade colder, ghostly pale flames running its length. He stepped over the dead at his feet, and the [Crimson Reservoir of the Sangomar Line] thrummed against his finger.
It was a deeper register than the magic he was used to wearing, slower, more patient. The ring had recognized the bodies on the ground around him as a meal that fit its specifications.
‘Drink.’
Abyssal Genesis Physique rolled over inside him in the same breath, primordial biology meeting an artifact older than human history. The two of them, ring and physique, settled into a handshake under [Synchra]’s plate that went all the way down through Quinlan’s bones and felt, in a way he had no words for, like satisfaction.
Then the harvest started.
Red mist lifted off the dead. From the first enemy’s wound in a slow ribbon, then from the gunner crew, then from the heavy infantry in scattered ribbons across the broken courtyard. The mist moved against the breeze in clean lines that converged on Quinlan’s gauntlet and threaded itself through the flask-stone on his middle finger, vanishing into the black like rain into a well.
A counter ticked in the corner of his vision.
[The Crimson Reservoir of the Sangomar Line: 89 / 1000 liters.]
[The Crimson Reservoir of the Sangomar Line: 134 / 1000 liters.]
‘Hmm… It seems it’s not drinking all the available blood… What a picky eater,’ Quinlan mused.
The dwarves in the courtyard saw it.
A young woman with a soot-streaked face took an involuntary step backward.
“He is… what is…”
Her voice went up an octave by the second word.
“ANOTHER ONE?! ANOTHER ABILITY?! HE IS COLLECTING OUR BLOOD NOW?!”
A second voice picked it up from the inner gate.
“That is not in the briefings! Why is that not in the briefings?!”
The retreat bell, which had been ringing since before the dome cracked, somehow found a louder pitch. Down the stairs to the inner barracks, dwarven foot-soldiers were no longer running in any one direction. Some toward the gates, some into the gates, two of them sitting on the stones blinking at each other.
Quinlan walked through the formation he had defeated together with his girls, [Soul Reaper] loose in his grip, and the ring kept feeding.
[The Crimson Reservoir of the Sangomar Line: 198 / 1000 liters.]
…
The girls were warming up as the descent into the fort’s depths began, and Quinlan’s newly harvested Elite Souls would handle anyone they spared along the way. Halfway across the country, Raika, Iris, Lyra, and a handful of his other allies were riding with Morgana and the original soul army. The steady drum of distant kills fed back into Quinlan’s mind while he observed his girls, with Vex being the main focus.
Her tight face had not relaxed. She was scanning every doorway and every shadow for a flash of black hair and a familiar silhouette. The need to find Black Fang did not leave her. But on top of that drive, layer by layer, the joy of accumulated XP was lighting up underneath her ribs, and every officer she carved through closed the gap between her and the people she wanted to be able to face one versus one and come out victorious. She was beautiful in it. So was Sera, smiling into the line of officers she was carving through. So was Blossom, void-stepping through the crowd of officers and reappearing with new tabards on her claws and her dog ears canted higher than they had been an hour ago.
He approved.
Thoroughly.
[The Crimson Reservoir of the Sangomar Line: 312 / 1000 liters.]
…
Blossom’s voice came through [Master’s Link] before the first layer was fully cleared.
<Master.>
She was at the lip of the northeast stairwell with her nose working the down-draft.
<Blossom is smelling tunnels. Lots of tunnels.>
The fortress was deep. Dwarven halls always were. Barracks, then forge levels, then storage, then carved residential blocks for the families of the garrison, then below all of it the older caverns the fortress had been built into in the first place. Underneath the retreat bell, Blossom could pick out the tread of a great many feet, many of them small, most of them running away from them into corridors she could already smell the cold mountain air at the far ends of. Escape tunnels. Ventilation shafts widened into evacuation routes. The dwarven engineering corps had built the rear half of the fortress for the assumption that the front half would one day fail.
<Blossom can mark the escape routes, Master.>
Quinlan considered her offer for less than a second.
<Take some rogue-type soul soldiers with you and use them as you see fit.>