Novel Full Chapter 1635 Blood Harvest
Her tail went into propeller mode for a beat before she vanished into the stairwell.
<Yes, Master!>
[The Crimson Reservoir of the Sangomar Line: 387 / 1000 liters.]
…
The fortress fell in tiers.
Quinlan’s line moved through it the way a flood moves through a house with the doors open. [The Crimson Reservoir of the Sangomar Line: 451 / 1000 liters.]
…
The forge hall on the third level was the only fight that asked for time.
“No! He’s here!”
“Guards, do your job!”
“Yes, sir!”
Four ranks of elite guard in the heaviest plate the place could produce, anchored by the master smith and three rune-engineers who had decided that if the gate had failed, if the dome had failed, if the captain had failed, they could at least die with their tools in their hands.
He obliged the elite guard but not the men in aprons.
[The Crimson Reservoir of the Sangomar Line: 614 / 1000 liters.]
The master smith came at Quinlan with an enchanted hammer at his shoulder and managed a single very respectable strike off [Synchra]’s pauldron before Sera stepped in and cut his hammer-arm off below the elbow with an elf’s sadistic glee visible in her eyes as was proper for her kind. She might not have been a believer in Luminara before meeting the woman, but she shared the elven political view on the race of stocky drunkards.
The forge hall was quiet again.
Quinlan cast [Awaken].
A pale gold light rose at his shoulder and resolved into a stocky dwarven woman in a healer’s long white over-robe, her sleeves stitched with the rune-bands of a senior battlefield surgeon. She was one of the new Elite Souls he had harvested. The dwarves on the forge floor were her people.
“Stop the bleeding and save them.”
“Yes, Master…”
The Elite Soul went down on her knees at the smith’s side and got to work.
Why let them live instead of committing another genocide?
The first few forts had been a broadcast. The point of those raids had been the absence afterward. The point had been the runners arriving at the fourth, fifth, and sixth strongholds with their tongues stuck to the roofs of their mouths, gasping out that the Primordial Villain was on the road and there were no survivors and there would be no negotiations. The point had been that every dwarf at the next gate would feel the floor go out from under them the second his shadow crossed their horizon. Psychological warfare at its finest. The kind of fear that drove leadership to make mistakes, drove prisoners to be moved, drove lieutenants to lose their nerve and start trading information for clemency they had no chance of being granted, all of which served his actual mission, which was finding Black Fang.
That fear had been banked. The country now believed, with sufficient certainty, that the Primordial Villain could erase a dwarven stronghold to ash if he chose, and his actual targets had begun stirring in their burrows because of it.
The math from here forward was different.
Civilians did not give XP. He gained nothing from grinding any of them down to ash but, in fact, lost extraordinary engineers, smiths, brewers, metal-gatherers, tunnel-cutters, glass-makers, and extraordinarily sturdy workaholics whose alcohol output kept half the taverns of Iskaris in business.
Far be it from the Primordial Villain to bury all the best alcohol makers on the continent in a crater.
Killing the rest of them was just bad economics.
He left the smith and the engineers to the Elite Soul’s care and walked on.
But mercy didn’t mean freedom. He was still here to conquer, of course.
…
The lower forges were emptier. Word had traveled ahead of him through the fortress, and the corridors below the master smith’s hall had a thinned-out, post-evacuation feel. Children’s voices, faint, somewhere along an evacuation tunnel. The line walked through the abandoned forges without breaking stride.
Quinlan tested a barrel of dwarven mead on a half-amused impulse. It was excellent. He resealed the barrel and walked on.
The deeper they went, the older the architecture got. Forge brick gave way to rune-cut stone. Rune-cut stone gave way to the original cavern walls the fortress had been built into, glittering faintly in the lantern-light with the kind of veined ore that dwarves had been chasing for ten thousand years. The retreat bell was thinner here, more underground. The fights got smaller. A pocket of veteran stoneguards in a vault corridor. A rear-guard officer-detail whose sole function had been to buy time for the family levels.
[The Crimson Reservoir of the Sangomar Line: 891 / 1000 liters.]
…
The last fight of the descent was in the vault corridor leading to the deep-cavern command room.
The captain of the inner guard screamed at his soldiers. “Form ranks! Form RANKS! Where are you… form RANKS, you cowards…” Their barricade lasted only a couple seconds.
‘Not a single enemy above level 70 in the entire fort…’ he mused, noting how the army truly took their best to invade Vraven.
[The Crimson Reservoir of the Sangomar Line: 982 / 1000 liters.]
Quinlan reached the command room door and set his gauntlet against it. The Abyssal Genesis Physique flickered once, the ring on his finger thrummed, and a thin line of red traveled in an arc from the dying captain to Quinlan’s hand. Then another from a stoneguard further back. The Reservoir was scraping.
[The Crimson Reservoir of the Sangomar Line: 996 / 1000 liters.]
He pushed the door inward.
Inside the deep-cavern command room, the surviving leadership of the fortress had gathered. The grandmaster from the rampart, his chest no longer out and looking five centuries older than he had an hour ago. Two rune-engineers in a state of professional collapse. A senior officer of the inner guard with his sword on the floor in front of him, his hands open at his sides. He had read the reports. He had made his peace with where the night was going. A clerk. A scribe. A logistician who had not seen combat in thirty years and had volunteered to stay anyway.
None of them moved when Quinlan walked in.
His gauntlet came up and the Reservoir’s last few liters arrived from the corridor behind him in one thin ribbon. The flask-stone took the last drop.
[The Crimson Reservoir of the Sangomar Line: 1000 / 1000 liters.]
[All requirements met. Initiating…]
The artifact on his finger went still and warm at the same time.
The Abyssal Genesis Physique inside him stretched, slow and enormous, like something that had been waiting to be asked. Quinlan felt the system reach for him.
<Nyxara, can you hold this off until I am finished here?>
The reply came back on a current that smelled distinctly of lounging.
<Mmmm… yes, Master~>
…
Quinlan stepped fully into the command room and looked at the grandmaster.
“Subjugation or Eternal Damnation?” he asked.
His voice was calm. It carried like he had asked them which side of a dish they preferred the sauce on.
The room broke as the grandmaster’s eyes blew wide and the chest-out engineer who had been bragging about centuries of rune study under the broken dome minutes ago had not exhaled in some time. The senior officer’s hands went flat against the floor in front of his sword in a single jerk. The two rune-engineers behind the grandmaster started shaking so hard their spectacles rattled against their noses. The clerk made a low broken sound at the back of his throat. The scribe forgot to breathe. The logistician, who had not seen combat in thirty years, sat down on the floor where he had been standing.
To Quinlan, he had given six dwarves a choice between two types of future. That was all. To the dwarves, however, he was the big, bad, evil Primordial Villain, the man who had harvested a thousand liters of blood from their kin.
The grandmaster moved first.
He went forward onto his palms, then onto his elbows, then onto his forehead, against the flagstones of his own command room, in the prostration the dwarven engineering corps reserved for the founding ancestors of the great houses and almost nobody else.
“Mercy, O Great Destroyer… Spare this hopeless mortal’s meaningless life…”
His voice was muffled against the floor.
The senior officer was already prostrate beside him. So were the two rune-engineers. The clerk had gone down without thinking about it. The scribe had banged her forehead a little too hard against the floor and was bleeding faintly into the seam without noticing. The logistician, still sitting, scrambled forward on his knees and put his head down beside the grandmaster’s.
“Mercy…”
“Mercy…”
“Mercy…”
Six foreheads on the stone, six voices layered together, begging him for the lesser of the two options he had named.
Quinlan’s subjugation opened, and none of them had anything left to resist with. The invisible collars closed around their necks.
Before they even had a moment to taste their new reality, the question came.
“Where is Black Fang?”
The grandmaster’s mouth opened without a second thought.
“…I do not know.” His voice was rough.
Quinlan looked at the senior officer next.
One by one, the answers came back the exact same.
It was becoming apparent that if she was alive, she was being held in the heartlands. But the heartlands were where the Elvardian power was concentrated, where elves, dwarves, foxkin, and possibly undead worked together to keep his group away.
They were just not strong enough to go there by themselves…
At least not yet.
Quinlan lifted his hand and the blood storage artifact pulsed.