Primordial Villain with a Slave Harem

In the command room, the script writing itself above Quinlan’s heart kept on going.

The Abyssal Genesis Physique had dragged the unfinished slot back into his chest and started authoring on it. The blood from the ring drove up through the band in a sustained crimson feed and emptied itself into the work. A thousand liters of dwarven kin poured along his arm, vanished beneath his pauldron, and converged at the hollow above his heart, where the demonic mouthful in his marrow rose to meet it.

Then something else arrived.

‘Hmm?’ Quinlan felt it through the work, faint, foreign, and warm, brushing the place the script was being authored the way a hand brushes a forehead. He did not recognize its origin. It was not from his physique, not from any of his women, not from Nyxara, not from the system’s protocols. It was small and far away and not asking for his attention. He had no time to mark where it had come from before his body had already moved toward it.

The Abyssal Genesis Physique lurched.

It was a spark the size of a struck match against the side of a primordial biology, and it seized the warmth before it could pass through him untouched. The physique folded the foreign signature into the work at the hollow above his heart and used it as the last beam of a structure it had been authoring in pieces.

The script finished its sentence, and the flask-stone at his finger cracked.

It split along seams the dwarven smiths had never carved into it, and the dark stone at its core unraveled into a thread of red. The thread ran up the inside of his glove, through his pauldron, along the underside of his collarbone, and converged at the hollow above his heart where the new class had just been authored. The band stayed where it sat. The setting it had ridden a heartbeat before cooled to bare metal, empty and smooth, the ring around his finger now a plain band where the Sangomar’s flask had been.

Quinlan turned his hand and looked at the empty mount.

‘…Ah.’

His thought went quiet for half a beat.

‘Sorry, Gramps. I broke your gift in a day.’

Then his attention turned inward, and he understood that it wasn’t gone. The substance had walked itself along his arm and into the work at his heart, and the lattice under his skin had absorbed it without losing a thread. The Sangomar Line had not died, merely relocated.

‘…Oh.’

A grin pulled at the corner of his mouth inside the helm.

‘Disregard that, Gramps. Looks like it’s just integrating.’

Beneath [Synchra]’s plate, the crimson sigils across his back and chest stirred. The lattice of demonic script and primordial authority that the duel with Nyxara had inked into his skin woke for a single beat and pulsed with recognition. The seams of [Synchra] caught a faint crimson glow from inside for one heartbeat, then the mark settled back into its dormant state and went still.

The Soul Records reached for him a second time.

The procedural cadence had returned, and the cadence had changed. The careful italics that had been recalculating now came through formal and measured, mirroring the cadence of the Necromancy unlock, although this time it was not announcing itself to every sentient being in the universe. It was speaking only to the Primordial Villain in the deep-cavern command room.

[Class designation rewritten.]

[Subject’s biological architecture has overridden the integration protocol.]

[A new class has been authored.]

The slot above his class stack lit.

[Class Acquired: Bloodfather.]

A second line followed it. [The class designated ‘Bloodfather’ is a family-type class. Its measure is not the strength of its holder but the strength of the family bonded to its holder. The Bloodfather’s power flows to his bonded. His bonded’s power flows to him. The bond runs in both directions, and the bond is the class.]

A third line followed.

[Bind only those you are willing to bleed for.]

The light at the hollow above Quinlan’s heart receded.

The dark crimson cooled inside [Synchra]’s plate, and the lines on his skin under the armor dimmed into nothing. The ring at his finger had become decoration. The true Crimson Reservoir of the Sangomar Line settled into its second life inside him.

The system fell silent.

Quinlan stood where he had been standing.

His shoulders eased a notch inside his plate. The dim crimson at his chest faded the rest of the way into nothing. The air in the deep cavern, which had gone wrong in a register the dwarves on the floor had no words for, eased into the cold rock-smell and coal-smoke of an ordinary dwarven hall.

Behind him, his women had not moved.

Quinlan let out a long breath and pushed [Synchra]’s visor up. The plate flowed up off his face in a wash of red veins, and the platinum eyes came clear, alive and amused beneath the receded helm.

He turned a quarter so that he could see them, and a faint grin emerged at the corner of his mouth.

His women looked at him.

Then they looked at each other.

“He’s smirking,” Ayame exhaled reservedly. Her arms were crossed under her breastplate and her gaze had cooled into the particular flatness she used when her man was about to do something his second-in-command was going to have to talk him through later.

“Shamelessly at that.” Serika chuckled. The Solar Fist had her hands on her hips and a wry curl at the corner of her mouth. The post-fight tension was already draining out of her shoulders.

“That is either bad news or the best news,” Kitsara mused. Her three tails curled slow and languid behind her, and her red eyes had taken on the half-lidded gleam they got when her brain was running calculations her mouth was about to spoil.

“Master never has bad news!” Blossom chirped, ears straight up, hands clasped at her chest, dogkin loyalty operating at a frequency the fortress’s foundation stones could probably feel through the floor.

Vex tilted her head a fraction with a mischievous expression visible on her lips.

“What about that time he declared you a bad girl?” The Hexwitch’s smile had a slow, sly curl at the corner. “It happened at least ten times already by my count.”

“Vex…” Lucille sighed. Was this really needed?

“Ugh!!!” Blossom’s ears flattened so fast they slapped audibly against her hair and her tail went rigid behind her while her hands flew up to cover her mouth and her eyes went round and wet and panicked. The dogkin received a crippling blow of emotional damage. She made a small mortified sound at the back of her throat and could not decide where to look.

Quinlan watched the chorus settle for half a second, and then his grin sharpened.

“Let’s get out of here. We have to do something right away.”

There was a current under his voice the rest of his women caught immediately. He was excited. The kind of excited their arrogant primordial gets when something anomalous happens and he has very specific plans for what to do with it and how it involves his women.

Aurora tilted her head a fraction.

“Quin.”

“Mm?”

“You are aware,” she said, “that you are smirking like a maniac with six subjugated dwarven officers prostrating at your feet, right?”

A beat.

“It is a touch morbid, don’t you think?”