Primordial Villain with a Slave Harem

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

The six dwarves on the floor, who had been holding extremely still in the hopes that doing so would prevent any of this from involving them further, winced as a unit. The grandmaster’s forehead pressed harder against the flagstones.

Quinlan considered Aurora’s observation.

He decided, visibly and without a word, that it did not concern him.

He raised a gauntlet, the air at the rear of the deep-cavern command room split along a black seam, and [Warp Gate] bloomed open.

He stepped through, leaving behind a room full of women with dry looks on their delicate faces.

They did not follow after him right away, instead standing in a loose half-ring looking at the empty space he had just occupied.

Then they exchanged a glance.

Ayame’s arms uncrossed. She let out a slow breath through her teeth.

“He is getting more shameless by the second.”

“Mm. That much is true,” Kitsara purred, her three tails sweeping behind her in slow appreciation. “Increasingly so. I love it.”

Lucille smiled at the empty seam without bothering to hide it, biting into her lower lip for a moment.

“Mm-hm.”

Neither of them had a problem with the observation. They were stating it as fact and as approval in the same beat, and the only person in the half-ring acting scandalized on the line’s behalf was the second-in-command who had brought the complaint in the first place.

Ayame caught the agreement landing around her.

She scoffed at the chorus, the sound landing cuter than it had any right to. “Anything he does, you love it… What are you, lovesick maidens?”

“Your tone is that of complaint,” Sera interjected sweetly, blue eyes amused, “but why are your cheeks pink, Ayame?”

The Skysplitter’s cheeks were, in fact, pink.

“I-I also think it’s cool… Makes me feel at ease…” Kaelira squirmed hard while joining the conversation of her fellow sister-wives. “As if everything is going to be okay…”

“I like it when Quin is domineering and commanding,” Serika announced.

“Like it? I love it,” Lucille said, eyes dancing.

Ayame stilled.

The flat samurai stare she turned on Lucille could have parted the Bloodmonger from her axe.

Lucille smiled at her without moving and continued ignoring the death glare at full warmth.

Sera and Aurora giggled. Two of the women holding the group together during battle, reduced to giggles in the same breath, in front of dwarven officers still prostrating on their own floor.

Serika peeled off the line and crossed to where Blossom was still quietly mortified. The Solar Fist dropped a hand into the blonde’s hair and rubbed gently behind one fluffy ear, with the same warm pressure she had been teaching the rest of the harem to apply to Quinlan’s body while massaging him, adapted on the fly for her canine recipient.

“Hey, Blossom…”

Blossom whimpered.

“Quin is only joking when he calls you that. You know that, right?”

Blossom’s whimper went a fraction higher.

Serika’s smile turned tender. Her voice dropped into the warm low register she used for the women in the line who needed actual gentleness instead of brawler camaraderie.

“And he hasn’t said it in a long time, hmm? I haven’t heard it in months.”

“…?”

Blossom’s eyes were uncertain. The dogkin’s mind had been working its way through the recent quarter and had not yet settled on whether she had been a good girl during all of it, or whether some unknown infraction had been queuing up behind her without her being aware of it.

She thought about it for a beat.

She did not arrive at a confident answer.

Until…

“Blossom has places to be!”

She made the executive decision that the only correct response to uncertainty was to be physically near her Master, and she dashed off the spot Serika had been petting and into the portal in a single blonde blur.

Serika watched her go.

Her hand stayed in the air where Blossom’s ear had been, fingers half-curled.

“…I gotta work on my ear rubs.”

Vex shook her head from the back of the line, red eyes amused.

“If only it was that easy.”

A beat.

“Just ask Miss M. She knows Blossom the longest. I don’t see her replacing Hubby in Blossom’s heart anytime soon.”

Ayame went still.

The death glare she turned on Vex was the second one her face had produced inside a minute, and it carried the unmistakable flatness Ayame produced when she had been pulled into a joke she had no interest in being part of.

Vex grinned at her brightly, completely unrepentant.

Ayame scoffed.

She harrumphed, twice, and she walked toward the portal with her chin lifted.

She paused at the seam.

“We will discuss your behavior at length, everyone.”

She did not look back as she said it.

Then she stepped through.

The remaining women looked at each other.

A round of giggles passed through the line as a single ripple, then they followed their lover and second in command into the portal one by one. The line dissolved into the black seam at the back of the cavern until only the seam remained.

It closed.

…

The deep cavern held its silence.

Six dwarves on the floor.

The grandmaster of the dwarven engineering corps, who had not lifted his forehead from the flagstones, slowly turned his eyes a fraction toward the senior officer of the inner guard beside him.

The senior officer met the look.

Neither of them spoke. There were no words yet manufactured by any tongue, in any age of the world, suitable for what the dwarven leadership of the third stronghold had just witnessed unfold over their own prostrate forms.

Then a voice arrived in their heads.

<Repair the fortress. Prepare its defenses against any hostile force that may approach it.>

The voice was elegant, formal, and level. It carried in the register Ayame had used to give orders since girlhood, and it landed inside their skulls with the clean finality of the Primordial Subjugator’s leash settling its commands into them.

<From this day forward, this stronghold belongs to your new Master. From this day forward, you serve your new Master. Carry out his interests as you would yours. Failures will be measured.>

A pause.

<That is all.>

The pulse at the bonds on each of their necks settled.

The grandmaster’s eyes had widened against the flagstones.

The senior officer of the inner guard cleared his throat into the floor.

“…That was the closeted masochist lass, was it not?”

“…I believe so.”

The grandmaster’s voice, muffled against the stone, sounded uncertain.

“She sounded a great deal more domineering inside our heads, did she not?”

“…She did.”

“…Hm.”

The six dwarves remained on the floor for a long moment, processing what their new lives were going to look like in the service of their new household, whose second-in-command issued military orders inside their skulls in a register significantly more authoritative than the one she had used while conversing with her family.

The grandmaster slowly lowered his face the rest of the way to the floor.

He stayed there for a few seconds.

It seemed… safe.

<No slacking~> a honeyed elven purr sounded next, and the six of them all jolted upwards.

…

Why had Quinlan walked away so abruptly?

Simple. His new class was showing him something, and he had every intention of getting to the bottom of it immediately.