Primordial Villain with a Slave Harem

Before moving further, Quinlan ran his checks.

Kitsara had been the first one off his board. The Slutty Foxy had been on a quiet errand at the edge of dogkin territory all morning and Quinlan had pulled her back through a [Warp Gate]. Things moved fast in beastkin lands, and Papa Vargis was already on the case.

Next.

Halfway across the country, the original soul army’s grind through the Elvardian ranks had been running the whole day. Morgana coordinated with them, acting as their battering ram. Iris, Raika, Lyra, Ria, Feng, and a handful of others had been accompanying the soul army, the adventurer gang working properly together even now, despite missing Felicity. Raika was quite the different replacement, though Quinlan didn’t hear any of them complaining. The Brutalizer was an excellent teammate… so long as she listened. Which was a big if.

As for why Raika went with them?

Quinlan didn’t know, but had the feeling that she didn’t like seeing how quickly he was rising in power. She, a woman aged 150, was working hard each and every day to become stronger.

He, a primordial cheat, technically aged 10 months old, was now contending with the continent’s peak powers while obliterating the low level 60s as if they were ants.

Raika wasn’t a woman who’d accept inferiority. Thus, she must’ve been pushing herself harder than ever before.

The chimes stopped in his head.

He felt the moment the crew came up. Soul Records ticking over, the last kill landing, a small pause in the [Master’s Link] as the shift breathed out at the same time.

‘Done.’

Quinlan’s hand lifted, and the air at the rear of his garden split along a black seam.

[Warp Gate] bloomed open beside Rosie’s tree.

The Bloomguard on the canopy paused their reverence for the duration of a single shared glance, registered the gate, and returned to their grooming. Their princess had decreed Daddy was here, which meant any new arrival through Daddy’s portal was friendly until proven otherwise. Rosie herself, still on Quinlan’s shoulders, leaned forward with both small green hands gripping his hair as if to oversee the disembarkation personally.

Iris came through first.

She stepped out of the seam at the head of the column and the afternoon sun caught her in a way that was, by any reasonable metric, deeply unfair. Her dark hair was matted to her temples in damp ropes. Dwarven blood had dried in dark streaks down her cheek, along the line of her throat, into the open vee of her breastplate, and across both forearms in flaking layers that flexed with every shift of muscle. Her sword was loose in her grip. She had not come down from the kill streak yet.

She had been going all out for hours.

It looked good on her. Painfully so.

Her eyes found Quinlan immediately.

The exchange between them was not a long one. Iris’s eyes met his, held there for a beat that lasted a breath longer than it had any business lasting, and then her gaze betrayed her in a way every cuss she had ever thrown at his face hadn’t managed to. It dropped. Down the line of his bare forearm where Blossom was still tucked against his hip, down past his belt, and lingered for half a heartbeat at the front of his trousers before flicking back up to his face the instant she caught herself looking.

She scoffed.

She still hadn’t forgiven him for the [Blessed Seed] pills.

No, that wasn’t quite right.

She was angry at herself, for something that involved a small ugly pill, a private moment, a swallow she could not take back, and the resulting gains. Iris had cussed herself out in all the possible combinations she knew. She scoffed again, harder, and the second scoff was at herself.

“How was the primordial sperm tablet? Tasty?”

Ayame’s voice arrived from the left of the column at the perfect register, sweet and innocent and absolutely lethal.

Iris’s head turned a fraction.

The Skysplitter had her arms folded under her breastplate and the smug, cheeky tilt at the corner of her mouth. The look she leveled at Iris was the precise look that had been opening this rivalry in courtyards, mess halls, and training rings since the day Iris had joined the gang.

“Eat shit, midget,” Iris growled.

Hearing those words, the smugness in the oriental samurai increased drastically. “Did you gulp it down in one go? Did you chew on it? Did you twirl it around your tongue?”

Iris’s gaze darkened.

The Child of Reckoning had been carving forts open since dawn, and the body count was still warm in her shoulders. The focused predator she became after a hundred kills in a row was not yet ready to be put back away. The universe had thoughtfully placed an infuriating bitch inside arm’s reach.

“I’ve been gutting your kind all day,” Iris hissed. “Time to end their favorite night girl now.”

The smugness at the corner of Ayame’s mouth receded.

“…You just called me a dwarven prostitute?” Ayame echoed.

“Yes.”

Two short black-haired heads cocked at the same angle. Two pairs of eyes narrowed at the same rate. Two pairs of small armored boots planted in the moss in mirror image, and the garden registered, with a kind of resigned amusement, that two of its inhabitants were about to behave like alley kittens whose tails had crossed at the foot of Rosie’s tree.

Behind them, the rest of the column kept filing through the gate as if nothing of consequence was occurring at the foot of Rosie’s tree.

Lyra emerged with her shield arm hanging an inch lower than the other and a tight line at her mouth that meant the dwarves had hit her hard. Ria slid through behind her, a smaller shape with her hood pushed back and her senses already cataloguing the garden’s perimeter the way she catalogued everything, before the blonde assassin’s eyes lit up as Quinlan came into her view, the fangirl back in action fully. Next came Morgana herself, looking utterly confused as to how she should conduct herself. She’d been told she couldn’t look at Quinlan with contempt, so right now she was busy studying the tall tree with the elves standing on its branches.

Raika stepped through near the tail.

The Brutalizer was as drenched as Iris, possibly worse. Dried dwarven blood matted her black mane to the side of her neck, painted her gauntlets to the elbow, and had stopped dripping some time ago. Her chest was still rising and falling in the deep animal cadence she got after a kill streak that had outrun her ability to count. She walked out of the gate, scanned the garden once for any threat she had missed, did not find one, and let her shoulders drop a fraction.

Feng followed right after her.

The oriental teen was about as drenched as Raika, which was surprising. The Tidebreaker had spent the day making Elvardian formations work against themselves and had taken the resulting splash personally. Black hair clung to her cheek in wet strands. Her sword hung loose at her side. Her cheeks were quietly flushed. She was very pleased with her day.

Then she saw Quinlan, and the flush rearranged itself into a big pout, mimicking what the Hexwitch was currently sporting.

It was a comprehensive pout. The chin came up. The lower lip came forward.

The grievance was simple enough. Every other woman in this courtyard had been carving Elvardian lines apart at triple XP. Feng had been carving Elvardian lines apart at one. The math was the math. The reason for the math was that a certain shameless arrogant primordial had decided, with the kind of stupid morality and ethics nobody had asked him to develop, that he was not going to feed his [Blessed Seed] pill to a teenage girl. As if it were complicated. As if there were anything in the universe wrong with a stupid handsome primordial slipping a stupid little pill to a teenage girl who had earned it through tidy kill counts and impeccable formation work.

Hmph.

Hmph!

And he dared call her a brat?!

She did not say any of this out loud, but she conveyed all of it through her chin, her lip, her arms, and the entire architecture of her pout, which she aimed at the side of his face with the expectation that he would feel it.

Quinlan felt it.

Quinlan, shamelessly, ignored it.

His free hand lifted, and a casual ribbon of water uncoiled out of nowhere and slapped Feng across the face.