Novel Full Chapter 1760: Demanding Blood
Chapter 1760: Demanding Blood
It was the single most important sentence the Consortium had ever spoken to a sitting monarch.
Neither man he’d addressed so much as glanced at him.
Quinlan and Alexios were still locked on each other.
Maelstrom’s grin wavered.
Myrasyn arrived next, stepping from the elven cluster with Isveth at her shoulder and a serene smile on her lips.
She didn’t take a position to the side. She didn’t claim neutral ground between the factions.
The Queen of all elves walked past Alexios without a word, crossed the open space, and stopped behind Quinlan, smiling at Black Fang for a moment before looking forward.
Alexios saw it.
The flat composure he’d maintained through the entire exchange cracked by a fraction, and the look that crossed his face when an elven queen positioned herself behind the Primordial Villain as though she served at his pleasure told the story of a continent’s power balance tilting in real time.
Then the beastkin lords arrived, and there was nothing gradual about it.
Rajah, Skarn, and Gorruk approached shoulder to shoulder.
The pressure that entered the space when they stopped walking could have buckled stone. Vargis trailed a pace behind them, reserved and watchful, the only beastkin lord who hadn’t spent the entire spectacle measuring Quinlan’s threat level.
Four factions stood on flat ground that used to be an arena.
Alexios and Elisabeth held the crown’s and the church’s corner.
Maelstrom stood alone with his back straight and his grin cracked, the Consortium’s dream personified in a man nobody was looking at.
Quinlan held the center with Ayame at his right and Black Fang at his left, and behind him the Elven Queen and her Shrine Maiden had planted themselves like a declaration written in bodies instead of ink.
The beastkin lords completed the circle, four predators who had marched here for their own reasons and owed nothing to anyone standing across from them.
The silence that settled was heavier than any blow thrown today.
Then Maelstrom noticed he was the only leader standing alone.
"Hey, Black Fang." His voice came out tighter than he intended. "Get over here. You represent the Consortium as well."
She didn’t even acknowledge the general’s existence.
"..." Maelstrom’s forehead began sweating as he scoffed.
To think that the Venomborne Terror still considered herself one of them while she refused to even communicate with the syndicate for months was a level of delusion not many thought possible.
Skarn broke the silence first.
"The war is not over." The wolfkin lord’s voice cut across the circle, flat and final.
His grey eyes swept the group and settled on the elven queen standing behind the Primordial Villain. "Elvardia allied with the undead and armed the lionkin, causing a lot of harm to the Beastman Confederation. We came here to make things right, and we intend to finish what we started."
Rajah’s amber eyes hadn’t left Myrasyn since she’d taken her position behind Quinlan. "The Beastman Confederation demands formal surrender from both elves and dwarves. Reparations for every life we lost in both your meddling in our affairs and in this war."
Centuries of war lived in that demand.
The beastkin and the Elvardians had bled each other since before kingdoms had names, and every generation inherited the debt whether they wanted it or not.
The beastkin hadn’t marched to this field for Quinlan’s sake but because Elvardia was their enemy, and the chance to break them had been worth everything.
"Your people bled," Skarn continued, his grey eyes fully on Myrasyn. "Ours bled more. The reckoning is overdue."
"If you refuse to surrender and make things right, we’ll continue the war until you do," Gorruk announced.
Although the bearkin had been silent thus far, it was clear on whose side he stood.
The bearkin tribe had lost far too much thanks to the Elvardians’ sneaky meddling with the lionkin.
"Absolutely not," Myrasyn decreed, stepping out from behind Quinlan.
The warmth and the serene smile were gone.
The queen who had been fanning herself and clutching Isveth during the spectacle stood with her back straight and her green eyes authoritative.
"Over my dead body will I allow you to set one more foot on elven soil. This is as far as you go. You will turn around and-"
"We will not go anywhere but forward, straight to your capital!" Skarn and Rajah snarled, showing their sharp teeth. "We will raid your treasuries, we will enslave your people, and we will ensure no elf or dwarf will ever have the resources to do what you have done!"
The air between them compressed.
Two apex predators whose ancestors had hunted elves since the first war between their races stared down an elven queen whose ancestors had defended against beastkin raids since time immemorial, and the silence that fell between the three of them was the oldest kind on the continent.
Behind Skarn, his wolfkin heard the snarl in their lord’s voice and moved without needing an order. Formations tightened and the front line of grey-furred warriors shifted forward with the synchronized aggression of a pack responding to its alpha’s fury.
Rajah’s tigerkin mirrored them from the adjacent block, amber-striped soldiers growling with the menace of predators who had never once questioned whether they were at the top of the food chain.
In the elven ranks, the response to seeing their queen be threatened with such guttural screaming was immediate.
"Take aim!"
"Protect the Queen!"
"We’ll settle this once and for all!"
Elven officers barked commands, and bowstrings drew taut across rows of archers who had been standing at rest seconds ago.
Two armies were squaring up on flat ground that had no walls left to separate them, about to start a second battle on this field.
Then a hand came to rest on Myrasyn’s head.
The touch was so gentle and so out of place against the tension tearing through the air that the elven queen’s body froze before her mind caught up.
Her long ears twitched at the contact, flattening once before springing back up.
"Q-Quinlan?!" The gasp that left her was small and completely unbefitting a majestic queen squaring off with ancient enemies.
Myrasyn looked up, and seeing the cold menace on his face, she fell silent, watching.
Quinlan stepped past the expressive elf.
The aura hit the circle before his voice did, the sheer pressure of what the Primordial Villain carried when he stopped holding it in check pressing outward until every breath in range came a fraction harder than the last.
Skarn’s body went rigid.
Every instinct the wolfkin lord possessed fired at once, the same instincts that had screamed at him to kill this man when he was barely level thirty now howling the same warning ten times louder, and the thousand-year pact that bound them both was the only thing keeping his hand at his side.
Quinlan took three calm, agonizingly slow steps toward the snarling beastkin lords before stopping so close to the pair that they had to angle their necks to look into his eyes.
With a deep, authoritative voice he decreed, "The elves are under my protection."
Myrasyn’s eyes went wide.
[Synchra] flared in a ripple of living metal, and his infamous helmet sealed over his face with a hiss of crimson fire.
Domineering red eyes burned through the visor, bright enough to cast light on the frost beneath him.
When the Primordial Villain spoke again, his voice carried the weight of a creature far older than the man wearing the armor.
"The bloodshed stops here."