Primordial Villain With A Slave Harem - Chapter 1548 March

Chapter 1548  March

She’d assumed leadership over the force, using them to assault Vesper Consortium holdings in hopes of flushing Quinlan out.

But as it turned out, the slippery rat had left the duchy altogether, abandoning his syndicate members. Now, he was partaking in a war against humanity.

That was when the orders to march back to Ravenshade came.

As for the army… they were falling behind. Fifty thousand men couldn’t move at the speed of a queen with wind magic and a dozen elite guards running on pure stats, and every second the gap widened.

Morgana hadn’t waited for them. She’d received the reports, processed the logistics, and launched herself north before her advisors had finished reading the suggested optimal strategy.

Next to her entourage, keeping pace on the ground through sheer physical speed, Kaede Fujimori cut through the terrain below. The leader of the Fujimori Clan and Duke of Silverwind moved with efficient grace. Her elites ran in her wake, a tight formation of Fujimori swordswomen and clan warriors, and at their center Elder Chizuru kept pace with the stride of someone who could maintain this speed for days without tiring.

Flanking them to the east, Lilith Ravenshade’s Scarlet Lilies matched the formation stride for stride.

The Adamantite Adventurer ran at the head of her party with her white hair streaming behind her. Behind her, Jallen’s spear bounced against her back with every stride, the healer-spearwoman’s long legs eating ground while her eyes swept the treeline for threats with the professional paranoia of someone who’d kept her party alive through enough dungeons to earn a reputation. Bronnya ran beside Jallen with the heavy, thundering gait of a tanker who treated cardio as a personal insult but refused to fall behind, her tower shield strapped across her arm and her breathing already audible.

Also audible was the woman on her back.

“The road is too bumpy,” Void whined from where she clung to Bronnya’s shoulders, her dark robes pooling over the tanker’s armor like a blanket draped over a boulder. “And your armor is cold. And hard. Why do you wear so much of it?”

“Because I’m a tanker!” Bronnya snarled, adjusting her grip on the mage’s legs without breaking stride. “That’s the whole point! Run on your own! Use your void powers!”

“I’m sparing my mana.”

“Then ask Lilith for a ride!”

Void considered this for approximately one second. “Lilith is too bony. I don’t like riding her.”

“Then Jallen-”

“Her spear is in the way.”

“Yeah and you make me run with the shield in my arms because the shield would also be in the way!”

“You can take it. Stop whining.”

“I’m dying over here! You should hold the spear on your back-”

“No,” Jallen and Void said together.

A vein pulsed in Bronnya’s forehead.

Lilith listened to her friends grumble and bicker behind her, the same way they’d grumbled and bickered through a hundred dungeons and a thousand marches across the better part of four centuries. The sound should have been comforting.

She couldn’t hear it.

Her eyes were locked on the distance ahead, on the stretch of empty terrain between her party and the battlefield dozens of miles ahead, and the emptiness itself was the thing that made her grip tighten on her sword until her knuckles ached.

Scar should have been out there.

Their ranger, their scout, the woman who ran ahead of the party and mapped every threat before the Scarlet Lilies ever set foot in danger. She’d been doing it for centuries, ever since a disfigured nobody at Level 1 with a slashed-up mouth and nothing to her name joined them.

That nobody had become one of the most respected assassins on the continent. Centuries of growth, centuries of trust, centuries of running point for the Scarlet Lilies and coming back every single time with a report and a nod that meant the path was clear.

She was not here.

Because Black Fang and the Primordial Villain had taken her.

Lilith had watched it happen. Watched Scar fall in battle against a man whose necromantic powers turned death into recruitment, watched the Soul Reaper pulse with that sickening necrotic light, watched the spectral figure of her old friend rise from her own corpse with glowing eyes and blue skin and a loyalty that no longer belonged to the women she’d fought beside for hundreds of years.

The memory burned, and the burn had teeth.

Behind the anger, though, buried beneath the killing intent that had been building in her chest since the day she lost Scar, there was a quieter pain that Lilith couldn’t afford to look at for too long.

Scar’s smile.

The woman wore a mask. She’d worn it for as long as Lilith had known her, a half-face cover that hid the ruin of her mouth, carved open from cheek to cheek in the kind of disfigurement that made strangers flinch and children cry. Scar never took the mask off.

Except once a century.

On the anniversary of the Scarlet Lilies’ founding, in whatever tavern booth or campsite or dungeon rest point the four of them happened to be occupying, Scar would reach up with both hands and pull the mask down to her chin so that she could toast with her friends, letting them see the mouth that she hid from the rest of the world.

The scars twisted her lips into something that should have been ugly. The cuts had healed badly, pulling the skin tight in places and leaving it slack in others, and the smile that formed between them was crooked and uneven and looked like it hurt.

It was the most beautiful smile Lilith had ever seen.

Because it was trust. Hundreds of years of trust, offered once a century to the only four people in the world Scar believed wouldn’t look away.

And now a man who’d known her for less than a year had her soul in a sword.

Lilith’s teeth pressed together until her jaw ached. The killing intent rolling off her shoulders was thick enough that Jallen had stopped scanning the treeline and was watching her leader’s back with quiet concern. Bronnya had gone silent too, Void still clinging to her shoulders, both of them feeling the shift in their captain’s aura the way veterans felt a change in weather.

Then Lilith saw her.

At the edge of the distant field, a figure stood at the head of a column that stretched back into the haze.

Blue-skinned. Masked. A posture that Lilith could have identified from ten times this distance because she’d been watching that silhouette run ahead of her for centuries.

Scar stood at the head of an army of the dead.

Hundreds of spectral soldiers fell into step behind her, rank after rank of blue-skinned figures marching in disciplined formation with weapons drawn and eyes glowing, and Scar walked at their head with the measured stride of a general leading her forces to war against her master’s enemies.

She was looking directly at Lilith.

And behind the army, walking tall with the Soul Reaper hovering above his head and a grin visible, the Primordial Villain strolled forward like a man arriving fashionably late to a party he’d been planning all along.