Primordial Villain With A Slave Harem - Chapter 1556 Outmatched

Chapter 1556  Outmatched

“But you’re slowing down.” She stepped toward him. “I can see it. Your output is dropping with every exchange, yet you’re still standing here fighting me instead of running.” Another step. “Why? You should be running. Every instinct you have should be telling you to run. So why aren’t you? Black Fang is over there. Why don’t you run to her? Hide behind her.”

Quinlan’s hands moved and fire answered, but the flame was thinner than the first volley. He layered wind behind it to compensate, accelerating the firestream into a lance that screamed toward her chest, and followed it with a wall of ice that erupted from the ground behind her, cutting off her retreat path.

Morgana walked through the fire lance.

Her mana field absorbed it. The flames parted around her body and the residual heat that made it through singed the edges of her robes without touching her skin. She didn’t slow down.

The ice wall behind her cracked and fell as she pulled the heat from the fire lance and redirected it backward, melting her own escape route open without even looking at it.

“You survived [Voltaic Tempest].” She was breathing harder now, but from excitement, and her fingers curled and uncurled at her sides as the raw energy between them built toward something massive. “You survived [Infernal Gale]. You are still standing, still casting, still fighting me, and I need to know why.”

Her hands came up and the mana pouring off her body warped the air into a shimmering haze.

“Let me find out. [Cataclysm]!”

Fire and earth converged between her palms and detonated. The ground beneath Quinlan’s feet liquefied as magma surged upward from below while fire poured down from above, and the two forces met in a sphere of volcanic destruction that expanded faster than sound. The shockwave flattened everything within fifty meters.

Quinlan threw everything he had into defense. Earth erupted around him in the thickest dome he’d built yet, layered with ice for structural reinforcement and wind cycling inside to buffer the concussive force. His hands pressed against the inner wall and mana poured out of him in a torrent that made the stone glow.

[Cataclysm] hit the dome and the outer three layers disintegrated instantly. The fourth cracked. The fifth buckled. The ice reinforcement shattered and the wind buffer collapsed under the pressure differential, and Quinlan was running out of layers faster than he could build them.

The sixth layer held for half a second.

The seventh didn’t form in time.

[Cataclysm] swallowed him whole.

The blast ripped through his body and took his left arm off at the shoulder. His torso split open from sternum to hip as the volcanic force tore through [Synchra]’s plating like it was cloth, and the armor that had saved his life a dozen times over peeled apart in molten strips that scattered across the crater. What was left of him hit the ground in pieces. His legs crumpled beneath a body that no longer had the structural integrity to stand, and [Soul Reaper] clattered into the dirt beside a hand that was no longer attached to a wrist.

Blood everywhere. Dark and hot and soaking into scorched earth, pooling beneath a ruined chest cavity that had stopped moving.

The screaming started immediately.

“QUINLAN!”

Seraphiel’s voice tore across the battlefield first, raw and shattered, the sound of a woman watching her husband die. Serika’s followed half a second later, a howl that carried over the clash of steel and the roar of magic and turned heads on both sides of the field.

“No – no, no, no, NO -”

“MASTER!”

Blossom’s wail was the worst. High and keening and broken in a way that made soldiers on both sides flinch, the cry of a dogkin who had just lost the only person in the world who mattered.

Morgana lowered her hands.

She didn’t look toward the screaming. She didn’t need to. The anguish in those voices was confirmation enough, and the queen’s attention was already on the crater, on the ruin she’d made, on the specimen she’d pushed too far.

Then the blood vanished.

The ragged stump where his arm had been smoothed over like fog lifting off glass. The split torso rippled, lost its texture, and the pieces lying in the crater shimmered and dissolved into wisps of white light that scattered on the superheated wind like mist burning off a morning lake.

The blast that should have liquefied a human body had hit something that wasn’t one.

Morgana’s hands were still raised.

Her pupils contracted.

The smoking crater where the Primordial Villain had stood was empty. Just scorched earth and the smell of ozone and fox musk, and the fading wisps of light had a texture to them that Morgana recognized from a class of magic she was getting awfully familiar with.

Illusion.

…

High above the battlefield, above the cloud cover where the air thinned and the wind carried the distant sounds of a thousand simultaneous engagements, a figure hung motionless against the sky.

Quinlan watched the crater far below where the remnants of Morgana’s [Cataclysm] were still glowing, and the wind howling around him at this altitude ripped at his coat and tugged at his hair.

He dove.

The descent was vertical and instant. Wind compressed behind him and fire ignited in both hands, and the figure that plummeted toward the Elemental Sovereign came in like a falling star, trailing elemental fire and pouring enough mana into the dive to make the air around him scream.

Morgana launched upward to meet him. Wind exploded beneath her feet and she rocketed toward the diving figure with [Infernal Gale] already forming between her palms, the lance of superheated wind aimed at the falling star that thought it could catch her twice.

“[Infernal Gale]!”

The spell hit center mass. Fire and wind punched through the diving body and Quinlan’s form erupted in a blinding flash of light and dissolved into wisps of white, the same shimmer, the same fox musk, scattering around her as she tore through the space where he’d been.

Again.

She was already high in the air when it registered. Her momentum had carried her fifty meters above the battlefield on the tail end of her own launch, exposed and climbing, and for the first time since the fight began the manic excitement vanished from Morgana Ravenshade’s face.

She was out of position.

“[Winds of – ]”

Her hands came together and wind began cycling between her palms, the beginnings of a repositioning spell that would carry her back to defensible altitude. Mid-chant, her eyes cut sideways.

The girls were still fighting. Vex carved through a tanker’s guard mid-sob. Serika’s fist caved in a shield with tears still wet on her cheeks. Blossom was whimpering “Master” between kills with her claws buried in a soldier’s throat.

10:40

Every one of them performing anguish while fighting at full speed.

They were pretending.

And behind the front line, the foxkin who Morgana had watched throughout the battle, who had been standing there the whole time with three tails while “Quinlan” wove elemental magic so convincing that no mage alive would have called it illusion, met her gaze and grinned.

Kitsara turned around, bent forward, and jiggled her butt.

Her three tails curled upward, and the foxkin arched her back. Her hands slid down to her knees. She looked back over her shoulder at the most powerful mage on the continent with half-lidded eyes and a smile that belonged in a bedroom, not a battlefield.

She shook her ass at the Queen of the Vraven Kingdom.

As she did, the illusion dropped. The three tails shimmered and two of them dissolved into wisps of white light, leaving a single real tail still swaying to a rhythm only she could hear, wagging with the cheerful energy of a woman who had just pulled off the greatest magic trick of her life and wanted to make absolutely sure the victim knew who did it.

Two detached tails, two perfect copies of the Primordial Villain, each one channeling his elemental magic. The Quinlan on the ground and the Quinlan in the sky had both been her, and the third tail had stayed behind to maintain the illusion that all three were still attached.

Kitsara popped one hip and decreed,

“Die, you stupid fucking bitch.”

Morgana’s eyes went wide. The ground below her shifted.

She felt it through the air itself, the deep vibration propagating upward, the mana signature erupting from beneath the battlefield. She was fifty meters up with her momentum spent, hanging at the apex of a climb she’d made to kill a fake, mid-cast on a spell she would never finish.

The earth split open.