Primordial Villain With A Slave Harem - Chapter 1575 Betrayal
Chapter 1575 Betrayal
Blossom moved first.
The dogkin’s senses had caught the shift before the warhammer connected. The change in Ragnar’s scent, the spike of adrenaline through dwarven pores. Her body was already shifting through the void when the CLANG rang across the field, and she emerged from the shadow at Ragnar’s flank with her claw gauntlets aimed at the seam between his pauldron and his gorget.
“[Null Rend]!”
The void-enhanced strike should have phased past steel. That was what a Void Stalker did.
Ragnar’s blacksteel didn’t care.
The gold runes carved into his armor blazed the instant her claws made contact, and the void energy that should have phased past the plate hit a barrier so dense it felt like punching a mountain. The runes rejected the void energy outright, reflecting it back into Blossom’s gauntlets hard enough to numb her fingers to the wrist.
She bounced off him.
Ragnar didn’t even look at her.
“Grr!”
The hateful growl ripped out of her as she hit the ground rolling, and the dwarven column responded before she could close the gap again. Two hundred warriors in heavy plate collapsed inward around their king in a formation so rehearsed it happened without a single command being spoken. Shields locked. Axes leveled. The wall of blacksteel sealed Ragnar behind a barrier of dwarven bodies that stood shoulder to shoulder with their boots planted and their eyes forward, and the message was clear.
Come through us.
Ayame and the rest surged toward the dwarven wall. Serika’s fists blazed with solar fire. Lucille’s axe came off her shoulder. Aurora’s shields were already forming across the line. Iris drew her sword and attacked.
The dwarven wall held.
On the eastern edge of the field, Gorthrax the Eternal moved.
Black Fang’s instincts fired a fraction of a second before the necrotic lance would have punched into her spine. She twisted sideways and the attack passed close enough to scorch her sleeve, the dark energy crackling past her ribs and detonating in the dirt behind her. She completed the dodge in the same motion that drew her katana across Gorthrax’s midsection, the venom-coated edge carving a line into the ancient undead lord’s robes and the necrotic barrier beneath.
The barrier caught it. Barely. The venom ate past two layers of necrotic shielding before the third held, hissing and spitting where the poison met dead energy, and the slash that should have bisected him left a smoking furrow across his torso instead.
Gorthrax looked down at the wound. Blue fire flickered in his sockets.
“Impressive, girl.”
Above the field, the sky darkened.
Shapes descended in formation. Massive wingspans casting shadows across the scorched earth, and the riders on their backs wore armor trimmed with the same gold runes as Ragnar’s column. Dwarven wyvern riders. A regiment of them, circling in from the south in tight attack formation, and the war horns strapped to their saddles began sounding in unison.
The clang on Quinlan’s skull had been their signal.
The Drowned King and Archlich Vozen released a guttural rasp, an unnatural, unholy sound that traveled for miles.
From the east, the undead horde that had been pressing the Ravenshade flank from the Whisperfield battlefield shifted. Thousands of corpses redirected their march in a wave that curved around the edge of the field and began closing on Alexios’s group.
And from the north, the foxkin came.
Silver struck first.
The leader of the foxkin people materialized behind the captain of Alexios’s elite guard reserves and opened his throat with a single strike before the man’s hand reached his sword. The motion was so clean the captain took two more steps before his legs understood he was dead. Silver was already gone.
He flickered between positions like a mirage burning off a hot road, each flicker leaving a dead or dying soldier behind him, his attacks painting red lines across throats and gaps in armor.
The foxkin elite poured in behind him. Hundreds of them, fur-cloaked and silent, hitting the Fujimori and Valorian rear in a wave.
Kaede spun to face the assault. Elder Chizuru barked a command and the Fujimori swordswomen pivoted to meet the new threat, but the pivot exposed their flank to the undead horde closing from the east, and the foxkin had timed it exactly.
Textbook pincer.
Ragnar had planned for the chaos his actions would cause. The wyvern regiment, the undead reinforcements, and the foxkin backstabbing were the insurance, the raw force bearing down on Alexios’s side so that even with Elvardia’s faction tearing itself apart from within, the combined pressure would keep the Vraven Kingdom at bay.
Quinlan’s hands scraped against the scorched earth.
His vision was three images refusing to become one. Blood ran into his eyes and the ringing in his skull was so loud it ate the edges of every sound, turning the screaming and the steel and the war horns into a wall of noise that his brain couldn’t parse. He could feel the ground beneath his palms. He could feel [Synchra] on his frame, heavier than she’d ever been because his body had nothing left to carry her with.
He was trying to stand.
His arms pushed. His knees dug in. He made it halfway up before a gauntleted hand closed around the back of his neck and shoved him back down, and the cold bite of metal pressed against his throat.
The collar clamped shut with a sound like a lock engaging.
A pulse of binding magic shot into his channels. Foreign mana invaded his pathways like ice water pouring into veins, seeking the anchors that would let it write ownership into his soul, and Quinlan’s half-conscious mind registered what was happening with terrible clarity.
Ragnar’s grip stayed on his neck. The dwarf king stood beside him, pinning Quinlan’s face to the dirt, and his voice was low so that only the two of them could hear it.
“The young lass put it perfectly. For the future of the Great Nation of Elvardia and its sovereign interests, you’re too dangerous to let roam free. You’ll become a proper tool for us.”
“Ragnar!”
Myrasyn’s voice hit the field like a whip crack.
