Primordial Villain With A Slave Harem-Chapter 1539: Freedom

"HARGRIEVE! NO!"

Quinlan dropped his arms.

The meteors fell.

They came down in a cascading wave that turned the air itself into a furnace. The first impacts hit the ground around General Hargrieve and the soldiers nearest to him, and the detonations merged into a single roaring wall of heat and destruction that swallowed everything within a sixty-meter radius. The ground cratered and liquefied, collapsing inward as superheated stone melted into the earth and the shockwave flattened everyone still standing at the edges.

When the dust cleared, there was a pit where General Hargrieve’s position had been. Deep and glowing orange at the bottom, edges still dripping with cooling magma. Nothing recognizable remained.

[You’ve slain General Hargrieve Ashenmoor (Level 68). You’ve gained 84,500 XP.]

Quinlan chuckled.

"So be it."

He drew the Soul Reaper from his side and held it above the crater.

"[Eternal Damnation]."

The saber pulsed with necrotic light and the molten pit answered. Souls ripped free from the cooling magma, dozens of them, spectral wisps torn from the bodies of every soldier the meteor strike had claimed. They streamed upward in ribbons of pale light and funneled into the blade, the Soul Reaper drinking them in one after another until the weapon hummed with the fruits of a fresh harvest.

"[Awaken]."

Blue flames erupted from the saber’s edge and coalesced in the air beneath him, gathering into a shape that grew denser with every passing second until the spectral figure of General Hargrieve Ashenmoor hovered before his killer, barely more than a translucent blue silhouette stripped of flesh and armor and centuries of accumulated scars.

Arrows whistled toward Quinlan from the Ravenshade archers repositioning below. He deflected two with a flick of wind, froze a third mid-flight, and let Synchra eat the fourth as it glanced off his shoulder plate. A javelin followed, hurled by an officer with enough Strength behind it to crack stone, and Quinlan caught it in a gust and snapped it in half without looking away from the spectral figure floating before him.

He began the soul rank-up ritual.

The ghostly form shuddered as necrotic energy flooded into it, reshaping the spectral template from the inside out. Rank 2. The silhouette gained edges, shoulders squaring, the vague outline of a face sharpening into recognizable features. Rank 3. Musculature defined itself beneath the spectral skin, and the staff that had been vaporized alongside his body reformed in his grip as a construct of pure necrotic energy.

Another volley of arrows. Quinlan raised a wall of ice between himself and the archers without breaking his concentration on the ritual.

Rank 4. Hargrieve’s face was fully formed now.

Rank 5.

The transformation completed with a pulse of dark energy that rippled outward from Hargrieve’s body. His eyes opened, glowing with the same spectral light as every soul in Quinlan’s army, and he looked down at his hands with an expression that started as confusion and settled into exhilaration.

"Rank 5, it says..." Hargrieve murmured, reading a system notification only he could see.

The chain woman’s voice cut through the battlefield noise, raw and cracked. "Hargrieve?!"

The soul soldier looked at his former comrade. He turned his hands over, flexed his fingers, rolled his shoulders.

"I no longer feel old and frail..." he said, and a smile spread across his blue-skinned face that had no business being there. "Isara. This is amazing."

"What is wrong with you?!" Isara screamed, and the anguish in her voice was the sound of a woman watching a friend she’d served beside for numerous centuries look at her with glowing eyes and call it a gift.

Hargrieve laughed. A real laugh, full and deep and ringing with a joy that the living version of the man hadn’t been capable of in decades.

"Wrong? There’s nothing wrong! I feel better than I have in four hundred years! The aches, the fatigue, all of it, gone! Do you understand what that means, Isara? Nine centuries of fighting the passage of time, nine centuries of watching my body slow and my reserves shrink and knowing every battle could be the one where my reflexes finally failed me!"

He raised his staff above his head and energy gathered at its tip in a swirling mass.

"And now?"

He aimed it at the Ravenshade soldiers around him.

"[Hundred Falling Stars]!"

The volley that erupted from his staff rained down on the regiment he’d been leading ten seconds ago, and the soldiers who’d served under him for centuries watched only to see their beloved general’s face, glowing and blue-skinned and laughing, as his own spell tore through their ranks.

Hargrieve died in the first wave of return fire.

Three war-mages who’d fought under his command for a century burned him down with coordinated spell volleys, and his spectral body came apart in a shower of blue light.

He reformed four seconds later, cackling harder.

"Magnificent! Even death is temporary when you submit to ’him’!" He raised his staff again and another volley crashed into the Ravenshade lines.

Soldiers who had mourned his death were now scrambling to kill him a second time, and the horror on their faces as their former general laughed and killed and died and came back and killed again was the kind of psychological devastation that no amount of training could prepare someone for.

He died again. Came back again. Cast again.

"They call my Master the Harbinger of Ruin!" Hargrieve roared across the battlefield as his staff carved through a defensive formation that had been built around his own tactical doctrine, exploiting every weakness he knew because he’d designed them himself. "But I shall call him the Harbinger of Freedom!"

His former soldiers broke.

The regiment that had held its ground through hours of grinding warfare, that had watched their general get vaporized and kept fighting, shattered the moment that same general turned his spells on them with a smile on his face and joy in his voice. Men who would have died for Hargrieve ran from him, and the rout spread outward through the neighboring units as word traveled faster than the fighting.

Isara watched with hollow eyes.

’General Isara Blackveil,’ Quinlan identified her from the intelligence briefings from the Consortium. Level 70 binding specialist, six hundred years of service under the Ravenshade banner, known for locking down targets for allied kill teams. Which meant she was originally supposed to stall him, together with Hargrieve.

And by the look of things, even if not how they’d originally hoped, their goal had been achieved.

While the grunts tried to rout, he could feel the reinforcements already closing in.

"Isara!"

A voice from below. A heavy-set man in dwarven-forged plate landed to Quinlan’s east, a massive tower shield planted in front of him and a war-hammer resting on his shoulder. His mana pressure was thick and immediate.

’Garrison Commander Drekken Molvaine.’ Rumored to be around Level 71. Forty years older than Isara and twice as stubborn, according to the files. The man had held a river crossing against an elven assault force for three days during the Greenhollow Campaign with nothing but his shield company and sheer bloody-mindedness.

"I’m fine!" Isara snarled, already re-forming her chains. "He killed Hargrieve."

"Kekeke!!" the man in question cackled while barraging his allies with devastating spells.

"I saw." Drekken’s voice was flat in the way that men who’d buried too many friends sounded when they added another name to the list. He adjusted his grip on the hammer. "Then we stop playing support and put him down ourselves."

A third figure dropped from the sky to Quinlan’s south. A woman with twin short swords and a cloak that shimmered with active camouflage magic, materializing out of thin air as her stealth broke.

’Reina Ashworth.’ Level 73. Ravenshade’s senior field assassin, and she specialized in killing mages.

She appeared without a word, swords drawn, eyes already locked on Quinlan’s throat.

"It took Hargrieve dying for them to finally send you?" Isara spat without looking at her.

"I was already en route," Reina said. "Command redirected every priority asset the moment he started his rampage."

"How many?"

"Everyone they could spare. Drekken, Yullis and his mage-killers are sixty seconds out. So is Vorren’s lance company."

Drekken barked a laugh that had no humor in it. "Half the command structure chasing one man. What a joke the art of war has become."

"The front line is already collapsing where he hit it," Isara said through her teeth. "Look at what he did to the 4th Column. He froze six hundred men in three seconds and turned Hargrieve’s entire section into a crater."

Quinlan floated above them and listened to three of Ravenshade’s most dangerous officers coordinate his death.

’They’re good. Binding specialist to lock me down, shield-tank to absorb my counters, mage-killer to slip through while I’m occupied.’

The grin spread behind his helmet.

"Thanks for the briefing, everyone."

He bolted.

"What?!" Drekken’s hammer swung through empty air, releasing a shockwave toward where the Villain had been floating a half-second ago.

Reina’s eyes tracked the bolt of light cutting north across the sky. She hissed through her teeth and launched after it without a word, her cloak shimmering as she pushed every stat she had into pursuit speed.

"He’s running!" Isara screamed. "Don’t let the Villain escape! Converge! Everyone converge or he’ll regenerate and recover!"

"That’s what we call a tactical retreat, don’t insult my glorious Master!"

Hargrieve’s voice rang out from below, cheerful and bright and completely unhinged, and his staff swung toward the three officers chasing Quinlan.

"[Arcane Barrage]!"

The volley slammed into Drekken’s shield and forced him to plant his feet mid-pursuit, eating three seconds of chase distance.

Reina flickered sideways to avoid a cluster of projectiles that tracked her movement with the precision of a general who had personally trained Ravenshade’s anti-assassin doctrine. Isara threw up a barrier.

"HARGRIEVE! Stand down!"

"I’m afraid I can’t do that!" He was already charging another volley, grinning ear to ear. "My Master is retreating with grace and dignity and I will ensure his departure remains unimpeded!"

"He’s running like a fucking coward and you know it!"

Hargrieve’s staff swung toward her and he snarled with immense fury in his eyes, "Bitch, I’ll kill you!"

Three war-mages burned him down again. He came apart in a shower of blue light.

Isara’s scream of frustration carried across the battlefield as Drekken and Reina gave chase. Isara reformed her chains and launched herself north. Behind them, five more mana signatures adjusted course, and behind those, another dozen lesser signatures scrambled to keep up.

And far ahead, a streak of wind and lightning cut north across the smoke-stained sky, pulling Ravenshade’s dangerous officers away from their lines and toward a stretch of unremarkable terrain three kilometers out.

Just like that, the chase began.

...

Author: Apologies if the Chapters have been lacking in recent days, I’m sick and dealing with a nasty headache. Thanks for the support!