Primordial Villain With A Slave Harem-Chapter 1540: Herded

Quinlan ran.

He burst north through the sky on a platform of compressed wind reinforced with lightning, body parallel to the ground, arms trailing at his sides as the landscape below blurred into a smear of trampled grass and smoking craters. The wind howled around him and the cold bit at the cracks in his armor where the chain woman’s binding had stressed the joints.

Behind him, the pursuit swelled.

Isara’s chains lashed out from range, golden streaks that arced across the sky and snapped at his heels every time he dropped below a certain altitude. He climbed to avoid them and a volley of arcane bolts from two generals he hadn’t bothered to identify peppered the air around him, tracking his movement with the coordinated precision of officers who had drilled anti-air formations for centuries.

He rolled through the volley, deflected one bolt with a gust, froze another mid-flight, and sent a sheet of ice back along the trajectory that forced both generals to break formation. It bought him two fractions of a second.

Drekken was still coming. The man had abandoned the ground entirely, launching himself through the sky in short, brutal hops powered by his [Fortress Charge], each leap covering thirty meters in a straight line.

Reina was worse. She flickered in and out of visibility along his left flank, never quite committing to an intercept but always there, always pacing him, waiting for the moment his attention split one direction too many. Her mana signature pulsed like a heartbeat, steady and patient.

’She’s herding me.’

A new cluster of mana signatures joined the pursuit from the southeast. Yullis’s mage-killers, five of them in tight formation, moving fast. Behind them, heavier signatures. Vorren’s lance company, slower but carrying the kind of concentrated firepower that turned evasion into a math problem.

’Six. No, is it seven now?’

A dwarven cannon volley arced overhead from the main battle to the south, aimed at Ravenshade’s front lines but passing close enough that the concussive blast shoved him sideways and rattled his ribs through the Anima armor. An elven wide-area spell turned a patch of ground below into a churning mass of thorned roots that grabbed at Ravenshade soldiers and Quinlan’s own soul troops indiscriminately.

The battlefield didn’t care whose side anyone was on. It was just a machine that ate people and spit out corpses, and the longer you stayed inside it, the more likely it was to eat you too.

"[Skypiercer Lance]!"

The concentrated wind beam punched through the space where his torso had been a half-second ago. Quinlan twisted, took the graze across his hip, felt the armor crack and the flesh beneath bruise. He sent a magma fist back along the trajectory and heard a barrier shatter and a man scream.

He was running the numbers in his head as he flew, and the numbers were ugly.

He’d killed hundreds of soldiers in his rampage. Frozen a regiment. Turned their rear logistics into a crater field. Claimed a general’s soul and set him loose on his own men. By any individual measure, he’d been devastating.

And the front line had barely shifted.

Quinlan could see it from this altitude, the broad sweep of Ravenshade’s advance still grinding north against the Elvardian trenches, and the gap he’d torn in their rear was already closing. Fresh units shuffled sideways to cover the holes. Officers who weren’t chasing him redirected their regiments. The war absorbed his damage the way an ocean absorbed a stone.

’That’s the thing about wars this big,’ he thought, banking hard to avoid a cluster of tracking bolts from Yullis’s formation. ’Everyone’s a number. A hundred dead soldiers is a rounding error when the field holds a million.’

He’d risked his life for that rounding error. Taken real hits. The chain woman had nearly pinned him, the lance had cracked his armor, and every second he’d spent in the open was a second where a stray cannon volley or a wide-area spell could have ended him through pure bad luck.

He was Level 51 on a field with threats pushing Level 74. His elemental mastery, soul armies, and other advantages alongside the Abyssal Genesis Physique let him punch above his weight, but weight still mattered when the entire Ravenshade command structure was converging on his position.

’Even I’m just a number out here.’

Another chain snapped past his shoulder, close enough that the golden light reflected off his visor. Isara was closing the distance, pouring everything into pursuit speed, and behind her Drekken’s next leap ate forty meters in a single bound.

Quinlan poured more mana into his wind platform and the gap stabilized. Barely.

He was burning through reserves faster than he wanted. The rampage, the chain contention, the Hargrieve resurrection, and now a sustained high-speed flight across hostile airspace while dodging spells from numerous high-level pursuers.

The thought had been there since before the first spell was cast, settled and certain. His girls, his lovers, the women who’d poured months of brutal training into becoming weapons. Every one of them could hold their own against fighters who outleveled them. Every one of them was exceptional.

But on this field, exceptional meant nothing. The chaos was the enemy, and chaos killed indiscriminately.

A stray bolt from one of Yullis’s mage-killers grazed his calf and sent a jolt of dark mana through his leg that numbed everything below the knee for two agonizing seconds. He burned it out with lightning pulsed through his own body and kept flying.

...

A couple minutes ago

"That said, there’s something you all should do..." Quinlan had told them.

Their faces had been a gallery of barely concealed heartbreak, and he’d hated every second of it.

But then he’d watched their expressions shift from dejected to attentive as the words registered, and he’d laid out the play.

...

"Quin..." Ayame murmured, and her hand settled on her katana with the quiet hunger of a woman who’d been told she’d get to use it.

"So we do get to fight!" Feng cheered, joined by many happy squeals and grins.

Quinlan observed them and spoke with extreme warmth in his voice.

"Listen. Every single one of you could walk onto that field right now and make veterans fifty times your age and twenty levels above you rethink their career choices. I watched you grow into such beings even before the primordial realm. I know what you’re capable of better than anyone."

He’d met Ayame’s eyes, then Serika’s, then swept the rest of them.

"But I refuse to gamble with your lives on a field where a stray cannon shot can kill you just as dead as a named enemy. Not when I can give you a fight worth having instead."

Vex had stared at him for a long moment, then looked away with her arms folded tight across her chest. 𝒻𝘳ℯℯ𝑤ℯ𝒷𝘯ℴ𝓋ℯ𝘭.𝑐ℴ𝑚

"You could’ve just said all that first!!" she muttered with eyes narrowed into fiery slits. "Before the whole dramatic ’you girls won’t be engaging’ speech..."

"I was building up to it."

"You were doing your brooding voice while we all thought you were calling us deadweight."

"..."

"... Hubby!! I’ll have to teach you a lesson at this rate!" a low, threatening growl left her lips.

"We might need those thousand needles of yours, Vex..." Ayame grinned.

"Right. Vexie, you know what to do." Sera nodded.

"Leave it to me, girls," the Hexwitch decreed as her narrowed eyes locked onto Quinlan.

But even as she did that, immense relief and joy could be seen in those red, pentagram eyes of hers.

...

Twenty meters.