They had known he was coming. They had prepared.

Then the voice reached them from inside the dome, amplified by an artifact loud enough to shake pebbles loose from the ridge.

"THERE HE IS! The great Primordial Villain himself, gracing my humble walls with his magnificent presence!"

The words slurred. Badly.

A squat figure stood on the highest rampart behind the barrier’s shimmer, one hand wrapped around a tankard that was actively sloshing over his gauntlet and the other pressing a rune-etched horn to his lips that turned his voice into a weapon of its own.

He was round in the way dwarves got when centuries of command replaced combat, his belly straining against a breastplate that had clearly been forged for a younger man, and the slouch in his posture suggested he’d been drinking since before the sun cleared the ridge.

"I hear you like the slender sluts, Villain!" The dwarven lord’s voice boomed across the slope, crackling with amplified spite.

"Pretty knife-eared women with their long legs and their longer ears and their complete inability to hold a military position for more than five minutes! Tell me, Villain, does it not get tiresome bedding women whose entire contribution to warfare has been standing on branches and losing territory?!"

Below him, his officers moved with a precision that had nothing to do with their lord’s state.

Cannon crews cycled through targeting drills in tight rotation, rune-engineers reinforced the barrier’s base nodes with fresh charges, and a shieldwall four ranks deep locked into formation across the main gate with halberds angled outward.

Whatever their commander was, his officers were professionals, and the defense they were mounting would have made any fortress on the continent proud.

"Thousands of years of preparation!" The horn crackled as the dwarf’s voice climbed into a register that mixed fury with something closer to grief.

"Thousands of years of dwarven engineering, of rune-forge refinement, of alliances my grandfather’s grandfather bled to build, and one arrogant manchild ruins it all because their corrupt bitch of a queen couldn’t keep her wretched legs closed! Bah! They say she’s grace and beauty personified, but to me, Myrasyn is nothing but a failure of a leader! A dirty cunt who should’ve been tossed into the nearest brothel! At least she might’ve made some lives better then!"

He took a long pull from his tankard, and what came back was quieter but uglier.

"I hope your elf-wives are worth it, boy. I hope the elven pussy is spectacular. Because it cost this nation of mine everything."

At the base of the slope, Quinlan stood still and said nothing.

From thirty paces behind, Lilith watched him take every word without so much as turning his head. The insults landed on open air and died there, unanswered, and the silence the Primordial Villain offered in return was worse than any retort because the man radiating that silence was calm.

He wasn’t brought out of his element, not one bit.

But...

The air around him had thickened into a pressure that Lilith could feel against her skin from where she stood, a slow murderous intent so vast and so patient it didn’t need words, and the certainty it carried was simple: the drunk little barrel man behind the dome was going to die screaming, and the only question was how long Quinlan would let it take.

Quinlan looked at a certain human woman in ornate robes.

"Morgana, join me."

The Queen of Vraven stepped forward, her expression carrying the permanent disdain she wore for everything about her situation, and the hatred that burned behind it when she looked at Quinlan was old and deep and utterly irrelevant to what came next.

"We’re cracking that barrier." His head turned toward the fortress. "Hit it until it breaks."

She turned without a word, and the air around her ignited.

Quinlan went up a heartbeat later, Wind compressed beneath his boots, launching him skyward in a burst that scattered loose stone across the slope, and Aurora’s [Dreamveil] bloomed around him before he cleared the tree line, a translucent shimmer that flexed and hardened across his flank.

Sylvaris’s hands moved from the ground, and a silver construct materialized at Quinlan’s left shoulder, a shielded sentinel that tracked the nearest cannon battery with its luminous face and braced for the volley it knew was coming.

"SHOOT HIM DOWN!" The amplified roar shook the ramparts. "What are you waiting for, you useless, overpaid, IMBECILES?!"

Hundreds of rune-bound cannons fired in sequence, rounds the size of barrels screaming upward at both targets, and the siege began in earnest.

Quinlan banked hard right as the first salvo tore past him and Aurora’s shield caught the shrapnel that spread from the near miss, while Morgana answered from the east with a column of fire that struck the dome and spread across its surface in a wave of white heat that made the rune-braid scream.

The dome held, but the node beneath the impact point flickered.

Quinlan struck the west face a second later with compressed magma that detonated against the runes and spider-cracked a section three meters wide, and the drunk lord on the rampart staggered sideways at the concussive force that traveled through the dome’s skeleton.

"AGAIN! RELOAD, RELOAD, you maidenless bastards!"

They found a rhythm. Morgana’s [Cataclysm] crashed into the east node and Quinlan’s seven-element assault slammed the west in the same breath, the dome lighting up in colors it was never designed to produce as two of the strongest elemental forces on the continent hammered it from opposite sides.

Cannon fire tracked them across the sky, and Aurora’s barrier and Sylvaris’s constructs answered every shot that came close, silver sentinels repositioning around both fliers in a defensive net that caught the rounds Quinlan didn’t bother to dodge and shattered the ones Morgana refused to acknowledge.

Lilith watched from the tree line, and the ache behind her ribs had nothing to do with the concussive force rolling down the slope.

They were beautiful together.

Morgana read Quinlan’s rhythm and matched it, adjusting her timing to land a half-breath after his strikes so the barrier never had a full second to recover between impacts.

Quinlan adjusted in kind, widening his attack surface when Morgana narrowed hers, both of them reshaping their assault in real time without a single word exchanged.

’If only she wasn’t his...’

The thought landed in Lilith’s chest with a weight that surprised her.

She could see it, the version of this where Morgana stood beside the Primordial Villain as a partner instead of a prisoner, where two elemental monsters who complemented each other this well had chosen to cooperate instead of arriving here through chains and orders.

The talent was there. The synergy was undeniable. And all of it was built on the fact that her sister was his slave with absolutely zero rights to protest.

Then a different voice surfaced in her memory, small and purple-haired and screaming at a mother who wouldn’t look at her.

’He would have helped you if you’d just asked!’

Felicity’s words, hurled at Morgana during the battle that ended with her enslavement, and Lilith had not been able to put them down since she’d heard them.

A crack split the air loud enough to silence the cannons.

Within mere minutes, the barrier’s apex fractured. Golden light bled upward from the break in a pillar that climbed fifty meters before dissolving, and the dome’s hum shifted into a whine that every soldier on both sides of it recognized as terminal.

"Wha-"

The dwarven lord lurched backward as the shockwave rolled through the rampart beneath his boots.

The tankard left his grip first, tumbling end over end in a spray of dark ale that caught the light on the way down, and the dwarf followed it a half-second later as his heels caught the edge of a cannon mount and his considerable weight tipped past the point of recovery.

He landed on the stone flat on his back, and the round belly that had been straining against his breastplate decided the impact wasn’t finished, because the momentum rolled him sideways across the rampart in a graceless revolution that ended with his face against the parapet and his legs pointed at the sky.

The horn clattered beside him, still active.

"...I’ll kill him myself!" the rampart heard him wheeze into the stone.

Below, Quinlan’s women moved.

The fighters surged forward the instant the dome fell, Ayame at the front with her katana drawn and her mark blazing, Serika’s fists already trailing solar heat, Vex’s crimson tattoos lit and humming, Blossom flickering at the edge of visibility.

They covered the slope in seconds, a line of women who had cracked enough dwarven forts to make the approach feel rehearsed, and behind them Sera’s light cast long shadows up the mountain as the Dawnbringer rose to join the assault.

Then the grass died.

A hundred meters to their flank, a horizontal line split the air just above the ground, and every blade of grass beneath it went black in the same instant, curling inward as if the earth itself was trying to pull away from what was opening above it.

The line widened without sound, twenty meters across, then fifty, a seam of absolute dark that swallowed the light at its edges and gave nothing back.

Ayame froze mid-stride.

The charge, the fortress, the drunk on the rampart, all of it fell out of her world in a single heartbeat, and the blue eyes that locked on the spreading tear held a recognition that made her grip tighten around her blade.

"She’s coming."