Chapter 1907: Cruel Monster
The chain came in the half-beat when the king’s weight tied up his shield arm, out of the shield-wall’s blind side, runes burning down every link. Steel could not reach the Villain past their king, so the commander had stopped asking steel to.
Quinlan saw it late, and met it in the air anyway. The black saber struck blacksteel with a *CRACK!* that stung his palm to the elbow. The blow left a pale scratch on one link.
Blacksteel forged under the mountain did not open to a single strike, even his, and there was no time for a second: the weighted end wrapped his sword-side shoulder, cinched, and bit.
Synchra’s plates dimmed wherever the grounded links touched, her light draining into the floor.
"Now!" the commander roared. "Kill him now!"
Axes came down from every side, and he fought inside the chain the whole time, wrenching the king up to block high, the saber deflecting low on a pinned arm’s worth of reach.
A halberdier came in through the one line the royal body did not cover, found the seam under Quinlan’s raised arm, and opened it deep. The seam went wide, cold first, then a deep spreading burn. The blood ran fast and dark down his ribs.
Somewhere in the press, an old veteran began laughing with desperate hope.
"WE HAVE HIM!" he howled through his own laughter. "LADS, WE HAVE HIM!"
Quinlan pinned the king against his chest with one forearm and closed his free gauntlet around the blacksteel links.
Under Synchra’s cracked plates, the muscles of his back and shoulders swelled against the armor from inside.
He exhaled, set his feet in his own blood, and pulled.
The links held. The men holding the other end did not. The first heave dragged the anchor-team forward a full step, boots plowing tile dust, and the second tore the floor-pin out entirely.
"What in the Goddess is this Strength stat?!"
"Impossible! A mage is overpowering us?!"
Four dwarves arrived airborne into their own shield-press, screaming.
Quinlan stood in the wreck of the finest maneuver the mountain had left and unwrapped the dead chain from his shoulder.
"Much better," he sighed contently.
"Just what are your stats, you damned... creature?!" the commander cursed.
"They’re getting pretty high, right?" Quinlan laughed.
"STOP BRAGGING!"
Down the gallery’s flank, Orianna’s wedge had forced the servants’ gate, and the under-tier was squeezing through a doorway four dwarves wide, packed shoulder to shoulder with nowhere to scatter.
"Forget the Villain!" an officer shrieked by the far platform. "Kill the rats in the gate! Make him watch! He’s powerful without magic but not overwhelming!"
The ballista came around toward the doorway.
Quinlan’s helmet turned toward it, and the amusement went out of him mid-breath.
’Damn.’
They were aiming at a cluster of rebels, enthusiastic but severely lacking in speed or durability.
He didn’t want to see them all dead.
’Time to put some work in, legs of mine.’
The last king of the dwarves hit the tiles, dropped without a glance.
Then the floor detonated where the Villain’s heels had been.
Wind cracked down the length of the gallery, slapping banners flat against their poles, and a straight line of shattered tile ran from where he had stood to the far platform before a single dwarf could turn his head.
"LOOSE! LOOSE, LOO-!" the crew chief screamed at his own weapon.
The crew’s trigger-hand never finished tightening.
The black saber went through the ballista’s frame, the loaded bolt, and the man behind, all three in one savage, brutal slash. The great weapon folded off its mount in halves.
The officer who had given the order got one step.
"Wrong target," the Villain said, and cut him down where he stood.
The bolt meant for forty rebels never flew.
"Why do you care so much about some weak rebel scum?!" the commander screamed in utter outrage. At this point, it seemed some of the opposition just wanted to understand what nonsense was going on.
The big bad Primordial Villain was all over the place, bragging, sword fighting with great proficiency, and now saving nobodies?
Incomprehensible.
The reason was simple.
"I consider the dwarven people mine already."
For a breath, nobody in the servants’ gate made a sound.
"He dropped the king," a veteran said somewhere in the wreckage, hollow. "He... the shield he took a war to win, he just... for porters. For porters."
Then a young smith’s voice tore out of the crowd.
"HE CAME FOR US!"
"LORD ELYSIAR STANDS WITH THE MOUNTAIN!"
The under-tier came through the gate roaring, and the weight of a risen city landed on the honor guard’s flank.
Across the gallery, the last king of the dwarves still lay where the Villain had dropped him.
"THE KING!" a sergeant bellowed, peeling off with four shields behind him. "Recover the king! Get him behind the wall!"
Five of the honor guard’s fastest broke for the royal torso, and the first outstretched gauntlet got within a foot of the fused plate.
*Swish!*
A blonde blur beat him there.
Blossom came out of the pillar-dark at a dead sprint, hit the tiles in a one-handed cartwheel that was mostly bare thigh and straining leather straps, and came up spinning.
"Master!! Catch!!"
Her flying kick took the royal torso off the floor, and the last king of the dwarves crossed half the gallery in a flat, screaming arc, trailing a thin ribbon of dark spray.
"FUUUUUUUUUU!"
Quinlan received him into his already-waiting arm.
"Thanks."
"Ehehe!" Blossom beamed across the gallery, ears up, tail wagging hard. "Master saved the weak ones!! Master is no longer bad!!"
She dropped the five empty-handed dwarves a small curtsy, and was gone back into the dark between the pillars.
The Villain looked down at the cursing king in his arm, and his chuckle rolled out over the battlefield.
Even then, the honor guard did not run.
The end came from every direction at once.
The gallery fell rank by rank, backward, in order, and the commander died somewhere in the last knot of shields with his voice still level. It took nearly all of them, and it took time.
...
The final approach to the council hall was a hundred paces of killing corridor, and it held everything the high clans had left: the remnant of the honor guard, the lords’ personal guard in blackened ancestral plate, murder-slits down both walls, and the last two ballistae in the mountain, laid directly on the entrance.
The null ran oldest here, from anchor-stones sunk beneath the peak itself, and in the corridor’s dark, only bolts flew.
The whisper had outrun the Villain, passing from murder-slit to murder-slit, fraying as it went. Behind one slit, a guardsman began to pray, and stopped halfway through.
At another, Captain Torvek of the personal guard refused to believe it. Then he looked, and could not stop looking.
Quinlan walked into the killing ground with the last king of the dwarves held before chest and face. The royal flesh had gone from gray to a wet, sunken slate, sagging against the fused plate that held it, and the wound the gallery had paid for wept tarry filth in slow threads down the royal chest.
His girls followed him in, bloodied and smiling, fanning into the murder-dark along both walls. Behind the barricades, the lords’ finest stilled.
Through the slit, Torvek watched the Villain come up the center at a stroll. The Villain’s voice filled the length of the killing ground, warm and reasonable.
"Every man and woman who kneels shall be spared. Surrender and end this farce-"
"Loose!" someone barked from the barricade, and nobody loosed.