Chapter 1716: Black Fang’s Big Request
"The blood is helping, but it’s not enough." Black Fang’s eyes hadn’t left Quinlan’s, and the hunger swirling in them had nothing apologetic in it. "His [Blessed Seed] will work better. I think."
Myrasyn’s ears cycled through five different angles in two seconds, none of them dignified. "You think?!?! Also, what are you, my pimp?! You do it!"
"I can’t." Black Fang’s hand pressed harder against Quinlan’s chest, and the strain in it was real. "I’m not joking. I truly need your help."
The queen’s ears flattened, then perked, then flattened again as the implications of that statement fought the implications of the request.
Contempt and disbelief at the outrageous request she was hearing mixed with worry, knowing that the only good friend she made in the last thousand years was really struggling to contain the hunger spell.
But the worst of it was... That beneath it all, she realized a fourth emotion.
Overwhelming curiosity.
"N-no! I can’t be doing such a-"
"He’s your progenitor’s beloved child," Black Fang spoke with a unique edge in her voice. It was as if she knew something even Myrasyn didn’t. "You spent half our captivity praising him. Isn’t this the highest honor for a devout follower of the First Elf?"
Myrasyn’s face turned a shade of red that four thousand years of royal composure could not prevent. "My heart is not ready for this! I just finished being tortured! Why are you not asking his actual lover who is standing right there?!"
"She’s occupied." Black Fang tilted her head toward Sera, whose hands were wrist-deep in golden light trying to keep Black Fang’s channels from collapsing.
"Look at this shameless creature!" Myrasyn’s ears went through a full revolution. "Since when does the most badass woman I’ve ever known need this many people tending to her?!"
"Since her spell tried to eat her alive for days straight," Sera muttered without looking up. "And she’s not wrong about the seed. [Blessed Seed] is literally a primordial’s unique ability. The mana concentration would be..."
She trailed off and cleared her throat. "But I don’t like it. The pills should do the trick."
She presented one from her pouch and flicked it toward Black Fang, who caught it.
Black Fang didn’t swallow it immediately.
She held the pill between her fingers and brought it close to her face, studying the surface the way she studied opponents before deciding how to kill them.
Her nostrils flared once, catching the scent, and the purple spirals in her irises slowed.
This was it. [Blessed Seed] in alchemic form, the source of the unaging effect she’d watched Quinlan’s women carry while she held to the terms of their deal.
He had one month to seduce her the traditional way, of which weeks remained.
She popped the pill into her mouth and swallowed.
Her eyes blazed purple for a single heartbeat, bright enough to light the cell, and the notification arrived with it.
[Experience gain tripled and aging ceased. Duration: 12 hours.]
Then nothing.
[Eternal Hunger] screamed on, untouched, clawing through channels that the pill hadn’t reached. The blessing sat in her system alongside the hunger like two currents in the same river, one calm and one feral, and the feral one didn’t care about the calm one at all.
"As I thought... It’s not working," Black Fang murmured.
Quinlan, already in discussions with Aurora, relayed her thoughts on the matter. "The alchemic process preserved the blessing but burned the raw mana properties. Aurora believes that the hunger needs the potency, not the effect."
Sera closed her eyes and exhaled through her nose. "Alright. Then you can suck him off, I guess."
She however quickly opened one eye toward the queen. "But don’t think about going all the way."
"I wasn’t thinking about going any way!!" Myrasyn yelped, her ears shooting bolt upright as her face caught fire.
Then the words registered a second time. "’Suck him off’... What vulgar language you have, young lady! I just praised you!"
"Will you do it or not, perpetually yapping granny?"
"H-hah?!"
"I can do it myself," Seraphiel sighed, her voice strained. "But it’ll slow down the healing."
"Um, ladies." Quinlan raised his free hand. "I can also just do it mys-"
"’Suck him off,’" Myrasyn repeated over him, her ears twitching in a way that had nothing to do with indignation and everything to do with something she was refusing to name. Her voice dropped to a murmur. "Does that mean... lick it?"
The cell went quiet.
Sera’s healing hands paused while Quinlan looked at the four-thousand-year-old queen as if seeing her for the first time.
Myrasyn’s ears were twitching incessantly and she didn’t seem to realize it, her blush spreading down her neck and past her collarbone as her fingers curled and uncurled at her sides.
She wanted to do it.
The realization crashed through her with enough force to flatten her ears, and the horror that hit her had nothing to do with the act itself. She was horrified at how little horror she actually felt.
Quinlan spoke up again, gentler this time. "Seriously. I can handle it myself. There’s no need to-"
"The forbidden texts were very clear!" Myrasyn’s voice came out louder than she intended, her ears snapping upright as she seized on something she’d clearly spent far too many private evenings studying.
"A woman’s touch is far more effective than self-administration! ’A Good Wife’s Chronicle of Marital Warmth’, page forty-seven, states that the author’s husband released ten times faster under her ministrations than when left to his own devices, and-"
She caught herself citing page numbers and clamped her mouth shut with an audible click of teeth.
...
Silver’s eyes burned cold as he tore free of the last Raelor copy’s grip and scattered it with a pulse of mana that turned the air white.
But the fourth one was already reforming, its choker knitting back together around a throat that shouldn’t have existed.
"He broke me so easily, in a single punch..." the half-formed copy purred, one stocking-clad leg already solidifying beneath it. "Maybe the weakness is hereditary? A family trait...?"
Silver closed the distance with his guard high and his tail fanned in a defensive spread, because he knew better than to underestimate what these things could do now.
While honing in on the newest mockery of his son, "FIND HER!" he snarled over his shoulder at his soldiers. "I want the whore dead!"
Suddenly, the body before him shifted. It was instantaneous, a mask ripped away.
The proportions stretched, the feminine frame broadening, turning taller, darker, heavier.
The choker dissolved. The ribbons burned away. The simpering expression vanished beneath a face Silver had only seen once across a battlefield he’d fled from rather than fight on.
Quinlan Elysiar looked down at him, and the pressure that rolled off the man hit Silver like a physical wall.
The dread. The primordial authority that had made every instinct in Silver’s body scream ’run!’
Silver’s body went slack for just one single heartbeat.
The blade came through his abdomen, driven through the gap his fear had made.
The Quinlan in front of him smiled, and from his lips, a voice pressed warm against Silver’s ear, feminine, low, dripping with a cruelty that the bubbly foxkin princess had no business producing.
"My husband isn’t here to put a disgusting wife-rapist wannabe in his proper place," Kitsara purred as she twisted the blade and pushed it deeper, "so I’ll do it for him myself."
...
Myrasyn’s ears stilled.
