Chapter 1743: Peerless Genius
"[Overlord’s Magnanimity]."
The spell crossed the duel ground as warmth.
It poured out of the Primordial Villain and into the samurai standing across the frost, and every fighter in the crowd with senses worth the name felt the moment it arrived.
Ayame’s presence climbed.
It rose past the captains and the champions and the named monsters watching from the ranks, swelling around the petite woman until the air over the duel ground carried two storms instead of one, and then it stopped, leveling off exactly where the Primordial Villain had promised.
Ten levels below her sister.
The stats flowing through the bond were a loan from his own primordial body, measured with care, just enough and nothing more.
The verdict of this duel belonged to her, and he refused to steal a single gram of it. Quinlan just gave her what she needed to take matters into her own hands.
Ayame closed her eyes and breathed in.
Her whole life, her swordsmanship had lived one step ahead of her flesh.
There were angles she could see and not yet serve, cuts she could compose in her mind and not deliver, a perfect blade dancing behind her eyes while her body chased it.
The warmth flooding her limbs closed that distance.
She opened her eyes, rolled one shoulder, and swung a single horizontal cut at nothing.
The katana whispered through the cold air, and the sound it left was so clean that the nearest rows of spectators leaned back as one.
Across the frost, Kaede watched her sister’s pressure with the relic humming eager against her palms.
’Ten levels.’
The Duchess of Silverwind ran the numbers the way she had run them her entire reign, and the numbers came back loyal.
’Ten levels is an enormous cliff. I’ve killed numerous elites across much smaller gaps.’
She couldn’t help but smile inwardly. ’How tragic that he couldn’t give her more power...’
The whispers in the steel purred their agreement.
It should be a massacre.
Then the ground shuddered.
Kaede dropped into her stance with the blade flashing up, but the attack she braced for never came.
The earth was redecorating.
The duel ground sank with the two sisters on it, frost and churned mud flowing outward and pressing down into a vast circular floor as smooth and hard as worked granite, and around its edge the battlefield itself began to rise.
Rings of trampled mud lifted in great sweeping arcs, stacking into tiers, and the tiers grew seats.
Actual seats, with backs and armrests, in clean rows split by stairways, climbing higher and higher around the sunken floor until the bloodiest field of the Great War of Iskaris was simply gone, replaced by a stone colosseum vast enough to swallow a hundred thousand spectators.
At the heart of it all stood its architect, one arm wrapped around a dogkin, his free hand hanging loose at his side, not even gesturing.
Nobody got a choice about sitting. Rows rose beneath the armies and folded them into seats by the thousand, and yelps of alarm rippled across the tiers as veterans of the continent’s worst battle were gently, irresistibly seated like children at a recital.
Blue-skinned soldiers and other trusted allies herded the prisoners into their own blocks, walking the disarmed Fujimori columns up the stairs and sitting them down in rows with a courtesy that confused them more than chains would have.
Sinking onto a polished seat, the lieutenant with the ruined arm stared at the floor far below, understanding arriving slowly.
Their clan’s destroyer was seating them like honored guests, because he wanted them, specifically them, to see whatever came next.
In Quinlan’s arm, Blossom’s ears swiveled toward every grinding rumble, her tail thumping against the forearm that held her as the world rearranged itself around her master.
"Master is a showoff..." she giggled cutely, and then the giggle trailed off as the thought finished its journey through her fluffy head.
Master was showing off.
Which meant his most dutiful girl should be helping him show off, and Blossom immediately began scanning the rising arena for anything a good girl could contribute.
The winter air nipped at her nose while an entire war’s worth of spectators sat down on frozen seats, and the idea arrived all at once, snapping her tail from a thump into a blur.
She pulled herself up his chest, cupped a hand beside his ear, and delivered her findings in the most secretive whisper she owned.
"Master... everyone here already knows Master is the best at destroying things!! But the seats are super cold... If Master made them warm, they would all see how much more Master can do!"
Quinlan turned his head and murmured back with matching gravity, "Warm seats in winter." He let the weight of the discovery land properly. "Isn’t my pupcake a peerless genius?"
"M-Master!!" Blossom melted on the spot and got to work licking his cheek with quick, loving dedication, her tail whipping the air behind her hard enough to stir a breeze.
Heat threaded through the bowl, gentle veins of magma warmth rising into the stone, and across the tiers every cold and exhausted soldier felt their seat breathe warm beneath them.
The reaction rolled around the arena in a wave, soldiers stiffening, palms flattening against armrests, heads bending toward neighbors in disbelief as the worst winter battlefield of their lives turned cozy beneath them.
In the dwarven prisoner block, a stocky veteran shot upright with alarm all over his face. "Did I just piss myself AGAIN?" He patted the seat of his trousers, frowning. "This damned villain made my bladder act up all day..."
A long-fingered hand clamped onto his shoulder and reapplied him to his seat, and the elven soldier on guard duty stared down at him with the most disgusted pair of eyes the dwarf had ever been measured by.
"It is the Holy Son’s warmth, you filthy, fat, hairy, smelly, hideous goblin spawn. Sit back down before I take your head off."
Quinlan’s elven loyalists did not take kindly to anyone speaking badly of their new leader.
New leader, yes.
No law had been passed and no treaty signed, but every elf on this field had watched their queen kneel in the open sky and offer him the entire race, arrows, lands, and future, and every one of them had dropped alongside her when the Holy Son’s golden wave rolled through their marrow and let them feel, in their own blood, exactly how much the First Elf loved him.
Legality was a matter for clerks.
The mother of the race had spoken through the veins of every child she ever had, and as far as those children were concerned, a captured dwarf blaspheming against the Holy Son’s gift was lucky to be keeping his head.
A few rows over, a grizzled dwarven tanker ran his palm across the flawless polish of his armrest, and his bushy brows climbed higher the longer he looked.
"The man’s no mere mage," he rumbled to the engineers around him. "Look at the rake of this backrest. That angle’s chosen for a body that spent all day in armor. Magic doesn’t know that. Craftsmen know that."
"The heat runs under the seats, not through them," another muttered, palms pressed flat against the stone like a healer taking a pulse. "No scorching, no cracking when it cools. He treated the rock as a material, not a target."
"Yeah... Peerless elemental control is what I expect from the monster." A third engineer slumped against his treacherously comfortable backrest in open defeat. "But where in all the hells did the Villain learn joinery?!"
At the rim of the dwarven prisoner block, a pair of long elven ears twitched.
