Primordial Villain With A Slave Harem

Chapter 1789: The Truth

"Why did the blade need a continent?"

Black Fang asked, still observing the serene night sky.

"..." Chizuru said nothing.

The silence held past composure and became refusal.

Ayame cleared her throat. "Khm."

It was a small, almost polite sound, and the elder’s gaze snapped to her as though the samurai had drawn steel.

Then Chizuru’s eyes found Quinlan, and whatever she read in the way he was looking at her finished what remained of her resistance.

"I’m sorry, Black Fang. I wanted to not taint your prey more than needed, but..." he mused, chin resting on his folded arms.

"What a gentleman," Black Fang murmured. Then she finally looked away from the window, feet landing on the floor, sitting on the windowsill. "I don’t mind."

"I always am a gentleman. Just ask my grandmother."

"T-t-the First Elf has a mother?!" Myrasyn and Isveth broke into a shocked squeal in sync.

"..." Quinlan’s expression turned sour. He meant his human grandmother who kept calling him a real gentleman when he was a little kid.

"Quin, how about you stop flirting with my sister and the elves when we’re interrogating the people who killed my father and wanted to do the same to me as well?" Ayame asked dryly.

Black Fang’s eyes didn’t look amused as she observed her little sister. At the same time, the two elves, amid rapid ear twitches, returned to their prior graceful stance, electing to begin the inquisition into the truth when the occasion was right.

Quinlan, pretending not to have heard his beloved samurai’s admittedly ever so slightly justified scoff, began casting.

"[Subju-]"

The words left Chizuru instantly.

"The ancestral instructions were simple!" Her voice came out rapid and miserable as she recited doctrine because the alternative had just been named aloud. "Five main duties are passed to the council of elders from the ancestors. Lead the clan to prosperity. Retain authority over the clan leader. Search, always, for a proper heir to the blade. When one is found, awaken it." She swallowed. "And listen to it."

"Attached to the five was a promise. If the elders fulfilled their duties and the wielder obeyed, the Fujimori would reign supreme, the barrier would fall, and the clan would enter its golden age." Her eyes came up from the floor, and for once there was nothing in them to decode. "That is the inheritance. No reason was ever written down for us, and the blade speaks to no one but its wielder."

"We were taught how to serve it. Never what its goals were."

Quinlan studied her for a long moment.

"So the clan that killed its own patriarch, rigged a succession, and spent longer than living memory burrowing into a foreign kingdom did all of it on instructions nobody alive has ever understood the purpose of."

"Now you understand what honor demands of a Fujimori," Chizuru said, and the absence of irony in it was the worst part.

’This blade again...’

Quinlan turned his hand over, and the obsidian relic slid from his pocket ring into his grip.

The entire room leaned toward the weapon in one quiet, curious motion.

Quinlan raised the blade into the ring of moonlight and turned it slowly by the hilt.

In the arena it had fought him the entire way, hunger boring into his palm, veins darkening to the elbow while it searched for a way inside him.

Tonight the obsidian edge caught the moonlight and did nothing at all. He might as well have been holding a fire poker.

In the corner, Kaede’s breathing went shallow.

Since the succession, that voice had lived at the edge of her hearing, wanting, promising, weighing. Now the sword that had decided her entire life sat ten paces away in the hand of the man who had broken it, and it did not stir for her.

The quiet where its whisper used to live was the loudest thing in the room.

It was Ayame who spoke next.

"Why did you have to kill Raijin Fujimori exactly? Just so Kaede could inherit the clan as soon as possible?"

The question landed without decoration, and Chizuru didn’t ask who she meant.

"...That’s a part of it, yes. The other part is the binding. To awaken the blade in a new wielder is said to be a great risk." Chizuru recited. "To ensure higher chances of success, sacrificing the wielder’s strongest living bloodline member was required. Two birds with one stone."

"So he was material for your ritual..." Ayame’s hands closed into fists at her sides, and she held them there for a long time while the room gave her the silence she needed.

"Is he still in there?" The words came out rough.

Chizuru opened her mouth, but a different voice answered first.

"I don’t believe that he is."

Every head in the room turned toward the corner.

Kaede hadn’t moved, and her voice was so thin it barely carried past the healers on either side of her.

She was looking at the floor, her hands gripping the fabric at her wrist, twisting it tight.

"The being who spoke to me in the blade... it wasn’t Father." She swallowed, and the sound was audible. "It never sounded like him. It never remembered what he remembered."

Ayame looked at her sister for a long time, and the composure she’d worn all evening wavered at the edges.

"Did it tell you what it really wanted? Why it needed to conquer at the cost of risking everything?"

Kaede’s teeth found her lower lip. "That to unlock its full power, I had to become the ruler of Iskaris."

"...That’s it?"

Kaede flinched at that, visibly shrinking in her chair.

Ayame sighed, but pressed on. "And when you rule? Is something supernatural supposed to happen? It can’t just be about corrupted ego and whatnot, right? I’m trying to understand why it wanted to risk everything to prevent Quinlan from taking over."

Kaede bit harder, and a thin line of blood welled on her lip and ran down her chin.

Her voice came through gritted teeth, wet and raw.

"I don’t know." The tears arrived with the admission. "It said conquer. I asked why and it said to bring about the golden age of my people. I asked what would happen and it told me I would understand when I was worthy."

Her hand came up to cover her face, and what was left of her composure broke. "I did everything it asked, and I never understood any of it, and I’m sorry, I’m sorry..."

Ayame stood where she was, and for several seconds she simply had nothing.

Seeing the emotional turmoil his partner in crime was dealing with, Quinlan spoke. Level and unhurried, still turning the dead blade between his fingers.

"The blood of the father to awaken it. The severance of the bond with the sister to feed it."

He tilted the obsidian edge until it caught the moonlight flat, gaze on Chizuru. "And that rite you performed on the battlefield... When you lifted your talisman and chanted about the blood of your ancestors, and hundreds of your own clan withered into husks where they stood. Everything they had went straight into this."

He looked at Chizuru over the relic’s edge. "What’s the mechanism behind it all?"

"...Aside from experience points, the blade feeds also from its wielder’s hand, on what its wielder owns... And at a much faster rate than XP normally would allow. That’s why Kaede had to become the clan leader, and the undisputed one at that..." Chizuru’s gaze drifted to Kaede. No apology lived anywhere in it.

"That doesn’t quite answer my question," Quinlan replied.