Chapter 1918: Plans for the Future

"I’m no expert, but I did read about a few farming methods in my textbooks, back in my old world. Crop rotation. Selective breeding. Things nobody here ever needed to invent, because magic was always the answer to everything."

"Wait!! Master!!" Blossom’s head came around, and the entire discussion visibly rearranged itself inside her skull. "Blossom has an idea! What if Master involved more than just alchemists?"

It was the gorgeous dogkin’s turn to get her head petted, which she enjoyed by the most joyous of squeals.

"My Pupcake is on the same wavelength, I see," Quinlan chuckled. "I’m thinking we leverage the dwarves for the tools, have them create enchanted steel plows and seed drills instead of the shoddy sticks used by the masses today."

Sera wasn’t one to let dwarves outshine elves, so, proudly, she pitched her own people. "The elves have an unnatural affinity with nature, so we could sense how a crop is doing before blight ever shows, ensure a healthy growth, and listen to whatever complaints the crops make."

"Won’t they throw a massive hissy fit if their beloved greens get harvested on repeat?" Lucille asked, almost purring, eagerly awaiting a response.

The blonde elf’s lips trembled wryly. Then she straightened her spine. "It has to be Quinlan who asks for volunteers. If it’s the Holy Son, those crazies would do whatever he says."

"I see~"

"Humans can do the busy work, as there are too few elves to conduct this at scale and their fragile bodies and bitchy attitudes aren’t great for the hard labor part. Potentially even the beastkin’s noses could be of use, though we’ll have to run some tests on that," Aurora continued, already deep in thought.

"And conquer them," Vex added, grinning.

"And conquer them. Yep," Quinlan chuckled.

...

Back at the foot of the entry stairs, two girls with brand-new spears stood frozen in place.

They had spent the entire morning of their yesterday on the first Steel Carapace Beetle, circling, jabbing, screaming advice at each other, prying at the shell seams while the thing rattled and lunged.

On the forty-somethingth try, the taller one had finally driven her spearpoint into the soft joint behind its head. Both of them had collapsed against the wall afterward, shaking, bleeding from three scrapes apiece, grinning like they’d slain a dragon.

Now, the gallery ran straight for two hundred paces before the first fork, which was why they could still see clear to the far end of it, where the Villain’s family was disappearing down a corridor, chatting about farming.

Beetles, wisps, and bramblebacks charged that group from every nook, and died mid-lunge to a katana that never seemed to leave its sheath, a bare hand, a gauntlet, an elbow, a stray breeze. The family kept walking and kept talking, and not one of them turned to look.

"They’re not even trying," the smaller one whispered. "That one killed it with her hair. I saw it. Her hair!!!"

"That was a knife," the taller one said. "I never saw her draw it."

"It took us all morning," the smaller one said, renegotiating her entire understanding of the world out loud. "One beetle. All morning."

"Correct," said Cassandra.

The spectral captain of the royal guard stood behind them in her plate, blue-white soulfire rolling quietly off her pauldrons, arms crossed, entirely unmoved by the view.

"I’d say Quinlan Elysiar is at least at the level of Lilith Ravenshade, if not stronger already, while his wives could each at least hold their own against a member of the Lilies. That’s the distance you’re looking at," she said, and reached over to shove the taller twin’s grip further up the shaft without turning her head. "Higher. Hold it down there and you’ll lose fingers."

She nodded down the gallery at the family. "Every explorer who ever lived started at the end you are standing on, including the man who now owns this kingdom."

The twins looked down at their new spears the way acolytes look at relics.

Cassandra’s gaze swept the empty corridor ahead.

"Wait for the monsters to respawn," she said. "Then we begin."

...

A few corridors ahead, Quinlan slowed his stride.

"I need a few minutes. You ladies go on ahead."

He got a look from Ayame, and a longer look from Vex. Then ten women continued down the corridor, reading in his tone exactly how much of an answer they were going to get.

A warp gate spun open, and the Primordial Villain stepped out of his labyrinth and into the sky.

Wind took his weight. The world fell away in tiers of cloud, and the peak of the dwarven mountain rose ahead of him, white and silent. It stood so far above the gates of the vertical city that the hymns and hammering below arrived as less than a rumor.

Black Fang sat alone at the summit.

She sat cross-legged on bare wind-scoured stone with her serpent-patterned blade across her knees, back straight, lids down, frost dusting her shoulders and her hair.

She had been meditating, to all appearances, since the family left the mountain that morning without her.

Quinlan landed without a sound ten paces away.

He looked at her for a moment, and then, grinning, he crossed the distance, sat down directly opposite her, folded his legs into a mirror of hers, straightened his back into a mirror of hers, and closed his eyes.

The wind moved over the peak and frost gathered on them both, and neither of them moved for a long stretch of nothing.

"Why are you here."

Her voice came out flat, and her lids did not lift.

"Hm? I’m meditating. It’s very peaceful up here."

"You should be taking your partners leveling."

"Oh?" He opened one eye, delighted. "And how do you know what I’m taking my girls to do today?"

Silence.

She did not bother responding.

Quinlan chuckled, low and warm, and let the wind have the peak again for a while.

Black Fang sat across from him, radiating, to anyone who didn’t know this unique woman, serene indifference.

Quinlan knew her very well.

"Are you sulking, Black Fang?" he grinned.

She had been left behind twice now. Once at the dwarven war’s opening, by an oversight she had muttered about, and once this morning, on purpose, by the man sitting in front of her.

Had he asked her to come along and level, she would have run the numbers in her head and refused before he finished the sentence, so he had not asked at all. He had left her up here instead, with nothing to do all morning except notice that he had taken everyone else with him.

And, truthfully, he just wanted to be a bit playful with this amazing creature.

By the looks of things, his sulking question was ignored as well.

"Come with us," he asked. "I’d love to spend more time with you."

"...Pointless. I’d only be stealing resources."

At level 74, Black Fang only gained a single point of experience at a time, and only the strongest of prey yielded even that. At the current rate, her next level would arrive in several billion years.

It was best to let the others slay the labyrinth monsters.

Quinlan made no particular effort to stop what rose in his chest.

This creature.

She had taught herself everything, because the world had offered her nothing. At some point she had decided that tenderness was a fiction told to children and grief a waste of a morning. Nobody had ever handed her a reason to think otherwise.

He loved her in a way he had never once been permitted to say out loud, on her strict and standing terms. Watching her refuse to admit any part of what was happening on this mountain filled him with extreme fondness.

She was perfect.

"You’re right," he admitted. "You can’t level up. Your presence would be an active hindrance to the progression of my family."

"..."

Black Fang said nothing.

Quinlan’s grin deepened. "Good thing I’d like you there for something else entirely."

"If you expect me to follow you around so you can flirt-"

"You’re the most lethal killer on this continent," he interjected. "Your experience, honed instincts, and demonstrated ability to raise disciplines to the level you already had... Your presence could prove even more beneficial to our future than the levels themselves."

Black Fang finally opened one eye, looking at him silently, observing, studying.

"On my first visit to the labyrinth," Quinlan went on, softer, "back when I was a nobody with a shabby spear, a wonderful samurai girl walked me through these same corridors and taught me how not to die. Everything I have grew out of what she planted in me back then."

He extended his hand across the space between them, palm open.

"Now I’d like to ask her big sister to teach all of us."

Her other eye opened as well, unblinking, on him and on his open palm.

"Will you prepare the women I love for the vast outside world for me, Black Fang?"

The peak held still around the question. She looked at his hand for a long moment, expression at absolute zero.

"..."

Silence ruled supreme for a few seconds, poker faced terror staring at the tenderly smiling villain.

Then her hand came off her blade and closed around his.

"Okay."

...

A warp gate opened in a blue-lit corridor of the Aldoria labyrinth, and the Primordial Villain stepped through with the Venomborne Terror at his side, walking with her head held high.

Ten women turned.

"Sis!" Ayame lit up first.

"Oh?" Serika’s grin spread. "Welcome to the party."

Vex said nothing.

The Hexwitch only smiled, small and private, at her mentor arriving at her husband’s side like it meant nothing.

Black Fang swept the gathered family once, head to toe, ten of the strongest women alive standing in a comfortable, chattering cluster in a monster corridor.

"First lesson."

And just like that, minutes turned into hours, and hours into days.

But while Quinlan and the gang were farming experience, the rest of Iskaris were experiencing a rapid shift.

A shift that would shake up the rest of the world.