Demonic Po*nstar System

Chapter 774: Back in the Dungeon

The vehicle cut through what was left of the swarm at speeds the rookie track had never been cleared to run.

It was Vespera’s. A black, unmarked thing and a pilot up front who didn’t speak. The windows were one-way. The cabin sat eight comfortably and was sealed against everything Vespera felt like sealing it against.

Outside, the range was still burning in places. The fight had stretched for long. Awakened Association members and fighters from the veteran track had held the perimeter, together with Vespera and Kaiden’s team.

The evolved monsters had been brutal but finite. Once the bulk of the wave broke, the rest had been dealt with, but the cost was high and paid in human lives.

Dozens fell in the encounter, and the mood was further soured by the monster carcasses, the proof of their effort, disintegrated.

The Association was still working pockets of it as they rode out. Eclipse had pulled back in good order. Tessa had taken the veterans south to coordinate with the surviving guilds and would meet them at the dungeon.

This vehicle was just the family.

Comms had come back a few minutes after the Claimant left. The runes flickered, drank a little mana, and the network knit itself back together in pieces. Stream indicators had stayed dark for another hour and were only now showing tentative green.

Nobody was streaming.

Kaiden sat against the back of the cabin with his girls arranged around him in their usual configuration. Aria curled into his right side, silver hair tucked under his jaw. Calypso on the floor with her head resting against his thigh, her axe set down for once, her tail flat across the carpet. Luna sprawled across the bench seat opposite, phone in her hands, scrolling. Bastet seated on her left, regal as ever even cross-legged on upholstery, ankle jewelry catching the cabin light. Nyx on Luna’s right, tucked close.

Vespera sat across from Kaiden by the front bulkhead, her collar still stained dark, her expression composed.

Alice’s halo flickered above Kaiden’s head.

He set a hand on Calypso’s horn and rubbed the base of it with his thumb. She made a low, content sound that didn’t quite fit the mood.

Nyx broke the quiet.

”Mother-in-law, what do you think of that thing?”

Vespera looked at her hands.

They rested in her lap, palms up, long fingers loose. The same hands that had unmade three Shellback Gorgers and a spine-studded giant in a single closing motion. The same hands that had splashed against the Claimant’s flank and accomplished nothing.

She looked at them for a while.

”At least as strong,” she said, ”as the boss of the most challenging dungeon I have entered.”

The cabin got quiet.

Aria shifted against Kaiden’s side. Her voice came soft, careful.

”Do you think you can’t hurt it, mother-in-law?”

”I cannot say for certain.”

Aria’s brows drew together.

”It left quickly,” Vespera continued. ”Its body felt sturdy when my shadows reached it, but I was focused on protecting all of you.” Her palms turned over in her lap, settled. ”As it stands, I do not know what I could do to it.”

The implication sat in the cabin.

If Vespera was uncertain, the question of who could hurt the Claimant didn’t have an obvious answer.

Bastet’s tail curled tighter around her own ankle.

”Master.” Her voice was low. ”If not even your mother...”

She didn’t finish.

Calypso was quiet too. One palm had drifted up to rest on Kaiden’s knee and stayed there. Her axe stayed on the carpet. Her hand on his knee did not move.

Luna spoke.

”Okay.” Her thumb had stopped scrolling. She was looking at her phone with her brow furrowed in the way she got when she was three-quarters of the way to figuring out a boss mechanic and the last quarter was annoying her. ”This is going to sound insane. I know. But.”

Bastet leaned to look. Calypso pushed up onto her knees and angled toward Luna’s side too, both monster girls flanking her. Their eyes had gone wide at whatever they were seeing.

”I think this thing is a dungeon.”

”What do you mean?” Aria sat up.

Luna turned the phone around.

A news feed. Live, the corner watermark blinking. A reporter was crouched in heavy brush at what looked like a long telephoto distance, voice low and shaking, narrating something the camera had already made unnecessary.

The Claimant was on the screen.

It stood astride a dimensional gate, one of the twenty dungeons’ entrances the convergence had been pulling from. The gate was small at this distance, the size of a coin compared to the giant above it, but the colors of an active dungeon entrance were unmistakable. Its mouth hung open in a feeding posture, jaws spread wide, and from the gate a long, thick column of light was rising into it, a steady continuous pull.

The dungeon was draining.

Whatever ambient mana, ambient monster spawns, ambient whatever-it-was that made a dungeon a dungeon, the Claimant was inhaling it.

”Look,” Luna spoke grimly as she counted the facts on her fingers. ”The monsters disintegrated after we killed them. Kai got challenged as a Dungeon Master. For a month straight this thing was calling monsters from twenty dungeons to one place. It was doing something to them, turning them into the winged versions, maybe making them its own monsters in the process.”

She glanced at Kaiden, then back at the phone.

”And now it’s at one of those dungeons. Eating it.”

She tapped the screen.

”What if it’s powering itself up like a dungeon? Or like a Dungeon Master that has usurper-like abilities?”

Nyx exhaled. Her eyes went distant, brain working overtime.

”That would explain the despawn,” she said quietly. ”Wisps drifting toward it. The range stopped behaving like Earth and started behaving like its territory the moment it stood up.”

Aria’s hand had found Kaiden’s and gripped tight. The cabin felt smaller than it had a minute ago.

What would it look like in twelve hours?

Kaiden squeezed Aria’s hand back, rested his palm on Calypso’s head, and spoke into the cabin without raising his voice.

”It’ll be alright.”

Five sets of eyes lifted.

”We’ve spent a month farming stats, points, and resources. It’s high time we cash in on everything.” His thumb moved against Aria’s knuckles. ”This nasty howling rock magnanimously gave us a few hours. We’re going to use it to renovate the dungeon and protect what’s ours.”

Aria’s grip on his fingers tightened.

...

The vehicle eased to a stop at the outer line.

Kaiden saw it before the door opened. Through the one-way window, the clearing around his dungeon’s gate was no longer the quiet patch of stone and trees he had left a month ago. A perimeter had been drawn around the entrance in a wide ring, and that ring had teeth.

Vespera’s trusted veterans, now Eclipse members, held the inner line. Beyond them, Association officers in formal field gear worked the outer ring, methodical and grim.

Kaiden stared at them through the window and let the truth settle.

He had been a bad Dungeon Master, neglecting his duties to focus on the competition.

...

The Safe Zone opened around them as they crossed the gate, the hundred-meter circle of abyssal stone where nothing could be placed and nothing could spawn. Past the line, the Abyssal Corridor began. The tight tunnels of fortified rock, the chokeholds Kaiden had carved with malicious intent, the long ambush chambers waiting beyond.

The Nightclaws came before he called them.

They poured from the shadowed crevices of the ceiling in a rush of dark wings and serrated talons, and within a breath half a dozen had landed on Kaiden’s shoulders, his arms, the crown of his head. One nosed his cheek with a chirp. Another curled its claws delicately around his wrist, careful of the venom it withheld on instinct.

Patriarch was home.

Then they saw Calypso.

The pack erupted in a second wave, more of them descending from corners Kaiden had not known were occupied, swarming the demoness with chirps that climbed in pitch. Their old Matriarch. She let out a laugh, petting them violently.

”Hello, little cuties. Missed me?”

The response was overwhelming screeching.

The lead Nightclaw chirped a question at Kaiden, head tilting.

”Yes, we need a lift,” Kaiden nodded.

The pack split into pairs and angled for the girls.

While the girls caught on, Vespera returned outside, instructing her people on what they were dealing with.

They passed through the first chokehold, the first ambush chamber, and the second.

Kaiden watched it all from his Nightclaw escort and knew.

The tunnel was good work. He had been proud of it. He had flown over this same stone a little more than a month ago and admired his own vicious traps and monster placements.

But now he saw it through the eyes that had watched the Claimant’s crown scrape a sky the wrong color, and the corridor was a hallway.

He filed the feeling away.

...

The Verdant Expanse opened around them and the temperature shifted.

Sunlight from no sun the team had ever needed to explain.

Aria exhaled, her fingers loosening in their grip on the Nightclaw’s claw.

The palace rose ahead. Calypso’s old cathedral. The circular walls of dark stone with lava cascading slow down their faces, the ceiling vanishing into smoke, the dais waiting at its center with the bone throne on top. Kaiden had paid 300 DMP to keep the room exactly as she had built it.

Calypso’s eyes touched the lava cascades first. Then the ceiling. Then the carvings along the lower walls she would have last seen as her own. Her grip on Kaiden’s hand had closed sometime in the last minute and he had not noticed it happen.

He squeezed back once and walked her up to the dais.

The bone throne. Familiar from the day he had first sat on it and inherited everything.

He sat and the interface bloomed.

[Dungeon ID: #A23-6679] [Tier: Low] [Theme: Abyssal] [Total Area: 5 km²] [Dungeon Master: Kaiden Grey] [Core Status: Linked to Master] [Available DMP: 30,000]

Kaiden looked at the number.

A month of farming the competition. Weeks of monsters dying to his greatsword and his girls’ hands, and the system tallying every kill as tribute to the Master whose territory had birthed the conflict.

Thirty thousand.

The most he had ever held by an order of magnitude.

His girls had gathered around him, hopeful thanks to the focused aura he was emitting.

Kaiden pulled up the Landscape menu beside the Creatures menu beside the Defenses menu, and the interfaces stacked in his vision in three glowing columns.

It was time to spend it like his life depended on it... Because it did.

[Time Until Defense: 10:43:17]