Demonic Po*nstar System

Chapter 790: Skyward

A lower howl this time, rawer than the horizon call had been, aimed downward at the ground and the woman pinning its legs to it. The creature had felt the damage humanity had landed. It had understood, on the back of that, that the reason it could not move was a single woman’s will.

The six pupils closed, then opened.

The fissure-mouth cracked wider than it had been.

And the Kaiju jumped.

A scream left its fissure-mouth on the way up, aimed downward at the earth itself in a register the planet registered back, and the ground came with the creature. Chunks of continental bedrock the size of small islands tore free under its four feet and rode its vector skyward, soil and stone trailing the ascent in a cloud the size of a district. The trees around the perimeter blew flat a second time that day.

Vespera’s shadows had been wound through the Kaiju’s knees, anchored to the ground for their leverage.

The ground was not on the ground anymore.

Her cables whipped upward trailing the rising debris for a heartbeat before she pulled them back. Her red gaze flashed.

”This is cheating...” Luna whispered with wide, disbelieving eyes.

And the Kaiju rose.

It cleared the helicopters’ altitude in a second. It cleared the highest silhouette on the horizon in the next. By the third second, the creature was a shape against the bruised sky.

By the fourth, it was falling.

The four legs were folded beneath it. The crown was pointed down. The six pupils were aimed directly at the coordinate where Kaiden stood.

It was a dive. The Kaiju had launched vertical only to convert its kilometers of mass into a weapon, raw crushing weight aimed at the staging plain and everything gathered on it.

Every Awakened on the plain with eyes on the sky had already begun firing upward.

Vespera’s shadows corrected mid-sweep and reoriented into vertical lances aiming for the descending crown. Aria’s fingers moved, and a grid of moonlight crescents carved into being above the open ground to catch the Kaiju’s trajectory and slow it. Alice’s halo doubled in brightness, and a column of concentrated gold light fired from above Kaiden’s head into the sky. Scarlet was already in motion, red-gold fire spiraling upward from her open palms in a column wide enough to burn a city.

The defense had prepared for this too.

Nobody on the ground was surprised that the Kaiju had elected to drop on them.

[Time Until Defense: 00:00:05]

The Kaiju fell.

The howl came with it. The fissure-mouth opened mid-fall and released the same cosmic-scale declaration it had made on the mountain range when it had launched away from its first challenge and climbed toward the heavens. The sound rolled down the column of its descent and hit the open ground a blink ahead of its body, and every artifact in the upper air buckled under it at once.

[Time Until Defense: 00:00:01]

Then the sky unwrote itself.

[Time Until Defense: 00:00:00]

The Kaiju fell into whiteness.

So did everything else.

Every face outside Kaiden’s immediate line vanished in the same half-blink. The Chairman, the Association cordon, Eclipse’s veterans, the independents, the helicopters overhead, the reporters along the treeline, the broadcast chatter in a dozen languages, the continental effort Earth had thrown at this coordinate - all of it peeled off the world together and dropped into an emptiness stripped of sky and horizon and heading.

The dungeon gate was still behind them. The staging plain the dungeon sat on was still beneath them.

Past the treeline... there was no treeline.

There was only Kaiden, his eight champions, his dungeon, and a falling kilometers-tall mountain coming down out of an emptiness that did not bother with color.

”...What the-”

”-fuck-”

”-just-”

The overlapping reactions took the fraction of a heartbeat each of his women needed to process that the math had changed. Kaiden’s awareness rolled the same math in the same fraction.

The Association’s S-tiers, the Chairman’s blade, Eclipse’s veterans, Vespera’s outer forces, every artifact planted beyond his own gate - all of it had vanished with the world that held it.

The firepower they had counted on to slow the descent was not here anymore.

And the Kaiju was still coming.

Vespera’s shadows exploded outward from her feet in a single violent sweep that reached every one of Kaiden’s women in the same breath, coiled tight around their waists, and shoved them through the dungeon gate. Aria, Luna, Bastet, Calypso, and Nyx hit the threshold one after another as the shadow road slammed each of them past it in a crack of displaced air. Vespera’s tendril closed around Kaiden’s chest and carried him through with Alice’s halo locked above his head.

Two stayed outside.

Vespera was already working. Shadow road extending past the gate threshold, a second evacuation layer building against the inside wall for her own retreat, red gaze fixed upward on the falling mountain.

Scarlet was grinning up at the sky.

The Flame Monarch’s first column had already hit the Kaiju’s crown on the drop and slowed the descent by a hairsbreadth. Her second was compressing at her palms, and her third was stacked behind it, heat gathering in concentric rings of pressure that distorted the air above her.

She laughed.

”Hey, big boy!”

Her second shot left her palms as a lance three city blocks long and struck the Kaiju’s chest plate a breath before the first impact had dissipated.

”Haven’t you been taught that endless greed is not cool?!”

Her third column punched in beneath the first two and opened a crater in the ribs directly above her head.

”Twenty dungeons in and you still want seconds?!”

Each impact bought a fraction off the Kaiju’s terminal velocity. Small fractions on the scale of a falling mountain, nothing visible from the outside. Stacked, they were what Vespera’s shadow road needed.

Vespera’s tendrils wrapped Scarlet’s waist.

”Enough.”

”One more!”

Vespera did not wait for consent as her shadow yanked Scarlet backward toward the gate while the redhead kept shooting. A fourth column detonated against the Kaiju’s crown as the shadow road hauled her feet-first across the staging plain. A fifth fired as the gate threshold cleared beneath her shoulders, carving a trench along the creature’s flank that smoked up the entire outside of its body. A sixth left her palms as Vespera herself stepped backward past the threshold, her own shadows still locked on the extraction.

The Kaiju’s mass came down on the space Scarlet had been standing in as her boots crossed the gate’s last inch.

The dungeon gate sealed behind them.

Past the threshold, in the unwritten white country the world had become, the impact landed.

The seal caught the sound. The pressure came through anyway. The abyssal rock above the Safe Zone shuddered, dust fell from stone that had never known dust, and the lights along the cathedral’s distant columns flickered once and steadied.

Then the dungeon was silent.

Kaiden’s women stood around him in the staging threshold with their powers still live and their eyes wide.

Nobody spoke.

Alice’s halo above his head had gone very, very quiet.

Luna found her voice first.

”...What in the actual fuck?”