Demonic Po*nstar System

Chapter 791: Rapidly Growing Numbers

Kaiden exhaled once.

’System.’

The overlay pulsed at the edge of his awareness.

’Couldn’t you have warned me that this was coming?’

[All Dungeon Master Battles manifest differently. No two dimension seals look alike.]

Kaiden stared at the text for a full breath.

’...Great.’

Around him, his women were still coming back to themselves. Aria’s silver eyes were wider than he had ever seen them, fixed on the gate. Nyx had turned slowly in place, her gaze crossing the sky that wasn’t a sky.

When she spoke, she said it mostly to herself.

”This is just fucked up.”

Calypso was louder. Calypso was always louder when the tension broke.

”Did you all see that?!”

The demoness’s axe tapped the stone once in rhythm with her volume.

”He just tore the earth from under your mom’s shadow! And took those giant chunks with him!”

”Muscle-brained demon,” Bastet said from the other side of her, ears twitching once, slow, ”stop being excited about our enemy’s overwhelming might.”

”...Mmn. Fair point. But I can’t help it!”

Alice’s halo re-lit above Kaiden’s head, gold settling back into its steady cadence. Dual vision handed him the cathedral’s interior feed in the same breath.

”...”

Four Skyfiends dropped out of the Cavern’s ceiling haze as he took his first step, broad wings beating down the span, hooves clacking against the staging stone in formation as the mounts knelt and tucked their wings tight.

The girls swung up without direction. Aria behind him on his mount because she was already there. Luna vaulting onto her own because Luna was never behind anyone, unlike Nyx, who hugged her tightly from behind, eliciting a lot of grumbling when two heavy somethings landed on her shoulders. Bastet settled sideways on Calypso’s saddle because Calypso had shouted at her to.

Vespera and Scarlet were moving in their own direction. The two Monarchs had peeled off along the Cavern wall, tracking toward the first defensive chokehold, set deeper in, where the dungeon’s first monster line was already staged to hold it down. From that position the gate would still be in their sightline across the Cavern’s open span.

The Skyfiends launched.

...

The stream was going apeshit.

The feed ran along the lower edge of his peripheral vision, muted to a ghost-ticker that reported its own state without asking for his attention.

The counter at the top was doing something obscene.

Every other lens at the coordinate was now pointed at a sealed gate with nothing else going on around it, aside from some awakened peeking behind the small gate to see if the mountain-range-sized enemy was there.

It wasn’t.

The streamers who had been covering the defense from the cordon, the news crews who had set their rigs along the treeline, the commentators who had been narrating the buildup in a hundred languages, all of them were on the wrong side of the seal now, watching the same dead threshold the rest of the world was. Kaiden’s was the only feed still broadcasting from inside. The planet was migrating to it by the refresh.

[Viewers: 11.4M ↑]

[Viewers: 16.8M ↑]

[Viewers: 21.3M ↑]

Chat had lost the capacity to function as chat. The scroll had rendered into a colored blur that the interface had, at some point, quietly given up on displaying at human-readable speed. Every tenth line was caps-locked. Every fifth was a donation window with numbers in it. Every other was the same emote tiling itself into the feed a thousand times over.

The mod messages were the only ones the interface still held visible.

— PrincelessPrincess (mod): What the fuck was that?

— PrincelessPrincess (mod): No seriously. What the fuck. Was that?!

— Kaiden’s Wife (mod): Kaiden please be okay please please please!!!

— Kaiden’s Wife (mod): You must come back!! You can’t leave your loyal internet wife an internet widower!

— Lady Leia (mod): Guys! If he gets out of this one, do you understand what’s about to happen to the world?

— Lady Leia (mod): Look at the numbers.

— Lady Leia (mod): God damn.

[Viewers: 24.6M ↑]

Kaiden did not have the leisure of looking at the numbers as his Skyfiend tore across the air.

Together with them, Vespera and Scarlet had reached the chokehold.

The two Monarchs settled in alongside the dungeon’s first monster line, where the Cavern’s terrain narrowed into the deeper dungeon and the defensive staging had been set before the seal. Vespera’s shadows were already unspooling across the chokehold’s throat, a dark lattice braided into the terrain’s natural narrowing, patterned the same way she had laced the treeline outside. A wall of shadow set to pull anything crossing into it apart at the knees.

Beside her, Scarlet lifted her palms once.

The Flame Monarch’s heat gathered in twin banked rings around her wrists, condensed into a pair of red-gold lances, and locked into overwatch positions across the Cavern’s open span with the gate in their line of fire. Two sentries, held in reserve, primed to strike whatever walked in through it.

The two Monarchs watched the gate from the chokehold without speaking.

In the white country past the sealed threshold, the Kaiju’s mass had landed.

[Dungeon Master Battle: Begin.]

Kaiden read the notification.

His will flicked to the Master’s Domain tab before the second line had finished rendering. Two short, obscene expenditures from his pool answered him.

Hours earlier, within the cathedral where he and his women gathered around the floating catalog, two paired configurations sitting three levels deep in the Master’s Domain tree had made all of them go quiet. The second was locked behind the first and required it to activate.

”How much?” Luna had asked.

The number had hurt twice.

”A lot. But I like how they sound, let’s buy them.”

The others had agreed in the same breath.

He had bought them.

Now, with the duel’s notification still hanging above the sealed gate, the ability answered back.

[Sin Fusion: Active.]

[For the duration of a Dungeon Master Duel, compatible champions of the Abyssal Master receive a fusion of Sin. Expression is determined at the moment of activation. Incompatible champions receive no effect.]

The description closed.

Aria glowed first.

Pale silver light rose under her skin, concentrated at her fingertips and her irises and nowhere else. A violet thread lit through one strand of silver at her temple, and the same violet edged the silver of her eyes. An answering line of pale script rendered in Kaiden’s peripheral the instant the glow resolved.

[Aria Levander. Moon and Pride.]

[Lunar Sovereignty.]