Demonic Po*nstar System

Chapter 859: Doggy

The Kaiju wasn’t just bleeding. Every second his gauntlet stayed buried in the wound, the creature’s stolen reserves ran out of it and into Kaiden’s own pool, the points it would have spent on armies and terrain becoming his to spend instead, and the counter kept climbing. He was robbing the hoard while its owner was still lying on it.

The greatsword he condensed from the harvest came out the size of a cathedral spire, dark crimson shot through with flickering silver shapes, and he brought it down on the foreleg joint with Wrath riding the blade. The detonation buckled the limb at last.

After that, the beating found its rhythm.

Scarlet planted herself before the crown, wreathed in fire, and finally got to finish a fight.

”THIS is for the cage!” A column of red-gold fire hammered into the crack its own crash landing had split across the crown’s carapace. ”THIS is for deleting my last fight mid-swing!” A second column, wider than the first.

Calypso walked up the creature’s ribs with her axe dragging a molten trench behind her, Carnage Feast stacked higher than anything she’d ever carried, and her laughter rolled across the battlefield with every chop.

”Darling!” she called down, radiant, silver-grey liquid running off both arms. ”I’ve decided! This is the best date you’ve ever taken me on!”

”... Glad you’re having fun.” Kaiden drove the cathedral-spire greatsword through a knuckle joint, Wrath detonating along the blade, and made a mental note to never let her plan their actual dates.

Lower down, Nyx knelt at a seam in the pinned foreleg with both palms flat against the carapace, drinking the creature’s mana out in long coral threads, and her expression turned thoughtful in a way that boded poorly for someone.

”Kai, this will sound strange, but it tastes like twenty different dungeons in here.” She pulled another thread loose. ”I think I can taste which one it ate first.”

”Don’t get drunk on it, Fatty!”

”No promises.”

Above them, Aria and Alice poured twin beams into the same fracture from opposite angles, silver and violet-gold crossing inside the wound.

”Move your crescents. This fracture is mine.”

”Let’s share, little sis,” Aria answered, serene.

”...Fine.”

Someone decided to be a good girl for once.

Kaiden was cycling stances on a heartbeat rhythm by now, Lust to pour shaped warmth down five bonds, Gluttony whenever the gauntlet found a seam worth drinking from, Wrath for every blow that needed to land, and the cost of running the rotation had climbed past anything the Gambit had asked of him. He kept it spinning anyway, because the end felt close enough to touch.

The Kaiju disagreed.

Its whole body convulsed in one titanic heave that flung everyone clinging to it off in every direction, his women catching themselves mid-fall while monsters rained down around them, and across the plain, the spilled hoard answered its owner.

The silver-grey rivers reversed course.

Coral forests melted back into liquid, sandstone columns slumped and flowed, and every drop of it ran home into the creature’s wounds, which began to seal.

Seams the army had spent the whole battle carving closed in seconds, and the hairline crack that had cost Luna everything vanished as if it had never been there.

”The terrain! It’s drinking it all back!” Alexandra called from her pocket at Nyx’s back, her healer’s eyes reading the pattern before anyone else. ”It’s healing itself!”

Kaiden rammed the gauntlet in up to the elbow and drank harder, Gluttony thrown wide open, and the duel narrowed for a breath to a tug of war over twenty dungeons’ worth of stolen mass.

His pool climbed with every heartbeat, but the trade was ugly, because the creature owned far more hoard than he had arm.

A foreleg found leverage.

The half-pinned mountain rose a meter, then another, dragging Vespera’s cables taut and shoving Bastet’s weight back a step, and the plain tilted toward the possibility of having to do all of this again.

Vespera decided otherwise.

”Kaiden. Attacking the exterior is a losing battle. Keep the pressure on its weak spots anyway, keep it pinned. I will handle the rest.”

Her shadows released the creature’s knees all at once, because she had found a better road in.

The fissure-mouth was cracking open to draw breath for another howl, and an open mouth was an open road.

Her tendrils wrapped Scarlet’s waist mid-barrage and yanked.

”Hey?!”

Vespera’s shadow road poured across the plain, up the creature’s lip, and down its throat with the Flame Monarch in tow. ”You can go all out here.”

Scarlet’s protest died the moment her boots landed throat-deep in an enemy with no armor on the inside, and her grin arrived at full width.

”...Vespera, I take back every complaint I’ve ever made. Best employer in the world.”

What followed was invisible from the outside and impossible to miss.

The Kaiju’s silhouette began to glow from within, red-gold light bleeding out through every seam and wound the army had carved into it, black smoke boiling up out of the fissure-mouth while the interior flashed like a thunderstorm sealed in a bottle.

Shadow lanced out through one wound. Fire roared from another. The armor that had kept an entire army out now kept the fire in.

The hoard stopped flowing home, because its rivers had two monarchs standing in them.

Outside, Kaiden lifted his gaze to the six burning eyes rolling against the dark veils, the only soft things on a creature armored everywhere else, and his women were already rising toward the crown.

Aria’s lattice condensed into a single spear of moonlight, and Alice’s beam narrowed to a surgical line beside it. Luna rode her lightning up the crown with Calypso a wingbeat behind on her Skyfiend, and Bastet’s golden weight pressed one eye shut from where she stood.

Nyx folded space beneath Kaiden’s boots and hurled him at the centermost eye, the cathedral-spire greatsword already mid-swing.

Six eyes, and an answer for each of them.

The strikes landed in a single heartbeat, Wrath detonating at the center of it all, and the lights of the Kaiju’s crown guttered like blown candles.

The howl that finally tore loose was broken and thin, and through Alice’s perception Kaiden felt the calculation underneath it, the oldest one there was.

Predator math.

Its hoard was draining out through a wound it could not close, its six eyes were dimming toward darkness, its spine sat pinned under golden weight, and two of the things it had failed to kill on Earth were burning through its insides. The creature arrived at the answer every predator dreads.

The half-risen mountain crashed back down, and the struggling stopped.

The Kaiju went still under their combined weight, six eyes swiveling once across the battlefield, and what it did next froze every fighter on the plain mid-swing.

It rolled over.

The motion took four full seconds and shook the dimension to its edges, a mountain range turning itself onto its own spine, and when it settled, the eater of twenty dungeons lay belly-up with all four legs folded loosely toward the colorless sky.

Its crown lolled back, and six dimmed eyes, cracked at their edges and glowing like banked coals, found Kaiden’s face and held it.

It had looked at him this way once before, on a mountain ridge at the start of everything, when it lowered its head to one tiny human and chose him out of an entire world as worth challenging. It gave him that same look now from flat on its back, the predator’s claim turned into a plea, and Kaiden stared right back.

Then a sound left its fissure-mouth that nothing on that scale had any right to produce.

It whined.

Silence owned the battlefield for three entire seconds.

”...Is it showing us its belly?” Luna asked, Stormblade still raised, red lightning sputtering out around her in confused little arcs.

”It is.” Bastet’s tail had gone perfectly vertical. She studied the upturned colossus with grave professional interest, and nodded once toward the creature in acknowledgment. ”Total submission. The posture is textbook. I could not have performed it better myself.”

”It means it, Darling,” Calypso called over to Kaiden, axe sliding off her shoulder as she squinted at the belly towering over them like a cliff face. ”Monsters don’t fake that pose. Trust me, kneeling is sort of my area.”

The fissure-mouth cracked open at the top of the upturned crown, and Scarlet climbed out of it trailing smoke, drenched to the elbows in silver-grey, flames still crawling up both arms.

”It quit already?” she mused, but there was no heat in it. Whatever she’d burned through in there had scratched the itch.

Vespera stepped out of a pool of shadow beside Kaiden, immaculate, not a hair out of place. She smiled softly at him.

The rest of the girls lowered their weapons in various states of disbelief, and across the world, a hundred million viewers watched the apocalypse turn into a wildlife documentary.

- xXShadowMilkXx: ITS DOING THE DOG THING

- PrincelessPrincess (mod): The mountain that ate 20 dungeons is asking for belly rubs?

- Lady Leia (mod): 🎵 BIG STINKY PUPPY 🎵 SHOWED HIS TUMMY 🎵 BABY RAGE TO BABY POSE 🎵🎵

- Kaiden’s Wife (mod): Even the apocalypse submits to him. I understand it completely.

- bella_nocturne: the shadow monarch took the flame monarch INTO ITS MOUTH and they cooked it from inside. i am unwell

- sinnamon_roll99: W DOG W DOG W DOG

Golden script unfolded across the dimension before Kaiden could find a single word.

[The Claimant has surrendered.]

[The Dungeon Master Duel has reached its resolution. The Successor stands as Victor.]

[As Victor, he must now decide the fate of the defeated.]