Demonic Po*nstar System

Chapter 864: World-Class Powerhouse

[Return destination: Earth.]

[30.]

[29.]

Kaiden looked up from the countdown, and his girls were already looking back at him.

Nobody spoke.

The look that traveled around the group held one shared, electric thought, and every face wore the same excitement without a drop of worry anywhere in it.

Earth was out there, mid-apocalypse, holding everything they had built and everyone they had left behind, and they were coming back to it twenty-four levels heavier, at the head of an army, with its worst monster walking at heel.

They were going home.

[25.]

’Might as well.’ Kaiden pulled up his status while the countdown burned, and nine hundred and sixty unallocated points waited for him.

He had shelved them on the battlefield before the temptation could take root, but walking back into a world ending in real time with a level 84 frame still running his level 60 numbers would simply be lazy.

His attention settled on the first stat.

The obvious play was the even spread.

Nine hundred and sixty split across six stats with no remainder, one hundred and sixty points each, a frame that grew everywhere at once.

He was a jack of all trades by build and by temperament, and the system had handed him a number that divided as if it agreed.

’Tempting.’

The second option had been sitting with him since the Gambit.

Pour the whole pile into Mana and Endurance, and he became an engine, a walking power source that could run the warmth of Lust Stance at full burn for hours instead of minutes, through all six bonds now that Alexandra’s awakening had opened her brand to it.

He had felt that ceiling from the inside, the drain screaming behind his sternum while his women fought for their lives in arenas he couldn’t enter, and every point of fuel he bought now was a buff he wouldn’t have to ration later.

Then he looked up from the window at the women themselves, gathered on the open stone around him, comparing status screens and laughing at their new pet, and the second option died quietly.

Every one of them was a war goddess in her own right now, levels in the eighties, with a Valkyrie protector watching over them, and they were nowhere near done climbing.

The Gambit had been the exception, a game built to keep him in a chair. Out in the real world, his girls needed his warmth the way a wildfire needed a match.

And he had hated that chair.

He’d spent the entire Gambit sitting in it, playing cards while the people he loved bled on the other side of a boundary that refused him, and building himself into their battery would mean choosing that seat forever, bolting himself into the back line as a resource to be protected, fed by their wounds.

He had surrounded himself with these women because he loved them.

Loving them meant something simple to him, and it had never once meant hiding behind them.

’The best way to protect them isn’t pouring my power into their bodies and watching them bleed with it,’ he thought, his attention returning to the window. ’It’s being strong enough to walk out front and kill whatever comes for them myself.’

The next time a mountain range knocked on his door, he intended to be the answer, and he spent nine hundred and sixty points like a man sharpening a blade.

[Vitality: 183 ➣ 263]

[Strength: 218 ➣ 458]

[Agility: 263 ➣ 563]

[Endurance: 192 ➣ 352]

[Mana: 180 ➣ 320]

[Magic: 178 ➣ 218]

[Unallocated stat points: 0]

The points landed in one long, rolling wave, weight, speed, and violence settling into his muscles as a level 84 body finally caught up with its own number, and Kaiden exhaled through the feeling while the Cavern around him began to glow.

Heat arrived against his right arm before the wave had finished settling. Bastet had drifted to his side with her own status window glowing in front of her mind’s eye, and she folded herself around his arm, both hands wrapping it, her cheek coming to rest against his shoulder while she spent her pile of points.

The purr started low in her chest and hummed through his whole arm, her tail curling around his calf to complete the claim, and Kaiden let her stay exactly where she was.

While the dimension dimmed the lights on its way out, the gamer in him ran one last comparison, purely for fun.

Levels had never been equal in this world.

The universal system graded every level-up by how it was earned, paying out stat points according to the risk taken and the gap climbed, which was why two awakened of the same level and same tier classes could be entirely different animals.

The cautious ones, who farmed monsters slightly below their own strength and went home safe every night, averaged seven points a level.

Ten was the accepted human average.

Fifteen marked the aggressive climbers, the kind guilds fought over.

Twenty belonged to the suicidal maniacs who treated every dungeon run as a coin flip, and alongside them, to the stronger S-tier powerhouses who made their names in dangerous expeditions.

And twenty-five was the ceiling category, reserved for the national treasures, the rarest handful among the S-tiers and the best and bravest even of that breed, the ones who trekked into dungeons alone or carried entire expeditions through high-tier gates on their own backs, hunting so far above their own weight that the system paid them hazard wages.

People like... Vespera Ashborn.

It said a lot about his life that the textbook example of humanity’s apex category was standing at the edge of the group, supervising their new pet with a face that betrayed nothing.

Kaiden had started his career delighted with ten stat points per level.

The twenty-four levels the duel had just paid him averaged forty.

His new total came to 2,174 points across six stats, and sixty-six of those he had carried into his awakening, bought with a month of manic training before the system ever found him.

That left 2,108 points earned across eighty-three level-ups. He granted his imaginary rivals the average human base of sixty points to start from, and the division wrote itself.

A safe grinder would need to pass level three hundred to buy this body, a number that did not exist.

An average awakened would need level 213.

An aggressive climber, level 142.

A suicidal maniac or a standard S-tier, level 107.

And the national treasures, the ones running at what mankind considered the theoretical limit of growth itself? Even they would still need level 86.

He was level 84, averaging above the twenty-five-point ceiling across his entire career.

As of today, the Paragon of Sin ran ahead of the curve of humanity’s worst monsters, a category so rare that even the United States could count its own on one hand.

’And the Association still has me filed under F-tier.’ Kaiden grinned at his own window as the glow ate the last of the Cavern’s dark.

’It’s about time I retest myself, no?’

[3.]

[2.]

[1.]

The duel dimension came apart, and white light swallowed the dungeon whole.

Kaiden Grey had left Earth as its most-watched celebrity and returned as one of its world-class powerhouses.

...

Author: This marks the end of the current arc. Thanks for all the support!