Demonic Po*nstar System

Chapter 899: F-Tier

The lead examiner did not strangle Kaiden with the console cable.

Professionalism survived.

Barely.

Her hands stayed on the edge of the ruined console instead, fingers locked hard enough that the plastic casing creaked beneath them while the monitor in front of her continued to display the most offensive sentence any instrument in the Awakened Association had ever produced.

PARAGON OF SIN.

[F-TIER.]

The testing room was trying to remember how to breathe.

One technician was on the floor with both knees pulled to her chest, staring at a dead tablet as though it might start showing the sky again if she blinked at the wrong time.

Another had both hands pressed over his headset, listening to a flood of voices from emergency channels that had stopped sounding like channels and started sounding like a building on fire.

The guards had their weapons raised, aimed at where the ginormous, planet-sized eye was just moments ago.

Grace stood beside her fallen tablet with her face drained of all its polished diplomacy. Her eyes were on Kaiden too, but she was not looking at him like an amusing young man she liked bantering with.

She was looking at him like a decision point with a pulse.

”Nobody moves,” she said.

The guard who had asked permission to destroy the artifact kept his blade up, though the point sagged toward the floor between Kaiden and the cracked pedestal.

”Ma’am,” he said, voice tight, ”with respect, that thing just opened a... gate of sorts.”

”No,” the lead examiner said. ”At least I don’t think so...”

Everyone turned toward her.

She dragged one hand down her face, leaving a smear of sweat and bile near her cheek, then turned back to the split orb, hating every word she was about to say.

”A gate connects two spaces. That was a response channel through the artifact core’s Source Trace protocol, and I don’t know what answered because the protocol is sealed for a reason.” Her voice cracked halfway through. ”The artifact did not summon a dungeon entity but rather contacted the origin signature of Kaiden Grey’s class, and the origin signature answered.”

Silence folded over the room in a new shape.

Worse, somehow.

The younger technician made a small, wounded sound. ”That... hypothesis is supported by the manifestation of the women’s classes. No such emergence was supposed to happen for them either. But for Kaiden Grey...”

She gulped, trembling as she stared at him. ”The response was much... more. To the point that the Source Trace initiated, which it didn’t for the rest.”

”Exactly,” the lead examiner nodded grimly. ”But this is all a theory...”

”Answered Kaiden from where?” Grace asked. ”If not through a gate, then where did it materialize from?”

”I don’t know.”

”Was that being even real?” For Grace, and all other humans aside from Kaiden’s inner circle, the sheer fact that such a thing existed out there was impossible to accept.

The examiner stared at her.

”Define real.”

”Do not get academic with me right now.”

”Then yes.” The examiner’s mouth tightened. ”The feed logs from the relay show image capture from every registered stream angle, then simultaneous override from outside our relay.”

”Could it have been a mass hallucination?”

”No.”

”Interface contamination?”

”No.”

”Projection over the stream?”

”The sky changed.”

The government representative by the wall finally bent, picked up his phone, checked the caller ID, and went even paler. He answered it with hands that shook. ”Yes, sir.”

The room heard only his side of the call.

”Yes, sir. We saw it. No, sir. No, we do not have an explanation yet.”

He listened.

His eyes moved to Kaiden.

”Confirmed visual from civilian, military, and awakened feeds across multiple continents. We are awaiting satellite confirmation.” Another pause. ”Yes, sir, the subject is still in the room.”

Subject.

Luna’s head turned.

The guard nearest her noticed and adjusted his grip.

The man heard whoever was speaking into his ear and swallowed.

”No clear hostile action from Mister Grey,” he said carefully. ”Repeat, no clear hostile action from Mister Grey. The event appears to have terminated when he removed contact from the artifact.”

Hearing those words, Grace finally resembled herself as she adjusted her disheveled hair. ”Put me on.”

He handed her the phone as though passing a live grenade.

”This is Secretary Grace speaking.” Her voice changed the moment the phone touched her ear, all panic crushed down into authority. ”Nobody in this room is executing an apprehension order.”

The person on the other end started shouting.

”Because Mister Grey placed his hand on an Association artifact during an authorized reassessment,” Grace said. ”The artifact initiated the protocol. Not him.”

The Claimant, Pebble, had been the largest living thing humanity had ever seen.

Grace listened for three seconds, and the muscles at the corners of her mouth tightened. ”Yes, sir. I saw the sky too.”

It had stood up out of a mountain range it had been wearing as a body, eaten twenty dungeons on its way to Kaiden’s door, shrugged off the kind of artillery governments reserved for maps they were willing to erase, and still the human mind could place it somewhere.

A creature. A threat. A mountain that moved. A monster with legs, eyes, hide, and a body that could be struck until it bled.

”With respect, sir, the Claimant had coordinates.” Grace’s eyes flicked toward Kaiden, then toward the cracked artifact. ”It had mass. Impact vectors. A body we could point weapons at. This is not that category.”

What had just appeared above Earth had skipped the category entirely.

It belonged to a different sentence.

Pebble had been a mountain range pretending to be terrain.

The seven-armed presence had crossed the sky like the planet was a thing it could hold in one hand.

Grace’s expression went flat. ”No, I am not minimizing it. I am telling you that if you turn fear into an order before we have facts, you will ruin our attempts at establishing a favorable relationship with Mister Grey.”

That was the part nobody in the room could say out loud yet.

The worst turn of the apocalypse suddenly became local, physical, almost comforting in hindsight. The Claimant at best could challenge a planet. The creature in outer space could look down at one.

And Kaiden Grey had smiled at it like it was an old problem finally returning his call.

”If you order my guards to seize him, they die,” Grace said.

The room changed temperature in the only way that mattered.

Calypso’s heat had faded, Luna’s storm was contained, and Aria’s moonlight was gone, yet every woman behind Kaiden shifted half a breath closer to violence.

Grace kept going. ”Lady Ashborn already has her shadow tendrils aimed at every one of us.”

”Eh?!” A technician tried to step away from his own feet and hit the console behind him with a strangled yelp.

His shadow did not follow.

It ran across the tile in the wrong direction, a thin strip of black beneath the clinical lights, tapering to a point beneath the nearest guard’s boot.

Then everyone noticed.

Every shadow in the room had moved.

The dark beneath chair legs, boots, consoles, shattered casing, raised weapons, and the cracked pedestal had peeled loose from its owners. It angled itself toward throats, wrists, knees, trigger fingers.

Every person wearing Association colors understood with animal clarity that the first wrong movement would be answered before the movement finished.

One guard flinched so hard his shoulder struck the wall. The younger technician clamped both hands over her mouth. Another guard glanced down at the black line sitting beneath his sword hand, then up at Vespera Ashborn.

So did everyone else.

The Shadow Monarch stood behind Kaiden’s formation with her hands loose at her sides and her face empty of anger, fear, urgency, or performance.

She merely stood ready to murder every person in the room if they dared point steel at her children.

Grace kept her eyes forward.

That may have been the most impressive thing she had done all day.

”The live audience sees the United States betray the man the President shook hands with downstairs less than an hour ago,” Grace continued.

”The sovereign dungeon agreement, the research access, the first-responder clause... All of it depends on Mister Grey remaining cooperative and us not treating our strategic partner like an enemy because our artifact reacted in a way we do not understand.”

Grace kept the borrowed phone pinned to her ear, reached into her jacket with her free hand, and thumbed the emergency contact on her own.

”Chairman, I need your help to deescalate. The chain of command is panicking.”