Demonic Po*nstar System

Chapter 994: Back in Action

The convoy carried Kaiden’s family north out of the city for an hour, until the buildings thinned into rice terraces and the road signs began counting down the kilometers to a town called Kawanami.

Two valleys east, Scarlet had her own raid group at a second overflow zone, another town shaded out on the Circle’s map. The family group chat had carried three messages from her about who would finish first.

The cordon announced itself before the town did. Steel barriers crossed the valley road in a double line, watchtowers rose on both shoulders, and past all of it, wedged between a green river and greener hills, waited a town with no lights on.

A full kilometer out, the crowd started.

Cars filled the shoulder and folding chairs sat in truck beds.

Families who had spent the outbreak sleeping in gymnasiums and relatives’ spare rooms lined the guardrail with the joint stream open on their phones, because the morning feed had told them whose convoy was coming.

”They came out to watch us take their town back,” Aria said softly from the window.

A boy on his father’s shoulders held up a cardboard sign that said Eclipse in painted letters, one of them backwards.

”Kai-den! Kai-den!” a row of teenagers chanted at the glass, landing each syllable separately, practiced off the stream.

An old woman had both hands hooked in the wire as the lead car crawled past her. ”Please,” she said in careful English, to whoever was behind the tint.

At the forward post inside the barriers, Rin Sonoda was waiting with a folder and a bow aimed at Kaiden as he stepped down. ”My lord. Your escort squad is assembled. May I introduce their captain?”

Kaiden recognized the woman before the introduction landed, by the burn scar climbing out of her collar. She was the captain from the parade ground’s front rank, the one who had gripped her spear white-knuckled while he spoke.

”Captain Asakura,” Sonoda said. ”Twelfth Garrison. This valley is theirs.”

Asakura bowed to Kaiden. ”My squad garrisoned Kawanami before the outbreak. We know its streets.” She spoke English slowly and stiffly, like gear maintained but rarely used. ”We are... glad, to walk back in.”

Her squad stood behind her, nine fighters in slate and white with a gap in the rank where a tenth should have been. Kaiden’s eyes went to the gap, and Asakura followed them.

”Our tenth is in a ward in Tokyo,” she said simply. ”He is angry to miss this.”

”Then let’s give him something worth watching.” Kaiden smiled.

An old man had worked his way to the inner barrier, hat in both hands. He spoke toward Kaiden across the wire in Japanese.

”His family has planted the north field for four generations,” Sonoda translated at Kaiden’s shoulder. ”He wants to know if there will be a season this year. He apologizes for asking a soldier about rice.”

Then the old man bowed to Kaiden, at a depth that made two guards move to steady him.

Kaiden looked past him at the dead town for a moment. ”Tell him I don’t know the first thing about rice. But by the time we’re done, nothing will be walking on that field except humans.”

Sonoda translated it. The old man laughed, then wept, and the guards ended up steadying him anyway.

...

The monster convergence that happened back in the mountain range where Pebble awakened was a one-off occurrence.

Normal dungeon breaks, like the one that had swallowed the city behind them, resulted in the monsters staying close to their gate, rampaging and killing mindlessly until they were put down.

After which, they would respawn inside the dungeon and come out to do it all over again.

That’s why the action today started long before they reached the dungeon’s entrance. Kawanami had been feeding that cycle for weeks, and its tear sat in the town’s heart, so threats could be anywhere, starting from the town’s very first block.

Asakura walked the family through the gate file on the hood of the lead car, four pages of it, held down at one corner by her spear butt.

The tear had opened in the riverfront market during the global break, deep in the town’s heart. Its monsters had poured out for a night and a day before the Circle’s cordon held, and the shaded stain on the map had sat unchanged ever since: the town, wall to wall.

”The file rates it medium high-grade,” Sonoda said. ”It has been quiet since the first week. Nothing new comes out. That is why it sat so far down the list. Louder gates went first.”

”Quiet,” Luna repeated. ”There’s no such thing as a peaceful boss monster, only one that’s quietly scheming.”

The plan was the standard one for any gate on these islands. Push through the overflow to the tear, breach, descend, and put the boss down.

”No chance it comes up to meet us?” Calypso asked, sounding like she was hoping.

The squad’s spear-user shook his head. He had a strip of blessed paper wound down his shaft, and he touched it while he answered.

”Every gate on these islands, the boss sits on the core and guards it. It lets the small ones die and spawns more. It does not come up.”

”Booo!” Calypso complained, loud enough to turn heads down the barrier line. She pulled her axe off her back anyway, grinning. ”What cowardly boss monsters. Back when I was a boss monster, I ventured out of my dungeon.”

”You were defeated, though,” Alexandra said.

Calypso stopped moving.

She turned around. Alexandra had her hands folded at her waist and was smiling at her with tremendous innocence.

”I kneeled on my own, okay?” Calypso pointed the axe at her. ”Nobody defeated anything. Darling was just too manly. My knees couldn’t handle it.”

Alexandra giggled and said nothing at all.

”...Say something.”

Alexandra did not say something.

She aimed her hand to where Asakura’s nine were checking their straps for the last time.

Gold came up out of her palms in a slow flood. Her hair went incandescent with it, and the light kept climbing until it stood over the whole formation like a roof.

Then it came down. Every fighter under it felt their gear settle truer on their shoulders and their own skin go strange with borrowed strength.

Nine locals looked at their arms, then at each other, then up at the woman who had done it to them without a word.

The medic said something in Japanese that Sonoda did not translate.

Behind the barriers, a kilometer of guardrail made a single noise, and on every phone along it the joint stream cut to her.

...

Kaiden took in his family, his squad of borrowed locals, and the town waiting past the last barrier.

The hunger that had been building since the parade ground that morning was fully awake now, and he didn’t bother hiding it from the cameras.

”Feeds up?”

”National and international are live!” Kira sounded bright enough through the earpiece to be standing in the car with them. ”Viewers want some badass action, bloodshed, and heroic reclamation of lost human lands, boss!”

”Then let’s go get a town back.”

The barriers rolled aside, and Kawanami received its first visitors since the outbreak.

...

They went in on foot, the family spread loose across the main street with Asakura’s nine in a tight file at their center.

Alexandra walked beside the squad’s medic, because Kaiden had asked his guardian to keep her shields where the armor was thinnest. Alice rode above his head as the dark halo, sweeping every window and rooftop at once.

The overflow’s leading edge met them three streets in, and it met them all at once.

Shell-boars led, hog-shaped things the size of delivery trucks with bone plating stacked in overlapping slabs down their backs. They burst through dead storefronts on both sides of the main street, a wave the file would have rated a squad-killer.

Asakura’s fighters snapped into a screening line out of pure drill, shields up, spear butts planted.

Nothing ever reached them.

Calypso met the lead boar head-on, and her rising cleave opened it from plating to hip in one stroke. ”Next!!” she bellowed into the shower of it, already turning.

The ones that tried the flanks died looking up. Aria’s moonlight lances came down in tidy rows, each one entering an eye and exiting a flank, and the storefronts behind the targets stayed unmarked. She never touched the ground.

Kaiden and the rest of the family processed the wave with ease, working left and right of the street. They had spent three months killing things far worse.

Bastet laid her dominion over twenty meters of road without moving off the spot she was standing on, and the rank of boars inside it went flat under a weight they could not turn against.

”The piggies are lining up for butchering!” Luna took the line lengthwise as lightning before any of them got up, laughing the whole way. Neither she nor Bastet looked at the other before it or after.

Then the biggest of the boars broke out of a side alley behind the screening line, a bull half again the size of the rest, and it had the angle on the squad.

”Brace-!” Asakura got the word out and knew as she said it that it would not be enough.

Kaiden crossed the street before she finished it.

The gauntlet at his side stayed dark, no blade, no stance light on him at all. He planted his feet in front of nine locals and caught the bull’s tusk with one open hand.

The charge did not stop politely. Tons of armored monster kept coming, and for one long second the whole street was a single human arm arguing with all of it.

The tusk drove the load up his arm into his shoulder socket, and the joint howled about it. His heels started losing the asphalt.