Demonic Po*nstar System

Chapter 665: Confronted

— [MOD] Kaiden’s Wife: um. guys? is that...

— [MOD] PrincelessPrincess: Magnus Ashborn. Guild Leader of New Dawn. Yes, it is.

— [MOD] Lady Leia: What the fuck is that guy doing standing in front of Kaiden like he wants to commit a felony on live television?!

They were not the only ones freaking out.

The stream’s chat erupted into a blur of messages so fast that reading individual lines became impossible. Tens of thousands of viewers typing simultaneously, the scroll speed turning the entire chat window into a waterfall of text and emojis and capitalized profanity.

But on the ground, in the basin, covered in ichor, breathing hard, Kaiden Grey stood very still.

He looked at Magnus Ashborn.

Magnus looked at the halo above his head.

The silence between them was enormous. Larger than the basin. Larger than the dead Borer Queen rotting behind them. Larger than the mountain range itself, because this silence had been building for years, and every second it held was another crack in the wall that separated Kaiden Grey’s life from Kaiden Ashborn’s.

Luna’s hand found her weapon.

Calypso rose from the ground where she’d been lying, bleeding. She moved to his left, axe in hand, and planted herself there with the quiet finality of a woman who had chosen her hill.

Aria landed beside him, eyes steady.

Nyx simply appeared at his right, as if she’d always been there.

Bastet didn’t rush. She walked forward at her own pace, settled into position behind Kaiden’s shoulder, and regarded Magnus Ashborn with the serene indifference of a cat observing a large dog from the safety of a high shelf.

Five women. All of them battered, bleeding, mana-depleted, and exhausted from a fight that had nearly killed them.

All of them ready to fight again.

When it came to being possessively protective, Kaiden was definitely a culprit. He wanted to bleed for his girls, to take on all the hurt so they could live life without knowing what pain felt like.

But he was not alone. The feeling was mutual. All of them were ready to defend the love of their life with everything they had, no matter the personal cost.

Magnus’s gaze swept across them, brief and dismissive. This was the assessment of a man who had catalogued threats for decades and found nothing in front of him worth cataloguing.

Then his eyes returned to the halo.

To Alice.

The halo had dimmed back to its dark resting state after the fight. The golden light was gone. But the shape was there. The presence was there. And Magnus Ashborn had watched the stream footage. He’d seen the eruption of light. He’d seen the beam that vaporized chitin. He’d recognized the signature before his boots even touched this basin.

The Light That Destroys.

His daughter’s power, hovering above the head of the son he’d discarded.

When Magnus spoke, his voice carried the controlled authority of a man accustomed to being obeyed by hundreds.

”You’ve pushed past the extreme caution markers.”

Kaiden said nothing.

”This zone is active veteran-track territory. Multiple high-threat entities are migrating through this corridor, and the mana density is approaching levels that interfere with communication artifacts.” Magnus’s tone was clipped. Official. The voice of a guild leader addressing a jurisdictional issue, nothing more. ”Rookie-track combatants operating in this area create unnecessary risk for ongoing veteran operations.”

Every word was calculated.

He didn’t say ”son.” He didn’t say ”Alice.” He didn’t acknowledge the halo, the light, or the family resemblance that anyone with functional eyes could see between the man standing in front of him and the face he saw in the mirror every morning.

Magnus Ashborn would sooner eat his own sword than let the world connect Kaiden Grey to the Ashborn name.

’There he is.’

Kaiden looked at the man who had fathered him and felt the old machinery turn over. Rusted gears that hadn’t moved in a long time, grinding back to life because the face in front of him was the same face that had stopped looking at him at a certain point.

Magnus hadn’t hit him, not once in Kaiden’s miserable time in the Ashborn home.

There were no bruises. No shouting matches. No dramatic confrontations where a father threw his son against a wall and screamed about disappointment.

Magnus Ashborn was too disciplined for that. Too controlled. Too aware that visible cruelty left evidence and evidence invited judgment.

What Magnus did was simpler.

He stopped.

Stopped asking about Kaiden’s day. Stopped making eye contact across the dinner table. Stopped saying his name. The firstborn son who had been raised with the expectation of greatness, who had trained alongside his siblings, who had waited for his awakening with the same desperate hope as any child in a family of chosen, simply ceased to exist in his father’s awareness the day it became clear that he would not awaken.

Kaiden was twenty. His youngest sister, Alice, had just manifested an S-tier class at fourteen. His brothers had awakened years before that. His elder sister before them. Even his mother, Vespera, possessed shadow powers that made her one of the most formidable women in the country.

And Kaiden had nothing.

No class. No spells. No power. A commoner born into a bloodline of chosen, like a match that refused to light in a house full of bonfires.

Magnus’s silence spread like a disease.

Cassian and Calix caught it first. The twins were younger than Kaiden by two years, close enough in age to have grown up sparring with him, eating with him, competing with him for their father’s attention. They’d watched Magnus stop looking at their eldest brother and drawn the obvious conclusion. If their father didn’t see Kaiden, why should they?

They just stopped including him. Conversations happened around him. Plans were made without him. Family dinners became exercises in being present but unacknowledged, sitting at a table surrounded by people whose lives were accelerating into extraordinary while his remained ordinary.

Selena was the worst.

His elder sister had always competed with him for Magnus’s regard, and when Kaiden fell from grace, she didn’t just stop caring. She absorbed his share and wore it like a trophy. The occasional sneer she threw Kaiden’s way carried the satisfaction of a woman who had won a contest her opponent didn’t even know they were losing.

Alice tried.