Demonic Po*nstar System

Chapter 693: Reunited

The tent flap burst open and five women poured through it like a wave that had been held back by a dam made of canvas and willpower.

Calypso reached him first.

The Valkyrie hit him at full speed, arms wrapping around his torso with the kind of force that would have cracked a lesser man’s ribs, and the metal chair he’d been sitting in didn’t stand a chance. It tipped backward and Kaiden went with it, his back hitting the ground with Calypso on top of him, and before he could draw breath, four more bodies piled on.

Bastet buried her face in his neck. Aria’s arms locked around his waist from the side. Luna pressed her forehead against his shoulder and held on with a grip that had nothing casual about it. Nyx draped herself across all of them with the calm efficiency of a woman who’d calculated the optimal angle to touch him despite the bundle of far too needy girls already on him.

The metal chair lay sideways on the ground. The recording artifact wobbled on its tripod.

None of them cared.

”You’re okay!” Aria breathed into his chest, and the relief in her voice was raw enough to strip paint.

”Darling’s okay!” Calypso echoed, louder, her face pressed against his collarbone.

Bastet’s ears were flat and her tail was coiled tight around his thigh, and the sound coming from her throat was somewhere between a purr and a growl, the noise a cat makes when it’s reclaiming something it almost lost. She lifted her head just enough to speak.

”I’m going to kill that woman.”

Kaiden blinked. ”What woman?”

”The one with the folder.” Bastet’s eyes were narrow and furious. ”She said she tortured you. She smiled about it. Does she think that’s funny?”

”Bastet, she was joking. She made me tea.”

”I don’t care. She should die.”

Kaiden looked at Luna, who was still pressed against his shoulder and had not moved.

”Is everything okay, girls?”

”... Now it is,” Luna grumbled.

Kaiden exhaled.

He was lying flat on his back on the cold stone floor of an Association operations tent, pinned under the combined weight of five women who were holding onto him like he might evaporate.

He shifted his arms so they wrapped around as many of them as he could reach, pulled them tighter, and frowned.

”The ground.”

Nyx lifted her head. ”What about the ground?”

”It’s cold. And dirty.” His voice carried the particular urgency of a man who’d just noticed an unacceptable environmental condition. ”You’re all lying on cold, dirty ground. This is unacceptable.”

He tried to sit up, which accomplished nothing because five women were on top of him and collectively decided to resist the attempt.

”We need to move. You’ve been standing outside in mountain air for almost an hour, you haven’t eaten, you haven’t rested, and now you’re on a cold floor.”

The concern was genuine and completely disproportionate.

Calypso lifted her head from his collarbone and stared at him. Bastet’s ears rotated forward. Aria propped herself up on one elbow.

Luna pulled back and looked at his face, and the worry that had been gripping her features since the tent flap opened cracked apart and gave way to warmth and exasperation.

The edge left them all at once, like a wire being cut. The tension that had coiled through their bodies since Eleanora’s tent flap had closed, the combat readiness and the fear and the fury, all of it bled away and what replaced it was soft and needy and entirely too comfortable for a cold stone floor.

Aria nestled closer against his side. ”Kai.”

”What.”

”We’re high-level awakened warriors.” She said it slowly, as if explaining a concept to a particularly concerned puppy. ”Cold ground and a bit of dirt won’t kill us.”

”That’s not the point.”

”What’s the point, then?”

”The point is that you deserve better than a dirty floor.” He adjusted his arm behind Calypso’s back and shifted so Bastet could tuck more comfortably against his ribs. ”You deserve warm beds and soft blankets and meals that aren’t field rations, and until I can provide those things, the least I can do is make sure you’re not lying on cold stone.”

Luna shook her head slowly, and the look on her face was the one she reserved for moments when Kaiden Grey did something so absurdly overprotective that arguing with him felt like arguing with weather.

This was who he was. He’d sent her sprinting alone through a basin full of level seventy-plus monsters with nothing but her own spite, trusted her to survive an encounter that would have made most fighters die in a moment’s time, and then an hour later fretted about the temperature of a floor.

The contradiction was the whole point.

He treated them like the dangerous, capable warriors they were. He gave them tasks that respected their strength, pushed their limits, and never once insulted them by shielding them from risk. He’d built a team of women who could fight alongside him at the highest level and he expected them to perform at that level, every time, without exception.

And then he turned around and worried about whether they were warm enough.

It was contradictory and ridiculous, yet none of them had ever once complained about it.

They stood up reluctantly, one by one, untangling from the pile on the floor like cats being removed from a sunbeam. Aria was the last to let go, her fingers trailing along his arm as she rose, and the smile on her face was small and private and entirely for him.

They were all smiling. Warm, genuine, the kind of smiles that reached their eyes and lived there.

Kaiden stood, righted the fallen chair, and grinned.

”Let’s check the rankings, shall we?”

He pulled up his wrist artifact and the competition hologram flickered to life above his forearm, translucent numbers and team names arranging themselves in a vertical ladder. The display was live, updated in real time, and the girls gathered around him to watch it populate.

”Just a few hours ago,” Kaiden said, ”the top five looked like this.”

He tapped a tab and the pre-bombardment standings materialized.

1st — New Dawn: 101,880

2nd — Iron Halo: 91,900

3rd — Ashbound: 89,410

4th — Silver Talon: 69,640

5th — Runewoven: 65,590

The numbers hung in the air between them. Fifth place. Thirty-six thousand points behind first.

Kaiden tapped the display again.

”But now...”

The current standings loaded.

The bubbly smiles vanished.

The warmth that had filled the tent three seconds ago evaporated like mist off a blade, and what replaced it was cold, sharp, and infinitely more satisfying. Five women looked at the numbers hovering above Kaiden’s wrist and every one of them changed.

Calypso’s chin lifted. Bastet’s pupils narrowed to vertical slits, the predator’s focus of a creature that had just seen proof of a successful hunt. Aria’s mana flickered once across her shoulders, involuntary, the heat of pride expressing itself the only way her body knew how.

Luna’s mouth curved into something that was technically a smile and functionally a threat.

Nyx didn’t move at all, which on her was the most dangerous tell of them all. She simply looked at the standings with the quiet, absolute satisfaction of a woman reviewing a plan that had gone exactly the way she’d designed it.

”Sucks to be them~” she purred.

The new standings hovered above Kaiden’s wrist in clean, translucent text.

1st — Iron Halo: 92,200

2nd — Silver Talon: 69,840

3rd — Runewoven: 67,990

4th — Ashbound: 54,860

5th — New Dawn: 52,780

Nobody spoke for three seconds.

New Dawn, the guild that had spent the entire competition in first place, the guild whose name had sat at the top of the leaderboard since day one, was in fifth. Dead last among the top five. Below Ashbound, below Silver Talon, below Runewoven, below the team it had deployed an entire division to suppress.

Forty-nine thousand points gone.

”How,” Calypso said. ”Shouldn’t they be lower...? They had seven deaths!”

It wasn’t a question born of disbelief. It was a question born of math. She could see the number. She wanted the breakdown.

Kaiden tapped New Dawn’s listing and the hologram expanded into an itemized log. Point gains, point losses, timestamps, event classifications. The losses were listed in clean red text, one line per incident.

Member Death (Monster - Colossus): -10,000

Member Death (Monster - Colossus): -10,000

Member Death (Monster - Slasher): -10,000

Member Death (Monster - Slasher): -10,000

Member Death (Monster - Slasher): -10,000

Five deaths. Fifty thousand points. The monster kills that New Dawn’s fighters had managed before dying barely dented the deficit.

Aria frowned. ”As Cali said, more than five died.”

Bastet leaned past Kaiden’s arm and scrolled down with one finger.

Two additional entries sat below the monster deaths, formatted differently.