Demonic Po*nstar System

Chapter 716: Accelerating Curve

”Are we clear?”

The three projections were quiet.

”Understood, Guild Leader,” Hale said.

Osei nodded once. Fenn held Magnus’s gaze for a beat longer than the others, then inclined her head.

The projection flickered off. The blue light died.

Magnus stood alone in the guild hall. The mountain was quiet around him, and the communication artifact hummed softly on the table, and the standings still glowed on the secondary display he hadn’t dismissed.

5th — New Dawn: 68,180

He stared at the number.

His hand closed into a fist at his side, slow and controlled, the knuckles whitening as the grip tightened. The mana that had pulsed as a warning moments ago stirred again, deeper now, coiling through his chest and down his arms with the restless energy of a predator looking for a target.

He turned from the table and walked to the window.

The mountain range spread out below him, vast, dark, crawling with monsters and ambition. Somewhere out there, his remaining rookies were grinding for points they would never earn fast enough. Somewhere out there, Kaiden Grey was climbing toward first place.

Magnus’s jaw set. His gaze hardened against the glass, and the reflection that stared back at him was a man who had stopped considering the polite options.

...

The Fissure Render’s corpse was still smoking.

Its body lay crumpled against the base of a rock formation, limbs twisted at angles that said ’I lost’ in every language monsters understood. The crack in its torso where Kaiden’s greatsword had punched through was wide enough to see daylight through, and the ichor pooling beneath it was already soaking into the mountain stone.

[You’ve slain Fissure Render (Level 76)] [You’ve gained 1,140,000 XP] [You’ve gained 28 DMP] [Level Up! Level 55 ➣ 56] [You have 30 unspent stat points.]

Kaiden pulled his blade free and exhaled.

[Name: Kaiden Grey] [Rank: 3 — Star] [Class: Paragon of Sin] [Level: 56 | XP: 930,000 / 57,000,000] [Stats] Vitality: 166 Strength: 193 Agility: 191 Endurance: 179 Mana: 157 Magic: 155 [Unallocated: 30]

Thirty stat points from a single level. Again.

He stared at the number and let the true meaning of it settle in.

The average awakened fighter gained ten stat points per level. That was the baseline, the number the Association used in their projections and training models and tier assessments.

Most people got exactly that because most people leveled by fighting monsters at or slightly below their own level, the safe and sensible approach that almost every guild training manual in the country recommended.

After passing the bottleneck and reaching level 50, Kaiden had been averaging thirty stat points per level.

The math was simple and the implications were enormous.

The system rewarded stat points based on several factors, and Kaiden was hitting all of them. Difficulty of the kill was the biggest: the harder the fight, the more the system paid out. But the level gap mattered too. A level 56 fighter killing level 76 monsters earned more per kill than a level 70 fighter killing the same thing, because the system recognized the gulf between what you were and what you’d just brought down.

Whether the monster was an apex predator or a herd creature factored in as well. Solitary killers with unique abilities paid better than pack animals of the same level because the system weighted threat, not just numbers.

And this was where S-tier classes broke the ’game’ wide open.

A level one mage with an S-tier class could blast level 20 monsters on day one. The difficulty wasn’t even that high for someone with that kind of raw power, but the level gap alone flooded them with stat points that a normal mage wouldn’t see until they’d ground through twenty levels the hard way.

More stats meant harder fights became accessible sooner, which meant even more stats, which meant even harder fights. The curve fed itself. Getting ahead early meant staying ahead permanently, and the gap between an S-tier who punched up from level one and a conventional fighter who leveled safely widened with every single kill.

Kaiden had taken the safer approach in the early levels, back when his class was weak and his tools were limited. Now that he’d passed the bottleneck, the brakes were off.

His attributes at 56 were roughly equivalent to a conventional awakened in their high sixties if they fought hard, or the low seventies if they’d taken the safe road. That estimate was generous, too. Plenty of awakened leveled by grinding monsters much weaker than themselves, and those people’s stats at 56 would make his look like a different species.

Those people would never hit these levels in the first place. After level 50 the XP requirements jumped into the millions, and grinding weaker monsters meant the pace slowed to a crawl. They’d be stuck in the fifties while Kaiden climbed.

The gap would only widen the higher he climbed, and Kaiden had no intention of fighting anything that didn’t scare him at least a little.

’Level 56 with the stats of someone fifteen to twenty levels above me,’ he thought, wiping ichor off the flat of his blade. ’And people wonder why I keep picking fights with things that can kill us.’

The risk was real. He’d never pretend otherwise. The Crevice Borer Queen had taught him that lesson in blood and adrenaline, and he’d scaled back the insanity since then. No more twenty-eight-level gaps. No more solo boss engagements that required every member of his team to perform flawlessly for three straight minutes or someone died.

But he hadn’t scaled back much.

Level 76 monsters in groups of two and three were still far above what any sane team of mid-fifties would engage. The margin for error was thin and the fights were brutal and exhausting, and every single one of them made his team stronger in ways that safe grinding never could.

Luna landed beside him with a crackle of residual Storm energy.

”250 points!” she announced, holding up her hand for a high-five that was more of a demand than an offer. ”250 more competition points in the bag. Do you know what that means?”

Kaiden chuckled and slapped her hand, giving her the podium. ”Tell me.”

”It means we are roughly a thousand points from first place.” Her grin was feral, the kind that made her look like a woman who could smell victory the way a wolf smelled blood. ”A thousand. One more day of this, maybe even just hours, and Iron Halo is eating our dust. We will be on top of the world!”

Calypso whooped from somewhere behind the Render’s corpse and kicked the dead monster for emphasis. Aria laughed as she descended, moonlight still fading from her fingertips.

Bastet appeared from the flank with her ears twitching and not a drop of ichor on her.

Nyx merely grinned beside Kaiden.

The dark halo above Kaiden’s head pulsed once.

Then she added without waiting for an answer,

Luna stretched her arms above her head, full of satisfaction.

Suddenly his communication artifact buzzed.

Kaiden glanced at the screen. Brittany’s name. He answered.

”Kaiden!” Her voice was tight and fast and stripped of everything except the message. ”You need to move! Right now! Get your team out of there!”