Demonic Po*nstar System

Chapter 717: A Strange Feeling

The Ironscale Charger hit the ground with a wet crunch and didn’t get back up.

Brittany pulled her blade free, flicked the ichor off the edge in a single practiced motion, and exhaled. Her arms burned and her mana reserves were low enough to feel it in her teeth, and it was the best she’d felt in months.

Trisha lowered her hands from across the clearing. The last of her ranged volley fizzled out, the air still shimmering where the bolts had punched through the Charger’s flank to pin it in place for Brittany’s killing blow. She was breathing hard, sweat cutting lines through the dust on her face, and she was smiling.

”Clean,” Trisha said.

”Clean,” Brittany agreed.

They’d been hunting for three days.

Three days of waking up without a comm buzzing in their ears, without Ash’s voice telling them which zone to farm, which angles to play for the camera drones, which fights to pick based on content value rather than experience yield.

Three days of just being fighters.

The mountains were beautiful and brutal, the kind of terrain that killed people who weren’t paying attention and rewarded people who were. The air was thin enough at this altitude to make every breath a conscious act, and the monsters that roamed the upper elevations were stronger and meaner than anything in the basin below.

Brittany loved it.

She cleaned her blade on a patch of moss and sheathed it, rolling her shoulders to work out the tension. Her body was sore in the good way, the deep muscle ache of a woman who had spent three days doing exactly what she was designed to do.

”You know what’s weird?” she said.

Trisha was checking her mana levels on her interface, eyes swiping through numbers with the easy familiarity of a ranged fighter who lived and died by resource management. ”What?”

”Nobody’s watching.”

Trisha looked up.

”I don’t mean stream viewers,” Brittany said. She sat on the dead Charger’s flank, which was probably disrespectful to the monster but it was flat and she was tired. ”I mean nobody’s watching us. Like, watching-watching. Ash used to have us on camera feeds twenty hours a day. Content review meetings. Performance evaluations based on viewer engagement. Remember when he told you to switch to a tighter chest piece because the analytics showed your viewer retention went up when you showed more skin?”

Trisha’s mouth pressed flat. ”I remember.”

”Kaiden didn’t even look at our gear. He looked at our levels, asked about our abilities, and told us that he believes we know what to do.” Brittany leaned back on her palms. ”That was it. Three sentences and he moved on.”

”He has a lot on his plate.”

”It’s not that.” Brittany shook her head. ”It’s that he genuinely doesn’t care. It’s an ’it’s irrelevant’ kind of not caring. We could be ugly as sin and he’d have said the same three sentences.”

Trisha sat down across from her, cross-legged, and looked at the sky. ”We’re not ugly as sin, though.”

”No,” Brittany said. ”We’re not.”

They weren’t. Both of them knew it the way all attractive women knew it, the way you knew the color of your own eyes. Brittany had the kind of body that content algorithms were designed to amplify, and Trisha’s features had graced enough promotional material to wallpaper a guild hall. Their looks had opened doors for them, and then those same doors had locked behind them and become cages.

”His girls didn’t even blink,” Trisha said. ”When we showed up. Luna looked through us like furniture. Calypso didn’t acknowledge we existed. Aria gave us a nod that was basically a receipt.”

”Because they’re not threatened.”

”Because they have no reason to be.” Trisha laughed. ”Have you seen them, Brit? Luna is the most adorable woman alive. She’s petite and her face is so pretty it’s almost unfair, the kind of cute that makes you want to put her in your pocket and protect her forever. At least until she opens her mouth... Aria is the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen in person, and I’ve met hundreds of top models. Nyx looks harmless until she turns around and you realize she has the body of a succubus, curves that don’t make sense on a real person, the kind of figure that makes men walk into walls. And the monster girls...” She shook her head. ”Calypso and Bastet aren’t even competing on the same scale as us. They’re the two most exotic beings on the planet. Hundreds of millions of men would lose their minds just being in the same room as them. We walked into a camp full of women like that, and two more pretty faces didn’t even register.”

”And it feels...” Brittany searched for the word.

”Amazing.”

”Yeah.” She breathed it out. ”It feels amazing. For the first time in my awakened life, my face is irrelevant. My body is irrelevant. The only thing anyone in that camp cares about is whether I can fight.” She looked at her blade. ”And I can fight.”

Trisha nodded once, firm. ”Yes, you can.”

They sat in the quiet of the mountain for a moment, two A-tier fighters surrounded by thin air and dead monsters and the unfamiliar sensation of being valued for exactly the right reasons.

Then Trisha’s interface flickered.

Her eyes moved to the competition scoreboard, a habit she’d picked up in the first day despite not being a competitor. She liked tracking Kaiden’s team, watching the points climb, running the math on when they’d overtake Iron Halo.

”Brit.” Trisha’s voice had changed. ”Brit, look at the standings.”

Brittany pulled up her interface. The competition scoreboard materialized in front of her and she saw it immediately.

1st — Runewoven: 127,130

”We’re first,” Brittany breathed. ”When did that happen? Last time I checked we were two thousand behind Iron Halo.”

”Just now. I’ve been refreshing every few minutes and we jumped. But Brit...” Trisha’s smile died. ”Look at the others.”

Brittany looked.

2nd — Iron Halo: 98,390

”Iron Halo dropped thirty thousand points.” Brittany’s stomach turned. ”That’s... They were at one twenty-eight this morning.”

”Keep going,” Trisha said. Her voice was flat now.

3rd — Silver Talon: 57,730

”Forty thousand from Silver Talon.” Brittany stared at the numbers. ”Ashbound?”

”Stable.”

The math was simple and terrible. You didn’t lose points for failing a hunt or retreating from a fight. The only way to lose points in the competition was death. Each member’s death was a ten thousand point penalty.

Brittany stood. ”Something’s wrong.”

Trisha was already on her feet. They moved to the ridge and looked down.