Demonic Po*nstar System

Chapter 757: Stream Start

The mountain air hit them the moment they stepped outside.

Kaiden led. His girls fell in around him without discussion, the way they always did, six bodies finding their positions. Calypso on his right, Luna on his left, Nyx and the devastation duo flanking her. Alice on top of his head.

A ping chimed through his awakened interface.

Kira: The stream announcement went out thirty minutes ago. Fifty thousand in the waiting room already and climbing. Title’s set, overlay’s set, everything’s ready. Go live whenever you want, boss.

Kaiden started the stream.

The viewer count began exploding immediately. Hundred thousand in the first three seconds. Hundred thousand more by the time they cleared the guild hall’s outer perimeter.

Aria just so happened to fast walk to the front, for ’some’ reason, looking at him with a proud, beaming smile.

He’d seen her an hour ago in the staging area, Rika circling her with a brush and palette. He’d seen the focus on Rika’s face and the patience on Aria’s and thought nothing of it, because Aria was always beautiful and makeup was makeup.

He was wrong. Makeup was not just makeup. Whatever Rika had done turned Aria’s face into a problem. Her silver eyes looked larger, the unique color of her hair sharper against her skin, and the morning sunlight hit the angles of her cheekbones like it had been personally directed there by a woman with a blending sponge and a vendetta.

Aria caught him staring, of course.

Her chin lifted a fraction and her lips curved further. She let her gaze linger on his for exactly long enough to make sure he understood, and she was extremely pleased about it.

’She’s showing off,’ Kaiden thought.

”You’re out of this world, my beautiful moon.”

Aria’s lips trembled and her heart skipped a beat. She stopped in her tracks, unable to continue moving, needing a pause. Bastet patted her head and the Moon Valkyrie fell into step next to the felinid with a big pout, accompanied by rosy cheeks.

Luna was in a good mood. He could tell because she was still muttering trash talk under her breath, thumbs twitching at her sides like phantom controller inputs, riding the high of whatever lobby she’d demolished mere minutes before deployment. She hadn’t needed to help carry supplies or run through the pre-stream checklist. She’d spent the last hour gaming, which for Luna was the same thing as warming up.

”What’s new. Chat’s already simping for Aria,” she announced, eyes flicking through her interface. ”Thirty seconds in and they’re calling her the face of Eclipse.”

”She is a very pretty girl indeed,” Nyx mused.

”...” Fiery competition lit up in the Storm Valkyrie’s eyes.

As the girls conducted their everyday bickering session, Kaiden remained silent. This was the part the audience never got tired of, the banter, the warmth. The chat was already flooding with messages supporting their favorite female member of the gang, fans quoting and emote spamming their favorite creators’ every line.

Another message came from the twins, though it was not a ping this time, not wanting to disturb his focus. It was just there, waiting for him to read whenever he felt comfortable.

Rika: Clipping the Aria-Luna exchange for highlight reel. Also, Leia just dropped her first unhinged comment of the day and the chat literally lit on fire. The mod team is scary.

He almost smiled at that. Five fangirls running the machine from opposite ends of the country, and it worked.

The banter faded as terrain changed. The shift happened the way it always did. The playfulness compressed into focus, and people who had been laughing a minute ago were scanning the environment with quiet patience.

Kaiden pulled up the tactical overlay on his wrist artifact. The holographic map flickered above his forearm, topographical lines and colored markers spreading across the northern range.

He studied the spread. Two solo targets above level seventy in the northeast corridor. One cluster of four near the ridge, probably a pack.

Alone. Beatable. A monster whose strengths didn’t perfectly counter his team. The usual criteria.

”Northeast,” Kaiden smiled. ”Let’s move.”

They found it ten minutes later.

The Granite Tyrant was sunning itself on a shelf of exposed rock two hundred meters below the ridge line, its massive body stretched across the stone like it owned the mountain and was daring anyone to argue. Level 78.

This monster was a highly studied, really strange specimen.

Monsters didn’t evolve. They spawned in their dungeons, lived, died, and respawned unchanged.

That was the rule everywhere on Earth except here, where creatures from over twenty different dungeons converged for reasons the Association still couldn’t explain, and where their biology acclimated to the mountain environment as if the range itself was reshaping them.

The Tyrant was a textbook case - armored in overlapping plates that had fused with its hide from absorbing minerals from the deep mountain. Its head was broad and flat, built for ramming. Six eyes in a crown formation scanned the terrain with disinterest, the look of a creature that had never been afraid of anything.

Kaiden studied it from the ridge. His girls were already in position, spread across the vantage point in a loose formation that looked casual and wasn’t.

’Big. Slow. Armored to hell. Six eyes means good peripheral vision, so flanking won’t be free. Charges when threatened.’

Twenty-two levels above them.

Luna crouched beside him, her eyes locked on the thing, and Kaiden could feel the grin forming before he saw it. ”That’s a big boy. Does it make you feel small, Kai?”

She blew him a kiss. ”It’s okay, size isn’t everything~”

”You always have such a unique way of ensuring you get a firm spanking at the end of the day.” Calypso’s tail swished behind her. She was already gripping her axe. ”Darling, let me go first?”

”You’ll get your turn.” Kaiden refused to acknowledge Luna’s comment as he closed the overlay - that would come later tonight - and called upon his partner in crime. The Blood Monarch’s Gauntlet pulsed once, hungry, and the crimson liquid climbed his forearm and stretched outward, elongating, hardening, until a greatsword heavier than most people could lift settled into his grip.

He looked at Aria. She stood at the edge of the ridge with the wind pulling at her silver hair, her fingers already loose at her sides, moonlight pooling between, waiting to be shaped.

Bastet stood barefoot on the stone, her tail still, her eyes half-closed, the ground beneath her already beginning to hum.

Above his head, Alice pulsed once. Dark and ready.

”Begin the barrage. Luna, go when it staggers. Cali, with me.”

The ridge erupted.

Three streams of destruction converged on the Granite Tyrant simultaneously. Aria’s concentrated lance of silver-white energy that slammed into the creature’s torso with a sound like a cathedral bell being struck by a train. Bastet’s eruption, the stone beneath the beast’s front legs detonating upward in a column of molten earth. Alice’s golden beam, a needle of light that punched through the gap between its crown eyes and buried itself in the skull plate behind them.

The Granite Tyrant screamed.

It was a deep, tectonic sound, the kind of scream that came from a creature whose vocal cords were made of the same mineral-fused tissue as its armor. The shelf beneath it cracked. Its six eyes went wide and furious, and it reared onto its hind legs, all forty tons of it rising against the morning sky.

Luna was already gone.

She’d launched the moment the triple impact landed, a streak of purple lightning arcing down the rock face. Her Stormblade caught the light as she closed the distance in under two seconds, and her first cut opened a seam along the Tyrant’s exposed underbelly where the plates didn’t quite meet. Shallow, but enough to bleed. She was already past it by the time the blood hit the air, flickering to the creature’s left flank and cutting again, drawing its attention, making it turn.

Making it show its back to the ridge.

Kaiden and Calypso hit it from above.

The drop was thirty meters. Kaiden fell in Gluttony, the stance wrapping his body in a siphoning field that would begin draining the creature’s mana the moment he made contact. Calypso fell laughing, her axe above her head, her red skin catching the sun like a war banner.

They landed on its back.