Demonic Po*nstar System

Chapter 772: Usurper

Miles away in the Eclipse guild hall, Vespera Ashborn was mid-stride through the administrative wing when it happened. The communication artifacts across the building had gone dark, every rune draining at once. She couldn’t pinpoint him through the interference, but she didn’t need to. She knew the general direction.

The darkness in the hallway responded before she consciously called it, peeling from walls and corners and the spaces beneath furniture, pooling at her feet and climbing her legs until it had wrapped her in a cocoon that swallowed light and sound. The startled faces of Eclipse staff watched their guildmaster vanish into darkness.

The shadow stretched into a road that tore through distance itself, and Vespera stepped into it. The world blurred past in a rush of velocity that would have killed anyone below 250 Vitality.

She crossed miles in a breath.

As she did that, the mountain lunged. Four legs that had been peaks drove forward with a force that cracked the range beneath them, and the head that had been a summit dropped toward the ridge where Kaiden stood, six pupils descending faster than anything that size should be able to move.

Then darkness erupted between them. Vespera materialized in the air above her son, her hand already extended, and a wave of shadow slammed into the colossal monster’s descending limbs while tendrils wrapped Kaiden’s team and yanked them backward across the stone, buying distance, buying time.

The shadow struck the monster and did nothing. The darkness splashed against that enormous mass like water against a cliff face, dispersing, scattering, failing to find purchase.

And the mountain howled.

The sound hit Vespera point-blank. Her shadows lost cohesion as her eardrums burst and blood began to run from her nose and ears, the pressure wave threatening to reduce everything on the ridge to paste.

She didn’t falter, however. Her hands moved through patterns, drawing on reserves that would have emptied a lesser mage in seconds, and the tendrils she’d wrapped around her son’s team hardened into walls denser than steel. The pressure crashed against them and broke. The girls staggered but stayed intact. Her son stayed intact.

But while she managed to protect them from the sheer blast of the howl, Vespera took it on her body and bled.

For a single frozen moment the scene held: a mother standing between her son and a god, blood running down her face, her posture already shifting into the opening stance of a counterattack. Behind her the people she protected were recovering from a blow that should have killed them. Above them all, a creature measured in kilometers scraped its crown against the wrong-colored sky.

Then the creature stepped back. The motion was slow, deliberate. It withdrew its head from the space above the ridge and lowered itself, all four legs folding beneath its mass until its chin touched stone and its six eyes were as level with the humans as physically possible.

It looked straight at Kaiden, and him alone.

The Paragon of Sin stared back. His mother was pulling him away, he could feel her shadows wrapping his limbs, tugging him toward safety, his girls shouting through the ringing in his ears, Alice’s presence flickering frantically above his head.

But his eyes stayed locked on those six massive pupils. What he saw there wasn’t destruction or the glazed instinct of a monster following its nature. What he saw was recognition, and underneath it, a challenge.

The monster’s mouth parted. The fissure that had been pouring monsters widened further, and from the depths of that impossible throat came a new sound, low and guttural, aimed at the ridge like a cannon.

The sound hit them as force. Kaiden’s feet left the ground. His team scattered around him like leaves, and Nyx’s spatial manipulation slammed into him alongside his mother’s shadows, two desperate forces working in concert to keep them from being flung into the sky.

And through it all, Kaiden’s vision filled with text.

[USURPER-CLASS THREAT DETECTED]

[The Claimant has challenged your authority as Dungeon Master.]

[You must defend your domain or surrender it willingly.]

[Warning: a defeated Dungeon Master does not get to retire peacefully. A defeated Dungeon Master becomes property of the new sovereign, bound to serve until released or destroyed.]

[The Claimant has extended a courtesy!]

[You have been granted 12 hours to prepare your defense.]

The windows stacked over each other, flashing and urgent.

Then the Claimant stood. Four legs straightened, the crown ascended past the clouds, and the six eyes left Kaiden’s face and turned toward the sky. The mouth opened wider, and the howl it released this time was aimed at the heavens itself, rolling across the range like a declaration.

Then it jumped.

The impact of its departure was worse than any attack it had made. The range buckled. A shockwave of displaced air flattened every tree within kilometers. The stone beneath where it had stood collapsed inward, an entire section of mountainside folding into a sinkhole the size of a small city, debris erupting skyward in a plume that blotted out the sun.

And the Claimant climbed away from them, past the horizon, past the upper sky, like a launched warhead with somewhere else to be.

But the monsters it had spawned did not follow. All of them stayed. Thousands of them, tens of thousands, winged and warped and hungry, descending on the range where every human competitor and Association officer stood frozen in the aftermath of what they had just witnessed.

The screaming started.

...

Kaiden found his feet.

The world was chaos around him, dust and debris and the distant sounds of combat beginning across the range, his girls hauling themselves upright and checking each other in voices he couldn’t parse through the ringing. Aria was kneeling beside his mother, silver hair streaked with dust, hands gentle as she helped Vespera wipe the blood from her nose. The Shadow Monarch allowed it. Her eyes were already tracking the sky where the Claimant had vanished and where the monsters were descending from, but she stood still as Aria worked.

Behind them, Calypso’s laugh boomed across the ridge, the loud, unhinged relief of a demoness who had just survived a thing she couldn’t name. The rest of his girls held each other and breathed.

Kaiden stared at the horizon where the Claimant had gone, and the corner of his mouth curled upward.

”What the fuck...”