Demonic Po*nstar System

Chapter 796: Manly Dream

Inside the seal, the swarm had crossed the kill line.

Kaiden stepped into it.

The first strider in his lane was a heavy bipedal slab of muscle and gray plate, the kind of template that would have forced his pre-fusion body to set its feet, brace its shoulder, and time the swing. The fusion had taken those instructions out of his bones and replaced them with new ones.

He walked into the strider’s reach the way he would have walked into a doorway, and the greatsword came around in one short low arc that opened the creature from its right hip up through its left collarbone before it could finish its forward step.

The two halves separated mid-stride and kept walking for half a beat on momentum alone before they collapsed.

[You’ve slain invading Strider (Level 64). +21,400 XP. +102 DMP.]

The notification flickered against the corner of his vision and Kaiden let himself read it once, fully.

’A hundred.’

His mouth pulled inward at one corner.

A hundred DMP for a kill that, a month ago, would have handed him several hundred. The math was the math. DMP gain mirrored XP gain, and XP gain scaled to difficulty, and difficulty was a relative metric, not an absolute one. A strider at this tier had been a serious problem for him back when he was scraping his way up the curve.

With his current build, with Sin Fusion stacked on top of stat numbers that already outpaced any conventional awakened, the same strider was a brick wall to a freight train. The system priced the kill accordingly.

But the multiplier was still on.

[Domain Defense Active. Defending Master receives ×100 DMP.]

That was where the hundred came from. A hundred meant the actual difficulty-adjusted yield was a single point per strider, and the dimension was multiplying it by a hundred before it landed.

The horde was charging.

Striders shoulder to shoulder in the front rank, fliers spreading above them, more behind, the lane he was standing in about to become a wall of mountain-born mass thrown at one man. He counted twenty in the front rank. Forty behind. Templates that had survived twenty dungeons’ worth of consumption to end up in this roster. They had the numbers.

The numbers were stacked heavily against Kaiden and the gang, but despite that, his mouth pulled wider at the corner, and a grin came in over the smile, slow and sadistic.

The sigils along the gauntlet’s fingers flared crimson at his will.

The harvested blood from the first kill answered, lifting off his right forearm in one disciplined ribbon and arcing across his chest to gather at his off-hand, folding itself into a second greatsword in his left palm in one clean shaping of will, twin to the blade already in his right.

He had been turning the configuration over in his head for some time now but he had never committed to it in a live fight. A half-assed dual-wield was the kind of mistake that got men killed, and he had told himself he would know when his stats and his confidence with the blade crossed the threshold where the second blade stopped being a liability.

The fusion had crossed it for him.

He felt it sitting clean in his bones. The weight balanced across both arms, the off-hand grip as steady as the right, the sigil lines along his greaves and vambraces ready to feed both edges for as long as the killing kept feeding the gauntlet.

The killing was about to be plentiful.

Two greatswords. Forty meters of closing horde.

Kaiden stepped forward to meet it.

The first strider in the charge, bigger than the one he had opened with, came in shoulder-down at full bipedal speed. Kaiden brought both blades up in a wide cross-cut, right rising, left falling on the same beat, and he put his current Strength into the meeting point. Striders this size did not open under finesse. They needed weight, and his weight ran heavier now than any system display had ever shown him.

The two edges met at the strider’s collarbones and split it diagonally along the seam in opposing arcs.

The halves fell at the half-second mark of its charge, and Kaiden was already past them.

[You’ve slain invading Strider (Level 67). +24,900 XP. +118 DMP.]

The horde hit him.

Both blades stayed in his hands as he moved into it, and the blood from the second kill rose up his right calf in the same instant, drawn along the rune lines in his greaves, banking into the gauntlet’s reserve to feed both edges.

Two kills, two hundred and twenty DMP.

The chat ticker, banked at the bottom of his peripheral, had broken.

— Thirsty247: BRO. BRO. TWO. GREATSWORDS???!!!

— LapdogOfTheEmpress: The Handsome Emperor is too cool! Curses be upon his lineage!

— TouchGrass: That’s the build! I’m calling my dad. He gotta see this.

— NyxWorshipper: WAS THIS AN OPTION THE WHOLE TIME???

— Kaiden’s Wife (mod): ??? Aren’t us girls supposed to be the unhinged ones in this chat? Why are the boys losing it harder than us tonight?

— Thirsty247: Ma’am with all due respect, women will never understand. This is every manly man’s dream since birth. Peak human aspiration. You cannot grasp the magnitude.

— LapdogOfTheEmpress: ^^

— TouchGrass: ^^^^^

— NyxWorshipper: ^^^^^^^^^^^^

Kaiden’s gaze flicked sideways across the front line as he moved.

Aria’s silver light was dropping a flier wedge two at a time on a precision lattice she’d anchored at thirty meters of altitude, every crescent placed where the next bird was going to be rather than where the last one had been.

Luna was a red streak through the ground surge, lightning cracks landing wherever she had just stopped existing, every Stormblade hit detonating with the demolition the Calamity fusion had bolted onto her edge.

Bastet had not moved, and would not. The radial crack around her bare feet had widened by a meter and the serpents inside her zone were being pressed flat against the abyssal stone with a weight the Divine Dominion fusion did not bother lifting once it had set.

Calypso was three strider corpses deep into the heaviest knot of the ground charge, grin huge, ribs bleeding, half the buff stack already up.

Nyx had quietly compressed another four fliers into a single coral-haze bolus and was draining their mana down to dust before she let the bodies drop.

Alice’s gold beam was carving the upper air on a lazy track from above his head, surgical, the violet undertone biting deeper than the halo had ever bitten before.

The notification ticker, the one Kaiden had let ride at the bottom of his peripheral, was doing something he had not seen before.

[Companion Kill: invading Flier (Level 71). +78 DMP.]

[Companion Kill: invading Pup (Level 52). +30 DMP.]

[Companion Kill: invading Strider (Level 66). +110 DMP.]

[Companion Kill: invading Serpent (Level 68). +95 DMP.]

[Companion Kill: invading Flier (Level 70). +76 DMP.]

[Companion Kill: invading Strider (Level 65). +106 DMP.]

[Companion Kill: invading Pup (Level 54). +38 DMP.]

[Companion Kill: invading Flier (Level 72). +82 DMP.]

[Companion Kill: invading Strider (Level 64). +102 DMP.]

The lines stacked almost fast enough for the interface to fail rendering them properly.

His pool was filling.

This was the part of the dungeon system that humanity, if humanity had ever been allowed to see it, would have called the unfair part. Every monster his women cut down fed him. The dungeon claimed the essence of anything its Master’s bound forces felled regardless of who landed the blow or where the Master happened to be standing when they did, and his bound forces included every woman on this field. There was no need for kill-stealing.

His own counter ticked over without ceremony.

[Dungeon Master Points: 1,200.]

He flicked into Wrath.

The stance lit through his bones like a match touched to dry tinder. Motion-charged heat banked along both edges at once, the right blade humming at the start of its swing, the left answering in the next breath. Wrath asked for velocity and paid out in detonation, and Kaiden was about to pay it everything.

He charged.

Two greatswords into a closing wall of mountain-born mass.

The first strider he met took the right blade through the chest at full Wrath charge, and the body did not die so much as come apart, ribs exiting the back in a smoking concussive arc. The left blade followed a half-beat behind into the next strider’s flank, and Kaiden put his shoulder behind it because his off-hand had never been the precision hand. It had no finesse. What it had was the strength to swing the weight he gave it hard enough to land, and that was the only requirement in this lane. The blade went in at the seam below the ribs, jammed against bone, and the Wrath charge let go of its stored heat where the bone refused to part. The strider burst outward from inside its own ribcage.

[You’ve slain invading Strider (Level 65). +106 DMP.]

[You’ve slain invading Strider (Level 67). +118 DMP.]

A red streak blew past his left shoulder, laughing.