Demonic Po*nstar System

Chapter 801: Hunger

Calypso was the first to put what they all thought out there for all to hear.

”I am so done watching Shadow Mommy and Flame Aunty do our chores.”

”Took the words out of my mouth.”

Luna’s voice cut from his other shoulder, all gremlin, none of the banter, every consonant sharp.

She cracked her neck. ”I’m climbing out of the pits of mediocrity today. Watching the battle junkie breathe my kills away is making me physically sick in the stomach.”

Nyx’s voice came in quieter than the others.

”I deeply respect and love them both. But...”

Bastet finished it for her.

”...But we are grown women, not little kittens.” Bastet’s chin had lifted into the slow regal posture, tail moving in long deliberate sweeps behind her. ”We have stayed in others’ shadow long enough, Master. It is high time we grew out of all of them.”

Aria had already begun to lift.

Her boots left the abyssal stone in one silent pull of moonlight, and the silver carried her up into her firing position above the line in the unhurried glide that meant she had decided the conversation was over. Her silver hair settled around her shoulders as she turned her head down toward Kaiden, silver eyes catching the dome’s low light, voice coming down soft and authoritative the way it came down when she was about to kill.

”Mother-in-law is a woman who has all of my respect as a fellow woman, combatant, and elementalist.” The cold yandere register was right there under the serenity, polished smooth. ”But it has to be me who protects you, Kai. My love cannot remain a mommy’s boy forever.”

The dome cracked.

Calypso’s laugh came out first and loudest. Luna’s cackle chased it half a beat behind, lightning crawling up her arms in delighted little arcs. Nyx’s breath shook against his back in a soft amused exhale, and even Bastet’s regal composure broke into a small approving curve at one corner of her mouth.

Inside his halo, Alice’s light flared a full step brighter and her telepathy came in the form of giggles.

Kaiden sighed, dry and short, and shook his head once.

”I’m nothing of the sorts. But you girls got the sentiment right.”

He brought both blades up and twirled them once at his sides, the right and the left in opposing arcs, the harvested blood along their edges singing as the steel turned.

The first two enemies were already past Vespera’s lattice and bounding across the open ground toward the line, the heavier soldier behind them coming on a slower, denser stride that promised it knew what it was for.

Kaiden’s gaze tracked all three without turning his head.

He took one step forward through the dome’s forward edge, and the shadow parted around him without a touch.

”My beautiful angels...” He felt the six of them moving with him before he heard them, the line falling in around him the way it always did when he stopped talking and started walking. ”It’s time for us to ascend.”

”By the time we walk back through our gate onto Earth...” His grin sharpened. ”I want us to be unquestionable.”

Six smirks welcomed his words at once.

Then they moved.

The first Wraithstride cleared the lip of the Safe Zone at a sprint that ate distance.

Bipedal, plated in dark dorsal scales, four eyes set above a maw that broke open into a low predator’s hum. It came in low along Kaiden’s left flank, claws dragging black sparks off the floor, and halfway through its second stride its body flickered. A dark afterimage tore loose forward toward the kill line while the actual creature broke right and accelerated into the open.

The afterimage hit Aria’s lattice.

She had anchored three crescents at the altitude a flanker would take, edges burning silver-violet where Lunar Sovereignty bled the fusion’s color through the moonlight along their curves. The fusion held them fixed in the air where lesser moonlight would have fallen, locked into position by her will the way a banner is staked rather than thrown. The afterimage drove itself into the lower edge and the moonlight passed through it without resistance because there was nothing there to cut. The decoy dissolved.

Aria did not move her hands.

The lattice slid sideways on her intent alone, three crescents and a fourth blooming silently above the Wraithstride’s true line, and the whole wall came down at once. The Wraithstride met it shoulder-first at full sprint and the moonlight bit into the dorsal plating in four parallel lines.

The plating held. The crescents did not let go.

Where any pre-fusion crescent would have shattered against the alloy-dense scales and dissipated, Aria’s stayed embedded in the cuts they had opened, four blades of silver anchored into the Wraithstride’s shoulder by Lunar Sovereignty and refusing to leave. The creature staggered through the lattice with four lit lines cooking deeper into its flesh on every stride, ichor smoking along the moonlight’s edge, the wounds widening rather than closing as the anchor pressed the cuts open from inside. It pivoted hard for a second pass with the lattice still actively carving into it.

It flickered.

Two afterimages this time, peeling off in opposing directions while the real body broke center and bounded straight up at her airborne position.

Aria’s silver eyes went still, Lunar Sovereignty’s violet alive in her irises.

She had read it before the decoys finished forming. The silver-violet lance she had been banking at her right hand dropped through the leaping body in one clean line, the moonlight taking it through the unarmored throat where the dorsal plating ended and the soft tissue began, and Lunar Sovereignty drove the lance straight on through the carcass and into the rock five meters below, pinning the falling body to the floor mid-fall. It twitched once on the anchored lance and stilled.

Aria held her position above the pinned carcass, silver hair lifted around her shoulders by the moonlight currents, hand still half-curled in the gesture that had dropped the lance. The silver-violet glow slid along her wrist and across the line of her collarbone, where it disappeared into the curve of her dress.

She watched it bleed.

The smirk that landed on her lips was not the soft one her stream subscribers had memorized. Her mouth lifted by a precise cruel fraction, the silver eyes above it cooling another degree in the same heartbeat, and the look that came across her face was beautiful and entirely satisfied.

[Companion Kill: invading Wraithstride (Level 96). +840 DMP.]

Luna was on the second Wraithstride before its afterimage finished forming.

She had read the trick from Aria’s kill in one blink. The decoy peeled off the second Wraithstride’s body to commit forward and Luna ignored it entirely, her Stormblade coming down on the real body mid-stride at the hindquarters, and the Calamity fusion detonated through the strike.

The dorsal plating drank most of the blast.

The Stormblade cut a half-meter rip through the outer alloy scales and the detonation expanded outward in a thunder-crack that flipped the Wraithstride sideways across the ground, but the body did not come apart. It rolled, found its feet, and opened its maw at her.

It screamed.

The wail was sonic. The pressure cone hit Luna in the chest at five meters and the floor vibrated outward under her boots in a low pulse that staggered her one full step backward, ears ringing, vision shaking against the inside of her skull.

”Aww, is this baby crying for his mommy? Sadly your mommy isn’t a badass shadow mancer with turbo protective tendencies!”

She dissolved.