Demonic Po*nstar System

Chapter 805: Magma Eater

Melty had not retreated.

Kaiden’s loyal pet had breached the magma after the runt the way she breached the magma after any kill that had gotten airborne, full Dreadwyrm vertical, broken jaw trailing wet plate behind her into the air.

Her remaining upper jaw had come down on the runt’s exposed flank at the apex of her breach. Her foreclaws, the long curved hooks the evolution had grown along her forelimbs at Mid-Tier to anchor her purchase on basalt, had raked across the runt’s hide along its dorsal line as gravity caught her on the way back down. Her tail, the heavy weighted end she used to crack basalt boulders apart in her hunting, slammed across the runt’s back on the same fall.

The runt’s hide had absorbed it and kept drinking.

Melty had hit the magma again with one of her sisters’ breaches already arcing past her on the way up.

Two more Dreadwyrms breached on the same heartbeat from different angles, and the Magmashaper at the upper bend committed her shaping to drag the floating runt back down. The pod went onto the feeder ferociously, every angle covered.

The runt did not slow.

The Magmashaper’s pull did not register against the runt’s draw. The Dreadwyrms’ breaches scored its hide and skipped off because the hide had reached a temperature their teeth could not bite through.

It was the right read. It was too late.

The other quadrupeds in the column, who had been holding along the upper bend in formation while the runt fed, dropped their disguise. Every one of them was the same creature in pre-feed form. They moved in a coordinated wedge across the cooling crust where the river had receded, the magma in the upper sectors having drained far enough by then to expose walkable basalt under it, and they crossed down toward the floating runt to form a perimeter around it.

They positioned themselves between the bank and the airspace Melty’s pod was breaching into.

Melty’s sisters had been below the river’s surface in melee, the runt had been in the air above it, and the wall of column bodies between them now intercepted every Dreadwyrm breach mid-arc.

The pod could not reach the runt anymore, and it kept on drinking.

The column had advanced down the spiral as the river receded under their feet, opening more walkable basalt with every meter of magma the central feeder swallowed, and Melty’s pod had been driven backward along the receding line because the medium they fought in was being removed underneath them faster than they could keep up.

The dungeon’s memory closed.

Kaiden was back in the chokehold a heartbeat later, the channel’s history seated in his head as fact.

His brain caught up.

A glutton-template. The Claimant had eaten at least one dungeon with a magma-eater somewhere in its roster, replicated the species across an entire column, and committed the column down the path that had been built specifically to kill anything that was not magma proof.

The slime-coated approach had not been disabled by the gluttons. It had been used. The slip-mechanic that was supposed to drop invaders into the magma had dropped one perfectly disguised glutton into Melty’s bite, the bite had triggered the feed reflex the gluttons had been waiting to deploy, and the river had paid for it.

Magma was meant to be the defense. The defense was being drunk.

However, he was not dumb enough to have trusted a single layer to hold against everything. The magma had been Path B’s first answer, and the Salamawyrm tree had been the specialists who lived in the medium and ate anything that committed to it.

But the magma alone was not the whole defense. He had layered the kill route knowing that any single environmental hazard could, in principle, be countered. That was why the Virulent Mire sat past the burrow tunnel.

The Mire was a different environment by design. Where magma punished the unfireproofed, the Mire punished the unsealed: three stratified layers of toxic atmosphere across a sunken bowl, ground spores at the floor, knee-height clouds, ceiling-pressed vapor.

An invader who had survived magma had to survive poison next, in a biome with no shared mechanic. The premise was that whatever solved one would not solve the other.

However, he had no specialists for the Mire.

His Salamawyrms lived in the magma because the magma was their nature, and the river and the wyrms together were a unified weapon. The Mire had no equivalent. His abyssal beasts could enter the Mire and survive there, but they held no innate advantage the way the molten rivers held one for Melty’s pod.

Against heavyweight gluttons that had just demonstrated the ability to consume an entire magma channel, he feared that the few traps and the Venomflies were going to register as ambient noise.

The math came up cold.

If the gluttons cleared the burrow tunnel into the Mire, the Mire fell on its own systems alone. The Mire had no Salamawyrm-grade backbone. The architecture had counted on the magma to thin invaders to the point where the Mire’s lighter defenses could finish the job, and the magma was no longer thinning anything.

That was why the system was reading forty-seven percent of his domain lost while the gluttons were still nominally inside the magma channel, when in reality, the magma was followed by a kilometer of poison then three kilometers of Verdant Expanse.

The metric, as it turned out, was functional defense, not boots on ground, and his functional defense down the kill route had collapsed all at once. The magma was being drunk.

The Mire’s defenses were lighter than the magma’s by design and were going to fail faster against the heavier element of the column, and the Verdant past the Mire was the family’s home and his final fallback line, and the only thing standing between the gluttons and his cathedral was a harmless patch of land, defended by overly eager but underequipped Dungeon Borns.

This was no time to dwell, however.

”We’re in trouble!” Kaiden shouted, drawing his allies’ attention.