Demonic Po*nstar System

Chapter 857: Charge

The Kaiju grew with every step of the charge, and it had already been the largest living thing any human had ever seen.

Kaiden ran at the heart of his army and watched it sharpen out of the pale distance: four legs the size of skyscrapers, a hide of raw stone carapace, six burning eyes, each of which was much bigger than Kaiden himself.

The world had met this creature when it stood up out of a mountain range it had been wearing as a disguise, and it had eaten twenty dungeons on its way to his door.

Humanity had named it Kaiju because no smaller word fit.

Its chest swelled.

Kaiden knew what came next.

”Monoliths, move to the front!”

The order ran through the ranks, and the fortress-variant Maulfiends slammed down into a wall of obsidian plating across the army’s face just as the howl arrived.

It hit as pressure first, a rolling cliff of force that turned the air white where it compressed, and the Monolith rank slid backward a full meter with their plating shrieking against the floor.

”Behind me!” Nyx shouted, folding space along the formation’s heart so the wavefront split around the girls like a river around a blade, and even then enough of the sound got through to stagger half the rear line.

Behind the army, forty-six Dungeon-Born went down on one knee behind their shields with blood running from their ears, and the line began to slide.

Taigi’s voice cracked across her warriors, hoarse and furious, holding them in place by sheer will.

”STAND! We were useless the whole war, this is our only chance!”

Not one of them broke formation.

Kaiden’s hand tightened on his greatsword as the pressure faded. His eyes flicked once to the rear where his weakest and bravest were already pushing back upright.

He’d built the back line around what the Dungeon-Born could actually help with: carry the wounded, guard the healer, run the lines.

For now, they were out of their depth in a fight like this. There had been no time to rank them up, and no Dungeon Master option he’d unlocked could make them more than they were.

Alexandra stood in the center of their ring with golden light already pooled in both palms, and for the first time since this duel began, nothing separated her from the wounded who needed her.

Through the entire Gambit she had stood beside the board, pushing her light against a boundary that refused her over and over while the girls bled on the other side of it. There was no boundary here. Her hands were steady.

The Kaiju charged.

A creature that size had no business accelerating like that, but Kaiden had watched it clear dozens of miles in a single leap once, and the memory kept him on guard.

The ground quaked in long waves ahead of its footfalls, and he sent the Maulfiend ranks forward to break the first one before it reached the line.

They were armor. That was the cold arithmetic of it. The front rank caught the stomp’s shockwave on raised mauls and obsidian shoulders, and six of them died in the same second, plating folded flat like foil.

[Unit losses: Maulfiend x6.]

”Make it count!” Luna shouted, and the Quakelords answered the next footfall with their own, hammering the floor in unison so the counter-shock met the Kaiju’s wave head-on and broke it into harmless ripples.

Stone spikes erupted in belts across the creature’s path. Nightclaw flights poured over the formation with the Gorefiends diving ahead, and the Nightshrouds went for the crown, bleeding darkness across six burning eyes in overlapping black veils.

The Kaiju tore through the spike belts without slowing, and Kaiden reached into Lust Stance and pulled.

Warmth roared down five bonds at once, and he shaped it the way the Gambit had taught him: speed into Luna, density into Aria, pressure into Nyx, escalation into Calypso, weight into Bastet.

The drain lit up behind his sternum immediately, a deep burn that would only grow, and he welcomed it, because the system paid every buff back to its source. Six Sin Fusions burned across this battlefield, and each one of them made him stronger too.

The charge arrived a breath later, and the army parted around it on purpose, Monolith ranks angling the impact aside while the creature’s own momentum carried it deep into the middle of everything Kaiden owned. It planted all four legs to turn, and that half second of stillness was all the opening his team needed.

His women lit the white plain in fusion colors.

Luna hit the creature’s left foreleg first, a red streak corkscrewing up the limb with Storm Calamity detonating off every Stormblade strike.

”That’s for the chess bullshit! And THIS is for what your bug did to Fatty!”

”Can’t you be nice for a single second? You just hugged me a few minutes ago!” Nyx called from the center of the formation, folding space around a slab of shattered ground the size of a house and redirecting it into the Kaiju’s ankle.

”I did no such thing!”

The gremlin reached the elbow joint and glanced back down the limb to admire her work, and her work amounted to a line of scorch marks.

Detonations that had cratered the Gambit’s reforged bosses hadn’t carved a finger-width into hide that had already shrugged off a planet’s worth of artillery.

”Oh, you have got to be kidding me!” She hammered the same spot three times in one chain of red lightning and earned a hairline crack for all of it.

The foreleg answered her. The limb whipped sideways hard enough to crack the air, and Luna burst into red lightning a blink before the limb passed through where she’d been standing, reforming thirty meters below with a fresh stream of profanity.

The Kaiju was done tolerating passengers. Its other forepaw raked across its own flank, scraped a dozen Nightclaws out of the sky, and came down on a Maulfiend rank with a crunch that rolled across the whole plain.

[Unit losses: Nightclaw x12. Maulfiend x8.]

While the gremlin picked herself back up, Aria rose above the fight on a column of moonlight, violet threading the silver of her hair.

She considered the mountainside of carapace with the same calm she gave every target, chose a thread-thin seam where two plates met, and anchored a lattice of crescents that began falling on that single line, each impact biting a hair deeper than the last.

”Hold still,” she told the colossus softly, and the moonlight sang down.

The colossus did not hold still. Its crown swung for her at a speed that ignored its own tonnage, and Aria drifted aside on her moonlight, untroubled, the lattice never missing a beat above the seam.

Alice’s halo blazed violet-gold above Kaiden’s head, her beam raking the plating alongside everyone else’s until she quit wasting light on it and went hunting for gaps instead.

He didn’t need to relay it. Luna was already flickering back up the limb toward the knee’s hinge, done wasting detonations on plating, and Aria’s lattice had been grinding its chosen seam from the start. His women had reached the same answer he had, in the same handful of seconds, and nobody on this team needed to be told where to hit a fortress.

On the creature’s far side, Vespera and Scarlet hammered its right flank together, and no glow touched either of them.

The fusions answered only six of his eight champions, which left the two monarchs fighting on raw power, and watching them work, Kaiden privately concluded that the system had simply decided they were far too powerful to gain even more buffs.

Scarlet’s twin columns of red-gold fire locked onto the creature’s shoulder seam and stayed there, cooking the plating around it cherry-red, and her grin stretched wider the brighter it glowed.

”You owe me a fight, you oversized landmass!”

Calypso opened the first true wound.

The demoness had ridden a Skyfiend up the Kaiju’s flank and dropped onto the foreleg joint Alice had marked, and her first swing, loaded with everything Carnage Feast had stacked since the charge began, bounced off the hinge with a sound like a struck bell.

She laughed, set her feet, and timed the second swing to land in the same instant as Kaiden’s arrival. The warmth in five bonds cut out for the half second it took him to swap Lust for Wrath mid-leap, and her axe and his detonation struck the hinge as one.

The joint’s seam split two meters wide, and his follow-up rolled thunder deep into the creature’s interior.

The wound sprayed across them both, and Luna’s shriek carried over the battlefield from somewhere up on the shoulder.

”What the fuck is this thing bleeding?!”