Demonic Po*nstar System

Chapter 916: Victory Condition

He clapped once, and the sound was impossibly sharp, a concussive snap that hit hundreds of chests like a drumbeat, and the arena erupted.

The first three seconds were bedlam. Bodies surged in every direction, abilities flickering to life across the hall in bursts of color and heat and pressure. An earth-type shattered the padding beneath his feet and launched himself at the deck. A ranged caster hurled a bolt of fire that Calypso swatted aside with her tail without looking.

Yuna moved laterally, low and fast, her feet barely touching the ground as she wove between bodies in a pattern that put three large fighters between her and the nearest threat before anyone realized she’d left the spot she’d been standing in.

Skyline had given her this much, at least. When the field goes chaotic, get clear. Find angles. Read the fight before you commit.

She stopped behind a cluster of recruits who’d frozen in the middle of the arena, looking at each other instead of fighting, and raised her voice.

”Hey! Stop charging at them one at a time! Group up! They’re three people and a dog. I know they’re individually monstrous, but we have numbers. So we must use them or they’ll pick us apart!”

A stocky man with gauntlet-type bracers looked at her, then at the deck where Luna had already begun moving, then back. ”Who the hell are you?”

”Someone who’d rather not eat a thunderbolt alone. You in or not?”

He was in. So were the eight people standing around him, drawn to the only voice in the hall that sounded like it had a plan instead of a grudge.

”Ranged fighters, stay back and provide cover! Melee, on me, we go together! Do NOT split off solo, that’s exactly how they...”

She stopped. A woman with a halberd was squinting at her, head tilted.

”Hold on. Are you Yuna Park?”

The blood left Yuna’s face faster than Luna’s thunderclap had cleared the front rows.

”No.”

”You are! You’re that S-tier from Skyline! I’ve seen you on their recruitment banner!”

”I wish.”

”You just crossed thirty meters in a second and started barking tactical commands at strangers.”

”Lots of people can do that.”

”You’re literally S-tier.”

”Nope.”

The halberd woman opened her mouth to press it further, but the arena floor buckled as Pebble shifted its weight overhead and a sweep of amber light washed across the hall from six enormous eyes, and priorities corrected themselves on the spot.

”Fine,” the woman said, raising her weapon. ”Definitely-Not-Yuna, what’s the plan?”

Yuna opened her mouth to answer, and Calypso jumped off the observation deck.

She dropped straight off the railing like stepping off a curb, and the padded floor split in a starburst beneath her feet when she landed. Bare-handed, stanceless, a red-skinned demoness in a tank top rolling her shoulders once as she sized up the nearest cluster of fighters.

”Come on!” she called out, spreading her arms wide. ”There’s so many of you! Why isn’t anyone coming?!”

Seven people obliged at once.

The first, a brawler built like a refrigerator, threw a right hook that connected flush with her cheekbone. Her head snapped sideways, but the grin held.

She grabbed his outstretched arm with one hand, pivoted, and slung him across the padded floor into four of his friends like she was skipping a stone across a lake. He bounced once, tangled with the others, and none of them got back up.

’She’s pulling her punches,’ Yuna realized, watching the last two crumple as Calypso tore through what was left of the group without slowing down. The brawler was groaning on the padding, bruised and winded but breathing. If a Z-tier had swung for real, there wouldn’t be enough left to groan.

So they were holding back. Probably. Hopefully.

Then the second problem arrived.

Luna flickered. One frame she was leaning on the railing with her hands in her pockets, and the next she was on the arena floor forty meters away, and Yuna’s trained eyes caught maybe two frames of the transition. The hoodie didn’t even shift on her shoulders.

Her hands were still in her pockets.

A tank-type built like a wall charged her from behind, fist already swinging. Luna leaned sideways without turning, barely moving, and let the punch sail through the space where her head had been. She kicked backward with one foot. The man left the ground and didn’t come back to it for about fifteen meters. He hit the far wall and stayed down.

Three more came at her from different angles, coordinated, timing their approach. She pirouetted on one heel, hoodie flaring around her like a cape, and swept all three off their feet with a single spinning kick that started low and finished high. The third went furthest.

”That one called me a midget,” she informed the ceiling, conversationally.

”QUIT HIDING YOUR HANDS AND FIGHT FAIR, COWARD!” someone roared from the middle of the hall.

Luna looked at the man who’d shouted, blinked once, and kicked the nearest fighter into him so fast the whole thing looked like one motion instead of two. ”Nah.” Both hit the floor at the same time.

She examined the two of them before turning toward the candidates still in the game. ”Cool, you screamed at me. Try that when a rift opens on your street and see how it goes.”

Across the arena, Calypso was escalating. A coordinated squad of eight had tried flanking her, and she’d let every one of them land hits. She’d let them. A fire blast scorched her shoulder, a blade-type opened a cut along her forearm, and a force-user slammed her with a pressure wave that should have sent her skidding backward.

She absorbed it all. The smoke rising from her wounds thickened with every blow, her eyes burned brighter, and her next punch launched a man into the far wall hard enough to crater the padding behind him. The punch after that was faster.

”That tickled!” she called up to Kaiden on the observation deck, laughing. ”Darling, are you sure these aren’t civilians?”

Unconscious fighters were piling up across the padded floor like fallen timber. Each one another person who’d learned that the gap between their tier and the Sinners’ was a canyon with no bridge and no bottom.

Yuna hadn’t moved.

She stood with her growing group at the edge of the chaos, cap low, mask on, watching, and her assassin’s mind was doing what Skyline had never once asked it to do.

They were going to lose. Every single candidate in this hall was going to end up flat on the floor before this was over. Luna was fighting with her feet. Calypso was letting people hit her for fun. Neither of them was trying, and the arena was already thinning fast.

Unless she changed what winning meant.

”Listen,” she spoke up, loud enough for dozens to hear. ”Stop watching them fight. Watch him.”

She pointed up at Kaiden Grey on the observation deck. He stood at the railing, red eyes reading every movement below.

”He said the test is to win. But think about what us winning means to Kaiden Grey specifically.”

”Beating them?” the stocky man tried.

”We can’t beat the four of them. Nobody here can. But perhaps that’s not what he means.” Yuna kept her voice low and steady, because this was the part of her that Skyline had never once let off the leash, and it was the part that mattered most.

”I’ve watched nearly every stream. Every interview. Every clip of him on a battlefield. This is a man who’d burn everything down for any one of his women. If one of his girls hit the floor in this spar, even for a second, it would get to him. He wouldn’t brush it off.”

The halberd woman’s eyes went sharp. ”You’re saying...”

”Winning means making him feel like he lost.” Yuna turned back to the fight. ”We eliminate one of them. That’s all we need.”

Silence in the group. Then the stocky man’s expression changed, a light turning on behind his eyes.

”Which one?”

They looked at the arena together.

On one side, Calypso took a full-powered energy blast to the chest from a caster who’d been charging the shot for six solid seconds. The explosion scorched her tank top black and left a smoking mark across her collarbone.

She took it clean, threw her head back, and laughed. The smoke pouring off her was thicker now, her movements faster, her strikes landing harder than they had thirty seconds ago. Five more fighters went down in her wake.

On the other side, Luna yawned, kicked a swordsman’s blade out of his grip without taking her hands out of her pockets, then kicked the swordsman into the nearest cluster of his allies hard enough that all four hit the floor at once.

”Not the demon,” Yuna said. ”She’s getting stronger every time someone hits her. She wants you to attack her.”

”The speedster, then?” The halberd woman looked doubtful. ”She’s not even using her hands and she’s wiping the floor with everyone.”

”Exactly.” Yuna’s eyes narrowed behind her cap. ”That’s her telling us she’s bored. She’s holding back harder than anyone in this building, fighting with half her body locked down for fun. That’s a handicap she chose to give us for free.”

”She’s still the Storm Valkyrie. She could probably level this hall with both hands tied.”

”Maybe. But that’s the best I got. It beats waiting to get picked off.” Yuna scanned the arena, counting the remaining fighters, mapping the distances and the angles. Her group had swelled to nearly forty. ”Right now she thinks we can’t coordinate. That none of us is smart enough to read the board. What if we prove her wrong?”

The halberd woman’s lips pulled into a sharp, competitive grin.

”Alright, Definitely-Not-Yuna. How do we catch a lightning bolt?”