Demonic Po*nstar System

Chapter 997: Strategic Monster

It was slow, and it cost. Each rotation left the scars wider than the healing could shut, but the mound did not get tired and they did.

”It’ll take an hour,” Nyx judged, watching Calypso wind up again. ”Two, if we’re taking a more conservative approach.”

The work settled into a rhythm, heavy hitters rotating on the mound while the rest held the square.

Asakura’s squad spread onto the perimeter the moment the rotation formed.

Shields faced outward down the three chutes the blocked streets had left open. The medic and the onmyoji took the shade of the market awnings, and Oda covered the dead shopfronts along the square’s north face.

Alexandra stood with the screening line, exactly where Kaiden had asked her to be. His guardian belonged where the armor was thinnest, and the thinnest armor in the square was on an escort squad a world below the family’s weight.

Off rotation, people got comfortable. Bastet found intact shade at the end of the stall row and lay down in it, head toward the north face, eyes not quite shut.

Luna spent ten minutes trying to make the vending machine in the mound dispense something, and returned with a can of cold coffee she refused to explain.

The onmyoji taught Alice a paper-folding trick. Alice’s halo folded it back at four times the speed, and the onmyoji sat down.

The sun crossed the river. Arm-deep bite by arm-deep bite the mound got smaller, and the silent town watched them work.

Calypso’s axe rang off the wall again, the gong of it rolling out over the dead market.

Oda was watching the north shopfronts when the fish shop’s glass went wrong.

He had bought fish under that window once a week his entire life, and his eyes had crossed it a hundred times since the perimeter formed. On this pass, the dark behind the glass had depth.

He never did work out what he saw in it. His body skipped the question, drill turning him with the spear already rising.

A thin pressure-whine leaned against the square, like a kettle three streets away deciding to scream.

The window never moved. The roofline two floors above it fired.

The round crossed the square ahead of its own sound. It met Oda’s rising spear, blew the haft apart in his hands, and the deflection turned a shot aimed at his chest into a shot that tore through his shoulder.

The impact threw him a full car-length back into a stall frame, and the crack of it arrived late and rolled around the square twice.

Oda heard himself screaming before he understood he had been hit. There was an arm lying against his ribs and nothing in his shoulder to feel it with.

”Contact!” Asakura was moving before her own shout finished. ”Somewhere north!”

Alice’s halo whipped a beam of light onto the rooftop above the fish shop. ”There!”

It stood low against the ridgeline on four legs, long as two cars, and none of it matched.

”What the fuck is that?!” Luna shouted.

Plates of different monsters lapped over its frame in different colors, stitched at the seams with the same grey-green carapace that mortared the mound.

Its head had hinged open in two directions at once, the halves peeled back around a dark bore that was still smoking.

Then the ridge of tubes along its spine shivered, and began to cycle with a wet clicking.

The ridge fired a stream of rounds, stitching across the flagstones toward the stall frame where Oda lay in his own blood.

Alexandra came off the screening line at a dead run and put herself between Oda and the roof, a large projection shield forming in her arms.

”Get behind!”

The burst hit the shield and broke there, round after round bursting white against the curve, and the light rang under it like an anvil that refused to crack. ”Gh...” the blonde woman grunted, and refused to be moved backward.

Alexandra had poured her light over these nine at the barrier that morning, before any of them thought to ask her for it.

Kaiden had given her the weakest links in the square to keep, the one who was lying behind her legs in his own blood.

Something went out of her then, and it was the fear.

”I’m the Hearth Valkyrie... I protect!”

Gold rose out of her and kept rising. It climbed through her hair until the blonde burned white at the edges, then swallowed the uniform whole.

What stepped out in front of the Japanese awakened was Kaiden’s fourth Valkyrie in full regalia, light hanging off her shoulders in plates, both palms raised like a wall’s answer to a gun.

The stream hunted the dome her raised palms had thrown up, found nothing it could break, and stopped.

”It sat up there all afternoon and moved the second the wall stopped healing.” Kaiden did not leave the wall. He ripped the pickaxe free long enough to point it at the roofline, then sank it back into the scar. ”Bastet called it. Something out here is minding this door. Caly, keep swinging.”

”On it!” Calypso’s axe never paused. The barricade kept tolling under the gunfire, stubborn as a heartbeat.

The thing on the roof adjusted.

The mouth-bore swung off the dome it could not open, and its next round went into the flagstones under the squad’s shield line. The street floor erupted, and fighters went down in a tangle of shields, alive because the shot had gone into the ground under their feet instead of their bodies.

And the sealed side streets opened.

Spider-hounds poured through gaps in the rubble walls that had not been gaps at noon, two packs from two chutes, flowing along the square’s edges toward the downed shield line. A pincer attack, timed to the second.

It created a trap out of the terrain it designed!” Luna shouted as she hit the first pack sideways as lightning, Stormblade shearing three hounds in one pass.

Intelligent monsters were rare but not unseen. However, ones who would strategize on this level, while outside their own domain, were practically unheard of.

The second sniper round came from a different roof.

The relocation had happened from one moment to the next, and the shot came for the two fighters dragging their blast-stunned squadmates clear of the cratered shield line.

Alexandra’s light got there. Barely. She flung a second shield forty meters off her open palm, and the round burst against it and folded it like wet paper.

”There’s too many of you spread out!” Alexandra had her feet planted and gold pouring off her in ropes, a dome over Oda, the flung shield reforming, a third plate of light bending over the medic. Her voice cracked in the middle of it. ”Everyone, to me! Please!”

The squad tried. That was the moment both packs reached their line.

The hounds reached the shields and flowed around them. The lead pair went past the spear-user’s point, straight for the medic, and the strip of blessed paper on his shaft flashed white, burning itself to nothing as it turned aside a scythe-leg meant for her back.

Across the square, the mouth-bore kept firing, patient, on a clock of its own. Every round was aimed at a person, and every person it aimed at wore the slate and white of the Twelfth Garrison.

Bastet left the wall first, in silence. Her dominion arrived over the western pack and drove eight hounds flat into the asphalt hard enough to crack their shells.

”Twelfth! On the Valkyrie, move!” Asakura’s shout came out of the middle of her own tangled shield line, and her fighters answered her in hoarse overlapping Japanese, hauling each other clear by the harness.

Nyx went next, folding a burst out of the air a hand’s width above the onmyoji’s back.

Then Aria stopped killing and started intercepting, moonlight lances spent knocking rounds out of the sky, until the assault on the wall was down to Calypso and Kaiden.

The next round hit the barricade just over Calypso’s head and buried her in a spray of shattered wall.

The pile moved. Calypso came up out of it with her horns full of dust, laughing, and put the axe straight back into the crater.

”It’s shooting at me now, Darling!” She sounded delighted about it. ”Keep going!”

Kaiden tore the pickaxe out of the wall. The thing had built this trade to go one of two ways, and everyone in the square knew it. Keep cutting, and the guides died in the open. Turn around to cover them, and the wall took back every arm-deep bite the afternoon had cost.

”Let’s help them.” The pickaxe burst apart mid-stride and the blood sheeted back into his greatsword. ”Kill the packs, cover the squad.”