Demonic Po*nstar System

Chapter 1003: Into the Deepest Depths

The deep part of the dungeon was where the road stopped being a road.

Kaiden stepped out of the last switchback into a cathedral of a cavern, and the floor of it moved.

The dungeon had stopped sending waves. It had emptied an entire cycle’s payout into one chamber and let it pool there, marrow-crawlers packed across the floor shoulder to shoulder in their dozens, eyeless, hairless, slick, hunched on four knuckled forelimbs and open-mouthed to a man.

The screech that had chased him down the last switchback had come out of those open mouths, all of them at once.

Flensers hung off the ceiling among the stalactites, folded into themselves. Membrane stretched between overlong limbs, hook-rows down every edge of it, and nothing else to them at all.

Through the middle of that pool, shouldering the small ones aside, came the deep things.

Two gravebores, blind and armored in overlapping bone, a wedge of fused skull where each of them should have had a face.

A carrion reaver behind them, walking upright on four blade-limbs.

And behind the monster, in no particular hurry, something that had to turn its shoulders sideways to fit through the gap it came out of.

On the far side of it, one low tunnel bled violet light. Every line of the rebuilt dungeon pointed at that door.

Alice’s halo climbed to hang in the dark above him. Her voice came out very careful.

’Count them down for me.’

He did not stop at the mouth of that chamber. He went into it at a run, in Pride, and threw the salvo out ahead of himself.

Forty glyphs carved themselves across that cavern inside one breath, angular and violet-white, hanging over the pooled swarm in a grid. Then they fired.

The floor of the chamber came apart. Arcane bolts went down through the massed crawlers in overlapping volleys, cratering stone, throwing bodies into the walls. The kill column at the edge of his vision stopped being a stack and became a blur.

It cleared him a third of that floor, and a third was not enough.

The ceiling let go.

The flensers came off it as one motion, screaming, a gray sheet unfolding into hooks. There was no Aria in this sky to make the ceiling somebody else’s problem, and it landed on him.

Pride went out of him and Wrath came in between one stride and the next. He killed six in the first three seconds and wore four more.

The ones he wore did not bite. They set their hook-rows into the gaps his armor had already given up and pulled, and what came away came away in strips.

Alice burned two off his back at contact range, close enough that he felt her beam come through the plate as heat.

While he was tearing the last one out of his neck, the floor arrived.

The gravebores came at him in sequence from two angles, blind, running off sound and floor-tremor alone.

He read them right, took the first head-on with a Wrath detonation through his open palm hard enough to stagger it into its brother’s path, and put both of them into the far wall in a tangle of legs.

He read them right and it cost him anyway.

The impact punched in under his ribs from his blind side, a hot shock already through his left side before he understood what it was.

The spur came out of the sideways-shouldered giant’s own shoulder, a barbed meter of fused bone driven clean through him by a thing that had not slowed down to aim it.

It had crossed the whole chamber under the noise of its own brothers’ charge.

He went off his feet backward with all of that weight behind it, into a bone pillar that broke apart around him.

The rubble buried his legs.

”Gnh...”

The sound he made under it was short and ugly, and he did not hear himself make it.

The impaler loomed over him for the finish, hauling the spur back out of his hip to line the next one up. Millions of Earthling eyes were pointed at Kaiden’s face, breaths held.

”Got you.”

Kaiden killed it from underneath.

Greatsword up two-handed into the soft seam where the plate did not reach, up through the roof of that thing’s mouth and into whatever it used for a brain, and the whole dead weight of it came down onto the rubble on top of him.

[You’ve slain Bonespur Impaler (Level 124). +610,000 XP.]

[You’ve gained 39 DMP.]

He could not feel his left boot.

The spur had gone through the muscle above his hip on its way out, and the wound was pinned shut by the impaler’s own weight, which was the only reason it wasn’t emptying him.

The swarm that had chased him down four levels came over the rubble after him. They had all the time they wanted now. He was the one pinned.

The only thing keeping them off him was Alice, her beams walking the rubble line, burning the first crawler of every rush before it cleared the stone.

He had swapped to Gluttony the moment the weight came down.

The carcass lay against him from collarbone to knee, and the stance drank what was still in it. A drained impaler was not enough to close a hole that size. It bought him his arms back, and that was all it bought.

Kaiden set the Blood Monarch’s Gauntlet against a dead weight that outmassed a truck, pushed, and moved it two centimeters.

The carrion reaver was picking its way across the chamber toward him on four blade-limbs, in no hurry, folding its plate down flat against itself as it came.

Pinned on his back under the carcass, Kaiden could not swing, could not dodge, could not even turn to face it. All those blades had to do was arrive.

He pushed again. Four centimeters. The wound tore at the edges and paid for every one of them.

He read the fight cold, and for the first time since the gate the read came back wrong.

Thirty meters of floor for the reaver, against a carcass he could move a hand’s width at a time. Stay under the weight and its blades found him helpless. Roll the weight off and the hole above his hip tore open with nothing left in Gluttony to close it.

Alice’s voice had lost its shape.

She was buying him seconds, and he was spending them on centimeters that were not going to add up in time. For the first time in three months, he was losing with no answer he owned, live, in front of the whole planet.

And it was there, pinned under a monster’s corpse at the bottom of a stolen dungeon, arms shaking, blood pooling under his back in a spreading warmth he had stopped pretending not to notice, that Kaiden Grey finally had the thought he’d been outrunning since the gate.

’Everything I’ve been given adds up to this.’

He’d hit the jackpot of several lifetimes, and he knew it better than anyone.

A system built by a galactic legend dropped in his lap, a filthy, generous thing that paid him power for all kinds of acts.

Every window that had rained XP on him all the way down came out of that.

The inheritance of the Original Sin itself, four Manifestation-tier stances that veterans could not classify.

Vespera’s blood in his veins.

Five women who loved him, each of them worth a man like him five times over.

A guardian standing in the open square above him with a wall of light held between her palms.

A little sister burning over his head right now, thinning the swarm, buying him seconds with everything she had.

All of it.

Every gift, every jackpot, every unfair advantage the universe had ever handed one man.

And one freaky patchwork monster in one rural dungeon had still put him under a corpse, crawling.

Because that was what he was doing now.

The last of what Gluttony pulled out of the impaler bought him the leverage to roll the carcass off his hip, and the rubble on his legs slid away with it in a grind of stone and bone.

There was no standing yet, so he crawled, forearm over forearm through his own blood, dragging his bad side toward the violet door while Alice’s beams cracked overhead like a one-girl artillery line.

The world above watched Kaiden Grey drag himself toward the boss room on his forearms, and the joint feed’s chat exploded.

- Guildless Dave: he’s crawling

- Old Awakener: toward the boss room. He’s crawling toward the boss room!!

- Kaiden’s Wife: I can’t watch this. I can’t stop watching this!!!

He let Gluttony go and took Wrath back for the heat of it. Under that heat, cold and clear, Kaiden was dissatisfied.

The crawl was working. The problem was his ceiling, the place where his strength stopped and this dungeon kept going.

The reaver’s shadow fell over him. He rolled onto his back, put the greatsword up two-handed, and turned its first blade-limb into the rock beside his head. The impact rang up both arms.

Every stance he owned was a one-man answer, and this dungeon had spent four levels asking him many-against-one questions.

He had felt every gap in that answer open, and every gap had a name.