Demonic Po*nstar System

Chapter 1004: If Only...

The flankers kept living on his blind side because no Luna arrived there first.

Calypso would’ve borne the brunt of the damage, letting him avoid being targeted all the time.

Bastet would have claimed this floor with one step and dared the wave to move on it.

One fold from Nyx and the tunnel mouths would have stopped pouring.

Nothing was supposed to reach his back, because his back was Alexandra’s, and she stood a kilometer of rock above him being everyone else’s wall instead. Aria would have made the ceiling her sky, and no flenser would have dropped out of it alive.

He wanted them down here.

Under that, plainer and uglier, he wanted what they carried, the answers themselves, and down here, with no one watching, there was no pretending otherwise.

The second strike he turned wide. The third took a strip out of his forearm.

Alice’s beam found the joint of a raised blade-limb and burned it black. The reaver shrieked, flinched wide, and kept coming.

Everything in this dungeon wore something taken off something else.

The hounds wore boar plate.

The reaver above him wore a coat of dead weapons.

The thing at the top cut pieces off its own living minions with a butcher’s patience, and that was the whole shape of its want: what it wanted, it took.

Kaiden’s want pointed at people who loved him.

So he reached down the bonds and asked.

Not for rescue, the door above could not spare one woman and he would not have taken her.

He asked for what they carried, plainly, the way he had reached for the empty stance slots back in the shrine street and gotten silence.

This time the answer came before he finished asking.

Six bonds lit at once, every one of them in the middle of a war.

Luna’s answer arrived at full sprint. Calypso’s came mid-swing, he would have sworn to it. Alexandra’s came steady, under a weight he could feel the far edge of.

Each bond dimmed as its owner gave away something she was using to stay alive, and not one of them hesitated for the length of a heartbeat.

What came down the bonds was the giving itself, and the giving rewrote the want in his chest.

Everything he had was given, freely, without terms, by a system, a mother, six women, and the little sister burning through her mana above his head.

What is given cannot be stolen. What is stolen was never yours.

The thing at the top of this dungeon had spent its whole life taking, and by that law it had never owned anything at all.

[The Successor has decided.]

The reaver’s fourth strike never landed, because the world had gone still and cold, and the violet light of the chamber bent.

[Envy: The Dispossessor.]

[The Heavenly Demon’s Envy was want without end. He looked upon what the universe kept for itself and could not rest while another held it. It was the sin that raised his hand against the universe.]

[The Successor’s Envy refuses. What his enemy holds, his enemy loses.]

[While Envy is active, dispossession spreads out from the Successor to claim the room he stands in.]

The Wrath heat drained out of him, and what filled the space behind it was cold, and the cold was hungry.

Kaiden breathed in, and the fifth of his stances opened its eyes.

’Took you long enough.’

The reaver raised all four blade-limbs, and the blades sloughed. There was no other word for it.

The layered plating that had turned his greatsword twice ran off its limbs like wet clay off a wheel, sheet after sheet letting go of a body that suddenly had no claim on any of it.

The thing that stumbled back from him was soft, pale, and small inside the space its armor used to fill, and what it had underneath those blades were four thin white arms that had never once been looked at.

Above him the halo flared white at its edges, brighter than anything violet in that chamber, and stayed flared.

The flensers wheeling down for the easy kill lost their hook-rows mid-stoop, hook after hook pattering onto the cavern floor, and the gray sheet unfolding out of the dark became a gray sheet of bodies, falling.

”Big Brother,” Alice said out loud, halo turned all the way around, forgetting the feed, forgetting everything. ”Their armor. It’s falling off them...!”

Kaiden got a knee under himself. Then a foot.

The greatsword hummed dark and low. Every living thing in that chamber felt the room change owners, every crawler, every flenser, every deep-grown horror wearing bone it had grown or taken off something else.

On the surface, the joint feed’s viewers watched a cavern full of armored horrors shed everything they wore, and the chat lost its mind.

- Guildless Dave: what did he just do???

- Kaiden’s Wife: their armor is falling off?!

- Old Awakener: armor does not just walk off a body, people. That’s a brand new stance.

He stood all the way up, blood sheeting off him, and went to work.

The reaver tried to back away on limbs with nothing left on them, and he took its legs out with the flat of the greatsword.

By the time the point went in he had already swapped, Wrath running down both arms, and the strike went through the soft of it and out the far side in a burst of heat that lit the whole cathedral.

[You’ve slain Carrion Reaver (Level 121). +510,000 XP.]

[You’ve gained 36 DMP.]

A crawler came off the wall at his blind side with its skull plate already gone, sloughed somewhere behind it in the first cold breath.

He caught it by the throat with the gauntlet, let Gluttony drink it dry, and dropped it empty on the stone.

Then he was cold again, and the room lost its armor again.

The gravebores got up off the far wall and came at him together. Their bone started leaving them at forty meters, then twenty, then ten, so what arrived at his Wrath detonation was two blind animals made of nothing but meat and momentum.

They did not survive the contact.

[You’ve slain Gravebore (Level 114). +340,000 XP.]

[You’ve gained 31 DMP.]

[You’ve slain Gravebore (Level 116). +380,000 XP.]

[You’ve gained 32 DMP.]

Alice’s voice came apart into a wordless chime, and her beams walked down through the hookless flensers from one wall of the chamber to the other.

’I know.’ He put the greatsword through a crawler that had lost its skull plate mid-lunge. ’These Frankenstein amalgamations no longer stand a chance.’

Cold, hot, cold, drink, cold.

Envy stripped, Wrath detonated, Gluttony drank, one stance at a time on every breath he took, and the kill column went down the edge of his vision faster than a human eye could follow it.

The cycling had a cost.

Every breath he spent cold was a breath Gluttony went without drinking.

The hip his own Wrath heat had seared shut tore on a pivot and went from numb to white. His vision narrowed at the edges and stayed narrowed.

Halfway through the pool the bad leg folded mid-swap, and the nearest crawler was on him before the knee landed. He took its lunge on the crossguard, put the gauntlet in its throat, and drank it dry standing back up.

’It’s fine. You no longer have to worry about me.’

By the end, the whole respawn pool was a floor of soft gray shapes and settling dust.

...

The last stretch was quiet.

He didn’t read the kill windows stacked at the edge of his vision.

He walked, and it was almost a walk, through the low violet tunnel with one hand against the wall. The dungeon around him had finally, completely, run out of things to send.

His breath came in threes. Two short, one that caught on the ribs.

The wound above his hip had been seared shut by his own Wrath heat, a field dressing with a pain bill he’d be paying for a week. The blood he left on the tunnel wall marked his progress in handprints, evenly spaced.

Alice said, very quiet, very close, all pretense of the work voice gone.

’Always, little sis.’

The tunnel opened, and Kaiden came out into the heart of the dungeon, and stopped.

The core hung in the center of the chamber, a slow-turning knot of violet light. Its light fell on a hoard of parts.

Plating stood in sorted stacks taller than he was, scythe-limbs were bundled like firewood, and hides lay folded beside bone sorted by length, by thickness, by kind. It was a supply depot, built by something that kept everything it ever cut loose.

And against the far wall, arranged with care, lay the remains of something enormous.

It had been dead a long time. It had been the biggest thing in this dungeon by far. The skull alone told him that, and the skull’s crown was scarred with a hundred healed-over gouges.

Its long jaw was missing, taken, cut away at the hinge with a butcher’s tidy lines.

On his last legs, barely breathing, bleeding, victorious, Kaiden looked at what was left of the dungeon’s true boss.

The core turned overhead, and its violet light didn’t flicker, because nothing about any of this had ever bothered it at all.

Kaiden limped under the slow turn of the core and stopped, dripping. He raised the Blood Monarch’s Gauntlet and set its open palm up into the core’s light.

’That freak upstairs killed its own boss and took its house. I always knew Japan was a bit freaky, but why is my first dungeon dive such a mess?’

Kaiden shattered the core.