Demonic Po*nstar System

Chapter 1006: Part of the Trade

He was a ruin.

The feed’s viewers catalogued it in horrified real time: the seared wound above his hip, the opened forearm, the blood dried down one side of his face from scalp to collar, armor plates missing in strips where the flensers had peeled them.

He came out of it all upright, unhurried, Alice’s head tucked against the plate over his heart.

The little sister had fallen asleep in his arms as soon as she ensured her brother was safe.

The gate’s last motes lifted off the rubble behind him and winked out. Where a dimensional tear had stood, there was nothing but evening air over a broken market.

Kaiden looked down at the small, exhausted face against his chest. Every step of that descent, she had been above his head, burning herself down to keep the dark off his back.

”You’re far too amazing, partner,” he told her quietly. ”Thank you for everything.”

Alice slept on. The corner of her mouth curled anyway, as if the words had found her wherever she was.

Then his girls hit him.

”Kai!!”

Luna arrived first, because Luna always arrived first, a violet-white bolt that resolved into a gremlin wrapped around his neck and swearing at him through what were absolutely not tears of joy.

The rest of them landed on him together. Aria and Nyx took a side each, Calypso lifted the entire arrangement in two red arms, and Bastet pressed in with a rumbling purr she would deny to her grave.

The pile went down onto the flagstones in a tangle of armor, limbs, and at least three languages of endearments.

They had held that doorway from the moment he went through it, and every one of them had been braced for a body to come back out instead of a man.

Alexandra crawled closer until she joined the pile and, despite her own overwhelming exhaustion, attempted to render first aid on the sibling duo.

The reinforcements had started rushing over as soon as the pincer ambush happened. That was the scene they arrived to.

They came up the main road in force, a full Shogunate column at a run, blades out, formation tight, braced for a war that had ended without them.

Rank after rank spilled into the square, slowed, and stopped in perfect battle order. They watched Japan’s foreign guests of honor lie in a laughing, crying heap on the flagstones of a liberated town while the Twelfth Garrison cheered themselves hoarse from the barricade line.

At the head of the column, Yunohana took the whole square in with one long look: the dead horde, the shed armor of the thing on the road, the town standing, and the pile.

She crossed the open ground alone, and the strain on her face was visible from the middle of the pile: a fury with nowhere to put itself, held down under courtesy.

Her country had promised this man a backlog gate.

It had handed him a nightmarish mess instead, and she had watched him bleed for it in high definition with the rest of the planet.

She stopped and bowed, low and formal, to the man at the bottom of the heap.

”Lord Grey.” Her voice was soft and did not entirely hold. ”Your first undertaking under our banner should never have looked like this. The fault is ours.”

Under the loving weight of his women, Kaiden considered how much of that guilt he wanted her to carry.

The system chose that moment to settle its own accounts.

[The undertaking is complete. The Kawanami dungeon has been destroyed.]

The kill column he had refused to read for the whole descent collapsed into one settlement.

[Cumulative award: +52,170,000 XP.]

[Cumulative award: +6,140 DMP.]

[A Dungeon Master has been slain. The bounty is divided among all participants of the undertaking.]

[Your share: +45,000,000 XP.]

[Your share: +3,860 DMP.]

[Level Up! Level 84 ➣ 85.]

A full level, at an altitude where the world’s national treasures fought for one a year. Kaiden pulled his status up with a thought.

[Name: Kaiden Grey]

[Class: Paragon of Sin]

[Level: 85. XP: 12,170,000 / 86,000,000]

[Vitality: 340 | Strength: 458 | Agility: 563 | Endurance: 360 | Mana: 320 | Magic: 311]

[Unallocated: 50]

’50 points...’

It rolled through him in one long tide, and from the sounds breaking out across the pile, his interface was not the only one.

Luna sat bolt upright on his chest and started swearing at her status screen with real feeling.

”Level up! Fuck yeah!”

Under all of it, quiet, cold, and patient, the fifth seat in his chest where Envy now lived settled in beside its siblings as if it had always been there.

His whole family was wrapped around him and leveling. He had a brand-new Sin and a dead stain on the map of a country that had treated his people like royalty.

One battered gauntlet worked its way free of the pile, rose over Luna’s shoulder, and gave Yunohana a thumbs-up.

”Ease your heart, Yunohana Tsukikage. This is merely a part of the trade.”

Yunohana looked at the thumb. Then she looked at the man under his family, grinning through dried blood at her.

The fury went out of her all at once. What it left behind, as she straightened from her bow, was a smile she made no attempt to hide.

He wasn’t furious.

...

Nobody’s camera was pointed three streets north of the square, where the collapse had split a riverfront warehouse down the middle.

In the split stood a figure, thin and still, ankle-deep in fallen hounds. It had been standing there since the horde dropped, and it had not looked at the dungeon gate once.

It watched the square. The lights, the column, the laughing pile with Kaiden Grey at the bottom of it.

Its mouth worked a while before any sound came out of it, and the sound arrived wet.

”Mistress,” it said. ”Must... alert... must...”

Then it bent over one of the dead hounds, and the hound began to shrivel.

By the time the Shogunate’s first searchlight swept the street, the figure was gone.