Demonic Po*nstar System

Chapter 807: Ashborn Trio in Action

"Go, Kai."

Aria’s voice came down from her firing position above the line, serene and final, her silver-violet crescents already banking for the next wave without a pause in her rhythm. She did not look down at him.

Bastet was in full agreement. "We didn’t decide to ascend in this fight just so you could stay here and hold our hands, Master."

Luna landed on the carcass of the Wraithstride she’d just split, red lightning still trailing off her shoulders, and her grin was sharp and completely unafraid. "We said sink or swim. So let us swim!"

Calypso ripped her axe free from the monster she’d buried it in and met his eyes, the heat that kiddos had lit in her chest riding behind every word. "Go, Darling. We’ll be here when you get back."

Kaiden looked at them.

Five women standing across the chokehold with blood on their weapons and not a single trace of doubt behind their eyes. He had always known what they were capable of, had watched them bleed and grow and refuse to stop growing through every fight they’d shared, and the only person who had never let them prove it to anyone but him was him.

He gritted his teeth.

"So be it."

Then, with the weariest of hearts, his eyes wished them a good battle and he turned from the line, dissolved his twin greatswords back into the Gauntlet’s reserves, and ran.

Alice’s halo pulled tight against the back of his skull as the acceleration hit, her light dimming to a focused point as they left the frontline behind. The gate pumped another cluster of bodies into the Safe Zone in his peripheral and he did not look back.

Behind him, the line was quiet for exactly one breath.

The fight hadn’t stopped. Scarlet’s fire was still cooking everything that crossed the kill zone and the gate was still pushing bodies through, but the center of the formation was empty now, the space where Kaiden’s twin blades had been turning, and every woman on the line felt the weight of that absence land in her chest before the next wave hit.

Luna was the first to crack.

Her crooked grin climbed her face slowly, red lightning still crackling along her arms. "You know... after all the badass shit we just spouted, if we actually die now, we’re gonna be the most memed women on the internet until the end of time."

Aria was quieter than before. "I don’t care about that. What I care about is that we’d break Kai’s heart."

The line hardened at once. Calypso’s grin set. Bastet’s bare feet pressed deeper into the stone. Nyx exhaled through her nose and folded her barrier tighter around the formation. Breaking his heart was the one thing none of them were willing to do.

They turned back to the gate, and the next wave met women who were done being anyone’s kiddos.

"Let’s rock, bitches!" Luna shouted, blazing brighter than ever before as she turned into lightning.

...

Kaiden ran the back route through his own domain. The Abyssal Corridor swallowed him in eight meters of narrow stone, then the Twilight Sink opened in a kilometer of bioluminescent haze that would have disoriented anything that didn’t own the place. The distortion field parted for its Master, and he crossed it at a sprint.

The Verdant Expanse hit him on the other side, green and warm and open, the cathedral visible at the far end. Home. Taigi stood at the treeline with forty-six bronze-armored Dungeon Borns at her back, the final fallback line already deployed and primed. The brief look between them as Kaiden crossed the meadow said everything the situation required.

He stopped at the Verdant’s edge.

Thirty meters below, the Virulent Mire sat in its sunken bowl, and from up here the three strata of its atmosphere were visible in cross-section: a luminescent carpet of ground spores at the floor, motionless knee-height clouds above them, and a ceiling-pressed vapor that ate the light at the top of the basin. The air rising off the lip already burned faintly at the back of his throat. Anything that breathed down there without protection was dead in moments.

The Blood Monarch’s Gauntlet pulsed at his wrist. Kaiden pulled harvested blood from the reserves along his vambraces and shaped it across his lower face in one smooth motion, the blood hardening into a sealed dark mask from the bridge of his nose to his chin that locked his airways behind a shell the spores would have to eat through before they reached his lungs.

Then he dropped over the edge.

Alice’s telepathy came bright and giddy against the inside of his skull, her halo flaring above his head.

"Don’t jinx it," Kaiden murmured, but the corner of his mouth pulled up behind the mask.

The sounds of combat reached him before the visual did. Shadow and stone and the wet crunch of something enormous being driven into something equally immovable rolled through the Mire’s haze, and when the toxic clouds parted ahead of him, he saw her.

Vespera was already deep in the fight.

Her shadow lattice had the front of the glutton column wrapped in hooked cables that drove into the lead creature’s bloated hide from six angles, the body she was carving now twice the size it had been in the dungeon’s memory, cherry-red hide pulled taut over the mass of river it had swallowed. Behind it, the column stretched back through the murk in a dark procession of bodies pressing forward, and the Mire’s toxic layers were curling around them without visible effect.

Kaiden re-formed his twin greatswords from the reserves along his vambraces, the Gauntlet pulsing once as the blades took shape. He twirled them at his sides in opposing arcs, the harvested blood along their edges singing as the steel turned.

"Let’s do this, Alice."

Then, the monster parted its jaws wide and spat.