Demonic Po*nstar System

Chapter 808: Spitting Balloon

"Let’s do this, Alice."

Then, the monster parted its jaws wide and spat.

The stream came out as a pressurized ribbon of stolen river, orange-white and dense enough that the toxic haze combusted on contact and left a tunnel of superheated nothing in its wake.

Kaiden’s body was already moving sideways when the shadow caught it.

Vespera had sealed a mask of braided shadow over her lower face against the Mire’s air, the same solution Kaiden’s blood mask served from the other end of the family toolkit. Her shadows intercepted the torrent six meters from his chest in a braided wall that split the magma into two arcing sprays, cooking the ground spores off the floor wherever the splash landed.

She did not wait for the stream to finish. Her lattice drove past her own deflection and into the glutton’s bloated torso from four angles, barbed shadows punching into cherry-red hide that had been stretched drum-tight by the volume of river packed inside it.

The body held for one beat, and then it didn’t.

Magma erupted from every puncture wound in pressurized jets that lit the Mire orange from wall to wall, and the glutton’s body launched off the ground on the force of its own decompression, careening across the toxic haze in a wild spiraling arc that sprayed stolen river in every direction. Ground spores ignited in its wake, the knee-height clouds combusted into nothing, ceiling vapor scattered upward as superheated air displaced the toxic layers along the creature’s tumbling flight, and a lane of clean air opened through the Mire’s defenses that had not existed three seconds ago.

The glutton shrieked across the basin.

The sound came from the wounds themselves, a high pressurized whistle tearing from every puncture as magma vented in wild arcs, and the body that had been the size of a delivery truck was now a careening deflating mass that hit the Mire’s far wall with a wet concussive boom, bounced, sprayed a fan of orange across the stone, hit the opposite wall harder, and kept going. Each impact changed the trajectory and each trajectory cleared another strip of the Mire’s haze, spores cooking off in the splash zones, the knee-height clouds parting in thermals around the tumbling body, the whistle climbing in pitch as the pressure dropped and the wounds pulled wider.

Vespera’s red eyes narrowed as she tracked the deflating body across the basin. Dissatisfied.

She caught it at the third bounce. Her shadows snagged the deflating body mid-ricochet and whipped it backward in one clean arc, the glutton’s remaining mass cracking into the rock at the column’s entrance hard enough to split the stone underneath. The cleared lanes crisscrossed behind it where every bounce had burned a path, toxic layers too slow to resettle over superheated ground. The column behind the glutton read the clean air and committed, bodies filing into the Mire along the burned corridors without a single spore to slow them down.

The thing stood back up. Its hide hung loose where the pressure had emptied it, folds of cherry-red skin sagging off the frame like a deflated wineskin, and the puncture wounds along its torso were already closing as the flesh reknit over the body. By the time Kaiden processed what he was watching, the creature was on all fours again with its head turning back toward them.

Alice’s telepathy came fast and rattled against the inside of his skull.

’What we always do, Alice.’ He brought both blades up. ’Fight until the end. Use your tracking, every sense you’ve got. Nothing gets past us.’

The gap behind the glutton was already filling with bodies as the column read the cleared air and committed, and both Ashborns moved on the same heartbeat, the son forward and the mother sideways.

Kaiden shifted into Wrath mid-stride and felt it land in every fiber at once. His eyes went red, heat climbed his arms and into both blades in a rising pressure that turned the harvested blood along their edges from dark to bright, and the Sin Fusion’s sixty percent stat boost sang through his frame on top of it, Strength at 320 and Agility at 317, his body moving at a speed and force that belonged to a fighter twice his level. Alice’s halo tightened above his head and her gold-violet light flared as the Wrath’s heat reached her.

The first soldier cleared the lane at a sprint, a Wraithstride reading in the high nineties with three more behind it, and Kaiden put his right blade through its skull at full Wrath charge without breaking stride.

The detonation blew the dorsal scales off the back of its head in a concussive flash that cooked the one behind it across the face, and he was already turning the left blade into the second body before the first hit the ground. Alice’s beam hit the third across the chest from above, gold-violet light punching clean past the hide, and the fourth ate a Wrath-charged throw that Kaiden pulled back on a blood-thread before the carcass finished falling.

[You’ve slain invading Wraithstride (Level 94). +580,000 XP. +800 DMP.][You’ve slain invading Wraithstride (Level 92). +490,000 XP. +760 DMP.][Champion Kill: invading Wraithstride (Level 93). +780 DMP.][You’ve slain invading Wraithstride (Level 95). +640,000 XP. +820 DMP.]

Vespera had committed forward toward the glutton when the elites hit her flanks. Three of them had pushed in behind the soldier rush along the cleared lanes, bodies built heavier than the soldiers and armored in mountain-born bone the same grade as the boss monsters at the gate, and they had used the column’s own bodies as cover while Vespera’s attention was buried in the glutton. They split wide and came in low, angling to sever her lattice at the anchor points where the dark met the walls.

The Mire’s remaining haze pulled back from Vespera in a single breath as if the air itself wanted nothing to do with what was standing in the center of it. Shadows bled from her skin in the slow black pour that had swallowed a mountain range once before, her hair lifting in a wind that touched nothing else, and the lattice unspooled into a thousand hooked lines that met all three on every angle they had committed to.

The first one’s charge drove into a wall of dark that punched past its bone at the shoulder and kept going. The remaining two adjusted and pressed, because they had been built to work as a unit and losing one did not break the pattern.

Alice’s halo split a second beam off the primary fire line, the gold-violet track crossing the Mire in a pencil-thin streak that took a soldier off Kaiden’s flank before it reached him. Her Dominion Convergence pulsed along the Conduit link and the healing aura bloomed outward from his body in a warm ambient glow, ready and waiting for the first wound that would need it.

Kaiden drove into the column with Wrath cooking the air around every swing, twin greatswords turning in the opposing arcs he had made his own, harvested blood building along both blades with every kill. Thirty meters to his left, his mother held the elites in a grinding engagement that tore the ground into ribbons, her shadows driving deeper into the formation with every exchange. Above both of them, Alice’s beams tracked targets on their own, the halo rotating in slow quarter-turns that swept fire across the opening whenever a cluster of soldiers tried to push forward together.

Mother and son, thirty meters apart, fighting the same war from different ends of the same line, and the little sister crowning her brother in gold-violet fire that healed as fast as it killed.

Between swings, the chimes came. Soft system pulses at the back of his skull, one after another, champion kills stacking from the gate. His girls were fighting, and the XP was flowing into them the same way it flowed into him, and somewhere on the other side of his domain five women who had told him to go were proving they meant it.

They were doing their best to evolve.

The Paragon of Sin refused to be left behind!