Demonic Po*nstar System

Chapter 815: Confused

The fresh mana hit his system like cold water on a hot engine, the wells behind his spells refilling in a rush that made Alice’s Conduit link hum brighter and his Pride glyphs cost less than they had in thirty minutes.

The next wave was already clearing the entrance when the allocation settled, a mixed formation of Cragshells and Ruinwalkers backed by a screen of Mirescutters fanning wide for the passages, and Kaiden met the lead Cragshell at full Wrath with both blades driving into the joint gap he’d learned to find fifteen waves ago.

The carapace split and the Cragshell dropped.

He pivoted into the Ruinwalker behind it and felt the new mana reserves answer when he planted a Pride glyph under its feet, the pressure dome cracking chitin at the knees and staggering the bipedal frame long enough for both blades to find the gap.

Across the basin, Vespera’s lattice was buried three layers deep in the elites she had been grinding since the column’s vanguard pushed into the Mire, her shadows driving barbed hooks through gaps in the mountain-born bone plating that she’d spent twenty minutes carving open.

Each blow landed heavier than the last, the openings finally wide enough for her cables to reach the bodies underneath.

Then the Cragshell he was mid-swing on stopped fighting.

Its club came down in a half-committed arc that lost force before it landed, the chitin-sealed body turning from Kaiden mid-stride as if the kill it had been chasing had stopped mattering.

Behind it, the Ruinwalker pulled its weapon arm back and took a step toward the entrance, then another, its massive frame rotating away from the fight with a calm that living creatures did not show when they were losing.

They were leaving.

’Huh?’

Combat Drift cracked as the wrongness registered, and the person underneath it surfaced behind his own eyes for the first time in twenty minutes.

Three Mirescutters in the basin’s far lanes had reversed course and were running back toward the entrance with the same frantic speed they’d used to run away from it, except now they were running home.

A cluster of Veilstalkers slid through the haze in the opposite direction from every approach pattern Alice had mapped, their serpentine bodies threading back through the toxic layers toward the corridor mouth.

Alice’s halo rotated in a wide sweep.

The elites Vespera had been grinding absorbed her next volley of strikes. They did not counter. Their bone plating cracked under the hooks and their bodies shuddered with each impact, but their arms stayed low and their weapons stayed down, and all three of them were backing toward the entrance in coordinated steps that traded Vespera’s kill windows for distance.

They were defending and retreating, buying time to leave.

One eyebrow lifted.

From Vespera, that was screaming.

Then her eyes hardened, displeased as she understood what was going on.

She did not let them go quietly. The Shadow Monarch poured into the drained magma passage after the retreating column, her lattice reaching past her body to hook anything with its back turned.

A retreating enemy was the easiest kill a shadow could ask for, and the smaller templates paid for it, Mirescutters and Veilstalkers caught mid-flight by cables that found spines and throats before the creatures knew she was behind them, six kills in thirty meters of dry stone where the river used to flow.

The three elites bled but held. Her hooks drove into the wounds she’d carved over twenty minutes and tore them wider, bone plating cracking under impacts that would have killed anything under level 100, but the three of them rotated the damage between their bodies, each one shielding the most wounded behind the other two without breaking stride.

They reached the passage’s far end bleeding from a dozen open wounds each and disappeared back the way they’d come, still standing.

He pulled the tracker.

[Dungeon Ground Held: 54%.]

The number ticked upward as he watched. 58%. 63%. The Claimant’s forces were withdrawing, every body in his domain pulling back toward the gate on the same silent cue.

[Enemy Forces Eliminated: 28%.]

Frozen. Nothing left to kill because nothing was trying to fight.

Kaiden expanded the Dungeon Master overlay past the Mire, past the Sink, out to the chokehold.

Same thing.

The survivors at the gate were pulling back through the threshold in the same coordinated withdrawal, and six women stood across the chokehold with weapons raised and nothing left to fight.

Scarlet’s fire dimmed to a simmer as she watched the last of them go and then looked at the girls, as if one of them could explain what had just happened.

— Thirsty247: uhhhh why did they stop

— TouchGrass: ????

— KaisBicep: DID THEY WIN?? IS IT OVER??

[Dungeon Ground Held: 82%... 91%... 97%...]

The ground came back in a steady climb. Every corridor, every passage, every meter the Claimant’s forces had occupied for the last hour returning to his control as the last of the column pulled through the gate and out of his domain.

[Dungeon Ground Held: 100%.]

The realization settled behind his ribs before his mind finished assembling it.

Every wave from the first Mirescutter to the Ruinwalkers that had fractured his shoulder had been data, and the Claimant had watched him generate it for a full hour while noting every response, every position, every fusion his team deployed.

’It scouted us,’ he thought. ’The whole phase was used to study us.’

The thought sat there for three seconds, cold and clean and carrying everything it meant for Phase 2.

Then he pulled up his stat window.

Level 60. Four levels gained in a single phase, each one fatter than anything a fighter at his tier was supposed to earn, because no one at his tier was supposed to be alive in a column forty or more levels above their head.

Kaiden looked at the numbers. Looked at the bicep under the layered ichor and dried blood, the muscle that had been swinging greatswords through chitin-sealed armor for over an hour and still had fuel in the tank. Flexed it once, felt the 349 answer, and the grin that had burned away under Combat Drift came back in full.

’It scouted us? It’s much smarter than I gave it credit for, but...’ He dissolved both blades back into the Gauntlet and cracked his neck. ’While it was taking notes, we were getting stronger. I’ll take that deal every time.’

He checked the bond.