Demonic Po*nstar System

Chapter 682: Online

The feed loaded.

The viewer count was already climbing. One thousand. Seven thousand. Twenty thousand in the time it took Sarah to blink, the number ticking upward so fast the digits blurred, because Valhalla’s Sinners going live after an hour of silence was the kind of event that traveled through notification chains like a shockwave.

But the numbers weren’t what mattered.

The screen was.

Kaiden’s stream showed his perspective. The camera captured what he saw, and what he saw was a basin of dark stone far below, crawling with movement. Monsters. Dozens of them, segmented bodies and bladed limbs pouring across the basin floor in a tide of chitin.

And in the background, something massive. A creature the size of a large building, mineral-plated, six-eyed, smashing the ground with enough force to send fissures racing through the stone. Every step it took cratered the earth beneath it.

”What’s going on?” Emilia yelped.

Sarah’s eyes were already scanning. The camera angle, the height, the downward perspective - Kai was on a ridge, high above the depths below, looking down at it like a man watching ants from a rooftop.

Then... Her eyes widened.

”Wait, there’s people down there!” Sarah shouted. ”Those are fighters! Are those... is that New Dawn?!”

”The suckers!” Leia’s voice was sharp and immediate. She leaned forward, chair creaking. ”That’s the two butt buddies’ teams! They’re all in the basin with those... what are those things?”

The chat was already moving fast. A wall of text scrolling at inhuman speed, tens of thousands of viewers pouring in and reacting to the same image: Kaiden Grey, standing above a battlefield where his enemies were surrounded by monsters and doing nothing just watching.

The same thought went through the minds of everyone who saw the stream.

’Why is he just watching?’

One hundred thousand viewers. The number hadn’t stopped climbing since the feed went live, and every new arrival found the same scene: chaos below, stillness above, and the growing, sickening realization that the stillness was the point.

Then Kaiden spoke.

”My beautiful angels.”

His voice came through the stream audio warm and tender, the kind of tone a man used when he was proud of the people around him. The camera shifted as he turned to address his girls, and for a moment the basin disappeared, replaced by a glimpse of Luna’s grin and Calypso’s tail and Aria’s silver hair catching grey light.

”Our fellow awakened combatants are in a life-or-death situation.” His tone was measured, the voice of a man addressing a civic responsibility. ”It is our duty to help them out.”

Sarah’s blood went cold.

Because she knew that voice.

”Oh my god,” Leia breathed. ”Oh my god!”

The camera turned back to the basin.

Kaiden shifted his stance, and the stream’s audio picked up something that made the viewers go silent at once.

A sound like the air itself tearing, a low, resonant hum that built in frequency. The edges of the frame warped as arcane energy saturated the space around the camera, sigils bleeding violet and black into the periphery of Kaiden’s vision.

His girls joined him. The stream couldn’t capture the full scope of it, but the audio told the story: the crack of Luna’s Storm, the deep thrum of Calypso’s Carnage, Aria’s moonlight turning the frame silver at the edges, and beneath it all, a golden pulse from above that washed the entire feed in blinding white for half a second.

The chat stopped scrolling.

Hundreds of thousands of viewers held their breath as one.

Kaiden raised his hands toward the basin, and through his eyes, people watched the killing floor come into focus. Chinedu’s spear carving into monsters while his squad crumbled around him. Ash swinging wildly, blood on his face, screaming at fighters who couldn’t hear him over the roars of the beasts.

His aim didn’t discriminate.

”Let’s start blasting.”

The stream went white for a moment.

When the feed returned, the basin was screaming.

Kaiden’s arcane sphere had detonated at the center of the killing floor, and the blast radius didn’t care what it touched. The compressed force expanded outward in a ring of violet destruction that shredded Slashers and shattered barrier enchantments with equal enthusiasm, hurling bodies in every direction, chitin and steel alike tumbling across the rubble.

Three of Chinedu’s fighters caught the outer edge of the detonation and went airborne, armor crumpling inward from the concussive force, limbs ragdolling as they hit stone twenty meters from where they’d been standing.

Ash took the worst of it.

The blast wave caught him chest-height and launched him backward into the boulder he’d been propped against. His already-cracked breastplate shattered on impact, fragments of enchanted steel embedding in his ribs and collar, and the sound he made when he hit was wet and final. He slid down the rock and didn’t get up immediately, blood running from his mouth in a steady stream, eyes wide and glassy with the confusion of a man whose lungs had just been introduced to his spine.

Luna’s Storm hit the basin floor a half-second later.

Violet lightning erupted from the ridge in a cascading web that struck the nearest Slasher and chained, leaping from wet chitin to wet chitin, from ichor-soaked stone to the metal boots of a fighter standing in the wrong puddle.

Brittany shrieked as the current ripped through her legs and dropped her to the ground, convulsing, her enchanted greaves conducting the charge straight through the protective weave and into the muscle beneath. A Slasher two meters from her took the same bolt and fared worse, its nervous system cooking inside its carapace.

Stacy caught a chain arc through her sword arm and lost her grip, the blade clattering away as her fingers seized into a claw.

Aria’s beam came down from above. A silver lance of concentrated moonlight that carved through a cluster of four Slashers and kept going, punching into the ground where Chinedu’s buffer was trying to recast her barriers. The woman threw herself sideways and the beam missed her by less than a meter, but the thermal bloom from its passage seared the skin along her left arm and face, and her concentration shattered. The barriers she’d been maintaining over three wounded fighters flickered and died.

Bastet’s contribution was quieter and worse. The ground beneath one of Chinedu’s flanking fighters erupted, a pillar of superheated stone punching upward through the rubble and catching him in the torso. His armor held for half a second before the heat melted through the lower plates, and his howl was sharp enough to cut through every other sound in the basin. He collapsed sideways off the pillar, alive, but the left side of his body was a ruin of scorched metal and blistered skin.

Calypso looked at the basin, then at her axe, then at the basin again.

”I’m not great with ranged attacks,” she announced to no one in particular, ”but let me try!”

She swung the axe overhead in a two-handed arc and released at the apex. The weapon tumbled end over end through the air, trailing dark Carnage energy in a spiral, and buried itself in a Slasher forty meters below with enough force to split the creature in half lengthwise. The Carnage energy erupted from the bisected corpse and spread to two adjacent Slashers, rotting through their carapaces in seconds.

The axe was stuck in the ground.

Calypso blinked. ”Ah. I didn’t think that through.”