Demonic Po*nstar System

Chapter 758: Eclipse’s First Hunt

They landed on its back.

Kaiden’s greatsword punched through the cracked plate on its right shoulder and sank deep enough to anchor him. The Gluttony field ignited on contact, stolen mana flooding through the gauntlet and into his body, raw and mineral-tasting and enormous. He braced his legs against the creature’s spine, pulled the blade free, and swung again. A second plate split apart beneath the edge. A third fractured on the backswing.

Calypso didn’t bother with precision. She buried her axe into the beast’s hide, ripped it loose, and buried it again two feet to the left. The Tyrant’s armor was thick but she was Carnage itself.

The Granite Tyrant thrashed beneath them, slamming its body against the rock shelf hard enough to shatter stone, trying to scrape the two parasites off its back. Kaiden rode the impacts with his knees braced, his gauntlet used to create binds that held him in place. Calypso didn’t even try to hold on properly, she just kept swinging, letting momentum and her own grip strength handle the rest.

The beast’s crown eyes locked onto the closest target it could reach. Luna, a couple meters ahead, still bleeding it from the flank.

It charged.

Forty tons of armored predator bearing down on a petite woman with purple hair who weighed less than one of its toes.

”Wrong choice, stupid rhino.” The gremlin grinned, lightning charging up. ”I might be the smallest, but I’m also the fastest!”

Luna flickered sideways so fast she left an afterimage. The ram struck empty air and carried the beast forward into the rock face with an impact that shook the ground.

It whipped around, furious, and swept its massive head in a wide arc that cracked the rock face where Luna had been standing a half-second earlier. Luna was still circling, flickering in to cut and flickering out before the beast could track her, bleeding it from every angle. It couldn’t catch her. It knew it couldn’t catch her. Its crown eyes rolled upward, feeling the two parasites still carving through its armor, and arrived at a decision.

Frustrated, it dropped.

The beast threw itself sideways and rolled, all forty tons of mineral-fused hide grinding against the mountain shelf like a boulder in a landslide, solving the problem of two small things on its spine the way any animal would.

Kaiden read it before the first shoulder dipped.

He grabbed Calypso around the waist and jumped. Straight up, explosive.

”Nyx!”

”On it~”

The spatial catch came mid-ascent. The sensation of falling simply stopped, and Kaiden hung suspended twenty meters above the battlefield with a demoness under his arm and the Granite Tyrant rolling uselessly below them, grinding its wounded hide against stone that wasn’t going to help.

It had solved the wrong problem.

Kaiden shifted to Pride. Gluttony dissolved and arcane glyphs spiraled outward from his free hand, the stolen mana becoming ammunition. He fired downward. Concentrated arcane bolts cratered the defenses Calypso had already weakened, punching through plates that had been cracked by her axe and his greatsword.

The barrage trio didn’t pause. Aria’s crescents hammered into the beast’s exposed flank while Bastet’s eruptions detonated beneath it and Alice’s golden beams stitched a line across its belly with surgical precision.

Four ranged sources pouring destruction into a creature that had thrown itself onto the ground to escape two melee fighters and instead given four shooters a clear target.

”Darling,” Calypso said, watching the carnage below, tail curling with satisfaction. ”This is a lovely view.”

The Tyrant found its feet. Whatever survival instinct drove a creature this armored overrode the pain, and it hauled itself upright through sheer mass and fury.

”It’s thinking of running!” Nyx shouted and instantly swung them downward in a smooth arc and let go.

Kaiden landed clean on the creature’s shoulders and shifted to Gluttony the instant his feet touched hide, his greatsword sinking into a wound he’d carved earlier. Calypso hit the neck instead of the spine, slid two meters across the beast’s thrashing hide, buried her axe into a gap between plates to stop her slide, and started swinging from there.

The beast’s defenses were failing. What had been overlapping mineral-fused plates thick enough to deflect conventional weapons was now a ruin of cracks, craters, and missing sections. It was bleeding from a dozen wounds, and the ones Kaiden’s siphon touched were draining mana on top of blood.

The barrage from above didn’t let up either.

Just like the Space Valkyrie predicted, the Granite Tyrant broke.

So it ran.

Kaiden and Calypso stayed on.

Nyx couldn’t stop it. A level 78 apex predator resisting with everything it had was so far above her power that trying to grab it directly would have burst every vessel in her skull before its stride even slowed. She’d learned that lesson early.

But Nyx didn’t need to stop it. She just needed to make it clumsy.

A rock the size of a skull was tossed beneath the Tyrant’s front foot mid-stride. The beast’s weight came down on it wrong and its leg buckled, costing it a half-second of momentum.

It recovered, surged forward again, and a second rock rolled under its hind foot from a direction that shouldn’t have been possible. Then a third. Then four more in rapid sequence, a cascade of stones yanked from the mountainside and deposited beneath forty tons of fleeing predator with the timing of a woman who couldn’t win the slug fest but could absolutely untie your shoes while you were trying.

The Tyrant staggered. Its charge turned into a lurching scramble, legs fighting for purchase on ground that kept betraying it, Kaiden and Calypso still on its shoulders, still cutting, still draining. Its shell was in shreds. Its mana reserves were gutted. Every step sprayed blood from wounds it couldn’t close.

It wasn’t going anywhere.

And while it stumbled over a floor that wouldn’t stay still, Nyx reached out with her other hand and grabbed Luna.

Luna didn’t resist. Allies were easy. Her body went weightless, lifted by the spatial field, rising fast, higher than the treeline, a purple speck against the blue sky getting smaller and smaller.

Then Nyx angled her hand downward.

Luna’s voice hit them before she did, screaming down from the sky with her Stormblade overhead and murder in her eyes.

”All extras off the stage! Main character coming through!”

Calypso threw herself sideways off the Tyrant’s shoulders, cackling. Kaiden was already clear, having jumped the instant Luna’s speck started growing larger against the sky.

Luna came down like a thunderbolt.

The Stormblade hit the crown of the Granite Tyrant’s skull at terminal velocity, augmented by every point of Agility and Storm energy Luna could channel into a single downward strike. The blade went through skull, bone, and brain.

The Granite Tyrant dropped. Its legs gave out and forty tons of dead monster collapsed into the molten pool Bastet had prepared for it, sending up a plume of steam and ichor that painted the rock face black.

The fight had lasted forty-one seconds.

[You’ve slain Granite Tyrant (Level 78)]

[You’ve gained 1,420,000 XP]

[You’ve gained 32 DMP]

[Level 56 | XP: 2,350,000 / 57,000,000]

No level up just yet... Fifty-seven million was a mountain of its own, and they were chipping away at it one kill at a time. But 250 competition points from a level 76-100 monster just got added to Eclipse’s total, and the gap between them and the rest had gotten even wider.

Luna pulled her Stormblade from the skull with a wet crunch and wiped the ichor off on her pants.

”Forty-one seconds,” she said, and her smile could have lit a city. ”That’s a new personal record.”

The chat detonated.

Back at the guild hall, Kira and Rika watched the analytics dashboard repaint itself in real time. Subscriber conversions tripling. Donation alerts stacking so fast the queue was backing up. Clip shares spreading across every platform on the Awakened Media Network simultaneously, each one carrying the same forty-one seconds to audiences who hadn’t been watching live and were now scrambling to fix that mistake.

Kira looked at her sister. Rika looked back.

They didn’t say a word. They just grinned, identical and enormous.

And in offices, guild halls, private estates, and war rooms across six continents, people who had been watching quietly for a very long time leaned forward in their chairs.

...

Author: The competition arc is over soon... Really this time... Pinky promise.

Being frank, it definitely took longer than planned. But it isn’t like we spent all the time, or even most of it, on the competition itself. However I do understand if some (many) of my adorable readers wish to move on. This note is just to let you know that I’m aware, should you feel this way.

Thanks for all the support!