Demonic Po*nstar System

Chapter 795: Stranded Outside

...

The white had not arrived gently.

One blink the staging plain was a battlefield with a kilometers-tall mountain falling out of the sky onto it, every awakened emptying their reserves upward in a final coordinated push, helicopters wheeling out of the Kaiju’s altitude band and reporters along the treeline already running.

The next blink the sky simply stopped. The horizon stopped with it. The trees stopped. The mountain stopped.

Where Kaiden’s dungeon gate had stood, where the Kaiju’s descending mass had been about to land, where the Chairman’s second pressure-blade had been finishing its arc, there was now flat unwritten ground and a sealed boundary you could not see from this side.

The Kaiju was gone.

So were the dungeon, the gate, the staging chamber Eclipse had built around it, the Shadow Monarch holding her ground a hundred meters out, the Flame Monarch laughing into a falling sky, and the nine figures inside the threshold who had been about to find out how a Dungeon Master Battle worked.

In their place, an empty plain stood.

Sound came back in pieces.

Wind first, finding the gap the seal had left and filling it. Then the throats and the radios and the gear, all at once, every channel that had been holding its breath releasing it in the same heartbeat.

”...holy shit. Holy shit, are you seeing this?! It- the gate, the- it’s just GONE, are you-”

A reporter’s voice broke open into the air without finding any sentence to land on.

A second voice cut over hers a beat later, an Eclipse handler with a comm pinned to her shoulder.

”Where did they go?! Somebody get me eyes on the seal! Get me a scryer, I want a read on what’s on the other side of that boundary!”

”Ma’am, there is no boundary to peer through...”

”It’s as if the gate ceased existing altogether...”

Past her, a medic was hauling on a runner who hadn’t moved in ten seconds.

”Hey! Look at me, kid. You’re standing on a live plain. You wanna stand on a live plain or you wanna get behind the cordon? Move.”

The runner blinked at him, mouth half-open. A second medic shoved a water bottle into the kid’s chest from the side.

”Drink. Walk. Whatever you need to do, because we’ll both lose our jobs if you faceplant on camera.”

Somewhere off to the right, an artifact still keyed to the original target burned itself out against nothing and went dark, and the technician kneeling beside it slapped his palm onto the dead casing.

”Oh, fuck me. The lattice is recoiling.”

Further out along the treeline, a streamer who had been narrating in clipped Mandarin a minute earlier had gone fully silent for the first time in his career, his lens still pointed at empty ground. When his voice came back it came back small.

”...The gate is gone. Kaiden Grey is gone. I am- I am going to keep streaming, everyone! ... But there’s nothing else to stream.”

The Chairman of the Association lowered his hand.

He had held it raised since the second strike. The pressure he’d been about to drop into the Kaiju’s open ribs was still gathered along the line of his palm, and he let it disperse now in one slow exhale, the air above his fingers shimmering and giving up.

His coat was streaked with ash and a finer dust the artifacts had thrown when they failed.

Grace walked up to him.

The Chairman’s secretary had her tablet in one hand, her awakened interface ticking along the edge of her peripheral vision, every alert in it pinging at once.

She read the unwritten sky for a moment longer.

Then she said it.

”...So that’s a Dungeon Master Battle.”

”The start of one...” the Chairman sighed.

”How alien.”

Grace’s gaze cut sideways to him. He had not moved, busy watching the spot where the gate had been with the same unhurried attention he had been giving the Kaiju a minute earlier, when the Kaiju had been a problem he could still hit.

”I bet we won’t gain access until one Master is defeated.”

”Well, we will try of course. But I don’t have high hopes.”

She let the air out of her chest. It wasn’t quite a laugh.

”The fate of humanity might be sitting on the other side of that gate right now.”

The Chairman did not answer immediately.

His pause was brief. Just long enough for the sentence to settle in the open air between them, for the aides who had drifted close again to register what she’d said, and for the medic who had shouted at the runner to stop shouting and glance over.

Then he turned his head.

”Losing two Monarchs and the anomalous group of youngsters would be a grievous wound. I will not pretend otherwise. But the United States of America has not, in its history, been defined by the losses it has taken. We have walked through every disaster that has been placed in front of us. Plagues. Wars. We persevered through every one of them and we will persevere through this.”

He let the line stand for a moment before declaring,

”Whoever falls in there, this country does not. We prepare. We adapt. We continue.”

The plain held its breath around the words.

Two of the aides who had been edging back toward the cordon stopped edging. One of them, a young coordinator who had been on this staging plain less than three hours and had spent the last thirty seconds of it watching a mountain fall out of the sky, straightened her shoulders without thinking about it. The medic put one hand to his comm and turned it off because whatever the runner was saying could wait. Even one of the Eclipse veterans further out, who had no business hearing the Chairman from where he stood, lifted his head.

Grace caught the shift around her.

’What a nice speech. Very patriotic, sir,’ she giggled inwardly. Verbally, she just said,

”...You’re right. I spoke out of line, sir.”

The Chairman let her have the apology without comment, his eyes dancing with hers, both fully aware that he had to deliver that speech thanks to his station.

Grace flicked her interface back open.

The numbers were doing something obscene.

She stared at the viewer counter for a full two seconds.

Then she scoffed under her breath.

”Well... I guess at least they can stream from in there, wherever ’in there’ is.”

The Chairman’s gaze had returned to the empty ground.

”If they don’t get consumed,” she continued, half to him and half to the interface, ”they’ll come back legends. The whole planet is soon going to be on this feed.”

The number ticked higher as she watched.

Then her eye caught a strange curiosity in the feed.

”Oh? And would you look at that...”

Her voice took on a chirp that did not belong on this plain.

”Kaiden and the rest of the gang just got even more powerful. Just randomly~”

The Chairman’s eye did move this time, one slow lateral track to her, and the look he gave her was one he had handed hundreds of subordinates over the years for taking liberties with the register he expected on duty.

”Stop messing around. We are not in a casual setting.”

Grace turned her face toward him with the deadest possible neutrality.

She did not say anything out loud, but her own look, fully composed and completely flat, conveyed the sentiment: ’you literally assigned me to watch their pornographic content as part of my official duties, sir, but go off.’ She held it long enough for him to register it, then she let her interface cover the bottom half of her face again.

The Chairman, for his part, ignored the look entirely. He had been ignoring looks like that from her for a great many years.

Grace exhaled through her nose and accepted the situation for what it was.

”...Orders, sir?”

”We prepare for the worst case.”

The Chairman turned his back on the empty ground and started walking toward the Association cordon with the same unhurried pace he had used to approach it.

”If they lose in there, the Kaiju likely will come back out of it onto this coordinate, and I’d wager it’ll walk out of it stronger than it walked in. We do not get a second chance to set the line. Pull every reserve we did not commit to this engagement. Call upon all our notable guilds to partake and recall the S-tiers from the Pacific deployment. I want a welcoming party staged on this plain that makes the one we just put together look like a scouting line.”

Grace was already moving, her interface unfolding into a working pane in front of her as she fell into step.

”Yes, sir.”

”And get me a continuous read on the seal. The instant it shifts, I want to know.”

”Yes, sir.”

Grace lagged half a step behind him for the length of three paces, time enough to glance once more at the corner of her interface where the stream feed still ran, muted, ticking past 27 million viewers and still climbing.

Inside the seal, the feed had cut to a wide angle. Kaiden’s greatsword was coming out of a strider’s body in one clean arc, a shockwave radiating outward across the abyssal stone, his Sin-fused women at work in the Cavern’s open ground around him.

The camera she had been watching panned past a flash of silver that was Aria mid-air, past Luna’s red lightning trail, past a coral haze where Nyx had compressed four fliers into the ground.

And then, at the edge of the frame, the chokehold.

Two figures in overwatch behind the line.

The redhead. The shadow.

Grace’s eyes lingered on the second one a fraction longer than the first.

Vespera stood with her hands lowered and her cloak settled, watching.

’Good luck,’ Grace thought toward her. ’And please bring our little stars back home safely.’

She closed the secondary pane and pulled up the cordon roster.

The Chairman was already three strides ahead.

Grace caught up.