Demonic Po*nstar System

Chapter 812: Flow State

The stress left.

It did not leave gradually. It went out of him like air from a punctured lung, one exhale, and what remained behind it was rhythm.

The rhythm of the Paragon of Sin going to war.

Club from the left. Blade up. Deflect. Step into the opening. Siphon through the cut. Pull blood from the wound. Shape it into a spike mid-stride and drive it into the nearest knee joint. Detonate. Pivot.

Next one coming from behind. Alice’s call arrived before the club did, her perception threading the attack pattern into his reflexes faster than his own eyes could track, and his body answered her input without conscious thought because they had done this for months now, the two of them, the brother and the sister wired into the same nervous system.

He stopped being afraid.

[You’ve slain invading Ruinwalker (Level 108). +1,840,000 XP. +1,800 DMP.]

Three left.

He pulled blood from the fresh kill and shaped twin greatswords again because he’d earned the reserves, the left arm functional now that Alice’s earlier healing and thirty seconds of Gluttony regen had done their work, and when both blades came up in the opposing arcs the Wrath charge along their edges lit the Mire’s toxic haze in a double streak of red light.

He was grinning.

Blood in his teeth and a grin on his face, because this was it. This was the fight. This was the war he’d asked for when he told the system he wanted to be the strongest, when he told his girls they were going to be unquestionable, when he committed the last three months to building something worth protecting.

A kid who used to sit in his dorm room playing video games until 4 AM was now standing in the center of a toxic hellscape with a fractured shoulder and broken bones and millions of witnesses, fighting creatures that outleveled him by forty, and he was winning.

He was winning because his sister was in his head. Because his mother was holding the line behind him. Because five women had looked him in the eyes ten minutes ago and told him to go, trusting him to be enough, and he was going to prove them right if it killed him.

The Paragon of Sin moved.

He didn’t think about stance selection anymore. The stances flowed through him like water through a river channel, Wrath for the strikes, Gluttony between exchanges for the siphon that kept his wounds closing and his reserves filling, Pride for the single glyph he planted in the path of the two remaining exit-blockers that erupted under them in a pressure wave strong enough to crack chitin at the joints and stagger their formation for the two seconds he needed to close the distance.

Two Ruinwalkers. Both damaged. Both still holding their clubs.

He took the left one’s legs.

Both blades in a scissoring low cross that drove through the cracked joints Alice had identified three seconds ago via mana perception, the Wrath detonation going off inside both knees simultaneously, and the Ruinwalker dropped like a building collapsing on its own foundation. Its club hit the ground still gripped and Kaiden was on its chest before the body finished settling, his right blade buried through the skull in a single overhead drive.

[You’ve slain invading Ruinwalker (Level 113). +2,650,000 XP. +2,400 DMP.]

The last one swung at his back while he pulled the blade free.

Alice’s beam hit it across the weapon arm.

Gold-violet light punched through the chitin at the elbow joint and the club fell from fingers that no longer received signals, and in the half-second the Ruinwalker spent processing the loss of its weapon Kaiden put both blades through its chest from behind.

The detonation blew out the front of the chitin casing in a spray of green ichor and bone fragments.

[You’ve slain invading Ruinwalker (Level 115). +2,980,000 XP. +2,600 DMP.]

He pulled blood from both corpses. The Gauntlet drank until the vambraces glowed bright, reserves full for the first time since the fight began. His body was a ruin of partially healed fractures held together by Gluttony-sustained regeneration, his armor soaked dark with blood both his and theirs, and the mask on his face was more patch than original.

But he was standing. And the basin was clear.

The stream ticker erupted.

— Thirsty247: FIVE MONSTERS LIKE THEM! SOLO! WHAT???

— LapdogOfTheEmpress: ⚔️🔥⚔️🔥⚔️🔥 THE HANDSOME EMPEROR STANDS UNBROKEN ⚔️🔥⚔️🔥⚔️🔥

— Thirsty247: Bro, shouldn’t you be drooling at Luna’s PoV?

— TouchGrass: Yeah, why are you hyping the dude who ’cucked’ you?

— LapdogOfTheEmpress: Uhhh!!! MISCLICK! BYE LOSERS

— TouchGrass: ...

Behind him, Vespera had torn the glutton apart for the second time. Her lattice was holding the column’s mouth shut while her shadows carved through the body behind it, and the next wave of runners was going to reach the far passage in about forty seconds if he read the mana signatures Alice was feeding him.

Three seconds. Enough to catch his breath. Enough to let Gluttony close the worst of it. Enough to shape two new blades.

The next wave hit in a mixed formation, Mirescutters darting behind Ruinwalker legs for mobile cover, and the column had learned from its dead because the runners fanned wide across the basin the instant they cleared the entrance, each taking a different lane toward the far passage where the Verdant waited above.

Kaiden planted a Pride glyph across the left approach and felt the mana cost behind his eyes like a blade. A second across the right.

Both lanes sealed in pressure domes that caught the first runners mid-stride and bounced them into the toxic layer hard enough to tear membrane. Spores found exposed flesh in seconds.

But there was an issue.

Pride burned from a well that did not refill mid-fight. Wrath cost nothing but stamina, the Gauntlet cost nothing but harvested blood, and between the two he could fight for a long time.

Pride Stance’s spells - just like Alice’s spells - were the finite resources, every use a withdrawal from a pool that shrank and did not grow back quick enough. He would spend them when the situation demanded it, but for a lengthy fight like this one, he preferred treating it as a trump card more than a baseline stance.

The wave broke. The next came. The one after that came faster, and the intervals stopped being pauses and started being transitions.

[Phase Time Remaining: 01:28:41.]

[Dungeon Ground Held: 51%. Enemy Forces Eliminated: 11%.]

[Level Up! Level 57 ➣ 58.]

[You have 35 unspent stat points.]

Thirty-five. The premium for fighting fifty levels above his tier was steeper than the twenty-level gap had been, and the extra five points sat in his status window like a receipt for what his body had paid to earn them.

Runners were still reaching the passage. Speed was still the bottleneck.

’Agility.’

[Agility: 228 ➣ 263.]

[Sin Fusion multiplier active. Agility (boosted): 365 ➣ 421.]

The higher his base stats, the bigger boon the 60% boost paid.

The basin shrank. Distances that had required sprints now took strides, and the Mirescutters that had been outrunning him ten minutes ago could no longer reach the passage before a body with four hundred and twenty-one Agility reached them first. He caught two from behind in the same heartbeat, both blades through membrane-slick spines, ichor painting his arms to the elbows.

Time lost its edges.