Demonic Po*nstar System

Chapter 813: Supportive Little Sister

The waves came and died, and Kaiden stopped counting them. His body moved on the rhythm Alice threaded through his nervous system, her perception calls landing before his own eyes finished processing the threats they described, and the gap between seeing a target and ending it collapsed past the point of conscious decision.

He did not choose stances anymore. The stances moved through him like weather, each one arriving because the fight demanded it and departing when the demand changed.

The column stopped repeating itself. Mirescutters and Ruinwalkers still came, but they came backed by new templates as the Claimant rotated deeper reserves into the passage. Thornmaws arrived in the eighth wave, low-slung quadrupeds that launched volleys of bone spines from their ridgelines at range and forced him to close distance before the barrage found him.

Veilstalkers came in the eleventh, serpentine bodies that slid through the Mire’s toxic haze like eels through water and did not run for the passage but hunted him through the murk, invisible to everything except Alice’s mana perception.

Cragshells followed in the fifteenth, bipedal heavies armored in stone-layered carapace so dense his Wrath detonations skipped off the exterior and forced him to carve joints buried twice as deep as Ruinwalker plating.

Each new template forced an adaptation that lasted until the next one arrived.

He caught a Cragshell’s collapse mid-wave and dropped into Gluttony with his blade buried between the carapace plates, the siphon pulling mana and vitality through the gap in a rich current that sealed the crack in his shoulder and fed his reserves.

It was a powerful yet slow ability. Gluttony drained at its own pace and required contact for the duration, and he had been connected for exactly two seconds when Alice screamed.

He ripped the blade free and sprinted after the Mirescutter that had darted from behind the dying Cragshell, Wrath reigniting across his frame before the first stride finished. Caught it four meters from the corridor mouth. Both blades through its back.

Gluttony was the king of attrition, the stance that turned a grinding slogfest into a feast, but every second spent draining was a second not spent intercepting. The runners did not pause because the hunter was feeding.

Twenty minutes passed.

He had tried to compensate for the armor that was rapidly falling apart from the extreme strain it was put under.

Somewhere around the tenth wave, when a Thornmaw barrage scored his ribs through the shirt, Kaiden shaped blood armor across his chest and shoulders the same way he shaped greatswords: harvested blood compressed and hardened into dark plating that locked over his torso in overlapping segments. The Gauntlet built protection as well as it built weapons, and the construct worked. A Cragshell’s fist bounced off the chestplate the way it would have bounced off forged steel.

The fight did not let him keep it. Every hit cracked the plating, every crack cost reserves to repair, and the ichor from every kill layered over the construct in a film that cooled and thickened and added weight with each wave.

The enemies climbed in speed and level, and his own blood seeped into the armor from inside and bloated it past what he had shaped. By the fifteenth wave the construct weighed more than it saved, and the reserves he burned keeping it together were reserves he was not shaping into javelins and crescents and the ranged constructs that kept runners from reaching the passage.

Finally, he dissolved the blood armor between kills. Pulled it back into the Gauntlet, ripped the ruined shirt off after it, and committed fully to speed and violence because the fight rewarded killing fast and punished everything else.

’And?’

Alice went quiet for three full seconds, which was longer than she had been quiet about anything since the Conduit link had formed.

Then, with the particular martyrdom of a little sister who worshipped her big brother more than anything alive and hated every woman on the planet who agreed with her, she toggled her Conduit perception onto the stream.

Her perception covered a full sphere around Kaiden’s body, three hundred and sixty degrees of mana sight that she normally used to track threats from every angle. When she fed that view to the stream, fifty-five million viewers could select to see through Kaiden’s eyes or see Kaiden himself from above in a slow rotating third-person view that Alice controlled with the same precision she used to snipe Veilstalkers through toxic haze.

She had framed the shot perfectly.

She would deny this until the day she died.

It was just an accident!

All other fangirls can screw off!

Stop staring at Kai!

But... She was a good, supportive little sister...

Hmph...

— KaisBicep: Alice switched to her pov!

— xo_valkyrie: He’s shirtless!!! the blood knight is shirtless and fighting level 100 monsters!!!

— MoonlitSinner: the arms. the blood on the arms!

— SinfullyDevoted: Alice-chan, please show his back!!

— Thirsty247: Is this what being a fangirl feels like? because I think I get it now

— Thirsty247: On a second thought, I think this is just me discovering I’m bi

— Thirsty247: Fuck.

His skin above the vambraces was painted in layered ichor that had dried over older ichor, over his own blood from wounds Gluttony had closed in windows he no longer remembered. The blood mask on his face had been rebuilt so many times it was a patchwork of different species’ fluids hardened into a dark shell from nose to chin, and his hair was plastered flat against his skull with the residue of forty minutes of war.

He looked less human than the things he was killing.

Vespera’s lattice held the column’s front in a web that had grown thicker and more vicious with every passing minute. The glutton-like monster that had been reinflating every few minutes earlier had stopped entirely, because the Shadow Monarch had found whatever internal structure it used to regenerate and carved it out with surgical cables while holding the rest of the column stationary with the other half of her web. The carcass smoked at the entrance.

’Good.’

’If it was going to kill me, I’d be dead already. Track the next wave.’

’Alice.’

He turned toward the entrance with both blades dripping.

[Phase Time Remaining: 01:19:22.]

[Dungeon Ground Held: 50%. Enemy Forces Eliminated: 19%.]

[Level Up! Level 58 ➣ 59.]

[You have 38 unspent stat points.]

Thirty-eight, and climbing.

He paused on the allocation for the first time.