Demonic Po*nstar System

Chapter 879: Soren and Mabel

Aria was already moving before Kaiden had closed half the distance.

”Kai!”

She started running with both arms stretched out toward him, silver hair flying behind her, and the joy on her face was so open and unguarded that every head between them turned to watch.

She crashed into him with a hug that drove the air from his lungs and a kiss that landed on his mouth before he could get a word out.

Her arms locked around his neck and stayed there, her body pressed flush against his, and the kiss deepened with singular focus, as if one meeting apart had been one meeting too many.

”Mmm.” She pulled back just enough to breathe, her forehead resting against his chest, and the smile on her face was so close he could feel it. ”Welcome back...”

Kaiden’s hands settled on her waist. ”It didn’t even take an hour...”

”One second of separation is already far too long!” she decreed with zero hesitation.

Then Aria turned her head toward Vespera without releasing Kaiden by so much as a centimeter, her arms still looped around his neck, her body still pressed against his side as if proximity were a fundamental need rather than a preference.

”Thank you for taking care of him in there, Mother.” The title came out naturally.

Vespera glanced at her son, then at the woman attached to him. ”He didn’t need my help.”

Hearing those words, Aria’s smile widened. The pride that bloomed across her face matched the quiet warmth Vespera had shown during their walk, the same certainty arriving from a different direction.

”I knew Kai would succeed... He always does.”

For a single beat, the yandere lover and the yandere mother looked at each other over Kaiden’s shoulder, and the wavelength between them was so perfectly aligned it was almost unsettling.

Both of them possessive. Both of them proud. Both of them absolutely certain that the man between them was exactly as extraordinary as they’d always known.

The commotion of Aria’s needy yandere sprint had turned heads across the Eclipse group.

Luna glanced up from her handheld, Bastet’s ears swiveled, Calypso lowered her monster thigh, and Nyx’s gaze tracked from wherever her conversation with Scarlet had taken her.

Kaiden met their eyes across the camp and grinned, confident and easy. He’d walked into a room with the Chairman of the Awakened Association and walked out with everything he wanted.

That was all they needed.

Then two figures separated from the cluster of Eclipse members where Tessa and Talia had been standing.

Kaiden recognized them on sight.

Soren and Mabel.

His mother’s tank and healer, the two S-tier New Dawn members she trusted enough to stand beside her in the extremely rare occasions when she could use some help.

Well, ex New Dawn members...

He’d never met either of them in person, but he knew what they were to Vespera, and the fact that they were here told him exactly how thoroughly his mother had gutted New Dawn on her way out.

Soren looked the part. Tall, broad, shaved head, hands clasped behind his back in a posture so still it looked carved.

Light armor over simple robes, no visible weapon, and eyes that found Kaiden and communicated absolutely nothing.

Mabel did not look the part.

She came up to Soren’s elbow, walked with a cane she clearly didn’t need, and had white hair pinned in a bun, reading glasses perched on her nose, and a face full of laugh lines that belonged on someone’s grandmother rather than one of the most valuable healers on the continent.

”So this is the son.” Mabel planted her cane and looked Kaiden up and down with the thoroughness of a field medic conducting triage.

Her smile widened, warm and genuine, and then it flickered as a thought crossed behind it. ”The worthy one.”

The flicker was brief, but the shade it cast toward Kaiden’s two siblings was unmistakable.

She reached up and pinched his cheek before he could react.

”I’ve been waiting to meet you for a very long time, young man. Why did you never visit us in the guild? Granny was worried...” She turned his chin left, then right, examining him like a patient chart with disappointing results. ”Too thin. Vespera, are you not feeding him enough?”

Alice materialized on Kaiden’s free side so fast that the air popped.

”He eats FINE!” Both hands wrapped around Kaiden’s midsection, pressing flat against his stomach as if the act of holding it would prove its fullness. ”I make sure my big brother eats! A lot! Every meal! I learned how to cook just for him!”

She glared up at Mabel. Her newly discovered life purpose had just been questioned by a stranger, and Alice was not taking it well.

Mabel stared at her.

Then she removed her reading glasses, cleaned them on her sleeve, put them back on, and stared again.

The Alice she remembered from the guild was a ghost of a girl.

Silent, cold, hovering behind Vespera like a shadow’s shadow or not being present at all, never speaking unless spoken to and rarely even then.

Adults lowered their voices around her without understanding why.

This girl was hissing at her.

”Oh my...” Mabel’s smile bloomed slow and warm as understanding settled in.

She reached down and pinched both of Alice’s cheeks at once. ”Look at this little kitten hissing at me. Did granny step on your fluffy tail?”

Alice sputtered, her glare crumbling into bewilderment, because she had prepared herself to defend Kaiden’s nutrition against a skeptic and was now being handled like a house cat.

”Now then.” Mabel held Alice’s face and inspected her with the same field-medic thoroughness she’d used on Kaiden.

The results were lackluster.

”Are you feeding him everything and leaving nothing for yourself? You’re a girl in her growth spurt, young lady. You need to eat too, or at this rate you’ll always remain...” Her eyes drifted down to Alice’s chest, then back up. ”...compact.”

”I’m still growing!” Alice’s voice hit a register that could have shattered glass.

”Of course you are, dear.” Mabel’s tone was pure warmth, pure support, and absolutely devastating in its lack of conviction.

Her gaze slid sideways to Vespera’s figure, then back to Alice, and the sympathetic ”Hmm... there’s certainly room for growth, my dear...” that followed contained an entire medical prognosis.

The hissing that followed was not metaphorical.

Soren observed the interaction, and for the first time since Kaiden had laid eyes on him, the hard line of his mouth eased by a fraction, the faintest loosening around his eyes, as if a private concern about the kind of man his new commander might be had just been answered.

He extended a hand toward Kaiden.

Kaiden shook it.

The grip was firm, measured, and said everything the man’s mouth wouldn’t.

Kaiden didn’t find his lack of words strange because he knew that Soren’s power fed on silence, every unspoken word compounding into the strength of his next cast.

A handshake was the loudest greeting Soren could offer without weakening himself.

...

In a favela on the western edge of São Paulo, a girl named Lúcia held her neighbor’s phone with both hands while forty people watched the same cracked screen from behind her.

The broadcast showed the staging plain where the Kaiju had emerged, and the Portuguese subtitles running across the bottom were the only thing between this alley and panic.

Gates had been opening more frequently, monsters growing stronger, local guilds losing fighters to threats that used to be routine.

A C-tier gate had opened six blocks from here three months ago and swallowed four fighters from the local guild.

Now a Kaiju had terrorized the strongest nation, and Lúcia’s hands wouldn’t stop shaking because the question in this alley was the same one pressing against every chest on the planet: were they next?

...

In a storm shelter beneath a middle school in Ohio, a woman named Catherine held her two children against her sides and watched the emergency broadcast on a screen bolted to the concrete wall.

Nine hours since she grabbed her kids from school and drove. Her daughter was asleep against her arm. Her son was awake, watching the screen, still and focused, understanding more than a seven-year-old should.

The all-clear had come and gone, but Catherine hadn’t moved, because the creature that caused the shaking was still visible on the broadcast, standing in a field, and she needed someone to say it was over before her legs would work again.

...

On the staging plain, the questions had never stopped.

Reporters had been shouting at Kaiden since he walked out of the command tent, and he’d ignored every one of them through Pebble’s reunion, Vespera’s walk, Aria’s kiss, and the introduction of two S-tier veterans he’d never met.

One reporter decided he’d waited long enough.

”Kaiden!”

He broke from the press cordon with his microphone extended, legs carrying him toward Kaiden like his career was worth more than his life. ”Kaiden Grey! The world needs answers! What happens ne-”

Pebble’s head swung toward him.

The growl that rolled out of the Guardian’s chest vibrated through the staging plain at a frequency that made the reporter’s microphone screech with feedback, and the man’s legs locked mid-stride as his body attempted to reverse a decision his momentum had already committed to.

”E-easy...” His voice had climbed two octaves.

The microphone arm was still extended, trembling badly. Behind him, every camera in the press cordon zoomed in.

Kaiden looked at the man.

Then past him, at the wall of lenses and faces behind the cordon, hungry for a statement he’d been refusing to give all day.

They’d never leave if he didn’t give them something.

He glanced over his shoulder. ”Will you handle the cleanup?”