Demonic Po*nstar System

Chapter 894: Procedure Gone Wrong

”Ohh!! America has a new S-tier awakened!” people began clapping, celebrating the rare occasion.

Each S-tier was akin to a national treasure.

But the radiance kept climbing.

”Wait...” One of the technicians leaned toward his monitor, then jerked back like it had burned him. ”It’s not stopping. Why is it not stopping?!”

The console shrieked.

Values spiked past the S-tier ceiling and kept going into territory the classification system had no names for, and the technician was hammering the recalibration key while her readout filled with numbers that no awakened in the history of the Association had ever produced.

”It’s past S-tier, it’s... what is this?!” She whipped toward her colleagues. ”Is the artifact malfunctioning?!”

One of them ran a quick diagnostic while Nyx’s hand was still on it.

”No... It’s clean.”

The artifact was functioning perfectly.

It was simply reading something its designers had never imagined it would need to measure.

And the reading was still climbing.

The celebration in the room had died.

The officials who’d been clapping moments ago now stood with their hands frozen mid-gesture, watching the orb pour radiance across the room while the technician’s readout ticked higher and higher into numbers that didn’t have classifications.

Then the air shimmered.

Space began warping.

Light bent and straight lines curved, radiating outward from the orb in slow, rolling waves.

A pen slid off the edge of a console and floated instead of falling. A tablet drifted upward from a technician’s hands and hung in the air beside her head.

”What... what’s happening?!” The lead technician grabbed the edge of her station as the floor beneath her tilted by half a degree. ”Why is the room...?!”

”THE PEN IS FLOATING!” the younger technician shrieked, pointing at it as though saying it aloud would make it less insane. ”Her reading is warping actual space! This isn’t... readings don’t DO this!”

One of the government officials staggered as his feet lifted from the floor, arms flailing for purchase on nothing, and Kaiden was at his side in two strides with his hand closing around the man’s shoulder before the spatial distortion could throw him.

Calypso snagged one of the technicians who’d been lifted clean from her chair, red fingers closing around the woman’s ankle. ”Hold on. It’ll pass.”

The spatial warping intensified.

Ripples passed through the room like waves through water, bending the walls, curving the ceiling, making the monitoring stations groan against their bolts.

The orb beneath Nyx’s palm burned so bright that the shadows had vanished entirely, and the reading on every console that was still functioning showed values climbing into territory that made the beyond-S numbers from ten seconds ago look modest.

Nyx’s eyes were amused.

She looked like she was listening to something only she could hear, her power flowing through the artifact and spilling into the room because the orb simply could not contain what it was measuring.

The stream chat was a wall of text moving so fast that individual messages were unreadable.

Millions of viewers watching the Space Valkyrie warp reality inside a government building while an examiner screamed at her instruments and two of them held confused officials so they weren’t thrown around the room.

Then Nyx lifted her hand, and the release hit the room like a concussive wave.

A pulse of white-gold radiance bloomed from the orb and struck every wall at once, and in the same instant, the spatial warping collapsed.

Everything that had been floating dropped. Everything that had been bending snapped straight. The pen clattered to the floor. The tablet landed in the technician’s lap. The official in Kaiden’s grip stumbled as his feet found solid ground.

Silence.

Absolute, ringing silence.

”What...” one of the technicians whispered from the floor where she’d landed when gravity came back. ”What do we put in the report...?”

”What report?!” her colleague hissed from under his desk. ”What classification do we use?! There IS no classification for THIS! She broke the entire system!”

The lead technician was drenched in sweat.

Her colleague beside her wasn’t faring much better, and the government official Kaiden had grabbed was leaning against the wall with one hand over his chest, breathing through his nose.

The value on her screen sat so far beyond S-tier that the classification software had thrown an error.

Kaiden smirked, far too proud of his space babe’s display.

The examiner caught his expression and visibly had to resist saying something she’d regret.

”Miss... Cosmos,” she said instead, voice carefully controlled. ”Thank you for your cooperation. We’ll need to... convene to determine the appropriate classification for your reading. I apologize for the lack of immediate clarity.”

”Take your time~” Nyx smiled brightly, all sweetness, and turned away from the pedestal.

She walked to Luna and leaned down until her lips were beside the shorter girl’s ear.

”If you get a worse reading than me, I’ll-”

Nyx wasn’t permitted to finish her ominous whisper. ”That,” Luna hissed, ”will never happen.”

She marched toward the orb.

”Wait!” The lead technician shot to her feet, hand outstretched. ”Miss Aster, please don’t touch it yet!”

Luna stopped mid-stride, one hand already reaching for the surface. ”...Why?”

The examiner’s composure cracked.

She looked at Grace, then at her cracked monitors, then at the pen still lying on the floor where it had fallen after floating five feet in the air, and the words came out fast and clipped.

”We need to adjust the procedure. If your class manifests the way hers did, we need containment measures in place. The current setup is not designed for... for what just happened.”

”You’re saying you need to defend yourselves.” Luna’s voice was flat. ”From my reading.”

The technician swallowed.

Luna grinned, looking back at Nyx. ”Sure, make your preparations.”

What followed was fifteen minutes of the Awakened Association scrambling to rebuild their testing procedure from scratch.

Technicians wheeled in portable shielding artifacts and positioned them at the room’s four corners, angular devices that hummed with containment mana.

Two additional monitoring stations were hauled in from a neighboring floor by staffers who’d clearly been pulled from their regular shifts and weren’t happy about it.

The lead technician ran diagnostics on every remaining piece of equipment, swapped out the console that had cracked during Nyx’s spatial episode, and expanded the recording parameters to accommodate readings that her system had never been designed to store.

Then the guards arrived.

Six Association awakened in full combat gear filed into the room and positioned themselves around the perimeter with the practiced efficiency of people who protected things for a living. They were there for the examiners, the officials, and the very expensive equipment.

One of the guards surveyed the damage: cracked tile beneath the pedestal, a water-damaged tablet drying on a console, a man still braced against the far wall breathing through his nose. His eyebrows climbed.

The girls watched the entire production from against the far wall, and the amusement radiating from them was thick enough to qualify as its own class manifestation.

Finally, she straightened from her console and surveyed the room. Shields humming. Guards positioned. Fresh equipment calibrated. Recording parameters expanded to ranges that, until fifteen minutes ago, had been theoretical.

She took a breath, smoothed her coat, and turned to Luna.

”We’re ready. You may proceed.”