Demonic Po*nstar System

Chapter 1000: Locked Outside

Aria fired the moment it stepped into the open. She rose over the tower parapet and put down a lance the length of a lamp post, aimed at the seam where its skull met its neck, and the whole square went white underneath it.​

It stopped thirty meters out.

Then its four legs slid wide, its chest dropped low to the stones, and the thing that had not made one sound all day filled its throat and roared.

The sound had gears in it, a guttural grind so low it arrived through their boots before it reached their ears, and it did not stop.

Aria’s lance broke apart in the air above its back. Moonlight shivered, lost its line, and blew out sideways across the rooftops in a hundred harmless pieces. The parapet cracked under Aria’s hands from the wash of it.

”It scattered it.” The pleasantness had gone out of her voice. ”Kai, the sound scattered it.”

Behind them, the barricade answered. Its seams lit violet.

The carapace mortar unknitted itself in running lines from crown to flagstone, wreckage groaning as it leaned, and the barricade they had bled against all this time split down the middle and swung apart. It had been a door the whole time, and it was opening for its owner.

Violet light flooded the square, and out of it came the dungeon.

The joint feed’s chat stopped scrolling and then broke, the same four words arriving in a dozen languages at once.

’It opened the wall.’

Fresh shell-boars came first, unscarred, at a full charge. Mantids poured along the parted halves of the barricade like ants over a kicked nest, and hounds boiled through the gaps between everything. The population of an entire respawned dungeon emptied into the square with the roar still driving it forward.

Over its army’s backs the chimera-like monster fired, the tube-ridge spun up its wet clicking, and the open square turned into pure chaos.

”Stay on the line! All of you, please!” Alexandra planted herself behind the whole formation with both arms wide, and her light went out sideways in one unbroken sheet across Eclipse and the Twelfth together, a single wall of gold laid over the mouth of the gate. ”I have you!”

”Fuck!” Luna screamed.

Nyx cut a fold through the front rank and shouted over it. ”It was never trying to beat us! It was holding the door until its dungeon finished respawning!”

Kaiden held his ground in the breaking wave, looked at the parted wall, and a devilish grin formed on his face.

”An interesting strategy. Japan is a truly fascinating land.”

’That’s where you’re wrong, little sis.’

Kaiden’s ominous aura grew.

’Now is the perfect time.’

The door was open, and the thing that owned it was standing on the wrong side.

The pickaxe collapsed into the gauntlet, and blood sheeted back out as his greatsword.

He went into Wrath Stance mid-breath. The heat came up through his chest and kept coming until the whole wave in front of him read as fuel, and the harvested blood along the blade’s edge brightened from dark to burning.

”It created a pincer attack, but we’re standing between it and the dungeon. Meaning it can’t get back in if you’re standing in the way.”

His voice carried over the guns and the horde both. ”Hold here. I’m going for the core.”

”Kai-!” Luna’s protest lasted half a syllable before it turned into covering fire, lightning raking mantids off the barricade’s north half ahead of him.

”Go, Darling!” Calypso stepped into the gap he left, and her axe met the lead boar with a crack that rocked the square. ”We will keep your door open!”

He went through the wave. Wrath detonations opened the press in front of him stride by stride, boars coming apart at the joints, and Alice’s beams poured over his shoulders from the halo, sweeping his flanks as he ran.

The kill column raced down the edge of his vision. Violet light took him to the knees, then to the waist.

The thing on the road understood.

Its roar cut off mid-grind. Every mismatched eye came off the family at once and fixed on the man vanishing into its gate. It flung itself forward into a sprint that tore the asphalt, hurdling its own horde, wrong-jointed legs reaching.

Bastet rose from her crouch, and her dominion came down across the road in front of it like a falling sky.

She did not move from the center of the line. ”Master doesn’t wish to be disturbed. Be a good little freak and stay put.”

The family closed ranks across the parted gate, Calypso at the center with her axe low, Luna crackling at one flank, Aria off the tower and firing down from the top of the barricade on the other. Nyx shimmered the air between them, and the Twelfth Garrison held the ground on either side under Alexandra’s light.

The horde crashed against them.

Behind its own army, the thing skidded to a stop on stones it had walled in with a town’s worth of labor, and every eye it owned looked at the doorway it could not reach.

Then it lost all of its patience at once.

Both guns opened together. The mouth-bore fired into the door line point-blank over the backs of its own boars. The tube-ridge swept the formation end to end without stopping to pick anybody out of it, until there was nothing left in that square but noise and white light.

Alexandra held it. Every round that came for the family went into gold instead, sheet after sheet of it breaking and reforming faster than the eye could follow, while she stood in the middle of the line with her arms up and her hair burning white at the edges.

She did not give back one step.

Alexandra Seren had spent most of her life apologizing for taking up space. Now she was the only thing between a dungeon’s artillery and every person she loved, and she was winning.

”Keep going!” Her voice cracked straight down the middle, and she kept shouting through the crack. ”I have you!”

And the Twelfth Garrison would not let it aim.

The Twelfth peeled off the door line at their captain’s word and broke wide across the square. The onmyoji’s talismans went up burning along its flank.

Asakura’s spear glanced off its shoulder plate without leaving a mark, and its head came around to find her. That was the entire reason she had thrown it. A gun pointed at scattered soldiers was a gun not pointed at the door.

One round would kill any of them. It had proved that already, on a man who was still lying under the awnings behind them. Every one of them knew it, and every one of them kept moving anyway.

Now the door stood open, barricaded by the people Kaiden loved.

And just like that, the Paragon of Sin made a mad dash for the dungeon core as millions of people watched, gripping their seats as if their lives depended on it.

The Japan outing just turned real, and it was only getting started!