Demonic Po*nstar System

Chapter 1005: Aftermath

A kilometer of rock below the market square, Kaiden Grey had just brought the Blood Monarch’s Gauntlet down on the Kawanami dungeon’s core, and the first the surface knew of it was the light.

The violet glow drained out of the parted barricade between one axe-swing and the next.

Calypso’s blade was already committed, mid-arc into a shell-boar’s charge, and the boar simply was not there to receive it. Its legs had quit. It hit the flagstones on its chin, slid the last two meters into her shins, and did not get up, because nothing in the square was getting up anymore.

The horde died where it stood.

Hounds dropped mid-leap. Mantids folded off the barricade halves in rows, hook-limbs curling inward like burnt paper.

The wave that had been breaking against Alexandra’s wall of light for the better part of an hour sagged, knelt, and lay down, hundreds of bodies letting go of their own weight in one rolling hush that swept the square from the gate outward.

”Wha-” Luna’s Stormblade stopped halfway through a swing at an enemy that had stopped existing as an enemy. Then her eyes widened, heart drumming with mounting excitement. ”He did it, didn’t he?!”

”Yes. The core...” Aria whispered softly from the barricade’s crown. ”Kai reached the core.”

Every person on those islands had heard the rule from the man himself, on this same feed, on the morning this undertaking began. When a dungeon dies, everything that ever walked out of it dies with it, wherever on this earth it happens to be standing.

The world was watching the rule come true.

Asakura gasped the same thing, her spear still leveled at a pack that was now a carpet. She said it again in Japanese, to her own squad, and the Twelfth’s shield line came apart at the knees.

Alexandra’s golden wall thinned, flickered, and went out. She stood in the middle of the line with her palms still raised, chest heaving, hair guttering back down from white to blonde, and stared at the quiet like she did not dare trust it.

”...Is it over?” she asked nobody in particular. ”Can I stop?”

”You can stop, Lexi,” Nyx said.

Alexandra fell forward, face first, onto the flagstones. She had spent every last drop of energy in her body, and the ground was right there.

”Lexi?!” Nyx crouched over her. ”Are you okay?”

Alexandra nodded weakly into the stone. ”Just... resting...”

Bastet walked over, leaned down, and patted Alexandra’s head. ”No one can call you a token Valkyrie any longer. You earned your keep, blondie.”

Alexandra giggled into the ground, happy.

Under the awnings behind the shield line, the medic sat back on his heels and told Oda he could stop squeezing his hand now.

It was not entirely over.

Out on the open road, behind the carpet of its own dead army, the thing that had walled a town was coming apart in real time.

The tube-ridge along its spine spun down with a dying click.

Its mouth-bore sagged open, smoke curling off a barrel that would never cycle again. Then the plate began to leave it, slab after slab of borrowed boar armor sliding off its shoulders and cracking apart on the asphalt like pond ice.

The dungeon’s mana had paid for every graft on its body. The dungeon was dead, and everything it had ever lent was being called home.

Mantis-green blades dropped off its forelimbs. The grey-green mortar sealing its seams crumbled to powder and ran off it in streams.

What buckled to the asphalt in the middle of all that shed hardware was small, pale, and wrong-jointed, a runt the size of a large dog, made of nothing but the scars where its trophies used to attach.

”That’s it?” Calypso lowered her axe and squinted out at the road. ”All that armor, and it was hiding that?”

”I’m sick of you. Begone.”

A Stormblade dropped into Luna’s hand with a crack of ozone mid-lunge, and she put the blade down through its skull to the asphalt.

”Feel better?” Nyx grinned, one brow up. ”It had maybe two seconds left in it, bestie.”

Luna pulled the Stormblade free, looked down at the dead runt for a moment, and spat on it.

”Okay, and?”

”Bwahaha!” Calypso’s laugh rolled across the square and came back off the shopfronts. ”That’s my gremlin!”

”I’m not your gremlin. I’m no one’s gremlin. For I am no gremlin at all.”

”...” The gremlin caught wry looks from every direction, all of them aimed at her perfect graceful lady self.

”It shot at my Kai,” Aria said, pleasant as ever, looking down at the corpse. Her fingers aimed, and a lance of moonlight went through its disintegrating skull.

The joint feed’s chat, which had been a wall of unreadable velocity since the violet light died, distilled itself into a single sentiment in forty languages.

- Old Awakener: The execution was unnecessary. I respect it completely.

- Guildless Dave: Spit on it queen

The town went next.

It started at the barricade.

The parted halves groaned, shed their mortar in dry cataracts, and slumped into two long ridges of ordinary rubble. From there the collapse ran outward down every street the thing had ever walled.

The chutes fell in. The mail-slot loophole and the wall around it sighed into dust. Weeks of patient monstrous labor let go of itself block by block, and underneath it, scraped, gouged, and still standing, was just a town.

At the cordon on the valley road, the evacuees of Kawanami stood up off their folding chairs and cots as the violet tint drained out of the air over their home.

An old man who had run a hardware store on the riverfront for forty years took two steps past the barrier tape that had bounded his life since the break, and no one stopped him.

”I can see the roof,” he whispered in pure disbelief. ”I can see the roof!”

A woman lifted her daughter onto her shoulders so the girl could see the streets come back. Somebody near the aid tent started crying, loud and hiccuping, the kind of crying that had been held in through the evacuation.

On the big map in the Circle’s operations center, one of forty-one red marks guttered and went out. The shaded stain around it began, pixel by pixel, to shrink.

...

In the cordon’s control room, the mod trio had claimed the back row for the operation, and the largest chat on the planet had stopped being managed the moment the horde dropped.

The feed was a wall of flame and crown emoji. The donation display had run out of digits and settled for showing a plus sign.

Emily squealed first. Then all three of them were out of their chairs, hugging, jumping in a circle between the desks.

Kira and Rika abandoned the production console mid-broadcast to pile straight in.

Five of the most loyal fangirls alive, duties forgotten, hearts hammering, screaming with joy.

...

In the market square, the violet tear that had anchored weeks of misery began to close, its edges losing their color and peeling away into drifting motes.

The family turned toward it as one, because through the thinning light there was a shape climbing the last of the rubble.

Kaiden Grey appeared out of the dying gate with his little sister in his arms.