Demonic Po*nstar System

Chapter 676: Luna, Hunt

”Luna.”

The Storm Valkyrie looked up at him, violet eyes crackling with barely contained fury. She’d been vibrating with it for the last hour, lightning arcing between her fingers in unstable loops.

”Hunt some monsters for me. If you can’t win, come back.”

”Huh?”

Kaiden pulled up his overlay and angled the hologram so the girls could see.

Five hundred meters northeast. A migration column of Razorfang Slashers, level seventy-three to eighty-five. Fast, aggressive, pack hunters with serrated forelimbs designed for cutting through armored hide. The Association notes listed them as ”high pursuit aggression, will chase fleeing prey until line of sight breaks or a larger threat is encountered.”

There were at least forty of them.

Moving in a river of chitin and bladed limbs through a narrow canyon, following the same migration pattern every monster in the deep range had been following for days. Headed north. Toward the convergence.

Luna stared at the overlay.

Then she stared at the basin where fourteen New Dawn fighters were engaged in a brutal battle against the colossus.

Then she stared at Kaiden.

The fury drained from her face so fast it was almost comical. What replaced it was pure, uncut, gamer-girl euphoria. The expression of a woman who’d just been handed the most broken strategy in the game and told to speedrun it.

”Oh my god,” she breathed. ”Oh my GOD!”

She grabbed Kaiden’s face with both hands and kissed him. Hard. The kind of kiss that tasted like adrenaline and vindication. She pulled back, eyes electric, grinning so wide it looked like it hurt.

”I love you. I love you so much!”

Then she was gone. ”Got it, I’ll be back after I kill those monsters!”

Storm erupted from her legs in a cascade of violet lightning, and Luna launched off the plateau like a bolt given human shape. She hit the ground running and the landscape blurred around her, the fastest among them, doing what she did best.

Bastet exhaled through her nose with feline satisfaction. ”Magnificent.”

Nyx’s lips twitched.

Calypso’s grin returned as the lightbulb in her head lit up. ”Oh, I finally got it. Darling, this is simply amazing!”

”Kai...”

Aria’s voice was quiet. She’d moved closer, her silver hair catching the grey light. Her expression wasn’t euphoric like Luna’s or satisfied like Bastet’s. It was concerned.

”Are you sure this is okay?”

Kaiden didn’t answer immediately.

He looked down at the basin where the New Dawn squad was fighting for their lives.

He looked at his own team. Battered from the Borer Queen fight. Still recovering from mana sickness. Running on field rations and two hours of sleep.

He looked at the overlay, at the swarm of red markers moving through the canyon to the northeast, and calculated how long Luna would need.

”Kai, we only awakened a few months ago! Just a couple of months...”

But Kaiden was hearing none of it.

The Paragon of Sin looked at his beautiful moon and cut her off. ”Yes, that’s true, Aria. And in those few months’ time, we’ve accomplished more than most teams do in years.” His voice carried, calm and steady. The girls were all listening. ”The successor of the Heavenly Demon. The man recognized by the Original Sin. That’s what I’m supposed to be.”

He paused.

”And yet, here I am. Stuck in a competition, in the rookie track, being bullied by a man who couldn’t beat me, so he sent his dogs to make sure I couldn’t grow.”

Aria’s lips parted.

”This isn’t about being slow to grow, Aria. Everyone starts slow. That’s fine. I would’ve been happy grinding our way up, fighting every monster in this range, earning our place. I was doing exactly that.”

His eyes darkened. The red of Wrath flickered at the edges of his irises, there and gone, a pulse of power that he didn’t try to hide.

”But this? Being hunted? Having our targets stolen? Our growth deliberately crippled by a man who’s supposed to be competing in a different bracket entirely?”

He looked at each of his girls. Calypso. Nyx. Bastet. Aria. The dark halo above his head where Alice listened in silence.

”I refuse.”

The word landed like a hammer.

”I refuse to be suppressed. I refuse to let my father dictate what I can and cannot become. I refuse to watch my team, the women I love, be denied the growth they’ve bled for because one man decided his ego matters more than our future.”

Wrath pulsed in his eyes, steady and burning.

”No more games. No more running. No more letting them set the terms.”

He turned back to the basin.

”If they want to steal our kills...”

’They better be prepared to die for it,’ Kaiden finished inwardly. Plausible deniability was important, after all.

Below, the fight raged. Chinedu’s spear carved into the Colossus’s flank while his squad cycled through rotations with mechanical precision. Ash’s team worked the periphery, Brittany and Stacy trading blows along the creature’s hind legs while Trisha’s ranged fire kept its attention split. The Colossus roared and stomped and bled, but it was losing ground. Slowly, brutally, the way these fights were supposed to go.

Then one of Chinedu’s fighters stopped mid-cast.

The man pressed a hand to his ear, where a small communication artifact was flickering. His face went white. He spun toward the squad and screamed with everything he had.

”WAIT! STOP! DISENGAGE, RIGHT NOW!”

Chinedu pulled back from a thrust and looked at him. ”What do you mean?”

”DISENGAGE! WE NEED TO-”

”Shut the fuck up!” Ash swung his blade into the Colossus’s leg joint, ichor spraying across his armor. ”We’re winning! What’s wrong with you?!”

The fighter grabbed Ash by the pauldron and physically hauled him backward. ”You idiot, he’s-”

The Colossus’s ground-pound interrupted whatever he was going to say. The basin floor erupted, scattering both of them sideways.

But the damage was done. The warning had spread. Chinedu’s squad was already pulling back, discipline overriding the momentum of a winning fight. They knew how to read a panic call from their own.

Chinedu’s eyes flicked upward to the plateau.

Kaiden met his gaze.

The Wrath in Kaiden’s eyes was gone. What had replaced it was worse.

Satisfaction. Quiet, absolute satisfaction of a man who was willing to do anything. The expression of a man watching a deadly trap close in on his prey from a comfortable distance.

Chinedu’s smile vanished.

But disengaging a Deepvein Colossus wasn’t a decision you made. It was a negotiation the monster had to agree to, and the Colossus had no interest in letting fourteen sources of pain walk away from it. The creature surged forward, cutting off the southern exit with its bulk, and its roar shook the basin walls hard enough to send cracks racing through the stone.

Ash was screaming something. Chinedu was issuing orders. The squad scrambled to reposition, to find an exit that wasn’t blocked by forty tons of furious mineral-plated predator.

Kaiden watched it all from above.

The squad’s reaction was impressive, he had to admit. The shotcaller had read the situation from a single comm burst and made the right call within seconds. Chinedu had trusted it instantly, abandoning a winning position without hesitation or ego. The flanking teams collapsed inward on command, forming a tight defensive cluster that minimized exposure while they searched for an exit route.

’Great communication. Quick reaction time. Absolute trust in the chain of command. If this were any other situation...’ Kaiden mused, studying the scrambling figures below with the detached interest of a man observing an ant colony that had just discovered a boot hovering above it, ’I’d be genuinely impressed.’

They were doing everything right.

”Alas,” Kaiden said softly. ”I’m afraid it doesn’t matter.”

From the northeast, the screaming started.

It came in waves. A chorus of shrill, chitinous shrieks that bounced off the canyon walls and multiplied, layering on top of each other until the sound became a single sustained note of predatory hunger. Forty Razorfang Slashers poured through the canyon mouth in a river of bladed limbs and serrated chitin.

And threading through the sound, bright and wild and utterly delighted, Luna’s laughter echoed across the basin like a dinner bell.