Demonic Po*nstar System

Chapter 806: Dilemma

Vespera’s red eyes found his across the chokehold before the shout finished leaving his throat, her shadow lattice still holding three heavyweights pinned against the abyssal floor while her attention split to him with the seamless ease that defined the Shadow Monarch in combat.

”The magma path is collapsing.” Kaiden called it across the line while his right blade punched through a Wraithstride’s throat mid-stride, voice flat because panic was contagious and the fight at the gate had not paused. ”Some weird glutton fucker is drinking the river dry. They’ve pushed past the spiral, about to breach the burrow tunnel into the Mire and take fifty percent of the ground according to the counter...”

Scarlet’s head snapped from the heavyweight she’d been cooking. ”I’ll go! That’s my domain!”

”The magma is already almost fully gone.” Vespera’s voice came quiet across the Cavern, cutting through the noise without rising a decibel. ”By the time you arrive, the channel will be dry stone and the column will be entering a poison biome. Your fire disperses toxic atmosphere. You would destroy the Mire’s defenses faster than the enemy.”

Scarlet caught a heavyweight’s swing on a wall of compressed heat, processed the logic in the time it took the impact to dissipate, and let her shoulders drop. ”...Shit.”

”I’ll go.” Vespera said it as settled fact, her shadow cables already beginning the handoff sequence that would transfer the three heavyweights to Scarlet’s perimeter.

But her red eyes held on Kaiden for one beat longer than the decision required, and in that look was the only thing the Shadow Monarch could not hide behind composure. She was about to leave her children in a fight she could not guarantee they’d survive, and the cost of it sat visible at the corners of her eyes for one heartbeat before the rest of her face hardened over it like stone.

Kaiden held her gaze and neither of them spoke. She read what she needed from his face, and the woman who remained when the hesitation left was the Shadow Monarch entire.

The lattice released the heavyweights in a controlled handoff that passed aggro to Scarlet’s fire perimeter in under two seconds, the Flame Monarch catching the weight of all three without missing a stride as her fire bloomed outward to replace the shadow’s coverage across the chokehold. Vespera turned from Kaiden to Scarlet, voice cool and precise.

”If you dare mess around while I am gone...”

”Come on! I might be a battle maniac, but I’d never let the kiddos die on my watch!” Scarlet grunted a laugh through the heat haze, catching a second heavyweight’s charge with both palms wreathed in fire. ”You know that! That’s why you brought me here.”

Kiddos.

Six spines stiffened across the chokehold at the same time. Aria’s next crescent carved deeper than the target required, Luna’s Stormblade crackled a full shade brighter against the Wraithstride she was splitting, and Calypso’s axe came down on the nearest monster with more force than the kill was worth, because even here, even now, after everything, they were still someone’s kiddos being left with the sitter.

Vespera dissolved into the stone without another word, her body unraveling into shadow and pouring through the rock toward Path B and the column that had eaten her son’s first line of defense.

The chokehold changed immediately.

The lattice that had been braided through every surface since the battle’s opening hour had withdrawn with its owner, leaving raw abyssal stone exposed under Scarlet’s expanding fire. The Flame Monarch’s perimeter pushed wider to fill the gap, heat replacing shadow, but the coverage was louder, less precise, and the gang felt the difference against their skin the moment three more Wraithstrides cleared the gate at a sprint. Scarlet caught the lead one in a furnace blast that cooked it mid-stride, then pivoted hard to shove a heavyweight back two meters before it could press the opening the lattice had left.

She was working hard now, visibly, the lazy cocky register from earlier gone as one woman covered what two Monarchs had been sharing.

Nyx spoke while her spatial barrier deflected a chunk of debris from Aria’s firing lane, calm and working, the strategic register that surfaced only when the numbers in her head had finished running and the answer was bad.

”Even as a Scarlet fangirl, I can admit that mother-in-law is the most badass chick alive.”

”What!” came the disgruntled scream from the cone of fire at the front.

”...” Nyx, forcing herself through the sacrilege she was committing, continued, ”But she can’t hold it alone, Kai. The column down there is hundreds of bodies across kilometers of passage. If your mother commits to the front and one runner slips past her, one fast thing that pushes deep enough into the Verdant, the Ground Held drops below twenty-five percent and Phase One ends in their favor.”

She folded a Wraithstride’s lunge sideways into the cavern wall without looking at it. ”They don’t need to reach the Core. They need seventy-five percent of the passage, and we’re already at forty-seven.”

’She’s right,’ Kaiden couldn’t help but admit.

His mother was the strongest fighter he’d ever seen in action, and under normal circumstances that would have been the end of the conversation.

But the little shitbag that drank his entire magma river and swelled abnormally while Melty’s face broke trying to stop it was not normal circumstances. That was a species nobody had a playbook for, and who knew what else the Claimant had up its sleeve?

Vespera would be walking into a biome she’d never fought in against creatures she’d never seen. If even one strange monster pulled a trick she didn’t anticipate while her attention was buried in the column’s front, the phase was over.

Nyx looked at him while her hands held the perimeter.

”It should be you. Alice in Conduit gives you perception none of us can match, and you’re strong enough now to matter in her fight, not just watch it.”

”No.” Kaiden caught a claw on his right blade and drove the left through the chest behind it. ”Alice and I are...” He didn’t say it out loud, but they all knew. He and the little sister held the group together.

They always fought as a unit for a reason. Without Kaiden, the formation was made up of one bruiser in Calypso, one speedster in Luna, and three backline mages. The balance was completely thrown out of the window, and that’s not to mention everything else the brother-sister duo brought to the table.

”Go, Kai.”