Demonic Po*nstar System

Chapter 851: Aggressive Push

Five viewing panes burned in the air around Kaiden’s vision, each one showing a different fight, violence and screaming compressed into small frames, and the board beneath him held nothing.

Every square empty from edge to edge. Seven cards orbited his wrist while Lust Stance ran through five bonds at once, stretching him so thin the warmth felt closer to bleeding than giving.

Cards and warmth. That was all he had left to spend, and every drop of both had to count.

The Stalker fight went wrong from the first exchange.

Aria’s opening crescents crossed the arena in a silver arc and the creature cut them from the air with a flick of its bladed forelimbs, moonlight scattering against the walls at an angle that shouldn’t have been possible from limbs instead of shields.

Luna came in fast from the left, Stormblade crackling, and the Stalker’s compound eyes locked onto the tusk-wound on her left side before she’d closed half the distance.

Its forelimb jabbed through her guard at an angle her instincts couldn’t read because the joints bent wrong, and Nyx compressed the space between them to yank Luna sideways before the blade finished its arc.

Despite it being a 3v1, the girls were fighting a terrible monster they’d never had to face, especially not without Vespera or Scarlet being there to back them up.

It was going to be an uphill battle.

[Card Played: Swiftness. Target: Luna. +30% speed.]

The buff landed mid-dodge and Luna’s next evasion came cleaner, real distance opening between her and the follow-up. But the Stalker watched the new speed, catalogued it, and adjusted its next lunge to arrive half a beat earlier, aimed where Luna would be at thirty percent faster rather than where she’d been.

Luna pressed the opening with a low slash aimed at the Stalker’s midsection, and the creature read the angle before her Stormblade was halfway through the swing. One forelimb deflected the blade into the arena floor while the other sliced across her left side, catching the tusk-wound and tearing it open.

”FUCK!” She hit the ground rolling with blood soaking through her clothes and came up swinging, and the Stalker was already past her next strike before she finished the first.

Aria tried to punish the overextension with three rapid crescents aimed at the creature’s exposed flank, and two of them connected hard enough to crack chitin along its ribs. But the third sailed wide because the Stalker changed direction mid-stagger with joints that bent in ways no spine should allow, and its forelimb hammered into Aria’s stomach before she could adjust her firing angle.

She hit the arena wall hard enough to crack the stone behind her, blood running from her mouth, and slid to one knee with moonlight already building at her fingertips.

”I’m fine,” she said, firing point-blank into the Stalker’s face as it lunged for her, and the crescent bought her the half second she needed to roll clear before the bladed forelimb split stone where her head had been.

Three fighters, all bleeding, and the Stalker hadn’t taken a wound worth mentioning.

Kaiden’s eyes cut to the second pane.

Calypso was getting demolished.

The Ravager’s double-buffed forelimbs had shredded her guard faster than Carnage could build, and the Infernal Matriarch was bleeding from both arms with her axe barely in her grip.

If the insectoid killed her too fast, the Ravager would walk out of that arena and back onto a board where no one stood between it and Row 6.

[Card Played: Ironblood. Target: Calypso. Damage taken halved for 60 seconds.]

The shimmer settled over the demoness between strikes, and she felt it land. Her next swing came harder, the axe biting deeper into the Ravager’s guard, but the look she threw up at Kaiden through the display wasn’t the grin he expected.

”...I’m sorry, Darling.” Blood ran down her arms and her voice came out quieter than he’d ever heard it. ”For needing that.”

Then her eyes went sly, and the corner of her mouth twitched.

”You’re so cruel, you know that? Keeping me in the ring with this thing for longer.”

Kaiden’s heart went heavy, because she was right. The card wouldn’t save her. It just meant she’d bleed longer before the end.

But Calypso grinned through the blood. ”I love it. Both the fight and that I get to pull your heartstrings... I finally feel like a real demon!”

She turned back to the Ravager with Carnage screaming off the edge of her axe, and the arena swallowed the feed.

[Card Played: Bulwark. Target: Luna. Absorbs the next killing blow.]

[Card Played: Piercing. Target: Aria. Attacks bypass armor for 2 minutes.]

He pushed Lust Stance deeper into Luna’s arena, shaping speed into Luna, weight into Aria, spatial pressure into Nyx.

The drain behind his sternum hit harder than anything he’d felt since the match began, fire pulsing with each heartbeat as his warmth poured through three bonds at full burn. His vision wavered at the edges and the cards orbiting his wrist flickered in and out of focus.

He held it because the girls on the other panes were past saving with warmth alone. Lust Stance burned through his lovers’ bonds and only theirs, which meant his mother and sister fought without it.

Alice fought alone.

On her pane, the Obsidian advanced through golden beams that cracked its volcanic carapace with every impact, magma bleeding through fractures that sealed almost as fast as she could open them. She had no buff humming through her blood and no frontline between her and the creature’s grinding advance, but she was the Light That Destroys, and she was furious.

”Big brother, this thing won’t die.”

Both hands came up and a sustained beam punched clean through the Obsidian’s shoulder joint, magma spraying in an orange arc across the arena floor, but for every wound she carved open the creature sealed it shut within seconds. She could hurt it. She couldn’t kill it, and every second she spent learning that lesson was a second that mattered on the board above.

On the third pane, Bastet’s dominion flickered and died.

She was on one knee with the Serpent coiling above her for the killing strike when Vespera’s shadow lattice erupted between them and caught the lunge six inches from Bastet’s throat.

”Shadow Mommy, I’m sorry-”

Vespera stepped forward without a word and became the only target in the room. The Bone Weaver fell first, Vespera tearing the construct apart in three strides while Bastet fed every scrap of dominion she had left into the ground behind her. They turned on the Rampart together, Bastet skewing its charges with molten footing while Vespera hammered through its plating until a concentrated spear of shadow found whatever passed for a spine.

The Serpent struck before the Rampart finished falling, lunging from the flank with fangs wide, and Vespera shoved Bastet sideways. The fangs meant for the catgirl’s chest buried themselves in Vespera’s side instead, and she went down to one knee with blood pooling beneath her.

”Shadow Mommy!” Bastet caught her before she hit the floor. ”Why would you do that?! You’re the ace, not me!”

”He’s already sad.” Vespera’s voice dropped to something Bastet had never heard from her, one hand pressed against the wound.

”That’s the stupidest thing you’ve ever said.” Bastet’s ears flattened and her voice cracked. ”You think he’d hurt less watching his mother fall instead of me? You think that trade makes him feel better?”

Bastet’s dominion flared, not the dying flicker from before but a fresh pulse that cracked the arena floor in rings around her bare feet and sent heat rolling outward in visible waves. She grabbed Vespera’s arm and hauled her upright.

”No, Shadow Mommy.” She planted herself beside Vespera with the ground beneath them both turning molten gold. ”We fight this thing together. To the end.”

Vespera looked at the catgirl, then at the Serpent reforming across the arena with its light-refracting scales shimmering, and a smile crossed her face that Bastet had never seen before. ”...Okay.”

Shadow and fire erupted across the arena in tandem as both women advanced on the Serpent with nothing left to lose. Vespera’s lattice wove through pillars of superheated stone, black threading through gold, and the creature that had been hunting them recoiled from two women who had decided together that they were not done.

Kaiden forced his eyes to the next pane. If he kept watching them fight like that, he wouldn’t be able to do what they were buying him time to do.

Back on Luna’s pane, the Stalker had read their rhythm completely. Three card buffs and Lust Stance at full burn, and the creature was still finding gaps, threading its bladed limbs through the timing between Luna’s attacks and Aria’s covering crescents with a precision that turned every exchange into a losing trade.

The Stalker was driving Luna backward with each exchange, pressing her two more steps toward the arena wall. Aria’s crescents were landing slower, the wound across her stomach stealing breath from every cast, and the creature had stopped dodging the ones that couldn’t crack its chitin.

”Fuck off and die already!” Luna snarled as blood from the reopened gash on her side made her grip slip on the Stormblade. The wrong-bending joints meant every answer they found was outdated by the next exchange.

Nyx saw it before Luna did. The Stalker was herding her, each clash pushing Luna toward the corner where speed meant nothing and the wrong-bending limbs would find her from every angle at once, and Nyx had traced the pattern three exchanges ago. She’d known what breaking it would cost since the second she read the angle, and the math hadn’t changed.

Nyx compressed space and shoved Luna sideways.