Demonic Po*nstar System

Chapter 866: Incredible Gains

”The first one...” She murmured softly and turned the page.

The second photograph was different, attached to the document minutes ago.

Kaiden Grey as he stood now, more muscular and firmer, his gaze carrying the flat certainty of someone who knew exactly how the world worked and what he needed to do to achieve his goals.

And behind him, filling the frame from edge to edge, a mountain of dark carapace crowned with six burning eyes, its body angled toward the camera with the protective alertness of a hound that had chosen its master.

She studied this image longer.

”Stupid little thing,” she murmured, and her voice softened into a fondness that resembled warmth the way a blade resembles a mirror. ”It couldn’t help itself, could it? Saw something bright, bit down, and choked.”

Her nails caught the candlelight as her fingers curled once against the page. ”That is what happens when a creature follows hunger instead of practicing patience. It finds a master before it ever learns to become one.”

She closed the dossier, set it on the armrest, and the drowsiness left her eyes entirely.

”I’ll read the rest later. For now... there’s work to be done.”

...

The white light faded, and the Abyssal Cavern stood around them exactly as they had left it.

[Dimensional seal: dissolved.]

[Dungeon #A23-6679 has been restored to its point of origin.]

[Current location: Earth.]

Kaiden read the notification and felt nothing about it for a moment, because his body was still talking to him.

He had spent the nine hundred and sixty points during the countdown and felt the wave of them settling, but settling and living in the result were different conversations entirely.

The dimension had collapsed three seconds later, and the white light had swallowed everything before the new body could finish introducing itself.

Now, standing on solid stone with the Cavern’s cool air against his skin, the introduction arrived in full.

His hands were wrong first.

He flexed his fingers and the response came so fast it preceded the thought, tendons answering a command his conscious mind hadn’t finished giving, and the grip that closed around his gauntlet could have bent the metal if he’d meant it.

Four hundred and fifty-eight points of Strength.

He’d walked into the duel at two hundred and eighteen, a number that had already been putting him ahead of awakened levels above him, and in a single allocation he had added two hundred and forty more.

Two hundred and forty.

An average awakened earned ten stat points per level and spread them across multiple stats, which meant the Strength he’d just poured into himself in one sitting was worth more than what most fighters gained across their entire careers.

Then the Agility caught up.

Five hundred and sixty-three.

Three hundred points gained in a breath, from a number that had already made him faster than anyone on his team except Luna to a number that belonged on a creature, not a person.

The Cavern’s air moved differently against his skin.

He could feel the drafts individually, map their origin points, distinguish the warm current rising off Scarlet’s shoulders from the cooler one sliding down the stone walls.

Sounds arrived in layers. His heartbeat felt slow, because everything between the beats had widened, filled with perception that hadn’t existed twelve hours ago.

’This... This is intoxicating.’ He turned his hands over, watching the fingers move, and a grin pulled at the corner of his mouth that he didn’t bother hiding. ’I’m truly addicted to getting stronger.’

Then he looked up at his girls, and he paused.

They had all spent their points during the countdown alongside him, but seeing the numbers on a screen and seeing the results standing in front of him were two very different things.

Luna caught him looking and flashed teeth, wide and sharp and full of the same high he was riding, because the gremlin had been flexing her own fingers for the last thirty seconds and she knew exactly what that look on his face meant.

Her head tilted in a way that said ’right?’ and the motion finished before it started, her body running so far ahead of her intentions that the tilt arrived like a skip in a video, one frame still and the next already in the new position with nothing visible in between.

She noticed the skip too. Her grin got worse.

Beside her, Aria stood in the Cavern’s dim light with both hands folded in front of her, and the air around her hummed with pressure that had nothing to do with sound.

Her Magic stat at level eighty-three radiated off her like heat off sunbaked stone, a dense, silvery aura that made the space within arm’s reach of her shimmer faintly and pressed against the skin of anyone who stepped too close.

She noticed his gaze, smiled at him, and the aura pulsed once, warm and bright, as if her own power had opinions about who was looking.

Bastet stood at the edge of the group with her arms folded beneath her chest and her tail swaying in its usual unhurried rhythm, and the stone floor under her bare feet had cracked.

Pure gravitational weight, the kind that had nothing to do with mass. Dominion leaked from her in a slow, ambient press that made the air around her heavier, and the tanned felinid hadn’t noticed the fractures spreading beneath her soles.

Nyx’s was subtler. She stood with one hip cocked, idly turning a pebble of rubble between her fingers, and the pebble wasn’t touching her hand. It orbited her thumb in a slow ellipse two centimeters above her skin, held by spatial curvature that existed because the Space Babe’s resting state now included bending the local geometry without trying.

Calypso rolled her neck, cracked something that sounded structural, and cracked a smile at nothing in particular, her entire body humming with a low, contained vibration that Kaiden could feel through the floor from six meters away.

She hadn’t activated Carnage. She was standing still. The hum was just what a demoness sounded like when she gained two hundred percent more baseline to contain, and the containment leaked at the seams like a boiler running hot at idle.

”I’m lower level than I was before meeting Darling, but...” her lips turned upward into an animalistic smirk. ”I’m stronger than I ever was before.”

”Kai?” Aria’s voice arrived from beside him, warm and curious. ”You’re staring at everyone.”

”I couldn’t help but appreciate the view.”

”Oh?” Aria turned to face him fully, hands clasped behind her back, silver eyes blinking up at him with a sweetness so concentrated it could have rotted teeth. ”Anyone in particular, Kai?”

The question had one correct answer and Aria’s entire posture was a trap designed to extract it.

”All of you.” He looked around the group and let himself enjoy what he was looking at, because the next time a crisis knocked on their door, these amazing women would answer it alongside him, and the crisis had no idea what was coming. ”Every single one of you.”

Aria’s clasped hands sank an inch. The silver eyes that had been sparkling with anticipation went flat, and her lower lip pushed forward in a pout so pretty it nearly made him take it back. ”All of us. How fair. How generous.”

Several faces went pink at the same time. Nyx’s pebble wobbled in its orbit and hit the ground.

As the girls looked at him with varying expressions, Kaiden’s gaze turned toward the shimmering gate, beyond which his home awaited.

It was time to step outside onto Earth soil!