Demonic Po*nstar System

Chapter 895: Devastating Class Manifestations

Luna slapped her palm on the artifact before the containment shields had finished settling.

STORM VALKYRIE.

The faint F-tier glow lasted a fraction of a second before it tore upward through every tier the same way Nyx’s had, and the containment artifacts at the room’s four corners flared to life, humming with mana, doing their jobs for the first time all day.

They lasted about three seconds.

Purple-white lightning crawled up Luna’s arm from the orb and spread across her shoulders, forking down her back, wrapping her body in a lattice of storm energy that brightened with every heartbeat. Her purple hair lifted and crackled, individual strands separating and floating as static charge saturated the air around her. The grin on her face widened with each tier the reading climbed through.

The shields screamed. The angular devices at the four corners pulsed white-hot, pouring mana into barriers that bent inward under the pressure of what they were trying to hold.

”Get behind us!” One of the guards stepped in front of the examiner, and sweat was already darkening his collar.

His colleagues formed up around the officials and the equipment, combat stances locked, hands on their weapons, and all of them sweating because they understood exactly how useless those stances were against this.

Luna looked up from the orb. Lightning arced between her fingers and danced across her cheekbones. Her expression had passed entertainment and arrived somewhere closer to madness.

”They say Fatty is the best at controlling her power.” She tilted her head toward Nyx. ”But like an amateur, she released it right here. Watch this!”

Her entire body blazed white.

Storm energy erupted from her in a whirling vortex that swallowed the pedestal, the shields, and every light source in sight.

Purple-white lightning spiraled around her in dense, screaming arcs, each one bright enough to leave afterimages. The air crackled and popped, ozone flooding each breath. The temperature swung so violently that the consoles fogged over, the windows frosting at their edges.

”We need more defenses!” The younger technician was pressed flat against the far wall behind two guards, both of whom looked like they agreed with her but had nowhere further to retreat.

”Here. We. GO!” Luna screamed, a raw, wild, joyful sound, and pushed.

The vortex blasted outward through the walls and windows without breaking either. Every volt of storm energy she’d been building in that room tore through the building’s structure and detonated into the sky above the Association headquarters in a cascade of purple-white lightning that lit the clouds from within, thunder rolling across the city in a shockwave that rattled windows for blocks.

The crowd below erupted. Tens of thousands of people who’d been watching the stream through their awakened interface saw the Storm Valkyrie’s declaration from the inside, saw her body wreathed in lightning, saw her choose to send it skyward instead of through them, and the roar that followed shook the barricades. They were screaming her name. They were celebrating.

Luna stood at the pedestal with her hand still on the orb, breathing hard, wild-eyed, purple hair settling around her shoulders as the last sparks died.

The reading peaked. Same as Nyx, to the last decimal.

”It’s the same as Nyx Cosmos’s read...” the examiner announced, her voice trembling.

Luna looked at the examiner.

She was still behind the guard, one hand gripping the back of his tactical vest. Her instruments were fogged. Her hands were shaking.

”Read it properly. There must be a mistake.”

The examiner swallowed, extracted herself from behind the guard, and crossed to her console on legs that weren’t entirely steady. She wiped the fog from the screen, ran the comparison twice, and looked up.

”Identical. Same value. Same... everything.”

Luna stared at the readout. Her jaw worked. For one very tense second she looked ready to rip the artifact off its pedestal and smash it through the floor.

She scoffed. ”Guess it really is malfunctioning.”

She pulled her hand back, cracked her neck, and strutted back to the lineup.

Nyx was waiting with her arms crossed and her chin tilted, pink hair framing an expression so smug it could have cracked the shields all on its own.

”Bestie,” she purred. ”That was a cool light show. Any circus would be happy to have you.”

Luna’s eye twitched.

”Just for the record.” Nyx glanced at the examiner, then at the younger one still pressed against the wall, then back at Luna. ”What I did earlier? If I hadn’t controlled it, Miss Examiner and her technicians would’ve become compressed meat paste.”

The examiner went white. Her colleague made a sound that wasn’t quite a word.

Nyx giggled, sly and bright. ”I wanted to make a statement, so I let a tiny little drop through~ That was all~”

The silence that followed was the silence of professionals recalculating whether their hazard pay covered this.

”We need more defenses,” the examiner said instantly.

More minutes passed as the association made a second round of preparations, then Aria stepped up.

Where Luna had charged the pedestal, Aria walked to it.

No rush, no theater, each step landing with the quiet grace that made the armed guards forget they were guarding anything.

Silver hair caught the overhead light and scattered it. Her fingertips reached toward the orb’s surface the way they extended toward a target on the battlefield: with calm, absolute certainty about what would happen next.

She placed her palm on the surface.

MOON VALKYRIE.

Silver luminescence bloomed from the orb and filled the room, pure and radiant, and for a single breath it was beautiful. The fluorescent lights softened to a warm glow, the consoles gleamed silver at their edges, and the testing room felt sacred.

Then the crescents formed.

They materialized in the air around Aria, hanging motionless, dozens of them, curved and razor-edged and shimmering with the same silver light that had felt so gentle a moment ago. They floated at chest height, at head height, at the exact angles Aria used to cut firing lanes through swarms of monsters from a hundred meters in the sky.

The guards realized what they were looking at before the technicians did.

”Nobody move.” The lead guard’s voice came out very, very carefully. He was standing inside a grid of suspended moonlight crescents, any one of which could have bisected him at the waist, and the woman who’d made them was standing at the pedestal with her eyes closed and her expression serene.

The shields flared. Finally, they were doing their job, pushing back against the crescents at the perimeter, and the effort was making them whine at a pitch that set everyone’s teeth on edge.

The reading peaked. Same value. Same as Nyx and Luna, to the last decimal. Three for three.

Then the crescents moved.

Every guard flinched, hands tightening on weapons, but the blades weren’t attacking.

They were rearranging. Drifting through the air in slow, measured arcs, rotating, aligning, silver light trailing behind them like ink through water as they carved themselves into a new shape.

Letters. They were forming letters.

The moonlight crescents that could have bisected mighty monsters settled into five words, hanging in the air between Aria and Kaiden in shimmering silver script:

[I love you, Kaiden Grey.]

Aria opened her eyes. Her hand was still on the artifact, her power still flooding the room, and she was looking at him. Just at him.

The guards, the technicians, the cameras, the millions watching through the stream, none of it existed. Her smile was small and tender and completely unguarded, and it said everything the silver words had already spelled out.

Kaiden smiled back.

”Ugh... So corny!” Luna scoffed. ”How can you do this with a straight face?”

”As easily as breathing...” Aria whispered, then asked, ”Why can’t you?”

”!!” Luna didn’t reply.

The crescents dissolved into silver mist, drifting apart, and the shields sagged with relief.

The sacred moonlight faded to clinical fluorescence, and the room felt duller for having known what it was like to be full of her light.

One of the guards exhaled so hard his shoulders dropped two inches. The examiner stared at the space where the words had hung and seemed to have forgotten she had a job to do.

Aria drew her hand from the orb, crossed the room, and wrapped her arms around Kaiden. She pressed her face into his chest and held on tight, and he folded his arms over her without a word.

The chat was losing its collective mind.

Bastet placed her palm on the orb with regal patience, as though she were granting the artifact an audience rather than receiving one.

MANIFESTATION OF DOMINION.

It screamed through each tier, and invisible weight slammed down on every surface. The floor buckled beneath the pedestal, cracks spiderwebbing through the tile in clean geometric lines. A coffee mug on the nearest console shattered into ceramic fragments.

”Jesus,” one of the guards muttered, bracing against the wall.

Same value. Four for four.

”Four.” The examiner’s voice was barely audible. ”That’s four.”

Bastet drew her hand back and examined the cracked floor beneath her bare feet with the mild interest of a queen noticing a blemish on her own marble. ”You might want a third preparation timeout... A true brute is coming.”

”That’s right!”

Calypso was on her feet before Bastet’s seat was warm.

More defenses were brought in, the floor reinforced.

Then...

MANIFESTATION OF CARNAGE.

The Infernal Matriarch placed her hand on the orb with the bright-eyed curiosity she brought to every piece of human technology, and heat flooded the space so fast that collars darkened with sweat and the technician’s water bottle started steaming on her console. It climbed with the same violent certainty to the same impossible peak.

Five for five.