Demonic Po*nstar System

Chapter 995: Monstrous Strength

Then his Strength stat woke up, four hundred and fifty-eight points of it pouring out of paperwork into one straining limb, and his forearm swelled against his sleeve, veins standing from wrist to neck like hauled cables.

His heels tore twin furrows through solid asphalt, a hand deep and getting deeper. Then the contest ended: the boar’s plating buckled against its own momentum, and the crack of arrested bone rolled down the street and bounced back off the houses.

He let it out through his teeth as a grunt.

Then he turned his hips, the muscles across his back rolling in a wave the cameras caught in loving detail. He threw the bull one-armed onto its back and put his other fist through its skull before it finished bouncing.

[You’ve slain Shell-Boar Alpha (Level 79). +16,000 XP.]

The window stacked itself onto the tidy column of kill notifications that had been piling up at the edge of his vision since the first storefront burst, and the sight of that column fed the hunger in him that ceremonies never had.

’Something like that would’ve taken all of us just to hurt, and I one-shot it without spending mana...’

The impact still hummed in his shoulder, and Kaiden stood over the carcass realizing he was grinning at it like it had done him a favor.

’Finally. We’re back in the game, baby.’

The last of the wave was still coming apart under Aria’s lances behind him, and nobody needed him for a few seconds.

The wait had been only a couple of days, but it felt far too long.

The night the Claimant’s dungeon died, its whole world had poured into him and his girls. Twenty-four levels in under a minute, level 60 to level 84, while his family shrieked their own new numbers at each other across the formation.

The system in place had paid those levels at forty stat points apiece, hazard wages for a duel fought far above his weight class, four times what the average awakened ever saw.

He had banked nine hundred and sixty points in one evening and spent them.

The gamer in him had run the comparison that day, and he still liked rereading the result.

An average awakened would need level 213 to buy the body he was standing in. An aggressive climber, the kind guilds went to war over, level 142. A standard S-tier powerhouse, level 107. Even the national treasures, Vespera’s breed, the rare handful running at what mankind considered the ceiling of growth itself, would still need level 86.

This was the first honest use he had given those points, and every muscle involved felt like it was thanking him.

’Next goal: the level 100 bottleneck.’

”He caught it,” the spear-user said. ”Bare-handed.”

Asakura crouched at the dent Kaiden’s heels had left and measured it with two fingers, checking how deep solid asphalt had folded rather than let him slide. Her eyes had already reported it; she needed her hand to believe it.

Two of her fighters had stepped back from Kaiden without noticing their own feet.

In the control room, Rika was screaming at her sister to clip it in four formats, and the international chat had quit scrolling in any readable way.

On the cordon feed, an analyst asked which stance that had been.

”That was not a stance,” Sonoda answered from the forward post, making no effort to hide her pride. ”He had nothing active. That was just his body.”

”Up!” Alice’s chime cracked across the street from the halo over Kaiden’s head, and the dark ring snapped around to the north roofline. ”Both rooflines, and there’s more of them under the road!”

The second wave was mantids and spider-hounds together, scythe-limbed things flowing down off the rooftops with a noise like knives being sorted, and eight-legged ones boiling up out of a flooded underpass. Calypso and Bastet took the mantids off the roofline inside a minute.

The hounds lasted longer, because the hounds ran. Running bought each of them about one extra block before Alice’s golden beams started spearing them from above Kaiden’s head.

That wave taught the squad something else about their guests. A mantid’s scythe took the corner off a second-floor balcony, and the slab fell toward the squad’s medic.

Nyx folded the space beneath it before it dropped a meter. The slab stopped dead in the air, dust still pouring off its underside.

Alexandra’s hands came up half a beat behind it, gold light gathering in her palms and nowhere near fast enough.

Nyx walked it back up into the gap it had left and seated it there, then moved on with a plate of folded space wedged under the balcony to hold it.

The medic stared up at the corner that had been falling on her, and then after Nyx, who was already halfway down the street, and did not find anything to say in either language.

Asakura looked from the rescued balcony to the untouched shrine gate down the block, and the stiffness went out of her English.

”Lord Grey. Our files say it has only been three months since your first gate.”

”Sounds about right,” Kaiden said, watching Luna run down the last spider-hound of the wave. ”Maybe a little more.”

”...” Asakura’s chin came up. For a moment she only looked at him, and then the captain laughed, once, bright, the first sound like it that her nine had heard from her since the outbreak.

”Then it can be done,” she said. ”Growth like yours is real. We can free our city and try to reach new heights.”

She bowed to Kaiden again, deep, and came up already turning to her squad, her spear swinging out toward the river.

”Twelfth! We back Lord Grey’s family the whole way down! No one plays hero!”

”YES, CAPTAIN!” nine voices answered as one, the loudest her squad had sounded all day.

”Finally!!” Luna jogged back down the street with both fists in the air, purple hair full of dust. ”The bar moved! Do you know how long I’ve been staring at a frozen fucking bar?! Recruit tryouts, government audits, and sitting on my butt all give zero experience, by the way. I checked every time.”

”We know,” the family said, all of them at once.

...

Deeper in, the squad’s onmyoji earned her turn.

A nest of spider-hounds had packed a narrow shrine street, webbing strung between the eaves, dozens of eye clusters shining in the dark under it.

Truck-sized boars in an open road were something the family could simply hit. This street was four meters wide with a wooden shrine standing at the end of it, and hitting this would cost the shrine.

”May I clear it, Captain?” the onmyoji asked Asakura, unwinding a strip of paper talismans as she said it. ”The shrine should not be touched by claws. Ours or theirs.”

Asakura passed the request up to Kaiden with a glance, and he waved it on with open curiosity.

The onmyoji folded the strip twice and raised it to her lips.

”[Kaihou].”

The word left her lips clear and formal, breath threaded with mana, and the paper answered it.

The strip tore itself out of her fingers and unfolded into a flight of white cranes that banked into the nest street in formation. Where each crane passed, white fire took the webbing, the hounds, and nothing else.

The shrine survived it without a scorch mark, and the cranes reassembled into a strip of ash that she caught in her palm.

Kaiden watched the unique display of power.

Classes existed here that existed nowhere else on earth, spells folded out of paper and prayer.

The want landed hard enough that he felt it in his hands. His gauntlet flexed at his side, and an old pair of system lines surfaced on their own, word for word.

The system had shown them to him the night Lust manifested as the fourth of his seven Sin Stances. Gluttony, Pride, and Wrath had each arrived on the system’s own schedule back then, unlocking with his rank-ups whether he was thinking about them or not, and he had assumed the remaining three would come the same way.

That night, the system had thrown out its own schedule.

[The remaining Sin Stances are no longer locked behind artificial rank-up thresholds. They will manifest when the Successor is ready.]

[The system will not decide when. The Successor will.]

Envy, Greed, and Sloth still sat empty, the last three of the Heavenly Demon’s seven, and nothing was holding them shut anymore. No rank, no level, no hidden quest. Whenever he was ready, the system had said, in its way, and it had gone silent on the subject of what ready meant.

He was standing in a dead town watching a stranger throw burning cranes, and he had never felt readier or hungrier.

So he reached. He focused on the want, on the three blank slots, on more.