Demonic Po*nstar System

Chapter 999: Freaky Monster

Two streets east, low in one of the rubble walls that had sealed the side roads since noon, a mail slot had been cut at knee height, and the barrel was back inside it before anyone found the flash.

Every eye in that square had been on the skyline, because snipers go on roofs. They had spent twenty seconds naming every roof in Kawanami. The thing had spent that time cutting itself a hole in a wall.

The round took the pachinko sign off its pylon a meter from Aria’s boots. And the sealed streets opened again, three chutes this time, shell-boars in front like rolling shields with the hounds flowing behind.

Nyx folded the lead boars’ charge back into their own front rank and said nothing about it.

Bastet’s dominion flattened one pack into the asphalt without her rising from her crouch. ”It watched us choose those three locations. So it cut itself a slit we would never think to watch.”

The square got loud. Around the medic and Oda, the squad’s shields locked under Alexandra’s spread of light. Kaiden and Calypso stayed on the wall through all of it.

”You all look way too tasty, but I’m oh so busy!” she bellowed at the boars between devastating hits.

The thing fired twice more through its loophole. Then it broke cover to relocate.

”It’s moving! East roofline, running north!” The halo flared white on every word, and Alice’s voice rang off it loud enough to bounce back from the shopfronts.

Luna rode the call. She poured down the east roofs as continuous lightning, caught it mid-leap between buildings where nothing alive can dodge, and opened its flank from hip to ribs with the Stormblade. Plate sheared away with a sound like a train braking.

The thing made no sound at all.

Aria’s lance arrived before it landed, a line of moonlight that nailed its hind leg to a rooftop through the joint.

For one full second, the fight was won. It hung pinned and leaking, and Luna was turning on the roof ridge with the Stormblade coming around for its neck.

Then it tore its own leg through the lance.

Plate and a rope of dark muscle tore free and stayed hanging on the moonlight. The thing dropped off the building’s far side onto three and a half legs, already at full speed before it finished landing.

It cleared the first intersection while the roof tiles it had kicked loose were still falling, and the asphalt kicked up behind it in a rooster tail of torn grit. Nothing that size should have been able to move like that. Nothing bleeding that hard should have wanted to.

”Oh no you don’t!”

Luna went after it and the roofline came apart under her, tile, gutter and chimney brick blowing back off every landing as she flickered from one to the next.

But to her shock, the gap between them refused to close.

”What is this BS? Stop running and fight, bitch!”

Aria crossed the rooftops behind her, silver and silent, moonlight pouring off her heels.

The tube-ridge on its spine spun up mid-stride.

It did not slow and it did not turn. The ridge simply rotated backward until it was pointing over its hindquarters at the two of them, and it hosed the roofline behind it while it ran.

”Luna!” Aria shouted.

The first burst took the roof out from under the Storm Valkyrie’s next step. She came through the debris cloud as a bolt of violet-white and kept going.

The second burst walked up the street toward Aria, and Aria did not dodge it. She flew straight down the middle of it, killing rounds out of the air with clipped little crescents, two and three at a time. Her face never once changed. Every round she killed was a round that never reached Luna’s back.

”Faster! It’s turning at the market!” Luna shouted it back over her shoulder without slowing.

The moonlight stopped falling behind it and started falling in front of it. Aria walled the intersection with a curtain of lances coming straight down, and for the first time all day the thing broke stride, hind claws shrieking across the asphalt as it slewed sideways into the mouth of a walled chute.

Luna was on it before it got through. The Stormblade went in under the plate at the base of its skull with all of her weight and all of her speed behind it, and it came out with a hand’s width of the blade shining wet.

It was not enough to get through that much stolen bone.

It went into the chute with her still hanging off its neck and kicked off the wall hard enough to peel her loose. Luna hit the far side of the street and rolled twice before she stopped.

By then the chute had swallowed it toward the river, and there was nothing at the end of it but dark.

Aria landed in the intersection with her hands still lit and did not fire again, because there was nothing left to fire at.

”...Fuck my life,” Luna grumbled under her breath. ”Freaky chimera ass monster...”

”Are you okay?” Aria stepped closer, helping the gremlin to her feet.

”Yeah... Just irritated. I don’t like playing hide and seek.”

”That makes two of us.”

They went back to the square together, Luna over the rooftops and Aria in the air above her.

”It bleeds!” Calypso announced to the square, delighted, still swinging.

”And it got away. Again.” Luna came down off the roof with her hair still crackling, looked at the wall, and found the newest craters quietly closing, the fruits of their labor leaking away while everyone had been busy staying alive.

Her shoulders dropped. ”What kind of shitty-ass boss fight is this?! It doesn’t even fight! It just ruins everything and leaves!”

”It is the boss monster, I’m sure of it,” Bastet said from her crouch. ”Nothing under that rank should be this unique, versatile, and good at strategy.”

”Then somebody explain why it’s out here.” Nyx was still watching the chute it had gone down. ”A boss sits on its core. That is the one thing every person in this square agrees on, including the ten-year veterans, and that thing has been outside its own gate since before we walked into this town.”

Nobody had an answer for her.

Aria landed beside Luna, holding the piece it had left behind. Boar plate on one face, mantis-green on the other, fused through the middle like laminate. She handed it to Kaiden. ”Consolation prize.”

Kaiden turned it over in the gauntlet’s grip. It was a hand thick and lighter than it had any right to be, and the cut edge showed a dozen thin layers in different colors, like rings in a tree.

The sun touched the hills. Shorter than it had been at noon, the wall still stood taller than anyone wanted. Somewhere in the dead town, a wounded thing was watching them and deciding.

Redeploying took two minutes. Aria took the fire-watch tower and worked from behind its parapet, up only long enough to fire, down again before the answer could come.

Luna posted at the square’s center, where Alice’s next call could launch her in any direction.

The Twelfth took the north face. Asakura’s two heaviest fighters went at the carapace with a war-hammer and a length of scaffolding steel, in the same rhythm Calypso had set at the first swing.

Neither of them looked up at the rooflines once. Watching the rooflines was somebody else’s job now.

Alexandra stood behind them with both palms open and her light spread thin over the north half of the wall.

Kaiden sank the pickaxe back into the deepest crater. Nyx folded the newest cut open and held its two faces apart. He, Calypso and Bastet leaned into the barricade like miners racing a flood.

The newest crater bit deeper than any before it, deep enough that violet gate-light shone out of the wound and threw their shadows long across the flagstones. The healing was losing.

For a quarter hour, nothing answered them. No whine, no packs, no flash on any feed.

Then Alice’s halo turned all the way around above Kaiden’s head.

”Big Brother. It’s on the main road.”

It came up the center of the road at a walk.

No cover, no angle, no pack running ahead of it. It simply walked into the open square, unhurried, the torn hind leg swinging on a hitch that had already half-knitted, and for the first time, everyone got to look at it.

Four-legged and low, longer than a truck, it wore a dozen monsters at once.

Boar plate lapped its shoulders in slabs, mantis-green blades lay folded flat along its forelimbs, hound-grey hide stretched over the gaps between, and every border was sealed with the same grey-green carapace that mortared its wall.

Its mouth hung open a finger’s width on the smoking bore. On its spine, the tube-ridge sat still. Its eyes, and there were too many of them, in sizes that disagreed, all pointed the same way.

Seventeen of them were standing in that square. Its pace never changed, as if the count were in its favor.

The family spread across the square. Calypso rolled the axe off her shoulder, delight climbing her face, and Luna’s grin was back, with all the dungeon clear’s frustration sharpening its edges.

Asakura brought the Twelfth off the wall and set them on the family’s flank, what was left of them in a short line with their shields locked and their feet planted, her own spear level at the end of it.

”What’s the matter?” Luna called down the road. ”All out of friends?”

It kept walking.