Demonic Po*nstar System

Chapter 1029: At Long Last

"Kaiden Grey, at last." He took one hand from his pocket and offered it. "Viktor Thorne. I’ve been looking forward to meeting you for a very long time."

Viktor closed his offered hand into a fist and lunged, turning the greeting into a punch at Kaiden’s chest.

Kaiden raised his gauntlet in time to block. The blow drove his armored forearm into his ribs, and he felt one crack as he staggered back toward the bench. Aria and Yunohana were getting up behind him.

’Fuck... What is that Strength?’

He cursed inwardly, feeling his insides crying out in alarm.

Kaiden couldn’t give this man another step. He planted his feet, caught the man’s punching wrist, and twisted it away from the women.

Across the pond, one of their escort guards swung at Alice and Alexandra as they rose from their bench. Calypso caught his sword on her axe, shielding them while Luna got up from the adjoining table.

Then someone shouted the Storm Valkyrie’s name from the entrance.

"Luna! It’s me!"

Her brother stood at the garden entrance, looking straight at her.

"...What?"

Shock held her gaze on him for a moment. She hadn’t decided whether she could bear to meet him, and now he was here, in Japan, watching a stranger attack Kai.

Beside Kaiden, Yunohana tried to step around the men to help him. The guard captain had followed Viktor toward the bench, and he swung his sword at her, forcing her to catch his wrist before the blade reached her throat.

Yunohana wrenched his arm behind his back and drove him to his knees with a brutal kick to the neck. He was crying, his fingers still straining to turn the sword toward her.

"They’re being manipulated."

She took the sword from his straining fingers and struck him with its hilt. He went limp, and Sonoda caught him as Yunohana released him and turned back to Kaiden, already reaching for the blessing on his wrist.

At the table across the pond, a guard drove his spear at Nyx’s chest. She pulled the table upright with spatial force, catching the thrust in its wooden top.

"The guards became just like the vampire’s thralls! Watch out!" Nyx shouted, alerting all her friends.

Bastet fired past Nyx, burning through the spear shaft and into the guard’s shoulder. Her next shot struck the sword out of the hands of the man fighting Calypso, allowing the demoness to knock him aside and leap across the pond toward Viktor.

Bastet stayed behind the upturned table, covering her friends with precise solar fire as the fighting spread along the walkways. The guards still in control of themselves pulled customers into the shops and grappled with comrades who kept trying to reach the family.

Kaiden heard the fighting spread around the pond, but Viktor was still pressing against his grip. The man smiled at him as his free hand came out of his coat.

"What a tough boy you became in just a few months. I think I’m one of your biggest fans. But alas, fate had other plans."

He was holding a dark red crystal. Kaiden, his senses screaming danger at the mere sight of it, reached for the item with his free hand while Aria sent a crescent of moonlight past his shoulder, cutting into Viktor’s upper arm. "Kai!"

"I won’t let you!" Luna shouted.

She crossed the pond in a flash of lightning and kicked at the hand holding the crystal.

Despite her brother being here in the flesh, the Storm Valkyrie chose to help Kaiden, needing only a single second to enter battle mode.

But that one second was all Viktor needed. He crushed the crystal before her heel struck his wrist.

Bone snapped under Luna’s kick.

"Ouch."

Blood and broken crystal sprayed over Kaiden’s gauntlet, but a red cord of magic had already shot from Viktor’s palm into his chest.

Kaiden tried to tear it away. The cord burst against his gauntlet and spread around him, forming a red shell that forced his grip off Viktor’s arm.

"Kai!"

Aria caught his sleeve before the shell closed. Its expanding surface pushed her hand away, leaving Kaiden trapped inside with his elbows pressed against his sides.

Calypso landed beside Viktor and swung her axe at his head, forcing him to duck away from Kaiden. He punched her in the stomach from beneath the blade, but she caught his coat before he could pull away.

"What have you done to him?!"

She spat blood onto his chest. Carnage fed on the injury, strengthening her grip as Viktor tried to wrench himself free.

Inside the shell, Kaiden fought for breath as its pressure crushed his injured ribs. Silver flashed around his wrist as Yunohana’s blessing activated, resisting the hostile magic just as she had promised when she tied the cord on him.

Yunohana reached his side and fed more mana into the cord, keeping the protective spell alive as the red prison squeezed against it.

"I have you, Lord Grey. Please keep fighting!"

Her ward forced the shell outward enough for Kaiden to move his arm. He punched the red surface in front of his face, driving cracks through it.

"Aria!"

She fired into the cracks from outside. Moonlight burned through the shell, but red magic filled the hole before Kaiden could force his hand out.

Behind him, a vertical slit opened in the air above the bench. Red light connected the opening to his prison, and the whole shell began moving backward toward it.

Kaiden dug his heels into the path, trying to keep the spell from dragging him through the opening. Aria reached for the cracks again, but a crash from the garden entrance made her turn.

A man in dark armor drove his shield into the Circle guard, one of the ones that didn’t suddenly turn hostile, hurling him backward into the pond. More armed men followed, advancing toward the family behind overlapping shields.

"Hey, Kaiden!"

David Bennett grinned at him from behind the shield line. Kaiden recognized the face he had beaten bloody in his first ever Awakened Duel, and the pale blue spell forming in the man’s hand.

"Been a while, hasn’t it? [Arcane Lance]!"

David fired at Aria while she stood beside Kaiden’s prison. She swept her moonlight into the lance’s path, breaking it apart before it reached her, then sent a crescent back at him.

One of the men in front of David raised his shield to catch it. Moonlight sheared through the metal, and the man beside him dragged David out of the way before Aria’s attack could cut him in half.

"H-hah? You dare?! Bitch!"

The other newcomers spread along the pond, firing past their swordsmen at the women gathered around Kaiden. Alexandra threw gold across the path to intercept their bolts while Alice ran up beside her, answering with beams that drove the attackers behind their shields.

Calypso still had Viktor by his coat when a swordsman struck at her back. She was forced to release Viktor to turn her axe against the blade, and he tore out of his coat, retreating toward the men coming to help him. "How feisty..." he chuckled, dusting his clothes.

"S-siter..." Theodore muttered weakly.

"Oh, I’ll absolutely butcher all of you scum! Starting with you!" Luna lunged after Viktor, but a volley from the entrance forced her to turn back and intercept the shots aimed at Nyx. "Fuck!"

Through the red shell, Kaiden saw his girls fighting on both sides of the pond. Yunohana stood at his shoulder, sustaining the blessing that kept his prison from crushing him, sacrificing her own safety to protect him.

The only reason she hasn’t been struck yet was thanks to Alice’s barrage covering her.

And Theodore was standing near the entrance those men had just stormed through, whimpering like an ignored puppy.

’The Blood Pact.’

The name came with a murderous surge of rage. These were the filth who had tried to take Luna from him, who had sent her own brother to deliver her into their hands.

They had come for his family again. David was grinning behind his guards while he shot at Aria, and Viktor was trying to drag Kaiden away so the others could finish whatever the fuck they had come here to do.

Kaiden started seeing nothing but deep red. These nobodies thought putting him in a cage would make him watch his family die?

"You think you can take them away from me?"

His killing intent struck the garden hard enough to make the nearest swordsman stumble. David’s grin vanished as Kaiden pressed his bloodied gauntlet against the red wall between them. "W-wait, stop him!"