Demonic Po*nstar System

Chapter 721: Consumed

Kaiden’s mana pressure swelled. The crimson deepened at its edges, and the stone around him splintered. The air on the mountainside grew heavy in a way that had nothing to do with altitude.

His eyes were fixed on Selena. The crimson in them had stopped flickering. It was solid now, consuming the white, and the irises burned like coals pressed into his skull.

Cassian’s face went white. Calix took a half-step backward.

The crimson mana pouring off Kaiden’s body had turned visible, a haze of dark red energy that clung to his frame and seeped outward from his skin. The stone beneath him groaned. Small rocks lifted from the ground around his feet, suspended in the field of his fury, trembling.

"Kai, stop!" Aria’s voice cut through from above, raw and desperate.

When he spoke, his voice was wrong. Deeper. Layered. As if something behind his vocal cords had woken up and was speaking alongside him.

"She curved that attack." The doubled voice carried across the mountainside, quiet and certain. "She aimed it at the monsters and bent it toward Nyx."

His hands were shaking. The knuckles had begun to split, and crimson light seeped through the splits.

"If the Association watches that footage and decides I’m the problem, then they can come and get me."

Tears welled in the Moon Valkyrie’s eyes as she shook her head. "I don’t care about any of that now! I just want you to not leave us behind!"

Then it went wrong.

Calypso’s head snapped toward Kaiden and the color drained from her face, because the demoness recognized what was stirring inside him before anyone else could. She had been there when he turned into a body of fire and horn and hatred.

"No," she whispered. Then louder, her voice climbing. "No, Darling, no!"

The girls were no longer concerned about prison, weren’t arguing about the Association or the competition or the broadcast.

"The Wrath is eating Darling!" she screamed at the others. "It’s not like last time! Something is wrong with it! It’s going to swallow him whole!"

Last time, in the longhouse, the transformation had been triggered by a stranger’s cruelty. A chieftain who meant nothing to him beyond the offense. The Wrath had been clean in its own terrible way, a fire lit with purpose, aimed at a target, contained within a domain.

This was different.

This was his own blood. The sister he’d idolized. The brothers who’d tugged on his sleeve and asked him to read to them. The family he’d loved so desperately that their rejection had hollowed him out and sent him fleeing to a college dorm with nothing but an economics degree and a broken heart.

The Wrath feeding on that kind of wound was poison. The fury and the grief were tangling together inside him. The transformation consuming his body couldn’t tell the difference between rage and agony as it was trying to burn through both at once.

His back arched. A sound escaped him that started as a groan and descended into something guttural, something that vibrated through the mountain stone and made the monsters in the stampede behind stumble and whimper. The crimson light bleeding from his knuckles spread up his forearms, and the veins beneath his skin turned black and swelled, and his shadow on the stone behind him grew too large and too dark and began to move independently of his body.

<Big brother, stop!> Alice’s voice in his mind was raw with a terror that went beyond the fear of prison or consequences. She was bonded to him. She could feel what was building from the inside, and what she felt was her brother being swallowed. <Something is wrong! You have to stop!>

His spine cracked.

The sound echoed off the rock face, a wet splintering that had nothing to do with injury and everything to do with the thing beneath his skeleton demanding more room. His shoulders widened and the armor across his chest groaned and split at the seams. Horns pushed through his skull, splitting the skin above his temples in twin lines of dark blood that ran down his face and mixed with the crimson mana bleeding from his pores.

The darkness at Kaiden’s edges pulsed outward. The mountain groaned. The halo above his head cycled between gold and a deep, ugly red as Alice’s fury fed into Kaiden’s and the two signatures tangled together.

A doubled voice came from his throat, deeper, layered with a resonance that vibrated in the stone itself.

"You wanted this."

He was looking at Selena when he said it. Across the sixty-meter gap, through eyes that had gone fully crimson with pupils narrowed to vertical slits, he was looking at the woman who had taken Luna’s arm and smiled about it.

His jaw shifted as the words left his mouth, the bone structure shifting, widening, and the sound of it was loud enough to carry. The horns at his temples were still pushing, curving slowly back over his skull.

Selena raised her hand and fired.

The crescent was identical to the one that had taken Luna’s arm. White mana, bright enough to cast shadows, screaming across the gap with the same beautiful trajectory and the same killing precision. It crossed the distance in less than a second and struck Kaiden in the chest.

He looked down.

The mana dissipated against his skin like water hitting hot iron, hissing and spitting and leaving nothing behind. The flesh was untouched and the dark energy pouring off him swallowed the remnants of Selena’s attack the way a bonfire swallows a match.

He looked back up at her.

Selena’s hand was still raised from the release. Her expression, the composure that had held through the entire ambush, through the running fight, through Luna’s arm and the transformation, broke.

She took a step backward.

One step. Involuntary. Her body recognized what her pride hadn’t caught up to yet.

The horns grew another inch while she stared. The skin of his forearms split along the veins and crimson light seeped through the fractures, and the bones beneath his knuckles shifted and thickened, pushing against flesh that was running out of room to contain what was growing inside it.

"Hit him again!" Cassian’s voice broke on the second word. He turned to his brother and their hands found each other, gripping forearms, and the mana between them flared without either of them calling it.

A tether of bright energy snapped into existence between the twins, visible and crackling, connecting them at the point where their arms met. It pulsed once and their combined power surged through it, amplifying through the connection into a concentrated blast that Calix shaped and Cassian fed with everything he had.

The resonance blast hit Kaiden from the side. It was stronger than Selena’s crescent, denser, the combined output of two veteran-track fighters channeling through each other at maximum capacity, and it hit hard enough that the stone behind him exploded into gravel from the overflow.

Kaiden’s hand came up. One hand, open-palmed, catching the blast against his fingers like a ball thrown by a child. The mana screamed against his skin. His arm didn’t move. The energy that the twins had poured everything into compressed against his palm, bright and desperate, and then he closed his fist and crushed it.

The fragments scattered. The tether between Cassian and Calix flickered as the feedback hit them and both twins staggered. Calix’s nose started bleeding. Cassian’s legs gave before he caught himself. The resonance that had amplified their power fed their failure back through the same connection, and neither twin had the presence of mind to drop the tether. It burned brighter between them, cycling in rapid desperate bursts.

Kaiden lowered his hand. The palm was smoking. His fingers were longer than they’d been a moment ago, the joints wrong, too many knuckles, and the light coming through the splits in his skin had gone from crimson to black threaded with red, pulsing to a heartbeat that was no longer entirely human.

His gaze moved from the twins back to Selena.

The bloodlust that came off him was physical. Selena could feel it on her skin from sixty meters away, a pressure that went beyond mana, born from whatever was looking at her from inside her brother’s body.

"What are you?!" Selena’s voice came out wrong. Too high. Too fast. The satisfaction was gone, the smugness was gone, the casual cruelty that had carried her through the entire afternoon was gone, and what was left was a woman staring at something she did not understand. "What the fuck have you become?!"

Kaiden didn’t answer. His spine cracked again, a second realignment, and his shoulders widened further and the last of his armor split and fell away from his chest in pieces. The skin beneath was veined black and radiating heat.

He jumped.