Demonic Po*nstar System

Chapter 724: Futile

A tendril of shadow caught her wrist. She severed it. Another caught her ankle. She severed that too. A third wrapped around her forearm and she cut through it with a crescent that left her fingers bleeding from the mana burn, and when she looked up Vespera was only five meters away and still walking.

"No!"

Selena cried out and threw everything she had. A barrage of crescents, each one a line of white light that carved the air between them, and for one second the ridge was bright with the fury of her Severance cutting the darkness to pieces.

Vespera walked through it.

The crescents hit her shadows and split them. But the shadows reformed around her without slowing her stride. She walked through her daughter’s best attack and the darkness closed behind her like a wake.

Selena’s hands dropped.

Her mana was gone. Her arms hung at her sides, trembling. The shadows pooled around her feet and climbed her legs. They tightened against her chest.

Vespera was right in front of her.

The composure that had held through the entire mountain, through Luna’s arm, through the stampede, through Kaiden’s transformation, through her own brothers being dragged across stone, broke in full.

Selena’s face crumpled. The controlled, satisfied expression that had been her mask for the entire afternoon collapsed inward, and what was underneath was a 24-year-old woman staring at her mother with tears running down her cheeks.

"I’m sorry." Her voice cracked. "Mother, I’m sorry."

Vespera looked at her daughter.

Her expression did not change as she decreed, "You do not get to call me that. Not anymore."

The shadows slammed Selena into the rock.

The impact cratered the ridge beneath her. Then the shadows lifted her and slammed her again, and again, methodical and unhurried. The rhythm of it was the worst part, the steady, measured violence of a woman who had all the time in the world.

The twins screamed from where they were pinned. The shadows bore down harder and the screaming thinned to gasping. The darkness closed over their mouths, and there was only the sound of Selena hitting rock.

Kaiden watched.

He watched his mother beat his siblings with the same expressionless face she wore to dinner. He watched Selena’s body hit the ridge over and over, the shadows lifting and dropping with a patience that was more terrifying than any fury could have been. He watched his sister’s blood on the rock. His brothers’ silent, pinned bodies. His mother’s face.

The beating stopped.

Selena lay motionless. Her body was wrong in several places, limbs bent at angles that said the bones beneath were no longer intact. Blood pooled beneath her, dark against the darker stone, and her breathing came in shallow, wet hitches that meant ribs had given way.

The twins were released. The shadows pulled back from their faces and they gasped, dragging air into lungs that had been compressed flat. Neither of them tried to stand. They lay where they’d been pinned, merely breathing and doing their best not to look at their mother.

Vespera stood over her eldest daughter and decreed,

"You are beyond anything I can correct."

She turned her back on them.

...

The hall was silent.

Twelve people stood in the common room of New Dawn’s mountain headquarters, arranged in a loose semicircle, all of them watching Kaiden Grey’s live stream feed. Nobody was sitting. Nobody had been sitting for a while.

The feed showed a mountain ridge where three bodies lay on broken stone. Two of them were breathing. One of them wasn’t moving at all.

Mariana Reyes stood at the front of the group with her arms folded and her face the color of old paper. Behind her, Chinedu hadn’t moved in over a minute. His hand rested on the back of a chair.

Nobody spoke.

They had watched all of it - the stampede, the ambush, the crescent that took the girl’s arm, and the transformation that had turned Kaiden Grey into something with horns, splitting skin, and a voice that came from two places at once.

And then they had watched Vespera Ashborn turn off the sun.

A junior member near the back made a sound. It was half a word, maybe an attempt at a question, and it died in his throat before it became anything.

Mariana’s lips worked. She had been ordered to stay behind with her team and now she knew why: the stampede. She had obeyed because Mariana followed orders, and because Magnus had never been wrong before.

"That’s the Co-Guild Leader," someone whispered behind her. The voice was young and shaking. "She just... That’s Lady Ashborn."

"We know who it is!" Mariana hissed.

Chinedu released the chair. His fingers had left impressions in the wood.

"Millions of viewers. The Association will have flagged this before the first blow landed."

"Let them flag it." Mariana’s chin lifted. "Those three were operating under Guild Leader Ashborn’s authority. Whatever the Co-Guild Leader has done to them, she’s done it to New Dawn’s deployed assets during an active competition. That is internal discipline carried out on personnel who -"

"Mariana." Chinedu’s voice was careful. "She broke her own daughter’s body."

Mariana looked at him. The steadiness held, but the fear underneath it was close to the surface, and Chinedu had known her long enough to see it.

"Guild Leader Ashborn will handle this," Mariana said.

"Which one?"

The question sat in the silence. Mariana’s mouth thinned.

Before she could answer, the gate alarm chimed.

It was a simple sound. A clear, two-note tone that indicated someone was approaching the building’s entrance. It chimed when supply runners arrived, when maintenance crews rotated shifts. It was the most mundane sound in New Dawn.

Every person in the room went rigid.

The temperature in the hall dropped.

It happened slowly, a gradual bleeding of warmth from the air that started at the edges and crept inward. The shadows in the corners grew deeper. The lights overhead dimmed without anyone touching a switch.

Mariana turned to face the entrance.

The gate opened.

Vespera Ashborn stood in the doorway. Her expression held nothing at all as the shadows pooled at her feet.

She stepped inside.