Demonic Po*nstar System

Chapter 770: Final Day

The morning had the feel of a victory lap.

Kaiden walked through the Eclipse wing with his girls trailing behind him in various states of readiness, and every room he passed had someone who stopped what they were doing to smile at him. Real smiles, the kind that came from people who’d been looking at the standings and had started to relax.

They’d basically won the rookie track. The gap between Eclipse and second place was the kind of number that made pundits on awakened news networks stop pretending there was drama left in the competition. One more day of grinding, and then a closing ceremony that would make it official.

"Good luck today, Kaiden!"

Brittany was sitting in the lounge, her hair pulled back in the practical bun she wore when she was tending to administrative matters. She lifted a coffee cup in a toast as he passed. Trisha was beside her, reviewing something on a tablet, and she looked up long enough to give him a smile that held every bit of the gratitude she carried for him.

He smiled back and kept walking, rounded the corner into the main atrium, and nearly ran into Vaelira.

The A-tier stopped dead. She stared at him, her eyes going wide, her lips parting around a word that never actually made it out. "Something important..." She didn’t even finish her excuse before she pivoted on her heel with the kind of athletic grace only an A-tier could manage and walked briskly in the exact opposite direction of wherever she’d been going.

Very briskly.

Kaiden watched her go and grinned inwardly.

’What a well-behaved young lady,’ he mused. ’Though leaving like that was kind of rude... Still, a major improvement in attitude compared to the snarky fox who ridiculed me.’

Kaiden shook his head and kept walking.

...

The day’s work opened the way every day had opened for the past week.

They rode up into the deep range, Alice settling into her Conduit halo above Kaiden’s head with a happy hum, and by mid-morning they were carving through the mountain face like a well-oiled machine. A nest of Boulderjaws came apart under a combined barrage from Aria and Bastet before Kaiden’s greatsword finished the stragglers. A pack of Glasswing Darters tried to swarm them in a narrow canyon, and Nyx welcomed the entire swarm with a maelstrom of boulders, alongside Luna who introduced several thousand volts of lightning.

A small and weak Venomfang Stalker, a juvenile, broke from cover and tried to paralyze Calypso on the approach; she laughed at the slow attempt and buried her axe in its skull.

The kills stacked, the points climbed, and the stream chat scrolled fast.

Kaiden checked his notifications between engagements. Another level. Another thirty stat points.

By the time the sun crossed overhead, they’d banked enough points to widen the gap past the point of parody. Aria drifted down from her perch on a ridge, delicate and lethal with her silver hair catching the light, and wordlessly reached for Kaiden’s hand the way she always did when she wanted a minute of warmth between fights.

He took it and pulled his beautiful moon in close.

Then the screech hit.

It came from somewhere deeper in the range, from a direction none of them could immediately place, and it arrived as pressure before it arrived as sound. A wave with a voice wrapped around it, rolling across the mountains with a force that vibrated the bones of Kaiden’s skull and clapped his hearing into a high, whining silence.

Birds dropped from the sky in a radius he couldn’t see the edge of. Somewhere below the ridge, a tree split down its trunk and folded sideways.

Everyone on the ridge staggered. Calypso’s ears started bleeding, Luna caught herself on a planted Stormblade, and the rest of them rocked back with hands pressed to their heads.

Then the monsters moved.

Every creature within line of sight turned at the same moment, in the same direction, and started to run past them. The stragglers from the Boulderjaw pack poured by in a single straight line, heads lowered, eyes glazed. A pair of Mirecrawlers scuttled up a sheer cliff face. A distant silhouette that had been a Cragweaver on its web dropped from its own strands and began to gallop on eight legs toward the heart of the range as if it had been called.

Kaiden turned a slow circle.

None of them acknowledged Kaiden’s group on the way past. A Boulderjaw brushed close enough that its flank grazed Luna’s shoulder and it didn’t even turn its head.

His hand went to his communication artifact out of reflex and found it dead. The runes were dark, the mana inside the device drained, and when he tapped the interface, the crystal stayed dark.

"My comms are out," Nyx said. Her voice sounded strange to him, flat and far-off, and he realized his hearing was still recovering.

"Mine too."

"Same."

"Master, the stream..."

He opened his system window. The broadcast indicator was red. Whatever pulse had come out with that screech had not only knocked out every signal artifact on the mountain but also interfered with the Awakened Media Platform, the platform no human had ever managed to so much as touch.

<Big brother.> Alice’s voice came through. <This is very, very wrong.>

"Yeah."

The horns came next.

Association horns, from the direction of the evacuation beacons staked at every checkpoint across the range.

A flicker of motion in the sky resolved into an Association officer, hurtling past their position. "Evacuate!" he was shouting, over and over, his voice amplified by a hoarse mana construct that projected across the range. "All combatants are to evacuate!"

Kaiden’s expression hardened.

The mystery they’d been chasing for weeks. From twenty dungeons, all monsters were converging on this mountain range for an inexplicable reason. The competition itself was established because the association wanted to get to the bottom of this mysterious phenomenon, and used the rewards as incentives to get the guilds to work.

Convergence. The deep range had been calling them.

Today it was calling them home.

"We’re leaving," he said. The girls were already in motion before the word finished.

They turned south.

For half a breath, the range was quiet. The evacuation horns had stopped. The monsters had all moved past. The only sound was wind across stone.

Then the mountain stood up.