Demonic Po*nstar System

Chapter 771: Living Mountain

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.

Rivers shifted. Valleys buckled. The entire face of the range slid sideways as something enormous rearranged the ground beneath it.

There was no warning.

One moment the range was a range, peaks and ridges and the familiar silhouette that Kaiden and every member of his team had been climbing and fighting across for weeks. The next, the peak they had used as a navigational reference for the entire competition, detached from the range.

It stood, and the scale refused to fit inside Kaiden’s head.

His mind kept trying to apply normal reference frames and failing. Building, guild tower, skyscraper - none of the words worked. The thing that rose from the range was measured in kilometers. It had four legs that had been, moments before, the surrounding peaks. It had a back that had been an entire ridgeline. The stone that had covered it in the guise of a mountain sloughed off in house-sized boulders as it straightened, cascades of rock thundering down its flanks to flatten the forests below.

Six eyes parted along the crown of its head in a slow, staggered cascade, like lanterns being lit on a cathedral. Each one was the size of a small settlement, lit in a hue that should not exist in natural light. Vertical slits for pupils, irises of a deep glassy black threaded through with veins that pulsed like mana and weren’t. They did not blink. They opened, and the moment they did, the sky above the range turned the wrong color.

The mouth followed, a jagged fissure along the front of what had been a peak, splitting wide in a ragged line that didn’t move the way a mouth should move. The edges were stone and flesh, weeping a dark mineral fluid that hit the forests below and set them alight. Inside was a deeper blackness, a swirling pressure.

It screeched again.

This time Kaiden was ready, and it didn’t matter. The wave crashed over his team and the range and the valleys beyond with a pressure that flattened grass, shattered boulders, drove every one of his girls down to one knee. Alice’s halo flickered hard. His teeth rattled.

And from the mouth, they came.

They poured out of it like the thing was a gate rather than a creature. Glasswing Darters first, a cloud of them in a glittering swarm so dense it blotted out a quadrant of sky, wings too large, bodies doubled in mass, the crystalline panels threaded through with the same dark veins that pulsed in the mountain’s crown.

Mirecrawlers behind them, flying now. Mirecrawlers weren’t supposed to be able to fly. A Shellback Gorger with a wingspan Kaiden couldn’t measure. Three of them. A half-dozen Embermaws trailing fire from new wings, leaving smoking lines across the wrong-colored sky. A Cragweaver the size of a small guildhall, eight wings, one per leg, of course.

He knew all these monsters, having faced them before. But it was as if they’d been upgraded, evolved, granted wings and increased power.

And the things he had never dared to fight before.

A spine-studded giant half again larger than a Shardhorn Colossus, glassy growths along its ridge pulsing in time with the crown above. A lean, loping predator on six wings with a face he couldn’t hold in his mind long enough to name. Something that might have been a Fissure Render’s older brother, uncoiling from the mountain’s maw with fangs wet and wings dripping.

They came out wrong. Empowered and winged and warped in ways the originals hadn’t been. And they kept coming.

The mouth did not close. The creatures did not stop.

Across the mountains, every human who could see the thing stood the same way. Veterans, Association officers, awakened fighters from every guild that had been grinding the range for a month. S-tiers. A-tiers. Rookies. Every one of them with the same blank expression, looking up, not moving, because nothing in their training had given them a response to what was above them.

And in Kaiden’s head, out of nowhere, the memory came.

"Mortals of Earth. It has been exactly ten years since the shattering of your world. Ten years since mana graced your meager existence, flooding your fragile sphere."

The voice had been beautiful and horrifying, a goddess with honey and venom on her tongue.

"You’ve been granted ten years of reprieve. Ten years of coddling."

The voice had grown colder. Something in the sky had twisted, and the clouds had spiraled.

"Today, I herald the decade-long grace period’s conclusion."

Humanity had gotten through it. That was what everyone had said afterward. The dungeon breaks across the globe, the disasters in the first forty-eight hours, were history. America itself had pushed its breaches into remote zones like this one. The narrative was that the grace period had ended and humanity had survived it and the worst was behind them.

Now, standing under a sky the color of a bruise with a mountain looking down at him on four legs, Kaiden had a thought.

’What if that was just the beginning?’

"Survive and thrive... if you can."

The voice had said that back then and gone silent, never to be heard again.

The mountain inhaled. Every one of its eyes pulsed. The monsters continued to pour from its mouth in a river of winged terror. The sky continued to curdle.

And then every eye on its crown rotated in a slow, inhuman drift and fixed on the Paragon of Sin standing small and still on a ridge far away in the distance.

The pressure of being seen settled across his shoulders. His mana flinched inward on instinct, recoiling from an attention that had no business zeroing in on him like this.

Alice’s halo pulsed once, hard, a frightened heartbeat above his head.

<Big brother. Run!>

The mountain held his gaze.

Then it lunged.

...

Author: Shorter Chapters because I had to do a lot of planning. The world of DPS is never going to be the same again. Thanks for the support