Demonic Po*nstar System

Chapter 785: Creation Mode

Kaiden let the interface settle across the dais and looked up at the sound of footsteps returning through the main archway of his home.

[Available DMP: 1,100]

The roster hung clean beneath the balance, the monster composition he and his girls had argued into being over the last hour of brutal math. Every Maulfiend evolved. Every Nightclaw branched. Every Salamawyrm redirected. The ratios were sitting exactly where they belonged.

Nyx came through the archway with Scarlet on her heels, pink hair bobbing, hands gesturing big. The tour was apparently concluded. She was still talking a mile a minute about something Melty had done, and Scarlet was letting her, a soft amused smirk pulling at one corner of the Flame Monarch’s mouth. Whatever the salamawyrm had done to Nyx’s idol, Nyx had already processed it into the most important news of the year.

From the cathedral’s upper space, Calypso’s voice drifted down.

"...and these cascades... Aren’t they amazing? Watch how the flow feeds the heat-sink rune at the base rather than pooling against the column..."

Kaiden tilted his head back. On one of the upper balconies that overlooked the cathedral floor, Calypso was leaning over the railing and gesturing broadly at a lava cascade on the opposite wall for Vespera’s quiet attention. Bastet stood half a step behind them, ears angled in polite interest as the Infernal Matriarch’s tour continued. His mother’s red gaze was on the architecture, composed and assessing, politely humoring her son’s red-skinned demoness because the pride of craft deserved its audience.

The distant clatter of pots came from the side wing where Alexandra had already claimed her pantry for the siege.

The domestic geography of his women, assembled.

Alice was helping Alexandra set up shop in the side wing. Aria stood near him at the dais.

Kaiden pulled the Creation Mode icon out of the peripheral overlay and held his will over it.

Luna caught the motion first. Her chin came up off the knee she’d been resting it on, the gremlin returning in a rush.

"Ohhh. You’re doing the thing."

"I’m doing the thing."

Aria’s silver eyes had tracked the icon the moment Luna spoke. Her small, soft smile curved warm against his shoulder, and her fingers pressed a brief squeeze against the back of his hand.

"Good luck, Kai."

From the balcony above, Calypso’s architectural lecture cut off mid-sentence, her tail giving a slow, knowing sweep against the railing stone. She had clocked the interface. Her grin split wide and entirely unrepentant.

"Don’t peek up our skirts while you’re up there, Darling," said the demoness who wore no skirts. Of course, neither did Vespera.

"I’ll try my best..."

Kaiden tapped the icon.

...

The world stopped.

Kaiden exhaled his own and began.

The air carried him where he willed it, not an ounce of effort asked. Master immunity. Creation authority. This had always been one of the best parts of being a Dungeon Master, the part where stone folded for his attention and the walls moved when he thought. Sadly, he could only enter this when a new tier was reached, which meant that unless there were special circumstances he wasn’t aware of, the next opportunity would come after he got to High-Tier.

He drifted above the dais and pulled the interface wide, the 3D map expanding around him in fast rotation, five square kilometers of dungeon suspended in the cathedral’s frozen air.

’Traps first.’

His will swept the map and sixty spike-trap bands lit in soft amber across the Abyssal Corridor. Low-Tier relics, fifty DMP a piece. They served him well against a human invasion, but here they were useless. He pressed the disassembly against the entire set at once, and the bands dissolved back into potential, flakes of unwritten dungeon scattering across the map in slow motion as the refund poured back into his pool.

[60 × Spike-Trap Band refunded. +3,000 DMP.]

[Available DMP: 4,100]

’Much better.’

He pulled the Landscape menu next.

The familiar entries sat where he remembered them, prices unchanged. Above them, a new section had rendered in since Mid-Tier ascension. Above that, one level higher, was the tier he was not here to shop from.

He scrolled up anyway, just to look.

Endless Void --- 25,000 DMP per square kilometer.

Chrono Garden --- 40,000 DMP per square kilometer.

Two entries further up, Nether Library and Dream Sea sat fully greyed, HIGH-TIER LOCKED in small polite letters where their prices should have been.

Kaiden let the slow smile pull at the corner of his mouth.

’Someday.’

He closed the tier and turned to the dungeon itself.

The Verdant Expanse held the far end of his domain, three square kilometers of forest and meadow and freshwater spring with the palace planted at its core. Between it and the Safe Zone, the two existing routes fed almost directly into the green. Close enough that a breakthrough on either path would land invaders in his family’s sanctuary inside minutes.

’Back.’

He set his will against the Verdant’s footprint and pushed. The green drifted away along the dungeon’s long axis in slow migration, the cathedral and its palace riding the shift, three square kilometers repositioning without complaint. A fresh gap of unwritten geometry opened between the Verdant and each of the two paths that had once fed it.

The system asked nothing for the move. He already owned the terrain. Geometry was free under his authority.

’Corridor side.’

Twilight Sink, one square kilometer, four hundred DMP. He flowed the biome into the new gap along the Abyssal Corridor’s exit. Bioluminescent haze settled into the low points in pearl-colored drifts. The ground buckled unevenly. Sound started going strange along the floor before he had finished shaping the zone’s perimeter. Nightshroud habitat, made to stack with their darkness fields into something worse than either alone.

[Twilight Sink × 1 km². -400 DMP.]

’Magma side.’

The toxic biome was the one he cared about most, and he took his time with it.

Two square kilometers of Virulent Mire materialized into the gap along the kill route, and the rendering was slow and pointedly ugly. Black ooze pools opened in polished slabs of stagnant toxicity. Crusted islands of blighted footing rose between them. Spore clouds condensed from nothing at knee height in slow, visible drifts. And overhead, a thicker layer of poison vapor pressed down from the ceiling crust in a second stratum of hazard.

Ground toxic. Air toxic. Ceiling toxic. The whole atmosphere a weapon.

Because the Claimant’s things could fly, and the Claimant’s things wore armor, he believed this to be a natural counter and the perfect continuation of the magma path that was meant to be extremely hazardous to traverse. If they somehow had resistance to magma or could survive it, he hoped that poison, an entirely different substance with its own properties, would be a proper second challenge.

The containment was the part he gave actual thought to.

Miasma this dense would drift out into the Verdant on one side and choke Melty’s magma on the other, and neither was acceptable. A sealed door at each boundary would contain the air and kill the biome’s purpose in the same stroke, since anything that could not flow through would be uncrossable for invaders too, which would then in turn break the rules.