Read Novel Full Chapter 860: Submission
Chapter 860: Submission
[As Victor, he must now decide the fate of the defeated.]
The golden script waited for its answer, and beneath it, the defeated waited with its belly in the air.
Kaiden stood at the foot of the creature that had eaten twenty dungeons and challenged a planet, and six dimmed eyes tracked him upside down with the anxious focus of a dog that had just knocked over something expensive.
One folded foreleg, a limb the size of a skyscraper, gave a small hopeful paddle against the colorless sky.
’...Really?’
Around him, the army that had been pouring everything it owned into this creature five minutes ago stood with weapons half lowered, and the chat was generating dog memes at a pace no moderation team on the planet could have contained.
- sinnamon_roll99: 🐶🐶🐶🐶🐶🐶🐶🐶🐶🐶🐶🐶
- xXShadowMilkXx: PET. HIM.
- MoonlitSinner: Woof 🐕 Woof 🐕 Woof 🐕 Woof 🐕
- Kaiden’s Wife (mod): Now it knows how the rest of us feel...
’What happens if I spare it?’ He aimed the question inward, to the one place only he could hear, and the Demonic Pornstar System answered in the private register.
[A defeated Dungeon Master, if spared, is bound in eternal service to the Victor.]
A clean rule, simple and absolute, and the window hadn’t finished settling before the next one arrived to complicate it.
[Note: the Claimant possesses no language, no concept of oath, and no framework for contract.]
[The duel’s standard servitude binding cannot attach. Theorizing the governing system’s probable workaround...]
[Closest precedent on record: the host’s own [Monster Girl Subjugator] skill.]
Kaiden read the skill name twice, and his memory, unhelpful as ever, served up exactly how that skill consummated its bindings.
Bastet, conquered across the warm stone of her own desert domain, a queen moaned into willing worship.
Calypso, who had skipped the conquering entirely, the Infernal Matriarch kneeling of her own free will and still getting fucked into such devoted, purring submission that she’d crawled into his lap to stay.
He lifted his gaze.
The belly in front of him was a four-kilometer cliff of stone carapace, and the fissure-mouth above it could have swallowed a cathedral without chewing.
’No.’
[...Clarification: carnal consummation is a binding vector, not a requirement.]
[Furthermore: the Claimant has already provided its signature.]
Kaiden looked from the window to the upturned mountain range, and understanding landed with Calypso’s words.
Monsters don’t fake that pose. Nobody was asking him to consummate anything, because in the only language this creature had ever spoken, it already had.
The belly was the contract.
The duel’s golden script unfolded across the plain a heartbeat later and proved the theory right.
[Adapted binding format: Submission Posture. Signature: received.]
[Awaiting the Victor’s decision.]
He let his gaze rest on the six cracked, banked-coal eyes clinging to his face from above.
This thing had chosen him on a mountain ridge at the start of everything, because the oldest instinct in its body had wanted an opponent worth consuming.
Kaiden knew that instinct from the inside. He’d built his whole career on it.
One reservation held his tongue for a final moment, and it was considerably less poetic.
’What do I miss out on by sparing it?’
[Clarification: a defeated Dungeon Master forfeits their dungeon in its entirety, spared or slain. Only the sentence differs. The forfeiture does not.]
That should have settled it, except the creature looming over him had never built a dungeon it could forfeit, because it had eaten twenty and carried them in its own flesh.
What forfeiture looked like when the master was the dungeon, not even the system’s notes seemed able to specify.
’Might as well find out.’ If the rules held, mercy cost him nothing the kill would have paid. ’Best case, I walk away with the loot and an OP guard hound on top.’
"I spare it." The Victor’s voice carried across the plain, to his army, his women, and a hundred million viewers.
[The Victor has chosen mercy.]
[Sentence: the Claimant is hereby stripped of its Dungeon Master authority.]
[Initiating Dungeon Integration.]
The creature that had owned twenty dungeons was about to pour every one of them into his.
Golden light split the white floor beside the formation, and the gate of the Abyssal home rose through it, summoned into the arena to collect what it was owed.
[Forfeiture: the Claimant’s hoard. Recipient: Dungeon #A23-6679.]
The Kaiju’s seams split along the whole upturned length of it, and the hoard left its body like a tide going out.
Silver-grey rivers poured off the colossus in a hundred streams at once, raced across the white plain in converging channels, and rushed through the open gate.
Shapes surfaced and dissolved in the current as it ran, a coral spire, a stand of frozen pines, a sandstone arch, twenty dead dungeons flowing through his front door in liquid form.
And with every river that drained out of it, the Kaiju shrank, the cliff of its belly sinking in real time as the mountain range gave up the mass it had been wearing as a body.
On Kaiden’s interface, the DMP counter stopped reading as a number and became a blur.
He watched it spin and felt the entire war reframe itself behind his eyes.
[Calculating...]
He had scraped this currency together a kill at a time, budgeted it in the hundreds, agonized over every four-hundred-point Maulfiend, and robbed the creature’s hoard mid-fight feeling like a burglar with one arm through a window. The system had just handed him the vault, the deed, and the bank.
"Kai." Nyx had drifted to his shoulder to read the shared display, and her voice held the specific warmth she reserved for winning.
"After today... You could raise an army that nations would beg to borrow."
[Calculating...]
[Claimant forces credited as slain: 3,044.]
Three thousand and forty-four. Every soldier it had held in reserve, every elite folded inside its own flesh, every reforged champion that had been waiting for a thirty-day siege, marked dead in one line of golden script without another drop of anyone’s blood.
[Spoils distribution: the Victor may designate recipients among his allies.]
The roster unfolded before him, each name with a selection rune beside it, and Kaiden didn’t weigh the choice for even a second.
"Wait!" Alexandra’s hand shot up from beside Nyx in actual classroom posture.
"I shouldn’t be on that list! I was useless for the first two phases and then spent the third phase on Nyx’s back! I healed, like, ten people at most!"
"Useless?" Kaiden thumbed the first rune on the list without breaking eye contact with her.
"Who kept our home spotless through the whole siege and worked herself ragged so a warm meal waited for us?"
The blush arrived all at once, climbing from her collar to the roots of her hair. "Th-that’s... You know cooking and cleaning don’t compare to what the others were doing! You know it, Kai!"
"No, I don’t know." He thumbed the last rune and held her eyes, with not one hint of doubt anywhere on his face.
Alexandra opened her mouth, closed it, and found there was no winning against that attitude, because she adored it far too much to argue and couldn’t possibly agree with it either. She shyly looked away. "...You’re unfair."
[All applicable candidates designated.]
[Distributing.]
The next window arrived alone, with nothing above or below it, as if the system understood exactly what it was delivering.
[XP awarded to each selected candidate: 1,716,000,000.]
For three full seconds, a chat that had memed through the end of the world posted nothing at all.
As far as Kaiden knew, it was the first silence in the stream’s recorded history.
His own brain refused him the same courtesy and ran the math at once, because numbers were how he had survived everything since the day he awakened.
Three months of picking fights above his weight class. A mana apocalypse. A dungeon war fought forty levels uphill. His entire career, every desperate gamble of it, had earned him a third of the number hovering in front of his face.
"What the fuck?" Luna gasped.
"That’s... That’s..." Nyx couldn’t find the words.
"I can protect Kai better now..." Aria smiled.
Then Kaiden’s brain detonated.
[Ding!]
[Level Up! Level 60 ➣ 61.]
[Ding!]
[Level Up! Level 61 ➣ 62.]
[Ding!]
[Level Up! Level 62 ➣ 63.]
[Ding!] [Ding!] [Ding!] [Ding!] [Ding!]
[Level Up! Level 83 ➣ 84.]