Demonic Po*nstar System

Chapter 869: Meeting Lazarus Crane

"Bahaha! He brought a dog with him!"

The Guildmaster of Crimson Dominion crossed the staging plain with the stride of a man who had walked toward worse things and lived to complain about them, his coat still streaked with ash, one hand raised in a wave that looked more like a greeting between friends than a formal approach between world powers.

"We finally meet, kid. I’m-"

Pebble growled.

The sound rolled across the plain like a diesel engine idling inside a cave, low and sustained, and every soldier within fifty meters stopped what they were doing.

Lazarus glanced up at six burning eyes locked on him from above Kaiden’s head, read the warning for exactly what it was, and kept walking anyway.

"Easy, big fella. This gramps just wants to talk."

He took one more step, and that step crossed whatever line the Guardian had drawn.

Kaiden hadn’t gestured that it was okay to come closer, yet Lazarus was approaching.

This could not stand.

One forepaw.

A single lateral swipe, almost casual, the way a dog bats away something it doesn’t want near its food bowl, and Lazarus Crane, one of the three most powerful guild leaders in America, went airborne like a ball off a bat.

He hit the ground sixty meters away in a skipping tumble that carved a trench through packed earth, bounced once off the hull of an armored transport hard enough to dent the plating, and came to rest against a mana artillery emplacement with a sound that made every soldier within earshot flinch.

The staging plain went silent for two full heartbeats.

Then every artillery crew on the northern ridge snapped to their triggers, and the nearest awakened formation drew weapons in a wave that rolled backward through the ranks like dominoes falling in reverse.

"Hold fire! HOLD FIRE!" Grace’s voice cut across the plain from behind them, sharp with authority she’d built over days of preventing exactly this kind of catastrophe.

Then, multiple veins throbbed on her forehead, and the woman the gang knew as a rather chill, easygoing lady began screaming in the direction the man had been sent flying. "Lazarus, I told you to BEHAVE! I told you TWO seconds ago!"

Kaiden’s hand was already on Pebble’s crown. "It’s okay, Pebble."

The Guardian’s posture didn’t change, six eyes still locked on the dust cloud where the intruder had landed, but the killing tension left his legs one muscle group at a time, and his crown lowered an inch under Kaiden’s palm.

"...Did our dog just hit Lazarus Crane?" Luna asked, staring at the trench. "Guild Leader of Crimson Dominion, top two guilds in the USA with New Dawn’s current predicament...?"

She just had to add in that detail.

"Yep." Scarlet watched the dust settle. "He did."

"Damn." Luna nodded. "I like this dog."

"Like? I’m becoming a fan!" The Flame Monarch liked what she saw, evidenced by her grin stretching from ear to ear.

The dust thinned, and Lazarus Crane stood up.

His left arm hung at an angle that arms should never hang at, the elbow clearly dislocated and possibly broken in two places, blood ran freely from a gash across his forehead into his white beard, and three of his ribs produced a sound when he straightened that suggested they were no longer connected to the things ribs were supposed to connect to.

He looked down at the arm, gripped his own wrist with his functioning hand, and wrenched it back into the socket with a wet crack that carried across the plain.

Several soldiers nearby turned green.

Red mana pulsed through the reset joint in a slow, controlled wave, knitting what it could and stabilizing what it couldn’t, and the Guildmaster of Crimson Dominion rolled the shoulder once, wiped the blood out of his left eye with the back of his hand, and walked back toward Kaiden’s group at exactly the same pace he’d been using before.

He was grinning.

Behind him, a woman in a pristine black suit was walking very quickly across the staging plain with her hands balled into fists at her sides and her heels striking the packed earth in a rhythm that suggested someone was about to be managed.

Viera Crane reached her father just as he finished rolling his shoulder, hip-length black hair immaculate, mirrored shades folded into her breast pocket, and the expression of a daughter who had specifically, explicitly, and repeatedly told this man not to do the exact thing he had just done.

"What," she said, "did I say."

"Good puppy," Lazarus told Pebble, ignoring his daughter entirely as he approached for the second time, dabbing at the gash on his forehead with his sleeve while his ribs clicked back into alignment under the coat.

The mana was still working through him, quietly setting things right while he pretended nothing needed setting. "Dogs these days are all for decoration in women’s purses, I can tell you’re different. You’ll earn your keep, won’t you?"

"Lazarus." Viera was keeping pace beside him, her voice low and surgical. "You are bleeding from your head. Your arm was in the wrong direction ten seconds ago. Please explain to me why you are walking back toward the creature that did this."

"Because Papa has business to attend to, dear."

Pebble’s crown tracked him the whole way, six eyes burning, but Kaiden’s hand on the armored plate held the second swing.

Lazarus looked at Kaiden and stuck out his freshly reattached hand. "Lazarus Crane. Crimson Dominion. And before we get into any formal business, I want to say something as a private citizen."

The grin widened beneath the blood-matted beard, warm and completely shameless. "I’m a fan."

The group stared at him.

Nobody moved. Nobody answered.

A guild leader whose arm had been hanging the wrong way ten seconds ago had just walked back through his own blood trail to announce he was their fan, and the chat, which Kaiden could see scrolling at the corner of his interface, had devolved into solid walls of question marks so dense the text became a single vibrating block.

"Been watching your streams for months," Lazarus continued, adjusting something in his ribcage with a casual press of his palm that would have sent a normal person to the hospital.

"The cooking ones, the bickering, even video games. Fantastic stuff. The combat streams are good too, don’t get me wrong, but there’s nothing like watching your lot argue about seasoning after a dungeon run to put an old man at ease."

He dabbed at his forehead again, found fresh blood, and ignored it. "I’d put it on in the evenings when the wife wasn’t nagging- when I had the living room to myself."

Kaiden shook the bloody hand. "...Thank you?"

"Don’t thank me, thank the missus for going to bed early." He caught himself again, cleared his throat, and redirected. "Point is, you’ve come a long way from the Mauler days, lad. A long way."

The girls exchanged a round of glances that said the same thing in six different expressions: a guild leader who tanked a hit from Pebble and walked back smiling was standing in front of them fanboying about their old streams.

"Tell you what, bucko."